Bitcoin price holds above $100,000, driven by “risk-on” sentiment after the CBOE Volatility Index (VIX) dropped to 20.
The Bitcoin Bull Score Index surged to 80, and the Fear & Greed Index suggests growing optimism, with historical patterns indicating potential for further price gains.
Bitcoin (BTC) price continues to consolidate higher above $100,000 after the CBOE Volatility Index (VIX) dropped to its 30-year average of 20, down from a peak of 60 earlier in 2025. This decline follows a US-China trade deal on May 12, which introduced a 90-day tariff pause and a 115% reduction on both sides.
CBOE Volatility Index chart. Source: X.com
The agreement has fueled a “risk-on” sentiment, boosting Bitcoin and equities as investors lean into higher-risk assets, according to Bitcoin network economist Timothy Peterson. The analyst said,
“$VIX dropped substantially yesterday on news of a potential China trade deal. It is now at ‘normal’ levels. This will be a ‘risk on’ environment for the foreseeable future.”
Adding to the bullish sentiment, the US Consumer Price Index (CPI) inflation rate dropped to 2.3% year-over-year in April 2025, the lowest since February 2021, down from 2.4% in March and below consensus forecasts of 2.4%. This softer-than-expected CPI reading signals easing inflationary pressure, potentially increasing the likelihood of Federal Reserve interest rate cuts in 2025, assuming other economic indicators align.
With respect to the current macroeconomic dynamics—lower volatility, cooling inflation, and a trade war truce- it creates favorable market conditions for Bitcoin.
Earlier this month, Peterson noted that BTC could reach $135,000 within 100 days, citing a drop in the CBOE Volatility Index (VIX) from 55 to 25, signaling a “risk-on” environment. With 95% accuracy, his model links low VIX levels to increased investor confidence in riskier assets like Bitcoin.
After posting one of its least bullish phases in two years during April, Bitcoin sentiment flipped drastically to its highest reading in 2025. Data from CryptoQuant indicated a dramatic rise in the Bitcoin Bull Score Index, soaring from 20 to 80, a level historically associated with significant price surges.
Bitcoin: bull score index. Source: CryptoQuant
This shift, driven by rising spot demand outpacing supply, reflects patterns observed after the April 2024 halving, suggesting Bitcoin could be poised for further gains.
Likewise, Bitcoin researcher Axel Adler Jr noted that while the Bitcoin Fear & Greed Index is climbing, currently at 53.3%, it remains below the “overloaded” zone above 80%. The analyst discussed the possibility of a market “upswing,” expressing hope for a successful test and surpassing Bitcoin’s all-time high near $110,000.
This article does not contain investment advice or recommendations. Every investment and trading move involves risk, and readers should conduct their own research when making a decision.
Two US senators are calling on Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to “exercise [the department’s] authority” and change a provision affecting taxes on corporate holdings of digital assets.
In a May 12 letter, Senators Cynthia Lummis and Bernie Moreno suggested Bessent had the authority to change the definition of “adjusted financial statement income” under existing US law in a way that could reduce what digital asset companies pay in taxes. The proposed adjustment was suggested as a way to modify a provision of the Inflation Reduction Act, signed into law in 2022.
“Our edge in digital finance is at risk if US companies are taxed more than foreign competitors,” said Lummis in a May 13 X post.
May 12 letter to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. Source: Cynthia Lummis
According to the two senators, the proposed modification would provide “relief to corporations that invest in digital assets.” Lummis has been one of the most outspoken digital asset advocates in Congress, while Moreno took office in January after crypto-backed political action committees spent roughly $40 million to support his 2024 Senate race.
The Inflation Reduction Act, which went into effect in 2023, imposes a 15% minimum tax on companies that report more than $1 billion in profits for three consecutive years. The measure would seemingly include unrealized crypto gains and losses, leading to Lummis’ and Moreno’s calls for the Treasury Department to “act swiftly.”
Senate awaiting second vote on stablecoin bill
The call from the two senators came as lawmakers in the Senate are expected to consider another vote on the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for US Stablecoins, or GENIUS Act — legislation to regulate payment stablecoins in the US. A motion for consideration failed to move forward in the Senate on May 8 due to Democratic lawmakers pushing back on Donald Trump’s ties to the crypto industry.
Lummis, one of the bill’s co-sponsors, suggested that she would continue to support digital asset regulation. The Senate could take up another vote in a matter of days.
We’re excited to announce a big surprise for the AI community — TechCrunch Sessions: AI is getting a limited-time discount to broaden the number of people who can attend and learn from some of the brightest minds in the industry. For just $292, you can get a general admission ticket — plus a 50% discount […]
Google is testing a redesign of its Search homepage in which “AI Mode,” the experimental AI-powered search feature the company rolled out earlier in May, replaces its longstanding “I’m Feeling Lucky” button under the Search bar. A company spokesperson confirmed to The Verge, which was the first to report the change, that the feature began […]
At long last, digital consumer bank Chime has moved forward with its IPO by filing its S-1 paperwork Tuesday. Chime had reportedly filed confidential S-1 paperwork back in December. S-1 filings typically reveal all kinds of information, covering financial, legal, and other risk factors. But Chime’s S-1 documents still have a lot of blank spaces. […]
Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, has missed a self-imposed deadline to publish a finalized AI safety framework, as noted by watchdog group The Midas Project. xAI isn’t exactly known for its strong commitments to AI safety as it’s commonly understood. A recent report found that the company’s AI chatbot, Grok, would undress photos of women when […]
Work-Bench, whose portfolio includes unicorns Spring Health and Socure, just raised a $160 million Fund IV to quadruple down on backing companies in New York City. The firm announced the raise in a blog post on Monday, saying the latest fund will support seed-stage founders building enterprise software. Checks will range from $2 million to […]
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.
A US court just put ownership of CRISPR back in play
The CRISPR patents are back in play.
Yesterday, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit said scientists Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier will get another chance to show they ought to own the key patents on what many consider the defining biotechnology invention of the 21st century.
The pair shared a 2020 Nobel Prize for developing the gene-editing system, which is already being used to treat various disorders.
But when US patent rights were granted in 2014 to Feng Zhang of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, the decision set off a bitter dispute in which hundreds of millions of dollars—as well as scientific bragging rights—are at stake. Read the full story.
—Antonio Regalado
To read more about CRISPR, why not take a look at:
+ Charpentier and Doudna announced they wanted to cancel their own CRISPR patents in Europe last year. Read the full story.
+ How CRISPR will help the world cope with climate change. Read the full story.
+ The US has approved CRISPR pigs for food. Pigs whose DNA makes them resistant to a virus could be the first big consumer product using gene editing. Read the full story.
Police tech can sidestep facial recognition bans now
—James O’Donnell
Six months ago I attended the largest gathering of chiefs of police in the US to see how they’re using AI. I found some big developments, like officers getting AI to write their reports. Now, I’ve published a new story that shows just how far AI for police has developed since then.
It’s about a new method police are using to track people: an AI tool that uses attributes like body size, gender, hair color and style, clothing, and accessories instead of faces. It offers a way around laws curbing the use of facial recognition, which are on the rise.
Here’s what this tells us about the development of police tech and what rules, if any, these departments are subject to in the age of AI. Read the full story.
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here.
The must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 Two Trump officials were denied access to the US Copyright Office Their visit came days after the administration fired the office’s head. (Wired $) + Shira Perlmutter oversaw a report raising concerns about training AI with copyrighted materials. (WP $)
2Google knew it couldn’t monitor how Israel might use its cloud technology But it went ahead with Project Nimbus anyway. (The Intercept)
3 Spain still doesn’t know what caused its massive power blackout Investigators are examining generators’ cyber defences for weaknesses. (FT $) + Could solar power be to blame? (MIT Technology Review)
4 Apple is considering hiking the price of iPhones The company doesn’t want to blame tariffs, though. (WSJ $) + Apple boss Tim Cook had a call with Trump following the tariff rollback news. (CNBC) + It’s reportedly developing an AI tool to extend phones’ battery life. (Bloomberg $)
5 Venture capitalists aren’t 100% sure what an AI agent is That isn’t stopping companies from sinking millions into them. (TechCrunch) + Google is working on its own agent ahead of its I/O conference. (The Information $) + What AI assistants can—and can’t—do. (Vox) + Check out our AI agent explainer. (MIT Technology Review)
6 Scammers are stealing the identities of death row inmates And prisoners are unlikely to see correspondence alerting them to the fraud. (NBC News)
7 Weight-loss drugs aren’t always enough You need long-term changes in health, not just weight. (The Atlantic $) + How is Trump planning to lower drug costs, exactly? (NY Mag $) + Drugs like Ozempic now make up 5% of prescriptions in the US. (MIT Technology Review)
8 China’s e-commerce giants are racing to deliver goods within an hour As competition has intensified, companies are fighting to be the quickest. (Reuters)
9 This spacecraft will police satellites’ orbits And hunt them down where necessary. (IEEE Spectrum) + The world’s biggest space-based radar will measure Earth’s forests from orbit. (MIT Technology Review)
10 Is your beard trimmer broken? Simply 3D-print a new part. Philips is experimenting with letting its customers create their own replacements. (The Verge)
Quote of the day
“We usually set it up so that our team doesn’t get to creep in.”
—Angie Saltman, founder and president of tech company Saltmedia, explains how her company helps store Indigenous data securely away from the Trump administration, the Verge reports.
One more thing
Meet the radio-obsessed civilian shaping Ukraine’s drone defense
Drones have come to define the brutal conflict in Ukraine that has now dragged on for more than three years. And most rely on radio communications—a technology that Serhii “Flash” Beskrestnov has obsessed over since childhood.
While Flash is now a civilian, the former officer has still taken it upon himself to inform his country’s defense in all matters related to radio. Once a month, he studies the skies for Russian radio transmissions and tries to learn about the problems facing troops in the fields and in the trenches.
In this race for survival—as each side constantly tries to best the other, only to start all over again when the other inevitably catches up—Ukrainian soldiers need to develop creative solutions, and fast. As Ukraine’s wartime radio guru, Flash may just be one of their best hopes for doing that. Read the full story.
—Charlie Metcalfe
We can still have nice things
A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or skeet ’em at me.)
+ Tune in at any time to the Coral City Camera, an underwater camera streaming live from an urban coral reef in Miami + Inhuman Resources, which mixes gaming, reading, and listening, sounds nuts. + This compilation of 331 film clips to recreate Eminem’s Lose Yourself is spectacular. + Questions I never thought I’d ask: what if Bigfoot were British?
Six months ago I attended the largest gathering of chiefs of police in the US to see how they’re using AI. I found some big developments, like officers getting AI to write their police reports. Today, I published a new story that shows just how far AI for police has developed since then.
It’s about a new method police departments and federal agencies have found to track people: an AI tool that uses attributes like body size, gender, hair color and style, clothing, and accessories instead of faces. It offers a way around laws curbing the use of facial recognition, which are on the rise.
Advocates from the ACLU, after learning of the tool through MIT Technology Review, said it was the first instance they’d seen of such a tracking system used at scale in the US, and they say it has a high potential for abuse by federal agencies. They say the prospect that AI will enable more powerful surveillance is especially alarming at a time when the Trump administration is pushing for more monitoring of protesters, immigrants, and students.
I hope you read the full story for the details, and to watch a demo video of how the system works. But first, let’s talk for a moment about what this tells us about the development of police tech and what rules, if any, these departments are subject to in the age of AI.
As I pointed out in my story six months ago, police departments in the US have extraordinary independence. There are more than 18,000 departments in the country, and they generally have lots of discretion over what technology they spend their budgets on. In recent years, that technology has increasingly become AI-centric.
Companies like Flock and Axon sell suites of sensors—cameras, license plate readers, gunshot detectors, drones—and then offer AI tools to make sense of that ocean of data (at last year’s conference I saw schmoozing between countless AI-for-police startups and the chiefs they sell to on the expo floor). Departments say these technologies save time, ease officer shortages, and help cut down on response times.
Those sound like fine goals, but this pace of adoption raises an obvious question: Who makes the rules here? When does the use of AI cross over from efficiency into surveillance, and what type of transparency is owed to the public?
In some cases, AI-powered police tech is already driving a wedge between departments and the communities they serve. When the police in Chula Vista, California, were the first in the country to get special waivers from the Federal Aviation Administration to fly their drones farther than normal, they said the drones would be deployed to solve crimes and get people help sooner in emergencies. They’ve had some successes.
But the department has also been sued by a local media outlet alleging it has reneged on its promise to make drone footage public, and residents have said the drones buzzing overhead feel like an invasion of privacy. An investigation found that these drones were deployed more often in poor neighborhoods, and for minor issues like loud music.
Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst at the ACLU, says there’s no overarching federal law that governs how local police departments adopt technologies like the tracking software I wrote about. Departments usually have the leeway to try it first, and see how their communities react after the fact. (Veritone, which makes the tool I wrote about, said they couldn’t name or connect me with departments using it so the details of how it’s being deployed by police are not yet clear).
Sometimes communities take a firm stand; local laws against police use of facial recognition have been passed around the country. But departments—or the police tech companies they buy from—can find workarounds. Stanley says the new tracking software I wrote about poses lots of the same issues as facial recognition while escaping scrutiny because it doesn’t technically use biometric data.
“The community should be very skeptical of this kind of tech and, at a minimum, ask a lot of questions,” he says. He laid out a road map of what police departments should do before they adopt AI technologies: have hearings with the public, get community permission, and make promises about how the systems will and will not be used. He added that the companies making this tech should also allow it to be tested by independent parties.
“This is all coming down the pike,” he says—and so quickly that policymakers and the public have little time to keep up. He adds, “Are these powers we want the police—the authorities that serve us—to have, and if so, under what conditions?”
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here.
On Monday, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit said scientists Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier will get another chance to show they ought to own the key patents on what many consider the defining biotechnology invention of the 21st century.
The pair shared a 2020 Nobel Prize for developing the versatile gene-editing system, which is already being used to treat various genetic disorders, including sickle cell disease.
But when key US patent rights were granted in 2014 to researcher Feng Zhang of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, the decision set off a bitter dispute in which hundreds of millions of dollars—as well as scientific bragging rights—are at stake.
The new decision is a boost for the Nobelists, who had previously faced a string of demoralizing reversals over the patent rights in both the US and Europe.
“This goes to who was the first to invent, who has priority, and who is entitled to the broadest patents,” says Jacob Sherkow, a law professor at the University of Illinois.
He says there is now at least a chance that Doudna and Charpentier “could walk away as the clear winner.”
The CRISPR patent battle is among the most byzantine ever, putting the technology alongside the steam engine, the telephone, the lightbulb, and the laser among the most hotly contested inventions in history.
In 2012, Doudna and Charpentier were first to publish a description of a CRISPR gene editor that could be programmed to precisely cut DNA in a test tube. There’s no dispute about that.
However, the patent fight relates to the use of CRISPR to edit inside animal cells—like those of human beings. That’s considered a distinct invention, and one both sides say they were first to come up with that very same year.
In patent law, this moment is known as conception—the instant a lightbulb appears over an inventor’s head, revealing a definite and workable plan for how an invention is going to function.
In 2022, a specialized body called the Patent Trial and Appeal Board, or PTAB, decided that Doudna and Charpentier hadn’t fully conceived the invention because they initially encountered trouble getting their editor to work in fish and other species. Indeed, they had so much trouble that Zhang scooped them with a 2013 publication demonstrating he could use CRISPR to edit human cells.
The Nobelists appealed the finding, and yesterday the appeals court vacated it, saying the patent board applied the wrong standard and needs to reconsider the case.
According to the court, Doudna and Charpentier didn’t have to “know their invention would work” to get credit for conceiving it. What could matter more, the court said, is that it actually did work in the end.
In a statement, the University of California, Berkeley, applauded the call for a do-over.
“Today’s decision creates an opportunity for the PTAB to reevaluate the evidence under the correct legal standard and confirm what the rest of the world has recognized: that the Doudna and Charpentier team were the first to develop this groundbreaking technology for the world to share,” Jeff Lamken, one of Berkeley’s attorneys, said in the statement.
The Broad Institute posted a statement saying it is “confident” the appeals board “will again confirm Broad’s patents, because the underlying facts have not changed.”
The decision is likely to reopen the investigation into what was written in 13-year-old lab notebooks and whether Zhang based his research, in part, on what he learned from Doudna and Charpentier’s publications.
The case will now return to the patent board for a further look, although Sherkow says the court finding can also be appealed directly to the US Supreme Court.
