Blockchain
UAE Investors Buy AI Dip, Maintain Crypto Exposure Despite Conflict
Investors in the United Arab Emirates are continuing to back artificial intelligence and crypto-related assets, even as regional tensions test the Gulf’s ambitions to become a global tech hub.
New data from eToro shows that UAE investors increased their exposure to AI and software stocks during the first quarter, taking advantage of falling prices rather than pulling back from risk.
Investors Lean Into AI Sell-Off
Despite market volatility, UAE investors used the downturn in AI and tech stocks as a buying opportunity.
According to eToro, there was a noticeable increase in holdings of major AI and software companies, including ServiceNow, Super Micro Computer, Adobe, and Oracle. These names saw strong growth in investor interest even as broader market conditions remained uncertain.
The trend suggests that investors are prioritizing long-term themes like AI infrastructure and digital transformation over short-term geopolitical concerns.
Crypto Exposure Remains Intact
Alongside AI investments, crypto exposure has also remained steady.
Strategy Inc., a company closely tied to Bitcoin through its large holdings, ranked as the eighth-most-held stock among UAE investors. This indicates that interest in crypto-linked assets continues despite market fluctuations.
Conflict Adds Pressure but Not Panic
The ongoing conflict involving Iran has introduced new risks for the region, particularly around infrastructure.
A recent Deutsche Bank report highlighted concerns such as reported strikes on data centers in the UAE and Bahrain, as well as potential threats to major AI projects like the planned Stargate campus in Abu Dhabi.
However, rather than triggering a broad risk-off reaction, the situation appears to be encouraging more selective investment strategies.
eToro analyst Josh Gilbert noted that investors are becoming more deliberate in how they allocate capital, maintaining exposure to core tech sectors while adjusting positions within them.
Gulf’s AI Ambitions Remain Strong
Despite these challenges, the Gulf region is expected to continue pushing forward with its AI strategy.
The UAE benefits from key advantages, including access to low-cost energy, a growing pipeline of data center projects, and strong backing from sovereign wealth funds, which collectively manage trillions of dollars in assets.
These factors position the region to remain competitive in the global AI race, even amid geopolitical uncertainty.
Crypto Firms Continue Operations
On the ground, crypto companies in the UAE report that operations remain largely stable.
Firms like HashKey MENA and Binance have continued functioning, supported by cloud-based systems that reduce reliance on physical infrastructure. While some disruptions, such as travel delays and postponed events, have occurred, the overall ecosystem remains active.
Investment firm Ento Capital described the current environment as a shift toward more risk-aware decision-making rather than a full retreat from the region.
Regulatory Clarity Attracts Capital
Dubai’s Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority has continued to roll out its regulatory framework during this period, including clearer rules around token issuance and crypto derivatives.
Regulators believe that transparency and strong oversight will help attract long-term institutional capital, especially during times of market stress when investors prioritize stability and clear guidelines.
Overall, the data suggests that UAE investors remain committed to both AI and crypto as long-term growth themes, even as geopolitical tensions introduce new layers of complexity.
Blockchain
ChainOpera AI (COAI) Builds Product Momentum as Usage and Valuation Gap Widens
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.
Blockchain
Velvet Rally Accelerates As SpaceX IPO Fever Reaches Crypto Markets
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.
Blockchain
Monolythium Introduces Public Testnet After Full Protocol Reset
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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