The biggest crypto news and ideas of the day |
Were you forwarded this newsletter? Sign up here. Don't want this newsletter? Unsubscribe |
|
|
Founded in 2018, Hex Trust is a leading digital assets financial service provider, delivering custody, staking, markets and investment solutions to over 300 institutional clients, including banks, funds, exchanges, financial institutions, protocols, brokers, and foundations.
With a presence in Hong Kong, Singapore, Dubai, France, and Italy, Hex Trust is recognized for delivering secure, regulated, and compliant solutions on institutional-grade infrastructure.
Get access to our comprehensive and regulated suite of services built on our proprietary and fully-integrated infrastructure.
|
|
|
The native token of Sui (SUI) surged on Thursday on news that Trump-affiliated decentralized finance protocol World Liberty Financial (WLFI) stroke a "strategic reserve deal" with the layer-1 blockchain project. The agreement includes WLFI adding Sui assets to its crypto holdings, the announcement said. The two projects will also explore "product development opportunities." SUI jumped as much as 10% to near $3 before paring gains. Still it was up about 13% in the past 24 hours, being the best-performing asset in the broad-market CoinDesk 20 Index. "We chose Sui for its American-born innovation combined with impressive scale and adoption," said Zak Folkman, co-founder of World Liberty Financial. “Given our plans to support foundational DeFi assets in the coming months, collaborating with Sui was an obvious decision." World Liberty Financial has already accumulated various digital assets in its "strategic token reserve," including wrapped bitcoin, ether (ETH), Tron's TRX, Chainlink's LINK as well as MOVE and ONDO tokens. |
|
|
The Industry’s Brightest Minds. One Unmissable Event.
Dealmaking. Networking. Big moves. Consensus 2025 is where the industry’s top players connect, innovate, and build what’s next. Don’t miss out. Save 15% with code NODE15. |
|
|
Between his recent social posts referring to the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), an interview with The New York Sun and his conversation with conservative pundit Tucker Carlson, FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried seems to be attempting a media rehabilitation tour.
Bankman-Fried suggested to Carlson on Thursday that one of the reasons he’d been given a harsh prison sentence was because he was getting closer to the Republican Party in the lead-up to his arrest. “One fact that might be relevant. In 2020 I was center-left and I gave to Biden's campaign," he said. "I was optimistic he'd be a sort of solid center-left President. I spent the next few years in [Washington] DC a lot. I made dozens of trips there, and was really, really shocked by what I saw, not in a good direction, from the administration." “By late 2022 I was giving to Republicans privately as much as Democrats. And that started becoming known right around FTX’s collapse, so that probably played a role,” Bankman-Fried added. Bankman-Fried was found guilty of multiple charges of fraud and conspiracy in March 2024 and sentenced to 25 years in prison. He made over $40 million in political donations to 196 members of Congress, including former Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and former Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.). In other words, 1 in 3 lawmakers took money from him.
During Bankman-Fried's lengthy trial, it was revealed that he'd mulled a number of potential ways to rehab his public image following the collapse of FTX. An undated Google Doc listed ideas such as "come out against the woke agenda" and "Go on Tucker Carlsen, come out as a republican." With the GOP now firmly in power in D.C., the latter idea has now seemingly come to fruition.
Bankman-Fried told Carlson that he’d never expected a whole lot from the Democrats but that he believed some lawmakers would prove thoughtful in both political parties. He criticized former Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chair Gary Gensler, calling the agency “something out of a nightmare” during his tenure due to difficulties for crypto companies to come in and register.
Asked by Carlson whether he’d called in any favors from political figures during his trial, Bankman-Fried denied it. However, the 33-year-old's parents, former Stanford Law School professors Barbara Fried and Joseph Bankman, have reportedly been meeting with lawyers and other people in U.S. President Donald Trump's orbit in an attempt to secure their son a presidential pardon. “There’s a long story there. It involves a law firm that took a pretty unusual and active role in the case, before I even gave up control of FTX, before it was ever filed for bankruptcy, the DOJ had already made up its mind.”
The Google Doc unveiled during Bankman-Fried's trial also suggested he was planning to "talk about how the cartel of lawyers is destroying value and throwing entrepreneurs under the bus in order to cover up the incompetence of lawyers.” Bankman-Fried recently posted a series of messages on social media about the difficulties of firing employees, in reference to the firings enacted by DOGE. Bankman-Fried was criticized by the crypto community for the posts, which were perceived as an attempt to ingratiate himself with the Trump administration. |
|
|
Texas Passes Bitcoin Reserve Bill |
Several U.S. states are getting closer to putting public money into cryptocurrencies effort, spurred by President Donald Trump since he announced plans to do the same on a federal level. And Texas is now among the leading contenders. On Thursday, the Texas state senate passed the so-called SB 21 bill which would allow the state to invest some of the public’s money into digital assets, specifically bitcoin (BTC). Bitcoin, according to a statement from Texas Senator Charles Schwertner last week, “has proven itself through multiple boom and bust cycles,” making it a great reserve asset in times of a “devastating national deficit” along with “inflation and uncertainty,” as Schwertner described. New Hampshire also passed a bill on Wednesday through a state house committee, the House Bill 302 by a 16-1 vote, that would allow the state to invest up to 5% of public funds into bitcoin as well as other precious metals. So, it's moving forward, though it's a few votes away from the finish line. Almost a dozen states have made strong efforts to pass a bill that would allow similar allocations, while at least five states ran into setbacks or no votes that tanked their bills. Utah has so far been the frontrunner in a variety of efforts and remains just one senate approval away from sending a bill to its governor's desk. However, the legislative session expires this week, leaving little time to get the senate to join the state house in approving an investment of as much as 5% of certain public accounts in a digital asset with more than $500 billion in assets. (So far, that's just bitcoin.) |
Deribit Improves Block Trades |
Deribit, the leading crypto options exchange, has launched a Block Request-For-Quote (RFQ) interface, allowing traders to execute large over-the-counter (OTC) trades with improved efficiency and liquidity. The feature, available to all users but tailored for high-volume traders, enables direct negotiation of block trades without impacting public order books, according to a press release. The Block RFQ system supports complex trading structures, allowing users to combine options, futures, and spot pairs with up to 20 legs in a single trade, yet using the system is subject to a higher minimum trade size. The platform uses a multi-maker model that allows multiple liquidity providers to offer partial quotes rather than requiring all-or-nothing fills, while allowing third-party platforms to connect to the Block RFQ system to pool liquidity from multiple sources, per the release. Deribit announced the new system shortly after Sygnum Bank expanded its custody platform to include the derivatives exchange. The trading platform, it’s worth noting, is reportedly in talks with Kraken for a potential acquisition. |
Opinion: The Self-Writing Internet |
Dominic Williams, founder of DFINITY:
Today, hundreds of millions of people own bitcoin and other tokens hosted on blockchains worth trillions of dollars. Increasingly, though, blockchains host far more than tokens. In fact, blockchains are our future tech stack, and they can host sophisticated Web apps too, which live fully-onchain, just like tokens. These apps are implemented entirely from network-resident code (i.e. smart contract software and its evolutions). This has huge potential: by the end of 2025, more than 5 billion people will own internet-connected smartphones with Web browsers. So what might drive them to create and use fully-onchain web apps, which can sport seamless Web3 functionality? I believe a new blockchain revolution is imminent, thanks to advancing AI and “self-writing app” technology. This relates to an important emerging trend called “vibe coding.” Vibe coding involves software engineers using tools with integrated AI that can write and fix software code on their behalf, making them much more productive. The self-writing apps paradigm takes this much further, by enabling non-technical users to create, own and update apps simply by instructing AI over chat. For reasons I will explain, blockchain is in a unique position to help bring this revolutionary functionality to the world. In the future, an individual will be able to create a personal branding website, or something like a custom wedding planning app for a family member getting married, just by talking to AI. An entrepreneur without technical staff or money will be able to create a new kind of e-commerce website, or build a sharing economy app with Web3 rails. And, an enterprise will be able to create sophisticated CRM functionality, for an infinitesimally small fraction of the investment in time and money that is currently required. All just by talking, without the need for software engineering or systems administration skills. In this new development paradigm, everyday users will issue instructions to AI over chat, and simply refresh their web browser moments later to interact with their new or updated app. Apps living on blockchains have a number of valuable features. They are sovereign and censorship-resistant, because they live on a public network, they are tamperproof, which means they are secure without depending on cybersecurity, incredibly resilient, and can seamlessly integrate powerful web3 functionalities because they live on-chain. In addition, blockchain technology solves major problems involved with having AI build solo on traditional IT. For example, the code that runs on traditional IT must be written carefully to avoid introducing security holes, and the whole platform is sensitive to security configurations, from cloud accounts, to operating systems running on cloud instances like Linux, to hosted platform software such as databases and web servers. This means traditional IT infrastructure must often be further protected by cybersecurity systems such as firewalls and anti-malware. Failover, and backup and restore, are another concern, and service providers must be trusted. Trusting AI to build solo on traditional IT is a stretch, because even a single mistake can lead to a cyberattack that results in data exfiltration, or ransomware encrypting data. Blockchains make it far easier for AI to build solo in many different ways. For example, the network-resident code blockchains host is “serverless,” greatly simplifying the coding tasks AI must perform, allowing code to be produced faster. Read more here. |
|
|
Paolo Comes to Washington |
|
|
|
