Bitcoin stabilized around $78,000, the community raised over 100,000 ETH to support the DeFi ecosystem, a researcher cracked a 15-bit key on a quantum computer, and other events from the past week.

Bitcoin Stabilization

In the past week, the leading cryptocurrency strengthened its position. Although Monday began with a drop to $73,000, Bitcoin managed to confirm a local positive trend.

By Tuesday, April 21, the coin had returned to $76,000. On Wednesday morning, the asset broke through the resistance level around $78,000, which it had tested the previous week.

On the same day, the digital asset reached a peak of $79,500.

After that, Bitcoin entered a consolidation phase, trading in a narrow range from $79,000 to $77,000 from Thursday until the end of the week.

As of the time of writing, the price is $77,800 — a 1.5% increase for the week.

Several analysts agree that the rally was primarily driven by the derivatives market rather than spot demand. During the rise to $79,000, a cascade of short position liquidations totaling around $1.1 billion was observed.

The shift in sentiment was confirmed by the cryptocurrency fear and greed index. At one point, the indicator rose to 46 — the highest since January. It currently stands at 33, indicating "fear."

Source: Alternative.me.

Other cryptocurrencies in the top 10 by market capitalization lagged behind the leader. Ethereum is stuck at $2,300 (-0.5% for the week), XRP is trading at $1.4 (-1.2%), and BNB is at $631 (+1%).

Meanwhile, Bitcoin spot ETFs continued their inflow streak for the fourth consecutive week, with $823 million entering the products.

Source: SoSoValue.

Ethereum funds attracted $155 million — marking the third consecutive "green" week.

Source: SoSoValue.

The total cryptocurrency market capitalization stands at $2.68 trillion. Bitcoin's dominance is at 58.2%, while Ethereum's is at 10.5%.

Collective DeFi Rescue

The community continues to address the issues arising from the Kelp hack. The main goal is to close the deficit for the rsETH token.

On April 23, the affected lending protocol Aave teamed up with leading DeFi platforms and launched the DeFi United initiative. This campaign opened a fundraising effort to restore the ecosystem, with other projects joining in.

"We believe that collaboration is paramount during such times, and our priority is to achieve the best possible outcome for users," Aave stated.

In just a few days after launching DeFi United, over 100,000 ETH (~$230 million) was raised. This amount nearly covers the damage caused by the hack, which was around $290 million.

Source: defiunited.world.

Among the largest donors:

  • Mantle — 30,000 ETH;
  • Aave DAO — 25,000 ETH;
  • Aave founder Stani Kulechov — 5,000 ETH;
  • Ether.fi — 5,000 ETH;
  • Lido Finance — 2,500 ETH.

About 30,700 ETH was recovered through the freezing of stolen funds on the Arbitrum network.

Nearly 400 ETH came in as donations from the community.

As part of the protective measures, Aave and its partners created a specialized fund to restore the collateral for the affected rsETH token. Kelp also established a separate structure for compensating users.

The drop in Aave's TVL has been stabilized. As of April 26, the figure stood at around $14 billion. However, since the attack, the volume of deposits on the platform has decreased by more than $12 billion.

Source: DefiLlama.

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Demonstration of Quantum Power

This week, the digital asset industry was reminded of the looming quantum threat. Independent researcher Giancarlo Lelli successfully computed a 15-bit cryptographic key on ECC using a publicly available quantum computer.

For this achievement, the startup Project Eleven awarded the expert 1 BTC as part of the Q-Day Prize program.

Lelli applied a modified Shor's algorithm to a search space of 32,767 combinations. This method targets the discrete logarithm problem on elliptic curves — the mathematical foundation of digital signatures used in most blockchains.

Previously, engineer Steve Tippakonnick had extracted an ECC key on a 133-qubit IBM computer, but it was only six bits.

Lelli's result surpassed the previous demonstration by a factor of 512. The Project Eleven team called the latest experiment the largest hack of elliptic curves using quantum technology.

While the current scale is not comparable to real systems, as Bitcoin uses 256-bit ECC, Project Eleven noted the rapid narrowing of the gap.

Programmers consider the transition more of an engineering challenge than a fundamental physical problem.

However, the project has its critics. Former Bitcoin Core developer Jonas Schnelli stated that in this case, quantum computing provided no useful outcome. The result was obtained through classical verification of output data indistinguishable from random noise. The method is akin to guessing, like flipping a coin.

According to the developer, Lelli's methodology cannot be scaled to the Bitcoin blockchain. Schnelli also replicated the experiment using 20 lines of Python code without any quantum computer.

His conclusions were supported by several experts, including cryptographer Adam Back. Analyst James Chek suggested that the reward payout from Project Eleven was merely a marketing move.

New Speculations

On April 22, the second documentary of the month about the identity mystery of Satoshi Nakamoto was released. The film Finding Satoshi, directed by Tucker Tully and Matthew Mele, summarizes a four-year investigation led by American business writer William D. Cohen and private detective Tyler Maroney.

According to the findings presented in the work, the pseudonym of Bitcoin's creator was linked to cryptographers Hal Finney and Len Sassaman. The former was responsible for the code and technical implementation, while the latter handled the textual and academic aspects of the project, including the white paper.

The arguments were based on an analysis of the digital activity of the proposed candidates. The authors compared Satoshi's online behavior patterns with the activity of known participants in the early crypto community and concluded that Finney and Sassaman fit the profile most closely.

The filmmakers presented several indirect pieces of evidence in favor of Finney, who was the first recipient of Bitcoin from Satoshi. They noted a pause in his activity in the repository — between the publication of the white paper in October 2008 and the launch of the main network in January 2009. It was during this period that Finney could have been working on Bitcoin.

For Sassaman, the film provided different arguments: an academic writing style, connections to cypherpunks, and expertise in anonymity.

The film also features dozens of interviews. Among the participants are Bill Gates, Gary Gensler, Michael Saylor, Joseph Lubin, and Fred Ersam.

Tully and Mele emphasized that the film does not claim to provide a definitive answer to Nakamoto's identity. They described the information presented in Finding Satoshi as merely a version.

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Updated GPT

On April 23, OpenAI released the new language model GPT-5.5. It is positioned as "a new level of intelligence for real work and agent management."

The neural network is "designed to understand complex tasks, utilize tools, verify results, and complete more tasks."

GPT-5.5 also has the ability to:

  • understand user intentions;
  • plan work independently and bring tasks to completion;
  • write and debug code;
  • search for information online;
  • analyze data;
  • create documents and spreadsheets;
  • manage software and switch between tools.

Tests of GPT-5.5 across various benchmarks. Source: OpenAI.

OpenAI noted that the new model is particularly effective in agent programming, computer management, intellectual work, and early scientific research — areas where building long chains of reasoning and actions is crucial.

The model "significantly outperforms" GPT-5.4 and Claude Opus 4.7 in logical reasoning and autonomy: it proactively identifies problems, predicts testing and review needs without explicit prompts.

Source: OpenAI.

GPT-5.5 is available in ChatGPT and Codex for Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise plan users. A separate version, GPT-5.5 Pro, is available for Pro, Business, and Enterprise users.

Both variations will soon be available via API at a cost of $5 million for 1 million input tokens and $30 million for output tokens. The context window is 1 million tokens.

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