Financial markets are becoming less affected by the Iraq War, and most assets rose in the first week of May.

BTC repeatedly tested the $80,000 level, reaching a high of $83,000. The S&P 500 hit a new high, and semiconductor stocks formed a parabolic pattern. The rush to buy Strategy's STRC before its ex-dividend date continued.

Delving deeper into the crypto, the assets experiencing price increases are more diverse, with many seemingly unrelated coins rising, unlike the past when a single vertical sector saw a general surge. For example, ZEC doubled in a week, reaching a high of $600, briefly pushing its market capitalization above $10 billion. TON rose 120% in a single week, briefly surpassing LINK to enter the top 20 with a market capitalization of $7.6 billion. ONDO rose 50% after the DTCC working group news, from $0.18 to around $0.4. LAB's FDV reached $4.5 billion. SKYAI increased tenfold in a month. Smaller tokens like LUNC, BIO, STRK, JTO, and PENDLE are also following suit.

It looks like the alt season has arrived, but in reality, the Altcoin Season Index has been stuck at 39 for a long time, with BTC dominance at 58.8%, and only about half of the top 100 are above their 50-day moving average. In other words, only a very limited number of tokens are truly rising. Many of the remaining DeFi coins with no shill and protocol tokens relying solely on TVL data are still trading sideways.

In this article, the BlockBeats editor breaks down four representative tokens—ONDO, ZEC, BIO, and TON—and analyzes the reasons for their price increases.

ONDO enters Wall Street

Let's look at ONDO first. ONDO is the leader in the RWA sector. It has risen by 57% in the past week and is currently around 0.4.

The main reason for its recent price increase is the implementation of two collaborative projects.

On May 4, Ondo was selected for the Industry Working Group of DTCC (Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation, a core financial infrastructure of the U.S. capital market).

This working group also includes financial giants such as BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Franklin Templeton, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Citadel Securities, NYSE Group, Circle, Fireblocks, and Robinhood.

What is the scale of DTCC? It holds $114 trillion in assets and clears $3.7 trillion annually. It's the pipeline behind the US securities market that almost everyone has to navigate. The SEC issued a no-action letter to a DTC subsidiary at the end of 2025, securing its regulatory approval. DTCC's own tokenization service is planned for a limited launch in July 2026, with a full launch in October, initially covering Russell 1000 stocks, major ETFs, and US Treasury bonds. Ondo's entry into this working group means it has the opportunity to participate in defining the token layer interface of this future standard.

Following this, on May 6th, Ondo, in collaboration with JPMorgan's Kinexys, Mastercard's MTN network, and Ripple, successfully completed the first cross-border tokenized government bond redemption. The process was as follows: Ripple redeemed a portion of its holdings in OUSG (Ondo's short-term US Treasury bond token fund). The redemption instruction was issued on the XRP Ledger, routed by Mastercard's multi-currency network, and settled in fiat currency through JPMorgan's Kinexys. The funds then entered Ripple's bank account in Singapore. The entire process was completed within 5 seconds outside of traditional banking hours, while conventional cross-border settlements typically take 1 to 3 business days.

DTCC CEO Frank La Salla has publicly stated that "tokenization will fundamentally change the way markets operate." BlackRock's Larry Fink had even earlier defined tokenization as "the next evolution of markets." Statements from figures of this caliber are entirely different from shill on Twitter.

Besides the favorable political window of opportunity and cooperation with traditional financial giants, the data also shows that Ondo's business is indeed taking off.

Ondo now controls approximately 70% of the tokenized stock market, with TVL increasing from $2.6 billion to $3.53 billion, and protocol revenue reaching $13.26 million in Q1 2026. The tokenized stock segment grew more than threefold in one year, from $375 million in May 2025 to $1.21 billion in May 2026.

Multicoin and DCG increase their ZEC holdings.

ZEC has seen the most dramatic surge. It has risen 90% in the past 30 days, with a single-day increase of 30% on May 6th, reaching above $580 and surpassing a market capitalization of $10 billion, making it the highest-valued token in the privacy coin sector.

The catalyst is very clear. On May 6th, Tushar Jain, managing partner of Multicoin Capital, disclosed on the Consensus Miami panel, followed by a long thread on X, revealing that Multicoin had been quietly accumulating ZEC since February. His logic was very straightforward: ZEC is "the cleanest way" to hedge against one thing: the increasing visibility and confiscation power of governments over private wealth. He used terms like wealth tax, censorship resistance, and surveillance hedge.

The original statement also mentioned a one-time 5% wealth tax on residents with a net worth exceeding $1 billion, which is expected to generate $100 billion in revenue. Jain's argument is that Bitcoin is censorship-resistant at the protocol layer; no one can freeze your BTC, but that doesn't prevent tax authorities from using block explorers to confiscate what they can see. This framing is the same idea behind Bitcoin's early definition as "combating currency devaluation," except the hedge has changed from printing money to surveillance.

A broader perspective is that the Trump administration's fiscal, tariff, immigration, and surveillance policies, combined, have reignited anxiety among some investors about the fear that "being seen by assets is equivalent to having them taken away." With BTC already defined as an ETF wrapper and digital gold, a niche has opened up for "money that combats surveillance." ZEC is better positioned to fill this role than Monero because it supports selective disclosure and, under the MiCA and AML frameworks, can remain on compliant exchanges like Coinbase and Gemini. Monero has already begun to be delisted in Europe.

The emergence of Tushar's thread from Multicoin Capital triggered a chain reaction within ZEC.

Within 24 hours, $62 million worth of ZEC futures short positions were liquidated, causing the price to surge from $400 to above $580. The institutional backing was actually laid long ago. Tyler Winklevoss's Cypherpunk Technologies had accumulated 290,000 ZEC by the end of 2025, representing approximately 1.76% of the circulating supply, and publicly set a target of 5%. Arthur Hayes has long touted ZEC as "the next asymmetric position after BTC."

Barry Silbert, founder of DCG and de facto controller of Grayscale, has stated since Bitcoin Investor Week in February that "5% to 10% of BTC's market capitalization will flow to privacy coins in the next few years," predicting a potential upside of 500 times for ZEC. On May 2nd, he compared ZEC on X to "the BTC playbook of 2013-2014, with 2015-2020 as the next step." Naval Ravikant, an early investor in Zcash, and Hayes have already spearheaded this trend once during the ZEC surge from $50 to $700 by the end of 2025.

Another piece of good news regarding ZEC recently is that Robinhood launched ZEC on April 23, pushing it to millions of retail accounts that previously had no access to it. Grayscale's Zcash Trust's application to be converted into a spot ETF is still awaiting a decision from the SEC, but it's estimated it won't be long.

Narrative alone isn't enough; there needs to be structural supply absorption. ZEC's shielded pool is currently absorbing 30% of the circulating supply, an all-time high. The Orchard pool alone has seen its ZEC increase from 1.92 million to 4.55 million in the past year. This means that roughly one-third of ZEC has entered a black hole where it won't be sold, and the remaining float is shrinking. On an asset with a truly shrinking circulating supply, any marginal buying will be amplified.

Then the short sellers took the fall. For the past three years, the market had habitually treated ZEC as a perpetual short target, resulting in a consistently negative funding rate. Tushar Jain's thread triggered a short squeeze. CoinDesk's liquidation data showed that ZEC's liquidation volume that day was second only to Bitcoin. The short squeeze combined with thin trading volume resulted in a 30% surge in a single day.

This is why ZEC simultaneously benefits from institutional buying (Multicoin, Cypherpunk Technologies), retail access (Robinhood, Grayscale ETF applications), and regulatory arbitrage (compliant privacy coin).

BIO reignites its launchpad, raising 5.9 times more in just half an hour.

BIO is the smallest and most volatile of the four, with a current market capitalization of $100 million. It surged 96% in two days in mid-April, from $0.018 to $0.044, and is currently fluctuating around $0.05. It has risen 176.8% in the past month.

To be honest, the story behind BIO's recent surge is a combination of mechanisms: "narrative return + low circulating shares + short squeeze".

Let's start with the narrative. The DeSci (Decentralized Infrastructure) sector has been talked about since 2024. In December 2024, BIO launched on Binance Launchpool, surging 2400% in the first two minutes. In January 2025, Arthur Hayes published his famous "degen DeSci" blog post, explicitly pushing Maelstrom's risk strategy entirely in the DeSci direction, publicly holding seven tokens: BIO, VITA, PSY, CRYO, ATH, GROW, and NEURON. In September of the same year, Maelstrom led a $6.9 million seed round for Bio Protocol, with participation from Mechanism Capital, Animoca Brands, Zee Prime Capital, and Foresight Ventures. Back in November 2024, Binance Labs (now YZi Labs) completed its first investment in the DeSci sector, investing in BIO. This institutional investment line has been consistently present.

However, from the second half of 2025 to Q1 of 2026, BIO experienced a dramatic decline, falling from a high of $0.88 to $0.0157. Binance delisted the BIO/BNB trading pair on January 9, 2026, and coupled with a liquidity crunch, this caused another significant drop. The entire sector was practically written off by the market.

What truly ignited the secondary market was the launchpad side. BIO Protocol completed its BioXP V2 upgrade at the end of April, launching a brand-new ignition sale mechanism. BIO holders earn BioXP points through staking, which are then used to pledge BioXP for priority subscription rights in ignition sales. While the mechanism itself is standard launchpad practice, BIO's approach was exceptionally effective: 100% of the funds from ignition sales were injected into LPs. After the sale, BIO holders not only received tokens from the new project, but their own BIO was also absorbed due to the new project's liquidity needs.

In a Bankless interview, Paul Kohlhaas, CEO of BIO Protocol, cited a key statistic: PeptAI (BIO's peptide AI project) used AI to design a novel peptide candidate compound for ADHD, completing the process from hypothesis to identification within 24 hours, with a validation cost of approximately $1,500. This data comes from BIO's own official statement and lacks independent third-party verification, but it serves as a sufficient narrative catalyst.

As the first ignition sale after the V2 upgrade, PeptAI was oversubscribed 5.9 times within 30 minutes, with 20% of the tokens allocated to BIO stakers. The actual effect of this mechanism was to directly reduce the circulating supply of BIO, as everyone locked their tokens in anticipation of the next ignition. Consequently, BIO rose 18.57% within 24 hours, with trading volume increasing by 697%, and daily trading volume soaring to $223 million (compared to a market capitalization of $70 million during the same period, more than three times). The market interpreted this as the launchpad working correctly.

Here, it's important to clarify something due to widespread misinformation in the crypto media. On April 14th, Eli Lilly announced the acquisition of CrossBridge Bio, a Houston-based biotech company that develops antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs), for up to $300 million. This is true, but CrossBridge Bio has absolutely no connection to BIO Protocol or vitaDAO. It's a completely traditional biotech company, founded in 2023 by Michael Torres, with technology from UTHealth Houston. In November 2024, it secured seed funding led by TMC Venture Fund and CE-Ventures, and in November 2025, it received a $15 million grant from the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas. Its investors and board members are all from the traditional biotech industry. Some crypto media outlets have portrayed this acquisition as "DeSci's first nine-figure exit," which is incorrect. This event cannot be considered a genuine fundamental catalyst for BIO.

The only indirect connection between BIO and traditional pharmaceutical companies is Pfizer Ventures' participation in VitaDAO's $4.1 million funding round in December 2022, making it the first traditional pharmaceutical company to invest in BioDAO. VitaDAO is a BioDAO within the BIO Protocol ecosystem focused on longevity research, so BIO holders indirectly wield influence over VitaDAO through meta-governance. This event has been repeatedly cited over the past three years, but strictly speaking, it's an old catalyst from 2022, not a new event in 2026.

So why did BIO surge this time? It can be simply summarized into three mechanism-level reasons:

First, the DeSci narrative has been consolidating for 16 months since its peak at the end of 2024, and market expectations for this sector have been pushed to rock bottom. Any narrative that someone is willing to revive, coupled with the fact that the intersection of AI and biology is indeed a high-certainty direction for 2026, could open up room for a rebound.

Secondly, the circulating supply is extremely small. BIO's market capitalization is less than $100 million, and its 24-hour trading volume is often 1.5 to 7 times its market capitalization. On a token with low float, any narrative catalyst will be amplified exponentially. The BioXP upgrade further locks up more BIO in staking and other ignitions, further reducing the circulating supply.

Third, a short squeeze. BIO's funding rate has been negative for a long time, and like ZEC, it has been a target of short in the market for the past year. Once the narrative returned, short sellers were forced to cover their positions, resulting in a 50% surge in a single day.

Here's a point about risk. BIO is the riskiest of the four. It has fallen over 96% from its high of 0.88, and the current rebound is largely a combination of narrative and short squeeze. A daily trading volume/market capitalization consistently exceeding 1.5 is a typical signal of speculative activity. For this coin to truly re-rate, a project like PeptAI needs an Eli Lilly-level exit to successfully implement BioDAO's "tokenization research + real IP off-balance-sheet" model. Until then, every price increase is a narrative trade, not a fundamental trade.

Even from a narrative trade perspective, BIO's position is clear. It's one of the few DeSci tokens with a token, a genuine protocol, and institutional backing (direct investments from Maelstrom and Binance Labs, and indirect endorsement from Pfizer Ventures through vitaDAO). Furthermore, DeSci itself remains a direction that hasn't been fully priced in by 2026.

With the return of TON's leader, Durov has staked his entire reputation.

TON surged 120% in a single week, from 1.35 to 2.89, briefly surpassing LINK to enter the top 20 with a market capitalization of 7.6 billion.

The logic behind this price surge is very simple: it's all about one person, Telegram founder Pavel Durov.

On April 23, Durov announced on X that the on-chain transaction fee for TON would be reduced by 6 times to 0.00039 TON per transaction, approximately $0.0005, a fixed rate unaffected by network load. This news didn't elicit much market reaction at the time, as most assumed it was just a routine optimization.

On May 4th, Durov posted a second message, which was the real tipping point. He announced that Telegram would replace the TON Foundation as the main driver of the TON network and become its largest validator. He named this plan MTONA, meaning Make TON Great Again.

To understand the significance of this announcement, we need to go back to 2018. That year, Telegram raised $1.7 billion through its Telegram Open Network (TON) project, one of the largest ICOs globally at the time. In 2020, the SEC sued Telegram, forcing Durov to return $1.2 billion to investors, pay an $18.5 million fine, and promise not to participate in the TON project again. Since then, TON has been community-controlled, renamed The Open Network, and operates independently. For a long time, Telegram and TON were in an awkward state of "we don't really have anything to do with each other."

This announcement on May 4th was tantamount to Durov publicly tearing off this facade. His original words were: "Telegram becoming TON's largest validator strengthens decentralization. It lets other major players join the validator pool without centralizing the network, with Telegram as the counterbalance. More and more TON gets locked in validation as everyone competes for 20% plus APR."

In other words, Telegram is staked 2.2 million TON as validators, which means Telegram is explicitly binding its 950 million monthly active users to TON. This was legally impossible in 2020, but will only become compliant and feasible in 2026. This is due to the overall deregulation under the Trump administration, the advancement of the Clarity Act, and the SEC's shift in its enforcement stance towards crypto projects.

On the business front, TON networks processed 1.5 billion transactions in Q1 2026, with TVL reaching $1.2 billion in April. STON.fi, the largest DEX on TON, saw its daily swap volume increase 26-fold from $1.5 million to $40 million in a week. Perpetual futures trading volume built into Telegram Wallet exceeded $1 billion per month.

So, in summary, after Trump took office, Telegram's return to TON changed from a compliance risk to a compliant feasibility. This was a very specific political window of opportunity.

Telegram itself stakes 2.2 million TON, with a validator APR of over 20%, which will continue to attract large holders to lock up their coins for validation. This is the same mechanism as ZEC's shielded pool, reducing the circulating supply.

Narrative and fundamentals are both being implemented simultaneously. Telegram is not treating TON as a partner, but as a way to rewrite its own economic infrastructure. Once this framing is accepted by the market, TON's valuation anchor will change from "an L1 project" to "a consumer-grade payment layer with 950 million users".

Essentially, the market's reaction stemmed from the signal that "Durov is betting his entire reputation on this."

Springtime of the circulating supply black hole

Looking back at these four coins, perhaps the biggest commonality is that each of them has a "circulating supply black hole".

Without new retail investors entering the market, the market can only compete for existing tokens. Whichever coin's float is truly decreasing, marginal buying pressure can cause an excessive price surge.

ONDO's DTCC partnership implies institutional custody and long-term holding, while tokenized government bonds like OUSG are locked within traditional asset management frameworks. ZEC's shielded pool absorbed 30% of the circulating supply, a historical high, while the Orchard pool grew from 1.92 million to 4.55 million in one year. BIO already had a low market capitalization and small circulating supply, and the BioXP upgrade locked up another batch of tokens awaiting ignition. TON's staking APR is over 20%, and Telegram itself staked 2.2 million tokens to act as validators, absorbing tokens into the validator pool.

These four mechanisms are different, but the effect is the same. The circulating supply is decreasing, while the elasticity of marginal buying is increasing.

The second commonality is that each target has short sellers as a backer.

From last year to the beginning of this year, the market consensus on alt was "only shorting," with a persistently negative funding rate, making it a target for perpetual short short by short sellers. As a result, whenever a catalyst was released, short squeezes combined with thin trading resulted in daily increases of 30% to 50%, which was common.

ZEC saw a surge of $62 million in short positions in a single week, TON's trading volume increased by 650% in a week, and BIO's daily trading volume was 1.5 to 7 times its market capitalization. These figures are not ordinary long buying, but rather the combined force of short covering and FOMO (fear of missing out) funds entering the market.

In addition, these coins all have one or more "narrative masters".

ONDO is backed by an entire consortium of institutions including DTCC, BlackRock, and JPMorgan, with Frank La Salla and Larry Fink publicly endorsing it. ZEC is backed by Multicoin's cypherpunk VC line, including Tushar Jain, Tyler Winklevoss, Arthur Hayes, Naval, and Balaji. BIO is backed by Arthur Hayes as the direct lead investor, early votes of confidence from Binance Labs, and DeSci believers like Moonrock. TON is backed by Durov himself.

The difference between these narrative holders and KOLs ( Shill) is that they don't withdraw just because of a pullback. Their positions, reputations, and careers are tied to the stock. This is a necessary condition for reflexivity to work; when prices pull back, someone will buy, and shorts won't dare to push prices down too much. The "collective takeoff of the entire sector" in 2021 relied on a large influx of new retail investors; the "single-point takeoff" in 2026 relies on the thesis holders not withdrawing.

Finally, let's look at the macro level. After all, even a pig can fly if it's standing in the right place at the right time.

The S&P 500 hit a new high, and the semiconductor sector followed a parabolic trajectory—this is a textbook example of risk-on. However, it is also compounded by two opposing political anxieties.

ONDO represents the compliance process following the implementation of hedge fund regulations, with Wall Street poised to enter the market. ZEC represents hedge fund surveillance and asset visibility, prompting retail investors to exit. BIO addresses the inefficiency of traditional scientific research capital in the hedge sector, with AI rewriting drug discovery. TON represents the scrutiny of the hedge platform economy; Durov himself was arrested in Paris once.

Therefore, in the absence of new money and a broad altseason, the market only rewards targets that have all three elements: specific individuals or institutions willing to endorse their narratives, a genuinely shrinking circulating supply, and short sellers still holding positions.

I would call this surge "the spring of the circulating stock black hole".