BTC $72K, Iran Ceasefire, & Anthropic Mythos

Bitcoin finally cracked $70K again. Could spring finally be here?

This Week in Crypto

Bitcoin has been pinned between $62K and $75K since early February.

• The dominant storyline remains geopolitics. Late Tuesday, a two-week ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran was announced, with Iran agreeing to restore safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz. 

• Bitcoin jumped to $72K as a result, touching a three-week high, while oil dropped more than 10%, triggering nearly $600M in liquidations.

The bigger structural story this week: Morgan Stanley launched MSBT, becoming the first major U.S. bank to issue its own spot Bitcoin ETF.

• It priced at a 0.14% fee, undercutting BlackRock’s IBIT which charges 0.25% and holds around $55B in assets.

• Day one volume came in around $34M in net inflows and projecting $5B AUM in year one.

And the NYT found Satoshi? Maybe?

• John Carreyrou, the journalist who exposed Theranos, published a NYT investigation this week arguing that Satoshi Nakomoto is Adam Back, a 55-year-old British cryptographer and current CEO of Blockstream.

• Carreyrou and a forensic linguistics expert analyzed archives from three cryptography mailing lists spanning 1992 to 2008, starting with 34,000 suspects and narrowing based on shared writing quirks. One person apparently matched it all: Back.

• Back denied it publicly and at length on X, arguing that his voluminous posting history on electronic cash makes him an easy match for AI pattern-matching, not a smoking gun.

• Fortune pointed out that the investigation arguably glosses over Nick Szabo, a reclusive polymath whose initials are the inverse of Satoshi Nakamoto, as a stronger candidate.

• The stakes, if it ever were confirmed: Satoshi is believed to control 1.1 million Bitcoin. Whether that stash ever moves is a question the market does not particularly want answered.

This Week in TradFi

This week’s dominant storyline in markets was nearly identical to crypto’s.

• On Tuesday, the S&P 500 spent most of the day down before clawing back losses in the final hour.

• After Trump posted that he agreed to a two-week ceasefire, the Dow ripped more than 1300 points - its best day since April 2025 - while the S&P jumped 2.51% and the Nasdaq rose 2.8%. 

• For the week overall, the S&P 500 rose more than 3% while 10-year Treasury yields fell 13bps to 4.31%, and markets, which had been partially pricing in a rate hike last week, moved back to expecting the Fed to hold for the year.

Gold has had an interesting few months:

• Since the war with Iran began in late February, gold has lost over 11%, with soaring oil prices dampening expectations of U.S. rate cuts.

• The ceasefire announcement caused gold to initially rally over 3%, before giving back nearly all of it as the broader risk-on trade took over and investors rotated out of safe havens. 

• Gold steadied near $4,700 to close out the week.

And private credit’s quarter from hell continues - 

• The ongoing private credit redemption saga picked up more press this week, even if the actual events happened in Q1. 

• Cliffwater's flagship Corporate Lending Fund, the second-largest private credit vehicle targeting retail investors, capped redemptions at 7% in Q1 after investors attempted to pull approximately 14% of shares.

• BlackRock's HPS Corporate Lending Fund similarly capped withdrawals at 5% after investors sought nearly double that amount.

This Week in Tech

Lots of Anthropic news this week:

• Anthropic announced a major expanded compute deal with Google and Broadcom that will give it access to 3.5 gigawatts of Google's next-generation TPUs.

  • Alongside the deal, Anthropic disclosed that its annualized revenue run rate has surpassed $30B, more than tripling from $9B at the end of 2025, and that it now serves over 1,000 customers each paying upwards of $1M annually.

• The company also quietly unveiled Claude Mythos Preview, a new frontier model it has decided is too dangerous to release publicly. 

  • In testing, it reportedly identified thousands of zero-day vulnerabilities across every major operating system and web browser, some of them decades old.

  • The most interesting part here is the system card. During internal testing, a version of Mythos was placed in a containment sandbox and instructed to find a way to send a message if it could escape. It escaped. It then emailed the researcher to confirm it had done so, and, unprompted, posted details about the exploit to multiple public-facing websites.

  • Anthropic's system card describes Mythos as both "the best-aligned model we have released to date by a significant margin" and "likely poses the greatest alignment-related risk of any model we have released to date."

  • It’s also apparently obsessed with British cultural theorist Mark Fisher. Whatever that may mean.

As usual, below are some fundraising announcements, M&A, and tech personnel changes that caught our eye:

• Collide Capital, which backs early-stage companies in fintech, supply chain, and the future of work, announced the close of a $95M Fund II.

• Zero Shot, a venture capital fund with deep ties to OpenAI, has made its first close on its $100M goal.

• Defense startup Hermeus has raised $350M to keep developing what it’s calling the “fastest unmanned aircraft”.

Arch is building a next-gen wealth management platform for individuals holding Alternative Assets. Our flagship product is the crypto-backed loan, which allows you to securely and affordably borrow against your crypto.

Disclaimer: None of the above is financial advice, seriously.