Japanese and South Korean Stock Markets Sharply Higher at Open, Gold Breaks $4700

SIREN, a crypto project previously linked to whale control, saw a steep drop overnight on April 1. At press time, SIREN was trading at $0.4084, marking a 75.8% drop over the past 24 hours. The token has seen multiple pump-and-dump cycles recently, the latest on March 28 when it jumped from roughly $0.8 to $1.66. Prior findings suggest a single whale may control roughly 88.5% of SIREN’s circulating supply—some 644 million tokens, worth about $1.44 billion. Some have tied the associated address to liquidity provider DWF Labs, whose public wallet holds ~3 million SIREN tokens. After a recent transfer, large-scale consolidation followed shortly, though the link remains unconfirmed by officials. BlockBeats advises users that such tokens carry extremely high risk, and they should invest cautiously.

April 1st — The U.S. Department of Justice’s Northern California branch announced that 10 executives and employees from four crypto market-making firms have been indicted for wash trading, which allegedly artificially inflated token trading volume and prices. The firms involved are Gotbit, Vortex, Antier, and Contrarian. Three of the defendants have been extradited from Singapore to the U.S., while two others have pleaded guilty and been sentenced. As part of an undercover operation, the FBI and IRS Criminal Investigation division created multiple cryptocurrencies to probe illegal volume inflation and pump-and-dump schemes in the industry. To date, over $1 million in crypto assets have been seized.

On April 1st, blockchain analytics firm LookOnChain reported that CoinShares transferred 10,720 BTC (roughly $720 million) to a new wallet over the past two days—marking the largest outflow in the firm’s history.

April 1st — Per HTX market data: Bitcoin briefly dipped below $68k, last trading at $67,875.41, down nearly 0.64% over the past hour. Ethereum has fallen below $2,100, last at $2,095.24.

On April 1st, per Onchain Lens monitoring, a newly created wallet deposited 1.9 million USDC into HyperLiquid and opened a 20x-leveraged short position on ETH (liquidation price: $2319.12).