☀️ "Winter's over" says the man on the horse

Saylor says winter's over — and a $78K bitcoin is making his case. Plus: a researcher just won 1 BTC for the largest quantum attack on crypto's underlying math, and the DOJ just cleared Warsh's path to the Fed. ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ Friday, April 24, 2026 Michael Saylor says the bitcoin winter is over. Some experts agree, with caveats. With bitcoin holding above $78,000, Strategy's Michael Saylor posted "Winter's Over" on X — complete with a Game of Thrones-style image on horseback — declaring a new phase for the market. Analyst Mati Greenspan mostly agreed, arguing the recent slump was a pullback inside a broader bull market, not a true crypto winter, and that bitcoin has likely already bottomed. The real debate is what comes next: Greenspan and others say institutional accumulation is just the first leg, with nation-state adoption — central banks adding BTC alongside gold — as the cycle that follows. Not everyone is buying it: other analysts warn altcoins are still very cold, and that the four-year halving cycle hasn't been declared dead yet. Read the full story → Sponsor message Tech Researcher wins 1 bitcoin bounty for largest quantum attack on underlying tech Independent researcher Giancarlo Lelli just won Project Eleven's 1 BTC Q-Day Prize — worth roughly $78,000 — after breaking a 15-bit elliptic curve key on publicly accessible quantum hardware using a variant of Shor's algorithm. That's 512 times larger than the previous public demonstration in September 2025. Bitcoin still uses 256-bit security, so the attack is far from threatening real wallets — but theoretical resource estimates for a full break have fallen sharply, with a Google paper now putting the threshold below 500,000 physical qubits. Roughly 6.9 million BTC sit in wallets with exposed public keys. The urgency around post-quantum migration plans like BIP-360 is growing. Read more → Policy Trump's DOJ drops probe that stood in way of president's pick to run Federal Reserve The DOJ dropped its criminal investigation into Fed Chair Jerome Powell on Friday — the probe into renovation cost overruns that Republican Senator Thom Tillis had been using to block Kevin Warsh's confirmation. Within minutes of the announcement, Kalshi odds on Warsh being confirmed before May 15 jumped from 30% to over 80%. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro handed the matter to the Fed's inspector general, but reserved the right to restart the criminal probe. Powell's term as Fed chair expires next month — though he may remain on the board through 2028, keeping a vote on interest rates regardless of who takes the chair. Read more → Consensus Miami · May 5–7, 2026 Join CoinDesk at Consensus Miami, where agentic commerce, crypto at scale, and institutional integration are redefining the future of finance. Save 20% with the code HEADLINES Get your pass → Know someone who should be reading this? Share this newsletter See all of CoinDesk’s newsletters    CoinDesk, Inc., 61 9th Avenue, 5th Floor, New York,NY,10011,USA, Unsubscribe Manage Preferences   Copyright © 2026 CoinDesk, All rights reserved.