Performance of Hard Assets Bitcoin and Gold ‘Remains Remarkable:’ Glassnode

The enigmatic Shiba Inu lead known to the community under the pseudonym Shytoshi Kusama has returned after yet another long, almost three-week absence.

The pseudonymous SHIB marketing expert Lucie shared a screenshot of Kusama’s Telegram post addressed to the SHIB team and the community.

"Let's go back to it," Shytoshi says

Lucie took to social media to share with the SHIB community a fresh message published by Shytoshi Kusama on his Telegram channel. Kusama published a call to action: “Next week let’s go back to it can we?”

It sounds as if the SHIB leader has been away or on holiday, and now he is eager to get back to hard work and continue to expand the Shiba Inu ecosystem.

Kusama also published a post on his X account, sharing a link to a podcast he hosted. In that episode of “Shy Speaks SHIB,” Kusama and his guest discussed the Karma reputation system integrated into the testnet Puppynet at the start of April.

Karma is a mechanism that was created for tracking and then rewarding user engagement within the SHIB ecosystem, and particularly on layer-2 solution Shibarium itself. Karma gives each SHIB user a “reputation score” based on their activities on Shibarium. Various activities include SHIB coin burns, purchasing virtual land in the SHIB metaverse using SHIB tokens adding liquidity to the network.

This week, the top developer of the SHIB ecosystem and Shytoshi’s right hand, Kaal Dhairya, likened Karma to an “XP system” in games, where players earn points of experience for completing certain actions: “Karma works like an XP system—just like in gaming.”

He once again reminded the SHIB community that the Karma system is still running only on the testnet, therefore, it may be adjusted or see major changes added to it: “Karma scores and levels are in BETA and may still change.”

SHIB burns crash despite market recovery

Meanwhile, an important metric of the Shiba Inu ecosystem, the SHIB burn rate, is in free fall deep in the red zone. As of press time, it shows minus 97.95%, with 1,705,330 SHIB meme coins burned, i.e., transferred out of the circulating supply and locked in unspendable wallets.

This is totally opposite to Wednesday, when 60,456,635 SHIB were burned in a single transfer.

Safe haven demand is lifting gold, but bitcoin is missing out, according to JPMorgan analysts.

Gold is attracting inflows in both the exchange-traded fund (ETF) and futures markets, driven by investors seeking safety amid macro uncertainty, JPMorgan analysts led by managing director Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou wrote in a Wednesday report shared with The Block.

Bitcoin, on the other hand, is being left behind, with declining speculative interest in futures and three straight months of ETF outflows, the analysts noted.

"Despite a decline in market breadth and liquidity, gold continues to benefit from safe haven flows in a similar fashion to currencies like the Swiss franc and the yen," the analysts wrote. "These safe haven flows are seen in both the ETF and futures spaces."

Global gold ETFs saw $21.1 billion in net inflows in the first quarter of 2025, with $2.3 billion coming from China and Hong Kong ETFs alone, according to World Gold Council data cited in the report. These inflows represented around 6% of total assets under management (AUM) for gold ETFs globally, compared to 16% for China/HK gold ETFs — underscoring a faster-growing impulse in the region, the analysts noted.

Gold futures have also seen increased buying from speculative investors since February, the analysts said.

In contrast, bitcoin has not shared in the same flows. "Therefore, bitcoin has failed to benefit from the safe haven flows that have been supporting gold," the analysts concluded.

Bitcoin staking protocol Babylon saw $1.26 billion in BTC unstaked from its platform, plunging the protocol’s total value locked by 32%. 

On April 17, blockchain analytics firm Lookonchain flagged several addresses that had unstaked 14,929 Bitcoin from the staking platform. The security firm flagged four addresses that unstaked 299 BTC, 499 BTC, 1,000 BTC and 13,129 BTC. 

One address held a majority of the unstaked assets worth $1.1 billion. With BTC prices hovering at $84,400, the total unstaked BTC is worth about $1.26 billion.

The unstaking event saw Babylon’s total value locked (TVL) drop by 32%. According to data tracker DefiLlama, Babylon’s TVL dropped from $3.97 billion to $2.68 billion during the unstaking.

Unstaked Bitcoin may be “staked back” to Babylon 

Community members are speculating on who was behind the unstaking. One X user suspected that the Bitcoin may belong to the Chinese government, while another said the move may simply be a rotation, risk-off, or a trader getting liquid.

While it’s unclear who’s behind the four addresses cited by Lookonchain, the fund movements could be related to a transition initiated by the decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol Lombard Finance. 

At the time of the unstaking, Babylon Labs retweeted an announcement from Lombard, saying it was unstaking Bitcoin as part of a transition to a new set of finality providers. 

Lombard Finance said it timed the unstaking with the end of Babylon’s phase 1 cap 1 on April 24 so users would not miss out on rewards. The protocol said it would stake the assets back.

“All of this BTC will be staked back into Babylon as soon as the unbonding is complete,” Lombard Finance wrote. 

Cointelegraph reached out to Babylon Labs for comments but did not get a response by publication.

Bitcoin unstaking follows BABY airdrop

The massive unstaking event follows a Babylon airdrop for early adopters. On April 3, Babylon announced the details of its early adopters airdrop program. The airdrop was allocated for its Phase 1 stakers, non-fungible token (NFT) holders, and developers. The protocol allocated 600 million BABY tokens for the airdrop event. 

Following the airdrop, $21 million in BTC were unstaked from the protocol. Bitlayer co-founder Kevin He previously told Cointelegraph that this was a common short-term market behavior representing early redemption.

Babylon is one of the largest Bitcoin DeFi players in the space, with a TVL reaching over $6 billion in December. Babylon co-founder Fisher Yu previously told Cointelegraph that the platform allows staking to be a native use case for Bitcoin, eliminating the need to trust another party while staking. 

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