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Bithumb Temporarily Halts MERL Deposits and Withdrawals for Major Network Upgrade

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If you’re a MERL holder or an active trader on Bithumb, here’s an important update you don’t want to miss.
South Korea’s top crypto exchange, Bithumb, has paused all MERL deposits and withdrawals as of 4:55 a.m. UTC today. This temporary suspension is part of a planned network upgrade for Merlin Chain, and while it may disrupt activity in the short term, it’s ultimately geared toward strengthening the ecosystem.

Why Did Bithumb Pause MERL Activity?

This suspension is directly tied to Merlin Chain’s ongoing network upgrade—a critical step that enhances the blockchain’s performance, security, and overall functionality.

Pausing deposits and withdrawals during upgrades helps ensure:

  • A smooth and error-free transition
  • Protection of user funds
  • Prevention of failed or stuck transactions
  • Proper integration of new features and improvements

In other words, this is Bithumb making sure everything updates safely and cleanly.

How Does This Affect MERL Users on Bithumb?

Here’s what the temporary suspension means for you:

  • Deposits: Not allowed during the upgrade
  • Withdrawals: Also unavailable until the upgrade is complete
  • Trading: Still fully functional—you can trade MERL as usual
  • Your MERL Holdings: Safe and unaffected in your Bithumb wallet

So while you can’t move tokens in or out, you can continue trading them on the exchange without any interruptions.

When Will MERL Services Return to Normal?

Bithumb hasn’t shared an exact completion time yet. Network upgrades can take anywhere from a few hours to a few days, depending on the complexity.

To stay updated, keep an eye on Bithumb’s:

  • Official website
  • Social media channels
  • Email alerts
  • Mobile app notifications

They’ll announce the moment the upgrade—and the suspension—has officially wrapped up.

Why Network Upgrades Are Good News for MERL Holders

Although temporary service pauses can be inconvenient, they typically lead to meaningful improvements. This upgrade is expected to boost:

  • Transaction speed and efficiency
  • Security against exploits and vulnerabilities
  • Scalability for future growth
  • Overall functionality and ecosystem reliability

Long-term, these upgrades are designed to make MERL stronger, more secure, and more capable of handling increased demand.

Tips for MERL Traders During the Suspension

While deposits and withdrawals are on hold, traders can still make the most of this time:

  • Keep an eye on MERL price movements
  • Plan your next trades in advance
  • Read up on what this network upgrade includes
  • Adjust your trading strategies if needed
  • Watch for the official announcement on service resumption

This pause highlights Bithumb’s commitment to secure, reliable operations—and shows strong coordination between the exchange and the Merlin Chain development team.

Frequently Asked Questions

How long will the suspension last?
No exact timeline yet. Upgrades usually take several hours to several days. Bithumb will announce when everything is back online.

Can I still trade MERL?
Yes. Trading is unaffected—only deposits and withdrawals are paused.

Are my MERL tokens safe?
Absolutely. Your tokens remain securely in your Bithumb wallet throughout the suspension.

Why do exchanges pause services during upgrades?
To prevent errors, protect user funds, and ensure the network upgrade integrates smoothly.

Will this affect MERL’s price?
Short-term fluctuations are possible, but upgrades often support long-term value by improving the network.

How will I know when services resume?
Keep an eye on Bithumb’s announcements via their website, social media, app notifications, and email.

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ChainOpera AI (COAI) Builds Product Momentum as Usage and Valuation Gap Widens

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ChainOpera AI is one of the more unusual stories in the decentralized AI space right now — a project with real, measurable traction that the market hasn’t fully priced in. COAI is currently trading around $0.36 with a 24-hour volume of $119 million, powering a decentralized AI stack that spans an agent super-app, a developer platform, a model and GPU layer, and an AI-native blockchain protocol. The numbers at the token level look modest. The numbers at the product level tell a different story.

A Platform With Genuine Adoption Behind It

At the time of its official platform launch in June 2025, ChainOpera’s AI Terminal had already surpassed one million daily active users and 150,000 paid users, with more than 1,000 AI agents submitted by community developers. Since then, the developer ecosystem has continued to expand.

The Agent Developer Platform has surpassed 100,000 developers creating and monetizing AI agents, a figure that is considerably higher than comparable projects in the same infrastructure category. That user base isn’t theoretical — it represents a functioning creator economy built around community-developed AI agents, with real revenue flowing through the BNB Chain ecosystem.

ChainOpera has also been actively expanding its AI Terminal with new agents for trading, market insight, and financial advice, and integrated Lit Protocol’s “Vincent” for non-custodial autonomous trading agents. The AI Trading Arena launched in May 2026 adds another functional layer to a platform that is clearly building toward a comprehensive AI agent marketplace rather than a single-use application.

The Foundation Has Been Buying

One signal that stands out from the noise is the behavior of the ChainOpera AI Foundation itself. The Foundation repurchased over 15 million COAI tokens for its strategic reserve — a move that drew attention from market observers as a signal of internal confidence in the ecosystem’s direction. Foundations that buy their own tokens in the open market are putting their treasury behind the thesis that the token is undervalued relative to what the platform is building.

On the derivatives side, futures open interest surged 77% in April 2026, signaling intense speculative interest and elevated leverage in the market. That kind of derivatives activity cuts both ways — it reflects genuine trader conviction but also raises the risk of a sharp deleveraging event if sentiment shifts.

The Valuation-to-Usage Disconnect

Trading at current levels, COAI carries a market cap of around $50 million with a fully diluted valuation near $264 million — a relatively modest figure for a project with user metrics that comparable AI-crypto projects with smaller adoption bases have been valued far higher for. That gap is either an opportunity or a warning sign, depending on what you believe comes next.

The supply structure is the variable most worth watching. Only around 18.8% of tokens were circulating at launch, and major unlocks for core team, advisors, and early backers are set to begin linearly after a one-year lockup — starting around late 2026. If platform adoption continues growing at its current pace and demand absorbs that incoming supply, the valuation gap could narrow considerably. If it doesn’t, the unlock pressure could weigh on price through the remainder of the year.

The system’s Proof-of-Intelligence mechanism verifies and accounts for contributions across compute, models, data, and agents — with COAI used for service access, resource coordination, contribution accounting, and governance, all sitting within a roadmap toward a fully AI-focused Layer-1 chain. The infrastructure is there. What ChainOpera needs now is for the market to catch up to what the platform has already built.

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Velvet Rally Accelerates As SpaceX IPO Fever Reaches Crypto Markets

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The Velvet (VELVET) chart tells a story that’s hard to ignore. After spending the better part of a year consolidating below $0.22, the token has exploded higher — surging over 300% since June 3 and briefly touching $1.10 before pulling back to trade around $0.87 at the time of writing. Looking at the daily chart, the move is near-vertical against months of flat price action, which makes the catalysts behind it worth examining closely.

Two announcements in quick succession appear to have done the repricing.

Trade.xyz Integration Opens the First Door

The rally’s starting gun was Velvet’s announced integration with Trade.xyz on June 3. The move is more significant than a typical partnership announcement — it represents a fundamental expansion of what the platform does. Rather than operating as a purely crypto-native tool, Velvet is now positioning itself as a single ecosystem where users can access crypto, stocks, commodities, research, and trade execution without jumping between separate applications.

That kind of multi-asset vision has been gaining traction as traders increasingly look for unified platforms that reduce friction. The breakout above the $0.20–$0.22 resistance zone — a level that had capped the price multiple times over the preceding months — came almost immediately after this announcement, suggesting the market considered it a genuine change in the project’s scope rather than a routine integration.

SpaceX IPO Mania Does the Rest

If the Trade.xyz integration lit the fuse, the pre-IPO announcement poured fuel on it. With SpaceX’s much-anticipated public debut increasingly on traders’ radar, Velvet announced that users can now access pre-IPO exposure to companies including SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic — with leverage — directly on the platform.

That’s a compelling offer in the current environment. Pre-IPO access in traditional finance is generally reserved for institutional investors and high-net-worth individuals. The idea that retail crypto traders can get leveraged exposure to SpaceX before it officially lists is exactly the kind of narrative that spreads quickly across markets and drives speculative inflows at speed.

The timing of the price spike and the announcement aren’t coincidental.

Where Velvet Sits Now

Velvet has carved out a positioning that sits at the intersection of two of the most active narratives in markets right now: tokenized access to real-world assets and pre-IPO investing. Both themes have attracted serious capital in 2025 and 2026, and the combination of Trade.xyz’s multi-asset infrastructure with pre-IPO exposure to the most talked-about private companies gives the platform a differentiated pitch.

The chart, however, warrants some realism. A near-vertical move from under $0.15 to above $1.00 in a matter of days rarely holds without consolidation. The token has already pulled back from its peak, and whether it can establish the $0.20–$0.22 former resistance as a new support base will likely determine the near-term trajectory. A healthy retest of that zone after a move of this magnitude wouldn’t be unusual — and would arguably set a stronger foundation for any continuation.

For now, Velvet has the narrative, the announcements, and the chart to back the attention it’s receiving. Whether the momentum outlasts the initial excitement is the question traders are working through in real time.

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Monolythium Introduces Public Testnet After Full Protocol Reset

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Monolythium Foundation Introduces Public Testnet for Post-Quantum Rust/RISC-V Layer 1

Monolythium Foundation today introduced the public testnet for Monolythium, a rebuilt Layer 1 blockchain designed as settlement infrastructure for autonomous agents, post-quantum accounts, native markets, and operator-cluster infrastructure.

The launch follows a full protocol reset. On April 28, 2026, Monolythium decommissioned its predecessor Cosmos-based app-chain, including its earlier EVM-bridged surface, legacy test network, operator software, launchpad, and explorer. The project chose to rebuild the protocol around autonomous economic activity carried out by humans, companies, software agents, and online services on open settlement rails.

Monolythium’s position is that the next phase of blockchain infrastructure will not be defined only by wallets sending tokens. Software agents are beginning to request services, pay for APIs, buy compute, open escrow, negotiate terms, and act under delegated authority. That requires more than generic smart contracts. It requires identity, consent, spending policy, reputation, service discovery, native markets, and dispute resolution enforced below the application layer.

“Monolythium was not rebuilt to become a slightly faster version of an existing EVM chain,” said Nayiem Willems, founder of Monolythium. “The reset was about removing assumptions that would have limited the protocol later. If autonomous agents are going to hold identities, spend funds, pay service providers, open escrow, and build reputation across platforms, the settlement layer underneath them needs different primitives from day one.”

The rebuilt protocol is not EVM-compatible at execution. Existing Solidity contracts and EVM bytecode do not run natively on Monolythium. The execution layer is Rust-first and compiled to deterministic RISC-V artifacts, while common settlement functions are handled through native protocol modules instead of repeatedly redeployed application contracts.

Those native modules include asset standards, name registration, account policy, issuer attestations, service discovery, availability, reputation, escrow, bridge policy, spending limits, and a protocol-level spot central limit order book, or CLOB. The native CLOB is intended to provide shared spot-market infrastructure for token pairs, stablecoin pairs, compute, data, agent services, real-world assets, and other marketable resources without requiring every market to depend on a separate bespoke contract.

Monolythium deliberately excludes perpetual futures and margin trading from the base protocol. The market layer is designed around spot settlement rather than leveraged derivatives. The project’s view is that agents paying for services, buying compute, routing liquidity, or managing treasury balances need predictable markets and final settlement at the protocol layer.

Post-quantum cryptography is built into the protocol from the start. Monolythium uses ML-DSA-65 for account and consensus signatures. User accounts, operator identities, and consensus certificates are based on post-quantum signatures rather than classical elliptic-curve signatures. The reason is structural: if an account or autonomous agent accumulates reputation, consent history, commercial activity, and attestations over years, its key material becomes part of its economic identity. Monolythium is designed so that identity does not begin with a future migration problem.

At the consensus layer, Monolythium uses Starfish-C, a DAG-BFT design organized around vertices, waves, and anchors. Anchors serve as the user-facing finality unit for payments, orders, escrow updates, bridge routes, and agent actions.

Monolythium also uses operator clusters instead of treating a network operator as a single key controlled by one party. Operators join clusters, clusters admit operators, and infrastructure quality becomes visible through network tooling. The model is intended to make region, reliability, hardware profile, archive capability, oracle support, and other service tiers part of the operator market.

The public testnet also includes LythiumSeal, Monolythium’s encrypted mempool research track. LythiumSeal is designed to keep sealed transaction bodies opaque until ordering is locked, reducing the visibility that can enable front-running and transaction-order manipulation. It is live on testnet, open source, opt-in, and research-stage.

Monolythium mainnet has not launched. The current release is a public testnet intended for developers, operators, and researchers.

About Monolythium

Monolythium is a Rust/RISC-V-native Layer 1 blockchain designed as settlement infrastructure for the autonomous economy. The protocol combines post-quantum account and consensus signing, Starfish-C DAG-BFT consensus, native asset standards, a native spot CLOB, agent-commerce primitives, operator clusters, and hardened node infrastructure.

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