Crypto Academy
Bitcoin Guides & Education
Bitcoin news, guides, and analysis. Everything about the original cryptocurrency — from mining and wallets to price predictions and institutional adoption.
Function FBTC TVL Hits Billions Without Daily Trades
Function (FBTC) is a wrapped Bitcoin protocol (formerly Ignition) offering 1:1 BTC-backed yield through DeFi integration across Ethereum, Mantle, Arbitrum, and 25+ dApps. FBTC trades around $77,000 with an $852M market cap and 11,014 tokens in circulation, ranked #8 in bridge category TVL. Function has amassed $1.5 billion in TVL and announced $50 million in cumulative DeFi settlements. Galaxy Digital co-led the $10 million seed round alongside Antalpha and Mantle, serving as core contributor and governance architect. The thesis: Function has shipped genuine institutional Bitcoin yield infrastructure with audited reserves and major DeFi integrations. But daily trading volume sits near zero, the integration pipeline has slowed since mid-2025, and GoPlus has flagged that the contract creator can still pause sells, change fees, and mint tokens. When the Build vs Adoption gap is this wide, settlement claims deserve careful reading.
Archie DuttonMay 3, 2026
BDX Price Held Steady While Privacy Peers Crashed
Beldex (BDX) is a privacy-focused Layer-1 with a private messenger (BChat), VPN (BelNet), and browser, plus LayerZero cross-chain support across Ethereum, Solana, BNB Smart Chain, Base, and Arbitrum. BDX trades around $0.08 with a $620M market cap and 7.74B circulating supply, ranked #86 on CoinGecko. While the privacy coin sector got hammered through January 2026 with Monero and Zcash facing exchange delistings, BDX held steady. The Obscura hardfork on December 7, 2025 brought Bulletproofs++ to the chain, cutting transaction size by 38%. Kraken listed BDX on January 22, 2026. Grayscale Research named Beldex among its Q4 2025 top performers by volatility-adjusted returns. KuCoin and WEEX launched 30-day fixed staking programs that locked supply during deep-fear sentiment. The thesis: technicals showed bearish, but on-chain data and infrastructure buildout told a different story.
Katerina KulikovskaMay 3, 2026
How SPX6900 Survived The Meme Coin Wipeout
SPX6900 (SPX) is a community-driven meme token built on Ethereum with multi-chain bridges to Solana and Base via Wormhole. SPX trades near $0.37 with a market cap of approximately $337M to $348M, ranking #102 on CoinMarketCap and #130 on CoinGecko. The token sits roughly 84% below its $2.27 all-time high reached on July 28, 2025. Tokenomics: 1 billion max supply, 69 million tokens permanently burned at launch in August 2023, leaving 930.99 million in circulation. On-chain conviction: 7,390 wallets held at least $1,000 worth of SPX as of March 2026. Murad Mahmudov holds roughly 29.96 million SPX with no on-chain sales despite a $60 million unrealized loss. April 2026 brought a 19% weekly rally to $0.3839 out of a $0.27 to $0.35 accumulation channel and a Box.Fun partnership for collectible SPX Boxes. The thesis: a $5 SPX price requires supply squeeze, Bitcoin rally, and a major exchange listing all firing within months of each other.
Archie DuttonMay 1, 2026
Add LIGHT to Your Wallet in Under 90 Seconds
Bitlight Labs (LIGHT) is a BNB Chain BEP20 token whose project builds RGB and Lightning Network infrastructure for Bitcoin. The token currently trades at $0.2435 with a $10.4M market cap and a $101.8M FDV, against a 420 million max supply and 43 million in circulation. Daily volume sits around $5.97 million, with Gate.io carrying $2.83 million of LIGHT/USDT trade and KuCoin and MEXC handling smaller shares. The Bitlight RLN desktop client launched March 24, 2026 and gives RGB asset issuance and instant Lightning Network transfer their first product-ready interface. First insider and private allocation unlocks begin in 2026, which will reshape circulating supply within months. The thesis: getting LIGHT into a self-custody wallet is straightforward, but ticker collisions, market-order slippage, and the upcoming unlock schedule are where new buyers lose money.
Crypto News NavigatorApr 30, 2026
Why Venom Holders Stayed When The Price Crashed
Venom (VENOM) is a Layer 1 sovereign-grade blockchain whose 2024 airdrop deliberately weighted token allocation toward testnet developers and contributors rather than wallet-volume farmers. Six months after distribution, the network logs 90,000 daily active users and 150,000-200,000 daily transactions while VENOM trades at $0.019, down 97.5% from its all-time high of $0.7824. OKX delisted VENOM in June 2025 and Bybit followed on April 7, 2026. Despite that liquidity loss, on-chain data shows base-tier recipients sold quickly while testnet contributors held; circulating supply sits at 988.9 million of 8 billion max. CEO Christopher Louis Tsu's team announced a post-quantum migration plan to ML-DSA and ML-KEM in April 2026, alongside x402 protocol integration for AI-agent payments. The thesis: builder-weighted airdrops produce stickier holder bases that survive price collapse, but only if the underlying tech finds product-market fit before patience runs out.
Archie DuttonApr 29, 2026
Merlin Crypto Tracker Shows What Bitcoin L2s Can Actually Do
Merlin Chain removed its sequencer infrastructure in June last year in Fork 12. The result was a historic earthquake with aftershocks that continue to ripple through on-chain data as of this writing. We're talking: 12.7M transactions processed, $16 billion cumulative bridge volume, and volumes of throughput activity no normal Bitcoin block explorer can make sense of. A good merlin crypto tracker breaks the chaos into legible parts: gas costs, bridge flows, proof submission cadences, and more.
Archie DuttonApr 28, 2026
How Threshold Signatures Fix Bitcoin Custody
Each time a user mints tBTC on Threshold Network, decentralized committees of automated nodes jointly sign a Bitcoin transaction without any single node ever possessing the full private key. The user experience, by design, is seamless and uncluttered. Under-the-hood, threshold signatures distribute cryptographic responsibility to tens of machines so the system as a whole is trustless. This silent threshold cryptography layer is rapidly becoming the load-bearing infrastructure for decentralized Bitcoin custody, cross-chain bridges, and a long list of DeFi integrations.
Archie DuttonApr 27, 2026
BAN Price Moved 340% While Everyone Watched Other Tokens
Banana duct-taped to a gallery wall by Maurizio Cattelan sold for $6.2 million at Sotheby's in 2024. The Comedian token that it inspired was launched on Solana's Pump.Fun platform in October of that year and has since seen returns that have made the art world look stodgy by comparison. BAN price rallied from its all-time low of $0.009291 to an all-time high of $0.3780 as of November 18, 2024, an increase of over 3,900%. Ban coin's Q4 2025 surge wasn't accidental.
Crypto News NavigatorApr 21, 2026
A 2017 ICO That Outlasted Almost Everything Else
Blockstack sold $47 million worth of tokens in the first SEC-qualified token sale in US history back in 2017. If you held, you probably lost. STX trades for roughly $0.24, down 58% in the past year. But Stacks has $545M sBTC TVL, Fireblocks and Grayscale as partners, and keeps shipping upgrades. Price predictions that fail to account for that survival mojo miss the real story.
Crypto News NavigatorApr 18, 2026