Morning Minute: NFTs Storm Back, Led by Bored Apes

📈 Blue-Chip NFTs post their best week of 2026

The NFT market posted its strongest numbers in months last week, with almost every major blue chip collection gaining double digits.

CryptoPunks crossed the 30.95 ETH ($72,000) mark this week, up 16.2%. Bored Apes are back above 9.65 ETH after two grail sales in the last 24 hours: a Gold Fur at 121.9 ETH and a Trippy Fur at 49 ETH.

The step is wide. Azuki is up 49%. BAKC rose by 50.1%. Azuki Elementals rose 37.5%. Other Koda rose by 32.2%. Meebit rises by 29.3%. MAYC increases by 24.2%. Nouns posted a gain of 284.6%, but on just 33 sales and 51 ETH in volume, so that number needs context. The only red on the board: Hypurr, expressed in HYPE, fell 6.1%.

While the Punks are still on top, it’s the Bored Apes who are leading the way in this run. They’re up almost 100% in the past month thanks to support from their new CEO and IRL clubhouse chatter, and they’re bringing energy back into NFTs. The atmosphere is good again (of course the green candles help).

As for why NFTs are making an appearance at this point in the cycle, many point to the end of the OpenSea farming program. In fact, over the past three to four years there have been incentives to trade NFTs on marketplaces like Blur, Magic Eden, and OpenSea. And incentive programs have historically destroyed demand for NFT collections.

Now these agricultural programs are over and a real supply-and-demand economy can return. Let’s see how big the demand is…

💰 DeFi United achieves its goal: Aave’s debt crisis has a solution

Six days after the $292 million Kelp DAO exploit nearly broke DeFi’s largest lending protocol, Aave founder Stani Kulechov said posted On Saturday it emerged that DeFi United’s recovery fund has achieved its goal.

His exact words: “The recovery fund has now been achieved with the aim of fully supporting rsETH, subject to pending votes, indicative agreements and successful implementation.”

Arkham confirmed that around $160-161 million was raised, compared to around $200 million needed. The largest contributors are Mantle and Aave DAO, who together contribute 55,000 ETH. Stani personally contributed 5,000 ETH (~$11.7 million). EtherFi added another 5,000 ETH, Lido 2,500 ETH and Golem Foundation 1,000 ETH. LayerZero, Ethena, Frax Finance and Ink Foundation have indicative commitments that are still pending formalization.

The Arbitrum Security Council’s frozen $71.5 million in attacker funds adds a recovery cushion, although its disposition is also pending a board vote.

The caveat in Stani’s post matters: this hasn’t been settled yet. The board still has a role to play. But the worst-case scenario of $230 million in bad debt appears to be off the table.

DeFi United is specifically designed to prevent a 15% depeg among all rSETH holders, which would have left Aave with $124 million in bad debt. Looks like it worked.

⚖️ DOJ drops Powell probe, Warsh confirmation now on track

The Justice Department on Friday dropped the criminal investigation into Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, clearing the last major hurdle to Kevin Warsh’s Senate confirmation.

U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro, who had pledged just two days earlier to continue the investigation, announced she would close the probe and refer the case to the Fed’s own inspector general, who had already been investigating the multibillion-dollar renovation of the central bank’s headquarters since last summer.

The move satisfied Sen. Thom Tillis, who dropped his confirmation Sunday morning, telling NBC he had gotten the assurances he needed “to feel like they weren’t using DOJ as a weapon to threaten the Fed’s independence.” The Senate Banking Committee has scheduled a confirmation vote on Warsh for Wednesday. Powell’s term as Fed chairman ends May 15.

The politics surrounding all this remain messy. Trump told CNBC on Friday that he would be “disappointed” if Warsh did not immediately cut rates after taking on the role. Senator Elizabeth Warren called the DOJ measure “just an attempt to clear the way for Trump’s sock puppet.” And Powell has not said whether he will remain on the Fed’s board of governors after his term as chairman ends (his board seat runs until 2028). That question could be answered Wednesday when Powell is expected to hold his final post-FOMC news conference.

💰 Western Union is launching a Solana Stablecoin next month

Western Union CEO Devin McGranahan used the company’s first-quarter 2026 earnings call last week to formulate a sentence that would have sounded absurd five years ago: “It’s no longer a question of whether Western Union will be in the digital asset space. It’s now about how quickly we can scale.”

The 170-year-old money transfer giant confirmed it is backed by the US dollar stable currencyUSDPT, is in final preparations and will go live in May, ahead of the original target for the first half of 2026. USDPT is built on Solana, issued by Anchorage Digital Bank (a federally chartered crypto custodian) and is backed 1:1 by US dollars.

The stablecoin thesis for WU is simple: SWIFT is slow, expensive and closed on weekends. Solana charges in seconds at a cost of less than a cent. For a company that processed 4.5 billion transactions by 2024, the cost savings add up quickly. McGranahan also pitches USDPT as a way for Western Union to “own the economics associated with stablecoins” – by capturing float, exchange rate spreads and transaction fees that currently go to third-party stablecoin issuers like Tether and Circle.

In addition to USDPT, Western Union is launching a Digital Asset Network that connects crypto wallets via API to its more than 360,000 cash payout locations in 200 countries. A USD Stable Card, which will allow consumers to hold and spend dollar-denominated stablecoin balances wherever cards are accepted, is planned for later in 2026, with high-inflation markets like Argentina as the initial target.

📉 Trump Hosts $TRUMP Meme Coin Holders at Mar-a-Lago

Saturday Mar-a-Lago meeting brought together the top 297 $TRUMP token holders for what organizers billed as “the most exclusive crypto and business conference in the world.”

The top 29 received a private champagne reception with the president. Attendees included Paolo Ardoino, CEO of Tether, venture capitalist Tim Draper and Cathie Wood of ARK Invest.

Trump delivered a 45-minute keynote in which he vowed not to let the banks derail the Clarity Act. “The crypto industry was created in America, its growth was led by America and its future will be made in America,” he said. He also talked about AI, the war in Iran and Trump-branded sneakers.

Despite the event, the token fell 14% on Saturday. $TRUMP is now down nearly 47% year-to-date and more than 90% from its January 2025 peak. Meanwhile, Reuters separately found that the Trump family has raked in more than $1 billion from crypto asset sales, including at least $336 million tied to meme coin sales in the first half of 2025.

Token holders lose, while the Trump family wins…

🌎 Macrocrypto and markets

• Crypto Majors Are Slightly Red After An Overnight Selloff; BTC -0.4% at $77.8k; ETH -0.7% at $2,320; SOL -2% at $85; HYPE +3% at $42.4
• Stable (+8%), Pengu (+6%) and JUP (+5%) were the leaders
• Oil -1% at $95; Gold +0.1% at $4,710
• Stock futures are open just before Monday
• Bitcoin recorded the highest weekly close since January last night at $78,450
• Chain link on Thursday listed its Data Feeds, Data Streams, and Proof of Reserve services on the AWS Marketplace, giving millions of AWS developers direct access to the blockchain oracle infrastructure through standard cloud purchasing
• Morgan Stanley Investment Management on Thursday launched the Stablecoin Reserves Portfolio (MSNXX), a government money market fund built specifically for stablecoin issuers to park the reserves that back their tokens
• More quantum progress when an independent researcher broke a 15-bit elliptic curve cryptography key on a publicly accessible IBM quantum computer on Thursday, winning Project Eleven’s 1 BTC Q-Day prize

Corporate bonds and ETFs

• The Bitcoin ETFs saw $14 million in net inflows on Friday, with a total of $813 million in the past week; the ETH ETFs saw inflows of $23 million this week and a total of $155 million
• Metaplanet issued 8 billion yen (~$50 million) of zero-interest bonds on Thursdaythe twentieth consecutive bond issuance, with proceeds going directly to Bitcoin purchases

Meme coin tracker

• Meme leaders were mostly red except Pengu; DOGE -1%, SHIB -2%, PEPE -2%, TRUMP -6%, BONK -2%, PENGU +6%, SPX flat, FARTCOIN -1%
• Hendrik (+100%), Belka (+100%) and Cards (+30%) were the leaders

💰 Token, airdrop and protocol tracker

• Western Union is going to launch its stablecoin USDPT on Solana next month
• Litecoin underwent a 13-block chain reorganization on Saturday, undoing approximately 32 minutes of network activity after attackers exploited a vulnerability in the MimbleWimble Extension Block (MWEB) privacy layer to push invalid transactions through unpatched mining nodes

🚚 What’s happening in NFTs?

• NFT Leaders were very green on a weekly basis, up 15-20%; Punks +6% at 31 ETH, BAYC +22% at 9.6 ETH, Pudgy +20% at 5.26 ETH; Hypurr’s -6% on 365 HYPE
• Nouns (+240%), BAKC (+50%), MAYC (+40%) and Azuki (+40%) were notable weekly winners
• There were multiple 6-figure NFT sales in the past week spread across gold Bored Apes, an Ether Rock, a Lost Robbie and 3 Skulls of Luci; there too It was a $600,000 loan against an XCOPY “Last Selfie”