US Stock and Hong Kong Stock Markets Closed on Monday, Early Close for Gold, Silver, and Oil Trading

May 24 — President Trump took to Twitter to denounce the Obama-era Iran nuclear deal as “one of the worst deals in American history,” asserting it gave Iran a direct pathway to developing nuclear weapons. The president noted the current Iran nuclear deal being negotiated under the Trump administration is “completely the opposite.” He said talks are progressing in an orderly, constructive manner, and advised U.S. negotiators not to rush into an agreement, stating “time is on America’s side.” Trump added that U.S. sanctions on Iran will remain fully in effect until a final agreement is reached, certified, and signed. He underscored the need for patience, noting “both sides must exercise patience, do things right, and not make any mistakes.” Further, Trump said relations between the U.S. and Iran are becoming “more professional and productive,” while stressing Iran must understand it cannot develop or acquire nuclear weapons. He also thanked Middle Eastern countries for their

May 24th: Security researchers are warning that AI is accelerating quantum computing’s development—and could pose an early threat to the modern encryption systems powering networks like Bitcoin and Ethereum. Project Eleven CEO Alex Pruden stated, “The future security landscape will be completely different. The combination of quantum computing and AI will make all the security approaches we’ve used in the past unreliable.” The report notes AI has been used to optimize key technical bottlenecks such as quantum error correction, which could cut down on the actual time to bring functional quantum computers to life. NEAR co-founder Illia Polosukhin also pointed out AI is speeding up scientific progress, adding, “We might even build the next generation of quantum computers with AI’s help.” Researchers are also worried about a growing “collect first, decrypt later” strategy: some governments or institutions are preemptively hoarding encrypted data now, waiting for future mature quantum

May 24: The probability of Polymarket’s prediction that Bitcoin will hit $100,000 this year has fallen to 37%, down from 49% on May 10. Separately, the current odds that BTC will rise to $90,000 this year stand at 59%, while the chance it will drop to $50,000 is 41%.

On May 24, data from Onchain Lens shows a whale took a 25x leveraged long position in 2,700 ounces of gold valued at $12.6 million. The whale also holds a 20x leveraged short position in crude oil, with over $324,000 in current unrealized gains.

May 24 — Keyrock’s latest report underscores that crypto rails are rapidly emerging as the default payment layer for AI agents. Over the past year, AI agents have completed more than 176 million blockchain transactions, with a total settlement value exceeding $73 million. As AI agents autonomously procure data, cloud computing power, API services, and AI inference resources, traditional credit card payment systems have failed to adapt to high-frequency, micro-payment scenarios. Data shows roughly 76% of AI agent payments are below 30 cents, and some on-chain stablecoin transfers cost only a fraction of a cent. Major players including Coinbase, Stripe, Google, and Visa have all started building infrastructure for machine-to-machine payments. Among them, Coinbase’s x402 protocol allows AI agents to directly use USDC for on-chain analytics and cloud service fees. Currently, 98.6% of AI agent payments are settled via USDC. The report notes this trend further strengthens Circle’s promine

On May 24, HTX Markets data shows RAIL—the token of privacy protocol Railgun—briefly spiked above $4.7 before pulling back. It is now trading at $4.01, boasting a more than 73% gain in value over the past 24 hours.