Bitcoin Teeters at Support as UK Sanctions HTX and XRP Upgrades

Bitcoin is trading just above $75,000 after being rejected at $78,000 Tuesday, remaining below the $76,000 threshold that analyst Tom Lee says must hold by month-end to confirm a new bull market. Crypto futures volume jumped 54% to $201 billion in 24 hours while liquidations surged 87%, largely reflecting the market waking up after an extended U.S. holiday weekend rather than any structural shift.

Bitcoin dropped 1% over the last 24 hours as open interest climbed to 740,000 BTC from 704,000 BTC, a combination that typically confirms a price downtrend. The negative cumulative volume delta shows traders aggressively shorting via market orders while funding rates remain neutral, and a technical breakdown of the bullish trendline that had supported prices since February has opened the door for deeper losses.

UK Sanctions HTX Over Russia Sanctions Evasion

In the week's biggest regulatory story, the United Kingdom sanctioned 18 entities, including crypto exchange HTX and a ruble-pegged stablecoin issuer, for allegedly helping Russia evade Western restrictions and finance its war in Ukraine. Britain applied banking-style sanctions to crypto exchanges for the first time, requiring U.K. financial institutions to freeze funds and trace transactions linked to the designated firms. The British government accused HTX of providing financial services to A7, a Russian crypto network whose A7A5 ruble-pegged stablecoin processed $9.3B in just four months, according to UK government figures.

Blockchain analytics firm Elliptic said HTX is suspected of servicing both the A7 payments network and Garantex, a Russian exchange previously sanctioned by Western authorities that later rebranded as Grinex before halting operations after a $13M hack. On-chain data shows HTX sent more than $4.9B in direct transactions to entities the UK sanctioned, with flows to the A7 network alone reaching $838M in 2025. Meanwhile, the XRP Ledger activated its v3.1.3 mainnet upgrade today, a maintenance and bug-fix release carrying fixes across NFTs, permissioned domains, vaults, and its lending protocol, signaling that the fifth-largest cryptocurrency network by market cap is maturing well beyond a simple payments system.