Bitcoin Nears $72K Pivot as CFTC Greenlights Perp Futures and U.S. Constitution Etched On-Chain

Bitcoin News

Bitcoin extended a six-week low on Friday, sliding toward $72,395 on Bitstamp as Wall Street equities surged into fresh record territory. The decoupling between risk assets has sharpened the focus on what traders are calling a make-or-break zone between $72,000 and $74,000. Veteran analyst Michaël van de Poppe argued that holding this range — coupled with renewed easing expectations — could mark the end of the current correction, while a failure here risks a deeper leg lower. Bulls now eye $77,000 as the reclaim threshold required to confirm a structural reversal in Bitcoin's multi-week downtrend.

In a landmark regulatory pivot, the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission approved KalshiEX's BTCPERP contract, clearing the way for the first true Bitcoin perpetual futures product to trade on a domestically regulated venue. CFTC Chair Michael Selig described the action as a watershed for U.S. market structure, while staff simultaneously granted no-action relief allowing Coinbase Financial Markets to route American clients into offshore perp and options liquidity through a registered futures commission merchant. Brian Armstrong noted that U.S. traders had previously been locked out of roughly 80% of global crypto derivatives flow — a barrier the agency has now effectively dismantled.

The agency's framework expansion did not stop at product approvals. A parallel staff advisory addressed 24/7 trading, clearing and settlement of derivatives, signaling broader infrastructure modernization. Through the new structure, institutional clients gain unified access to venues such as Deribit, where tens of billions of dollars in Bitcoin options open interest now become reachable inside U.S. compliance perimeters. The shift positions a regulated exchange network to absorb derivatives volume historically dominated by offshore platforms, potentially reshaping liquidity dynamics and price discovery for the asset.

Macro crosswinds continued to dictate Bitcoin's short-term trajectory. President Trump signaled a final determination on an Iran ceasefire framework and confirmed the lifting of a Strait of Hormuz naval blockade, sending WTI crude below $87 a barrel and lifting U.S. equity indices modestly. Bitcoin briefly recovered roughly $1,000 from session lows to trade near $73,500 before sellers resumed control. Despite the geopolitical relief, the asset is on track to close May lower after starting the month near $77,000, jeopardizing what had been a two-month winning streak and underscoring crypto's persistent divergence from traditional risk assets.

An anonymous actor permanently inscribed the full text of the U.S. Constitution onto the Bitcoin blockchain on Thursday evening, paying 113,454 satoshis — roughly $83 — in fees for the 44.4-kilobyte transaction. Processed by SpiderPool fourteen minutes after broadcast, the inscription exploited OP_RETURN expansions introduced in Bitcoin Core v30, which stripped away the previous 80-byte cap. The transaction is among the first high-profile uses of the new freedom, layered with SegWit and Taproot features to embed the Preamble, seven Articles, and twenty-seven Amendments into a single immutable record.

The inscription has reignited a fierce protocol debate. BIP-444, a pending soft-fork proposal, would restore the historical 83-byte OP_RETURN cap, with proponents arguing that unbounded on-chain data storage erodes Bitcoin's identity as a pure monetary settlement layer. Critics of the cap counter that workarounds always emerged and that restrictions created more harm than benefit. The Constitution upload — anonymous, unattributed, and unremovable — arrives at a politically charged moment for U.S. crypto policy and crystallizes the philosophical tension between Bitcoin maximalists who favor minimalist block space and developers expanding the protocol's data layer for broader applications.

SoFi's stablecoin rollout to fifteen million banking users added another institutional data point, lifting its shares 7% as it became the first U.S. national bank to offer a dollar-backed token directly to retail customers on a public chain. The cumulative pattern — perpetuals approval, stablecoin penetration into mainstream banking, and protocol-level data debates — suggests crypto infrastructure is maturing even as spot prices weaken. ETF-related profit-taking and stretched altcoin positioning continue to weigh on near-term tape, but the underlying regulatory and on-chain narrative has rarely been more constructive.

Spot Bitcoin trades at $74,200 with a modest 1.03% daily gain, yet the technical structure remains defensive. The RSI at 37.88 sits in oversold-leaning territory but has not flashed a divergence, while the MACD prints a bearish cross consistent with the prevailing downtrend. Immediate resistance clusters at $75,234 and $76,684, with reclaim of $78,592 needed to neutralize sellers. Support stacks at $72,937, $71,274, and a deeper line at $66,862. A bullish thesis requires a daily close above $76,684 on rising volume; failure to defend $72,937 would invalidate the base-building scenario and likely accelerate flows toward the $66,000 zone.