Bored Apes Rally, Canton Raises at $2B and Saylor Raps the Bears | The Breakdown

Bored Ape Yacht Club floor prices approximately doubled over the past month, rising from around 14,300 dollars to a high of roughly 26,000 dollars in early May. CryptoPunks rose from about 60,000 dollars to nearly 75,000 dollars over the same period, and Pudgy Penguins climbed from around 9,300 dollars to nearly 14,000 dollars. Despite the price action, analyst David Canales cautioned that NFT trading volume is not trending strongly upward and there is no firm evidence the market has fully recovered. The last comparable volume spike came around September of last year, driven largely by speculation about a potential OpenSea token airdrop rather than organic demand.

The NFT market remains structurally thin. Approximately 70 percent of all NFT volume across EVM chains runs through OpenSea, with the overwhelming majority occurring on Ethereum, and weekly trading addresses across EVM chains number only around 15,000 to 20,000, excluding Solana entirely. The Bored Ape holder base has about 5,600 unique addresses, and the top five or six holders each control more than 100 Bored Apes. Daily sales on Blur and OpenSea roughly doubled to about 10 per day over the past month or two. Canales noted that because the market is so illiquid and the holder base so concentrated, a handful of returning participants can shift sentiment across the broader crypto space quickly. He characterized the current environment as a retail bear market and institutional bull market, and argued that thin conditions mean a small group of participants could produce significant price action even without a full recovery.

Canton Network is raising approximately 300 million dollars in a round that values the firm at around 2 billion dollars, with the financing expected to close in coming weeks and the final figure subject to change. The company raised 50 million dollars from backers including Bank of New York Mellon and Nasdaq late last year, and earlier in 2025 raised 135 million dollars from Liberty City Ventures, QCP Group, and BNP Paribas. Investors in the current round include ACC and Zcrypto according to Bloomberg sources. ACC itself raised 2.2 billion dollars and some of that capital may be flowing into Canton, though whether the new Fund Five is specifically involved remains unclear.

Canton coin launched in November, listed at around 12 cents, fell roughly 50 percent within a month, recovered to a high of close to 20 cents in February, and was sitting at around 16 cents at the time of recording, representing approximately a 30 percent gain from its listing price. The network ranks around 21st by market cap, between Toncoin and Stellar. Active daily addresses grew from about 5,000 at the start of October to roughly 57,000 currently, and the network is processing about one million transactions per day. Analysts raised concern that the available dashboard shows only daily active users, daily transactions, and validator rewards with no notional dollar volume, and that conflating daily active users with daily active addresses can be a misleading metric. Don Wilson of DRW argued at DAS NYC that chains where maximal extractable value is possible are unsuitable for financial markets, a point that cuts against Canton's positioning despite the fact that Canton uses whitelisted super validators, making parts of its architecture permissioned even as it claims to be a permissionless blockchain.

Strategy posted a sizable loss last quarter, large enough that CEO Fong Lay signaled the company might need to sell Bitcoin to fund dividend payments to preferred shareholders. Saylor responded by saying that for any Bitcoin Strategy sells, it will buy 20 times that amount back, and Strategy had not sold any Bitcoin as of the time of recording. Saylor also released an AI-generated rap video featuring dancing Strategy executives and an AI version of himself rapping with lyrics referencing 65 billion dollars. Jeff Walton from Strive appeared with Coffeezilla on May 7 to debate Strategy, with Coffeezilla arguing that Strategy's Bitcoin buying and financial engineering carries characteristics of a Ponzi scheme. The core disagreement comes down to whether Bitcoin will appreciate on average every year over the next one to two decades. The episode noted that Tesla once sold approximately 10 percent of its Bitcoin holdings specifically to test market liquidity and demonstrate the asset's viability on a corporate balance sheet, and suggested Saylor's rap implies Strategy could make a similar small sale to prove it would not damage the Bitcoin price.