Morning Minute: Crypto Falls Amidst War Escalation and Mythos Release

Morning Minute is a daily newsletter written by Tyler Warner. The analysis and opinions expressed are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of Decrypt. And check out our new daily news show covering all of the top stories in 5 minutes, downloadable on Apple Pod or Spotify.

GM!

Today’s top news:

• Crypto majors fall 2-4% ahead of CPI this morning; BTC at $61.6k
• Claude releases Mythos (Fable 5) but cybersecurity features widely nerfed
• Morpho raises $175M backed by a16z & Paradigm to build out institutional integrations
• Crypto tax bills hit a wall in the House, likely won’t go to vote soon
• Kalshi Perps crosses $1B in volume in first week of existence

🌍 Crypto Falls Amidst War Escalation and Mythos Release

Two major macro events landed on Tuesday impacting crypto and broader markets.

A US Army Apache went down near the Strait of Hormuz, which Trump blamed on Iran and said the US “must respond,” and AP and CBC report the military has already begun striking back. Both crew members were rescued and are safe. The crash lands a day after Trump brokered a renewed Iran-Israel ceasefire and in the middle of active US-Iran talks, with Axios reporting the working theory is an Iranian drone of undetermined intent. The US has already begun retaliatory “defensive” strikes.

The same afternoon, Anthropic shipped Claude Fable 5, the public version of the Mythos model it had kept behind a restricted security program since April. It scores 78% on a vulnerability-discovery benchmark and is purpose-built to find software bugs, exactly the capability that should spook a market still bleeding from hacks. Requests touching cybersecurity, biology, or chemistry get bounced to the older Opus 4.8, a guardrail Anthropic says fires in under 5% of sessions. The uncapped Mythos 5 stays with vetted firms only.

Crypto didn’t really flinch on these headlines, but it did sell off overnight ahead of this morning’s CPI print which many believe will be hot. Shrugging off the Iran escalation isn’t a surprise given how markets have responded over the past several weeks. But Mythos was expected to be a bigger deal. And now that users are reporting it won’t even review smart contracts and that it usually kicks them back to Opus 4.8, this vaunted Mythos release may be a nothingburger for crypto. As for CPI, we will find out soon…

⚖️ Crypto Tax Bills Hit a Wall in the House

The House Ways and Means hearing that was supposed to advance crypto tax reform instead exposed the cracks.

The committee brought seven discussion drafts to the table, each tackling a separate piece of the code. The headliners:

• a de minimis exemption that would spare small everyday transactions, including network fees on up to 5,000 transactions a year where each fee runs under $10;
• a fix for the mining and staking double-tax, so rewards are taxed when sold rather than the moment they land in a wallet;
• wash-sale rules extended to crypto, closing the loophole that lets traders harvest losses and rebuy instantly; and
• a waiver of the costly appraisal requirement on crypto charitable donations over $5,000.

Other drafts cover stablecoin transactions and folding digital assets into existing securities tax treatment.

Then the politics got in the way. Pro-crypto Democrats questioned the staking and mining exemptions, and party leadership floated punting the whole package until after the midterms. For an industry that has notched real legislative wins lately, this is a reminder that tax is the harder fight. The bills still have life—but their timeline just got longer…

💸 Morpho Raises $175M to Move Credit Markets Onchain

Lending protocol Morpho closed a $175M round co-led by a16z crypto, Paradigm, and Ribbit Capital, with a big roster of strategic backers including Apollo, VanEck, Circle Ventures, Ledger, SBI Group, and France’s Bpifrance among them.

The deal values Morpho at up to $2 billion and ranks as one of the largest funding rounds DeFi has ever seen.

The Morpho protocol runs an open credit network that lets banks, fintechs, and asset managers build their own lending markets onchain, each with its own risk parameters, without standing up the rails from scratch. It already carries more than $11 billion in deposits and counts Coinbase, Kraken, Binance, Galaxy, Bitwise, and Anchorage among its users. Cofounder Paul Frambot, who started the project in Paris at 20, originally built it on top of Aave and now pitches it as a way for anyone to build their own Aave.

The fresh capital goes toward technical development and deeper integrations with those institutional clients, the aim being to make Morpho the default credit layer as more of finance moves onto blockchain rails.

The takeaway is clear—the demand for institutional crypto products is still strong…

🌎 Macro Crypto and Markets

• Crypto majors are red ahead of CPI this morning; BTC -1.4% at $61.6k; ETH -2% at $1,640; SOL -3% at $64.40; HYPE -10% at $56
• WBT (+14), Stable (+12%) and WLFI (+8%) led top movers
• Oil even at $89; Gold -2% at $4,180
• Stock futures are red as chip stocks fall and ahead of CPI with the DOW -1% Nasdaq -1.5%
• Gold and Silver have erased their YTD gains after their recent downfalls
• The CME Group launched its CME Crypto Index Futures covering the price of BTC, ETH and SOL
• Wintermute blamed the recent crypto selloff not on Saylor’s selling but on institutional outflows, and said there are no signs of that capital returning
• Humanity Protocol lost $36M after an employee laptop holding its multisig keys was compromised; attackers took 3 of 6 keys on Ethereum and 3 of 5 on BSC, drained 141.2M H, and minted 200M more
• Kraken was named Official Crypto Exchange Supporter of the FIFA World Cup 2026, kicking off June 11

Corporate Treasuries & ETFs

Meme Coin Tracker

• Meme leaders were red; DOGE -2%, SHIB even, PEPE -2%, PENGU -1%, TRUMP -1%, BONK -2%, SPX even, FARTCOIN -5%
• Jotchua (+32%), PXR (+150%) and Buttcoin (+25%) led movers on Solana
• Base movers included B3(+23%), LFI (+20%) and OS (+40%)

📈 Myriad Market of the Day

💰 Token, Airdrop & Protocol Tracker

• Kalshi Perps crossed $1B in volume in just its first week of having the product live
• Inference startup SERV claims its optimization layer lets open models like DeepSeek-V4-Flash and NVIDIA Nemotron match or beat Anthropic’s freshly released Claude Fable 5 at up to 90x lower cost, pitching it as the unlock for affordable enterprise AI

🚚 What is happening in NFTs?

• NFT leaders were slightly red; Punks even at 32.7 ETH, BAYC -1% at 9.1 ETH, Pudgy -2% at 4.4 ETH; Hypurr’s even at 272 HYPE
• NPC (+37%) and Normies (+34%) led notable top movers
• Meebits introduced Futbol collectibles alongside a Futbol Trading Desk channel in Discord