Hormuz Strait Shipping Disruption Global Shipping Costs Soar, Current Freight Rates Surge 11x to 12x

**Daqing Court Sentences Two for Stealing Oil Field Electricity to Mine Bitcoin** April 3rd — A court in Heilongjiang’s Daqing City has jailed two men for stealing electricity from an oil field to run Bitcoin mining machines, China Newsweek reported. The Honggang District People’s Court sentenced Zhang to 10 years in prison and Zhao to four years and 10 months on theft charges, per the recently released first-instance judgment. Prosecutors found that on September 8, 2024, Zhang illegally tapped into high-voltage lines owned by an oil extraction plant of a Daqing limited liability company. He used the stolen power to operate 24 Bitcoin mining machines at an abandoned pigsty on a slaughterhouse he rented. Zhang later recruited Zhao to join, increasing the total number of machines to 36. The pair acted for illegal profit, the court ruled. Case details are also posted on China Judgments Online.

April 3rd — Antpool’s cloud mining product (from the crypto mining pool Antpool) has caught the eye of plenty of new investors. The offering breaks down physical mining machine hashrate into smaller units, lowering barriers to hardware procurement and operation for users looking to get into mining. Antpool now offers full-platform access: users can subscribe with one click via the official website or App Store, enabling “buy now, mine now” functionality. The platform handles unified operation and hosting, letting non-professional users tap into professional mining farm-level hashrate resources.

On April 3, Hyperliquid officially announced that trading results from its binary market testnet are now immediately eligible for inclusion in its mainnet-level bug bounty program. Note: The current bug bounty scope does not cover multi-outcome markets. Frontend feedback is welcome but not eligible for program rewards. Previously, Hyperliquid had announced that HyperCore will support outcome trading (per HIP-4). Outcome contracts are fully collateralized, with settlement prices bounded within a fixed range. They act as a generic foundational transaction element for use cases including prediction markets and bounded option-like instruments.

April 3, the White House announced that Trump’s fiscal year 2027 budget requests $1.5 trillion in defense spending.

April 3rd: Iranian authorities reported an American pilot was allegedly captured by the Iranian military. Tasnim News Agency, an Iranian outlet, reported from Kohgiluyeh and Boyer-Ahmad Province that, per some sources, the pilot ejected and landed inside Iran after the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) shot down an advanced American fighter jet early local time. (Source: Jinse)

As of April 3rd, per Coinglass data: - A Bitcoin decline below $65,000 would trigger cumulative intensity of long liquidations totaling $1.143 billion across major centralized exchanges (CEXs). - Conversely, a Bitcoin rise above $68,000 would lead to cumulative intensity of short liquidations worth $754 million on these same platforms. BlockBeats Note: Liquidation charts do not display the exact number or value of contracts at risk of liquidation. Instead, the bars represent the relative importance of each liquidation cluster compared to neighboring clusters—defined here as "intensity." This means the chart shows how strongly a given price level will impact the market. A taller "liquidation bar" indicates that hitting that price will spark a more intense reaction due to a liquidity cascade.