Crypto Market Fear Subsides Significantly, Today's Fear and Greed Index at 45

On May 18, open-source data visualization tool Grafana announced on the X platform that an unauthorized attacker recently gained access to a token that allowed entry to Grafana Labs’ GitHub environment, which they used to download the company’s code. An investigation confirmed the incident did not involve any customer data or personal information being compromised, nor did it have any impact on customer systems or business operations. The company immediately launched a forensic analysis, identified the source of the credential leak, invalidated the relevant credentials, and deployed additional security measures to better protect its environments. Additionally, Grafana disclosed that the attacker tried to extort a ransom to prevent the code repository from being made public. Ultimately, the company decided to refuse paying the ransom and will release more details from the incident postmortem once the investigation is finished.

On May 18th, according to Bitget market data, spot gold fell below $4,500 per ounce, marking the first such decline since late March, with an intraday drop of 0.85%.

On May 18, monitoring from Onchain Lens reveals that a crypto whale trading under the alias "Evaded" opened a 10x leveraged long position, purchasing 36,875 ZEC and 87,000 HYPE tokens for a total position value of $24 million. This whale has now become the largest ZEC bull on Hyperliquid.

On May 18, data from LookOnChain indicates that amid the market downturn, the large Ethereum whale has continued adding to its long positions in ETH. The whale’s four addresses collectively hold 120,000 ETH, valued at $254 million, with an unrealized loss of over $17.5 million. Notably, this whale significantly boosted its ETH long positions on May 16.

May 18: A South Korean exchange triggered circuit breakers for the KOSPI index after KOSPI 200 futures dropped 5%, halting algorithmic trading for five minutes. (FX168)

On Monday, May 18, during morning trading, Bitcoin spearheaded a sharp sell-off across the cryptocurrency market. Within one hour, it plunged quickly below $77,000 before a minor rebound, and is now trading at $77,234.09. As a result, the global crypto market recorded $527 million in liquidations over that short period. Meanwhile, HYPE bucked the downtrend, emerging as one of the few top mainstream cryptocurrencies to gain value. The token rose following the announcement that trade.xyz’s pre-IPO launch is tied to SpaceX. As of press time, HYPE trades at $45.65, marking a 4.41% increase in the last 24 hours. Following the crypto swings, Asia-Pacific equities opened broadly lower. South Korea’s KOSPI index dropped 3% intraday and is currently at 7,267.97 points. Key market-moving news: Market panic has been stoked by reports that Trump is reconsidering launching airstrikes against Iran alongside Israel. Another sentiment factor: South Korea’s Samsung Electronics will hold the second