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25 May 2026, 21:10
The EU is preparing a record DMA fine against Google over search dominance
Google is now staring at yet another European Union antitrust hit, and this one could be the bloc’s biggest Digital Markets Act penalty yet. German newspaper Handelsblatt reported Monday that Brussels is close to fining Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOG, GOOGL) a high triple-digit million euro amount over the way Google shows its own services inside search results. The report came soon after the EU put a customs deal with the United States into force, so another fight with a major American tech company could add fresh stress to transatlantic relations. Handelsblatt said the process against Google is almost done, but the final decision still sits with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. Ursula is expected to make the call before the summer recess. If the fine lands as planned, it would be the largest penalty ever issued under the DMA. Brussels accuses Google of pushing its own services higher in search The European Commission opened the Google search case in March 2025, looking at whether Google uses its search engine to send more traffic to its own services instead of treating rival companies fairly. The Commission says its main goal is to force compliance, not just collect . Thomas Regnier, a spokesperson for the Commission, said regulators are still talking with the company about possible fixes. He also made clear that Brussels is ready to act if those talks do not deliver results. “Even with our negotiations on future solutions, we will not hesitate to move to the next steps as soon as possible,” Thomas said. Google has rejected the idea that the DMA has improved search for users. The company says the changes it already made in Europe have weakened the product. “The changes we’ve already made to Search under the DMA represent the biggest downgrade in the product’s history, creating a second-rate experience for Europeans to the benefit of a few self-interested complainants,” a Google spokesperson allegedly said. Of course, this is not the first major controversy between Google and the EU’s antitrust enforcement officials. In 2010, the European Union opened a number of antitrust investigations into Google’s monopoly power. Three of these probes led to an accusation from the EU. This involved Google Search, Android, and AdSense by Google. Google lost in all three probes. Their combined fines have exceeded €8 billion. Therefore, the case under the Digital Markets Act was expected. EU regulators have already forced Google to change Android and adtech For instance, the first case concerned the treatment of smartphone manufacturers by Google. According to the Commission, Google compelled manufacturers to install certain Google applications on their devices. Regulators claimed that Google made it difficult for mobile devices to use customized Android versions, which might have competed with Google’s own system. App tying was another concern of regulators. They accused Google of making some of its apps interdependent in a manner that led to phone makers installing more Google apps in order to receive access to key apps. According to the Commission, such behavior was easy to understand, and it was likely for the owner of a powerful platform for mobile applications to protect its other products. Eventually, in October 2018, Google modified its approach to providing services and selling applications to manufacturers. For instance, the company allowed phone and tablet makers to license the Google Play Store without being required to install all Google apps on their devices. However, if they still wanted Google apps installed on their devices, phone makers did not need to pay the license fee for the latter. Later, in March 2019, Google promised that European Android users would receive an alternative choice during installation. Users would have several options for their browser and search engines instead of seeing Chrome and Google Search as the only available options. In addition, the European Commission examined Google’s plan to buy Fitbit in 2020. The Commission approved the merger on December 17, 2020, provided certain conditions. In terms of advertising, on September 4, 2025, the Commission fined Google for €2.95 billion, roughly $3.4 billion, for its anticompetitive practices in the adtech market. It should be noted that the EU antitrust authority launched its investigation in Google’s advertising business in May 2021. Don’t just read crypto news. Understand it. Subscribe to our newsletter. It's free .
25 May 2026, 21:02
Raoul Pal sees crypto market soaring to $100 trillion
🚀 Raoul Pal claims the crypto market could hit $100 trillion. The current total cap in $BTC and other assets is $2.59 trillion. 📈 Key point: New regulations and tech advances may fast-track mainstream crypto adoption. Continue Reading: Raoul Pal sees crypto market soaring to $100 trillion The post Raoul Pal sees crypto market soaring to $100 trillion appeared first on COINTURK NEWS .
25 May 2026, 21:02
Aave DAO Faces Vote on Native BTC Collateral as Babylon Labs Files Temp Check
The blockchain research and development firm Babylon Labs submitted a Temperature Check to Aave DAO on Monday, seeking approval to integrate Trustless Bitcoin Vaults with Aave V4 and onboard native BTC as collateral without bridges, wrappers, or custodians. BTC Holders Could Borrow on Aave V4 Without Bridges if Babylon Labs Vote Passes The proposal calls
25 May 2026, 21:00
Crypto Today Looks Like Nvidia Before AI Went Mainstream, Jeff Park Says
Jeff Park argued that crypto is entering a phase similar to Nvidia’s pre-mainstream AI era, when the technological shift was visible to early believers but not yet obvious to the broader market. In an X post defending crypto’s ideological roots on Sunday, Park framed today’s industry as being in a difficult “middle game” before onchain capital markets become self-evident infrastructure. Park’s comparison centered on Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Elon Musk’s first public appearance together at GTC 2015, a moment he described as occurring inside a narrow window before AI had become a mainstream consumer or institutional priority. By then, Huang had spent decades backing parallel graphics processing and had supported CUDA since 2006, while Musk had already had what Park called his “Hassabis moment” in 2012. OpenAI, he noted, had not yet been founded. “This is that narrow window where a revolution is visible to some but not others,” Park wrote, “in which both of these geniuses had early inklings of recognizing AI’s pervasive potential, but the broad public was not yet made aware. It would take another 10 years for it reach mainstream applications of course.” Why Crypto Looks Like Nvidia Park said he sees crypto in a similar position today. Before GPUs became central to the AI boom, the technology was sustained by gamers, hobbyists and researchers who pushed its capabilities without necessarily knowing they were helping subsidize a much larger computing transition. In his analogy, early DeFi played a comparable role for crypto by subsidizing the development path toward institutional tokenization. Related Reading: European Commission Launches Crypto Rules Review As Euro Stablecoin Project Gains Support “Gamers subsidized AI’s development, just like early DeFi subsidized the institutional tokenization development,” he wrote. The core of Park’s argument is that crypto’s hardest phase is not the early ideological phase or the eventual mature phase. It is the transitional stage between them. He borrowed from Elon Musk’s remarks about autonomous driving at GTC 2015, where Musk said the simplest parts were very low-speed driving, where a vehicle can stop, and high-speed driving, where rules are more structured. The hardest part, in Park’s telling, is the 10-to-50 mph zone: urban environments with bikes, children, cones, manholes and edge cases requiring both precision and speed. Park applied that framework to crypto infrastructure. The “0-10 mph” phase was permissionless money, a use case he said people could understand from a practical standpoint. The “50 mph+” phase, in his view, will be onchain capital markets becoming obvious because of self-custody, capital efficiency, money velocity and settlement optimization. The difficult part is what sits in between. “But its the 10-50 thats hard, where money in a pre-internet financial infrastructure is hitting AML/KYC, offshore capital conduits, discretionary bank risk models, lagging reporting regimes create all kinds of need of need for precision and speed that institutional infrastructure today needs to develop further,” Park wrote. “Its fundamentally solvable, but this is the most challenging portion of fulfilling the dreams of onchain capital markets.” Related Reading: Washington Moves To Review Crypto Tax Rules With New IRS Study Bill Park also drew a distinction between Bitcoin and the wider crypto sector, while rejecting the idea that support for one must exclude the other. He said Bitcoin and crypto are not trying to solve identical problems, even if both originate from a similar ideological impulse around open access. “I love bitcoin. But contrary to some opinion, I believe its possible to love crypto too, because bitcoin is a monetary experiment enabled by the evolution of technology, while most of crypto is the inverse: a technology experiment enabled by the evolution of money,” he wrote. “They are fundamentally solving different problems, though rooted in one ideal: to make its access as much of a public good as possible.” Park’s broader thesis is that the ideology behind crypto is not fading but changing shape. He described the “winning ideology” as “technological financialization,” a form of hyperfinancialization with decentralizing elements that exports sovereign finance, agentic rails and self-determination as public goods. That framing matters because much of the industry’s current debate is focused on whether crypto’s institutionalization weakens its original purpose. Park’s answer is that the ideological layer remains essential, but the practical expression of that ideology is now moving through financial infrastructure, tokenized markets and systems that need to interact with existing compliance and banking regimes. “This ‘middle game’ period will be remembered as the most critical juncture for the industry,” Park wrote, adding that the future belongs to “those who recognized it was always ideological.” At press time, the total crypto market cap stood at $2.55 trillion. Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com
25 May 2026, 21:00
‘Conviction’ test ahead – Can Hyperliquid survive a 7.8M HYPE unlock?
HYPE unlock tests market strength amid ongoing spot accumulation.
25 May 2026, 20:50
NEAR rallies 75% in one week as short squeeze and AI rotation converge
The NEAR Protocol and its token are riding on a wave powered by a mix of short liquidations, renewed interest in AI-linked tokens, and growing fee revenue from its cross-chain settlement system, which has helped it to gain roughly 50% over the past seven days, trading near $2.73. The rally started when the token finally broke out of a month-long lull where NEAR’s price traded within a tight range between $1.20 and $1.75 for most of May. The rally, when it finally arrived, caused liquidations of over $9.85 million in short positions and forced buybacks that drove upward pressure. Derivatives activity rose alongside the spot move, and open interest went up above $473 million. As of May 24, NEAR futures open interest had crossed $720 million. NEAR is currently trading around $2.75 with a market capitalization of $3.57 billion and 24-hour volume above $1 billion as seen on CoinMarketCap . NEAR token is up more than 75% over the last week. Source: CoinMarketCap Arthur Hayes names NEAR in ‘holy trinity’ trade BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes recently called NEAR, Hyperliquid (HYPE), and Zcash (ZEC) “the holy trinity of altcoins.” All three tokens listed by Hayes have performed better than Bitcoin (BTC) lately, with HYPE reaching an all-time high and ZEC logging multi-month peaks , as Cryptopolitan reported . NEAR’s co-founder Illia Polosukhin joined Hayes to discuss “how the privacy revolution runs on NEAR.” They touched on ZEC, HYPE, and NEAR itself while linking the latest rally to the thesis around confidential computation and AI agent infrastructure. Around 78% of listed tokens reportedly lost value on the day NEAR posted one of its largest single-session gains. Why is NEAR rallying? Apart from the technical setup, two protocol-level developments gave traders a fundamental basis for the NEAR trade. First, NEAR’s Intents cross-chain settlement system has generated more than $33 million in fees in under a year, according to on-chain analyst @0xNairolf and Defillama on X. NEAR Intents have generated over $33M in fees since launch. Track detailed usage on our comprehensive NEAR dashboard. https://t.co/KIwqZlXoaj pic.twitter.com/CmUeymJ7BT — DefiLlama.com (@DefiLlama) May 25, 2026 The system processes swaps and bridge transactions across more than 35 blockchains, with settlement fees moving through programmatic NEAR purchases since February 2026. Analysts say it has created “a continuous demand floor.” NEAR Intents has handled over $10 billion in cumulative volume across more than 15.7 million swaps. The second development that has turned the tide for NEAR is its leaning into AI branding with tangible product releases. A May 20 rollout by NEAR strips passwords and personally identifiable information from prompts before they reach large language models like Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini. Developer Kent with the X username, @cuongdc_real, stated on X that NEAR AI updated its model picker to include Google’s Gemma 4 31B, running on NEAR’s trusted execution environment infrastructure with end-to-end encryption. CoinMarketCap describes NEAR as “a high-performance, AI-native platform built to power the next generation of decentralized applications and intelligent agents.” Its co-founder, Polosukhin, previously co-authored a 2017 paper that introduced the transformer architecture, which is being used in today’s large language models. Risks remain for late buyers The daily active users on the NEAR network went down from nearly 3 million earlier in 2026 to roughly 266,000, according to Token Terminal data. Analysts see this as a potential warning sign, having observed the gap between price action and on-chain usage. Dynamic resharding is an upcoming protocol upgrade coming soon, and it is designed to enable automatic scaling whenever there is a spike in demand. The execution may help the protocol to sustain its momentum and make its case to enterprise and AI developers beyond this week’s move. Don’t just read crypto news. Understand it. Subscribe to our newsletter. It's free .
