The prices of West Texas Intermediate (WTI) and Brent crude oil both saw their intraday gains widen to 2%, reaching $98.92 per barrel and $102 per barrel, respectively.

**April 29 – A U.S. court sentenced Maximilien de Hoop Cartier, a descendant of the Cartier luxury brand family, to 8 years in prison for running an unlicensed OTC cryptocurrency exchange and helping transfer over $470 million in drug trafficking proceeds.** Cartier had previously pleaded guilty to operating an unlicensed money transmission business and conspiracy to commit bank fraud. Per prosecutors, his network relied on dozens of U.S. shell companies and more than a dozen U.S. bank accounts. He lied to financial institutions about his business’s true nature—falsely claiming he ran a software publishing and development firm—to keep the accounts active. The scheme worked like this: Cartier received illicit funds as cryptocurrency, converted them to cash, deposited the cash into shell company accounts, passed it to other nodes in the money-laundering network, and finally withdrew the funds in Colombian currency. The court also ordered the seizure of roughly $2.36 million i

April 29 – Former President Trump posted on Truth Social: “Iran is a mess. They have no clue how to negotiate a nuclear deal. They’d better wake up soon!”

April 29 — Iranian reports indicate Pakistan has opened six land routes to Iran, bypassing the commercial blockade tied to Hormuz Strait tensions and offering an alternative passage for thousands of containers. (CGTN)

April 29: Kalshi has launched a prediction market tied to weekly Spotify play counts for top artists, letting users trade on stream numbers for names like Drake, Taylor Swift, Justin Bieber, Bad Bunny and others.

April 29: Binance Wallet announced via an official statement that the Gensyn (AIGENSYN) airdrop distribution launches today at 17:00 UTC. Users holding at least 227 Binance Alpha Points qualify to claim the airdrop. They can snag 715 AIGENSYN tokens on the Alpha activity page on a first-come, first-served basis. If the event remains ongoing, the points threshold will automatically drop by 5 points every five minutes.

April 29th — Gaming public chain Ronin announced it will migrate to Ethereum Layer 2 on May 12, with roughly 10 hours of downtime for on-chain operations during the transition. Normal operations will resume post-migration. The new underlying architecture will be built on the OP Stack, integrating EigenDA as its data availability (DA) layer. Users are advised to unbond their RON stakes before the May 12 migration; otherwise, the system will automatically unbond stakes after the migration completes. The core goal of the move is to leverage Ethereum’s security, data availability, and finality, while bringing mature on-chain gaming infrastructure to the Ethereum ecosystem. As the underlying network for popular titles like Axie Infinity and Pixels, Ronin calls this a key milestone in its ecosystem development. Post-migration changes include: - RON’s annual inflation rate dropping from over 20% to below 1% - The treasury receiving ongoing revenue from staking, Sequencer net proc