Elon Musk’s computer-chip brain implant company Neuralink is seeking patients all around the world to trial its device that allows one’s thoughts to control a computer.

Neuralink is looking for people with quadriplegia — those who are not able to use their arms or legs — to sign up for a clinical trial, it said in an April 2 post on X, the social media platform also owned by Musk.

As of January, Neuralink has said three patients have been implanted with a device. All are quadriplegic and are testing a small brain implant that tracks neural activity to control a computer or smartphone as part of a clinical trial called the Precise Robotically Implanted Brain-Computer Interface, or PRIME study.

Neuralink is one of several companies and academic institutions developing and testing so-called brain-computer interfaces, which vary from small wire-like implants as part of clinical trials to non-invasive devices akin to a hat.

Neuralink’s website says its clinical PRIME study, which will take around six years, is looking for quadriplegics with spinal cord injury or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis to use their thoughts to control a computer.

Musk also heads vehicle maker Tesla and is the Trump administration’s government cost-cutting czar. He has said he wants Neuralink to move beyond just allowing humans to operate computers by thinking and wants to help “give people superpowers.”

First Neuralink patient reports no side effects after a year

Noland Arbaugh, Neuralink’s first patient, said in a March 28 X post that he’s “had no negative side effects, neither physically nor psychologically” in the year after receiving his brain implant. 

Arbaugh, a quadriplegic, demoed his brain chip about a year ago by controlling a computer cursor to play chess and surf the web.

Arbaugh said he’s now using his brain chip “for all sorts of things” and guessed he’s using it for over 10 hours a day.

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He said the company’s researchers were “figuring out how to control a wheelchair with the implant,” which he added he won’t use “unless it’s next to perfect. I think it benefits everyone if I don’t lose control and drive into traffic.”

Arbaugh said he had found work as a traveling keynote speaker, which he attributed to Neuralink’s implant, which helped him write, research, and communicate online.

“I can’t tell you how much hope and purpose this technology has provided me,” he wrote. “It’s only a matter of time before the implant is in dozens, then hundreds, then thousands of people.”

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Crypto markets dipped after US President Donald Trump’s declaration of a national emergency and sweeping tariffs on all countries as part of his latest salvo in the ongoing trade war. 

The Trump administration has hit all countries with a 10% tariff starting April 5, with some countries facing even larger rates, such as China facing a 34% tariff, the European Union 20%, and Japan 24%. 

During an April 2 speech in the Rose Garden at the White House, Trump said the US is charging countries “approximately half of what they are and have been charging us.”

🚨 @POTUS signs an Executive Order instituting reciprocal tariffs on countries throughout the world.

It’s LIBERATION DAY in America! pic.twitter.com/p7UnfE617B

— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) April 2, 2025

The crypto market briefly went up at the news of a 10% sweeping tariff,  but once the full scope became known, it dipped with bleeding across the board. 

Bitcoin (BTC) had been staging a rally, reaching a session high at $88,500 but dropped 2.6% back to around $82,876. Meanwhile, CoinGecko data shows Ether (ETH) dropped over 6% from $1,934 to $1,797 following the tariff announcements and the total crypto market cap dropped 5.3% to $2.7 trillion. 

The Crypto Fear & Greed Index, which measures market sentiment for Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, returned a score of 25, classed as extreme fear, in its latest April 2 update. 

However, prices have clawed back some losses since. Bitcoin has recovered 0.8% to $83,205. While Ether regained 1.2% to take back $1,810.

Stock markets didn’t fare much better; trading resource The Kobeissi Letter said in an April 2 post to X that the stock market index S&P 500 erased over $2 trillion in market cap, working out to be roughly $125 billion per minute.

Trump tariffs could bring certainty to markets

Rachael Lucas, a crypto analyst at Australian crypto exchange BTC Markets, said the brief surge was a case of “uncertainty relief,”  then a sell-off as the full tariff details were released. 

“On BTC Markets, trading volume surged 46% as local traders scrambled to reposition. Big players took profit on the spike, while smaller investors hesitated,” she said in a statement.

She added that if China or the European Union “hit back hard,” expect another round of panic selling.

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent urged US trading partners in an April 2 interview with Bloomberg against taking retaliatory steps, arguing “this is the high end of the number” for tariffs if they don’t try to add more levies in response, which could provide a “ceiling” and certainty for markets.

David Hernandez, a crypto investment specialist at crypto asset manager  21Shares, told Cointelegraph that markets experienced significant volatility during Trump’s speech, but the clarity could be a good thing in the long term. 

“Although the tariff rates were slightly higher than expectations, the announcement provided much-needed clarity on the scope and scale of the policy,” he said.

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“Markets thrive on certainty, and with speculation now largely removed, institutional investors may see an opportunity over the coming days to take advantage of compressed valuations.”

Hernandez says global responses will be key for the market going forward, speculating that Mexico and key East Asian economies, including China, South Korea, and Japan, could be evaluating countermeasures.

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Cryptocurrency exchange OKX reportedly hired former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo to advise it over the federal probe that resulted in the firm pleading guilty to several violations and agreeing to pay $505 million in fines and penalties.

Cuomo, a New York-registered attorney, advised OKX on legal issues stemming from the probe sometime after August 2021 when he resigned as New York overnor, Bloomberg reported on April 2, citing people familiar with the matter.

“He spoke with company executives regularly and counseled them on how to respond to the criminal investigation,” Bloomberg said.

The Seychelles-based firm pled guilty to operating an unlicensed money-transmitting business in violation of US Anti-Money Laundering laws on Feb. 24 and agreed to pay $84 million worth of penalties while forfeiting $421 million worth of fees earned from mostly institutional clients.

The breaches occurred from 2018 to 2024 despite OKX having an official policy preventing US persons from transacting on its crypto exchange since 2017, the Department of Justice noted at the time.

A spokesperson for Cuomo, Rich Azzopardi, told Bloomberg that Cuomo has been providing private legal services representing individuals and corporations on a variety of matters since resigning as New York governor.

“He has not represented clients before a New York city or state agency and routinely recommends former colleagues for positions,”  Azzopardi added.

OKX reportedly wasn’t willing to comment on its relationships with outside firms.

Cuomo also influenced OKX to make executive appointments: Bloomberg

Cuomo, who is now running for mayor of New York City, also advised OKX to appoint his friend US Attorney Linda Lacewell to OKX’s board of directors, Bloomberg said.

Lacewell, a former superintendent of the New York Department of Financial Services, was added to the board in 2024 and was named OKX’s new chief legal officer on April 1, according to a recent company statement.

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After the investigation concluded, OKX said it would seek out a compliance consultant to remedy the issues stemming from the federal probe and bolster its regulatory compliance program.

“Our vision is to make OKX the gold standard of global compliance at scale across different markets and their respective regulatory bodies,” OKX CEO Star Xu said in a Feb. 24 X post.

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Big Four accounting firm EY, formerly Ernst & Young, has changed its enterprise-focused Ethereum layer-2 blockchain Nightfall to a zero-knowledge rollup design as it says corporate clients are more comfortable with privacy solutions with easing US sanctions.

EY said in an April 2 announcement that Nightfall’s new source code, “Nightfall_4,” simplifies the network’s architecture and offers near-instant transaction finality on Ethereum while making it more accessible to users than its previous optimistic rollup-based version.

EY’s global blockchain leader, Paul Brody, told Cointelegraph that switching to a ZK-rollup model “means instant finality, but it also makes operations simpler since you don’t need a challenger node to secure the network,” which verifies the correctness of transactions.

The move away from optimistic rollups means Nightfall users won’t need to challenge potentially incorrect transactions on Ethereum and wait out the challenging period, leading to faster transaction finality.

No such feature is present with zero-knowledge rollups, meaning that a transaction becomes final as soon as it is added into a Nightfall block, EY said. 

It is the fourth major update to Nightfall since EY launched the business-focused Ethereum layer 2 in 2019.

Nightfall enables the firm’s business partners to transfer tokens privately using Ethereum’s security while being cheaper than the base network. It also uses a technology that binds a verified identity to a public key through digital signatures to try to stem counterparty risk.

Nixed Tornado Cash sanctions “helped people feel comfortable”

Brody said the US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctions on the crypto mixing service Tornado Cash “had a chilling effect on legitimate business user interest.”

“Even though we long ago took steps to make Nightfall unattractive to bad actors, since it cannot be used anonymously, the removal of OFAC sanctions has really helped people feel comfortable that using a privacy technology will not be risky,” he added.

Nightfall’s code is open source on GitHub but remains a permissioned blockchain for EY’s customer base, competing with the likes of the IBM-backed Hyperledger Fabric, R3 Corda and the Consensus-built Quorum.

Brody said that EY’s blockchain team is working toward “a single environment that supports payments, logic, and composability.”

Currently, the firm requires Nightfall and Starlight, a tool that can change smart contract code to enable zero-knowledge proofs “to enable complex multiparty business agreements under privacy,” he added.

“We’ll spend some time supporting Nightfall_4 deployments initially,” Brody said. “Then we’ll move on to the development of Nightfall_5.”

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United States President Donald Trump signed an executive order establishing reciprocal tariffs on trading partners and a 10% baseline tariff on all imports from all countries.

The reciprocal levies on will be approximately half of what trading partners charge for US imports, Trump said. For example, China currently has a tariff of 67% on US imports, so US reciprocal tariffs on Chinese goods will be 34%. Trump also announced a standard 25% tariff on all automobile imports.

Trump told the media that tariffs would return the country to economic prosperity seen in previous centuries:

“From 1789 to 1913, we were a tariff-backed nation. The United States was proportionately the wealthiest it has ever been. So wealthy, in fact, that in the 1880s, they established a commission to decide what they were going to do with the vast sums of money they were collecting.”

“Then, in 1913, for reasons unknown to mankind, they established the income tax so that citizens, rather than foreign countries, would start paying,” Trump said.

Trump presented the tariffs through the lens of economic protectionism and hinted at returning to the economic policies of the 19th century by using them to replace the income tax.

Related: Bitcoin rally to $88.5K obliterates bears as spot volumes soar — Will a tariff war stop the party?

Trump proposes eliminating federal income tax and replacing it with tariff revenue

Trump proposed the idea of abolishing the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and funding the federal government exclusively through trade tariffs while still on the campaign trail in October 2024.

According to accounting automation company Dancing Numbers, Trump’s plan could save each American taxpayer $134,809-$325,561 in taxes throughout their lives.

The higher range of the tax savings estimate will only occur if other wage-based taxes are eliminated at the state and municipal levels.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who assumed office in February, also voiced support for replacing the IRS with the “External Revenue Service.”

Lutnick said that the US government cannot balance a budget yet consistently demands more from its citizens every year. Tariffs will also protect American workers and strengthen the US economy, he said.

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