Unchained - Ethena's L1 Shows Fat Apps Are on the Rise. Can They Beat Fat Protocols? - Ep. 804

Episode Date: March 21, 2025

Blockchains were supposed to capture the majority of the value in crypto. But what if that’s wrong? For years, the Fat Protocols Thesis argued that blockchains would be the biggest winners. But new data suggests that apps like Uniswap, Ethena, and others are now out-earning many networks. Are we watching the rise of “Fat Apps” instead? On this episode, Ryan Watkins, Co-founder at Syncracy Capital, talks about:  Why the biggest apps are generating more revenue than many layer 1s Why Ethena is launching its own blockchain What this means for Ethereum, Solana & other L1s How blockchains can compete on value capture Visit our website for breaking news, analysis, op-eds, articles to learn about crypto, and much more: unchainedcrypto.com Thank you to our sponsors! BitKey: Use code UNCHAINED for 20% off FalconX Mantle Guest Ryan Watkins, Co-founder at Syncracy Capital Links Unchained: Ethena Labs and Securitize to Launch New EVM Blockchain for DeFi Syncracy Capital: Applications Capture Fees, Blockchains Store Value Hansolar’s tweet  Pump.fun launches its own DEX  Timestamps: 👋0:00 Intro 💰 2:12 Why apps are out-earning the blockchains they run on 🔗 5:44 Ethena’s move: why it’s launching its own chain 📈 8:33 The rise of “Fat Apps” and what it means for crypto 🚀 12:50 How today’s crypto founders think differently from past builders 🏆 15:51 The blockchain architectures that will dominate ⚖️ 22:32 Whether L1s can compete in this new environment 📊 241:27 How blockchains accrue value and why MEV isn’t the best metric 📰 31:00 News Recap Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When I say that the chat app thesis to an extent is an evolution of the L1 trade, what we're getting at is that why do these projects want to expand horizontally anyways? It's because that's the biggest tan. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Unchained. You're no-hype resource for all things crypto. I'm your host, Laura Shin. We are now featuring quotes from listeners on the show.

Today we have a comment responding to my interview with Joe McCann on meme coins, Bitcoin, and Salana. On X, Heavenly Pulse writes, solid analysis, technical fundamentals drive long-term value, not meme cycles. Bitcoin leads while Solana builds infrastructure, exactly as it should be. To have your comment featured, write a review of the podcast overall or leave a comment on our video on YouTube or X. This is the March 21st, 2025 episode of Unchained. Bitkey is the Bitcoin Wallet from the 10th. team behind Square and Cash app. It's the first two of three multi-sick hardware wallet with recovery tools that replace the need for a seed phrase. Get 20% off with code unchained. Imagine an AI that

speaks crypto and does the work of a team of analysts. Introducing Focal by Falcon X, bringing clarity to a world of noise. Visit askfocal.com. Mantil is building the future of on-chain finance. experience its enhanced index fund, Mantle Banking, and MantleX. Visit group.mantle.xy to learn more. Today's guest is Ryan Watkins, co-founder at Synchracy Capital. Welcome, Ryan. Thanks for having me all, Laura. This week, Athena and Securitize announced that in Q2,

they are going to launch a new blockchain that will be EVM-compatible and cater to institutional investors. It also already has a number of D-Fi partnerships out of the gate. this announcement actually appears to be part of a larger trend, or at least glimmers of this trend. It's sort of new. But why don't we start with you telling us about this converge news and what you think of it? Yeah, I thought it was very interesting. Maybe I'll zoom out and say that.

About six months ago, I wrote an essay about how applications were starting to win a larger share of the global fee tool for blockchains. And on Ethereum and Solana, applications were now earning about 50 to 60. of all the fees on the chain. And that was up from practically a rounding error about three years ago. And what this tells me is that applications are starting to not only generate revenue, but generate more revenue than their underlying infrastructure. And what I started to make me think about is what are the implications of applications starting to become financially stronger,

potentially stronger relative to their underlying base layers. And one hypothesis that I had is that many applications would start to vertically integrate as they became more powerful. And there would be varying levels of vertical integration depending on the application and depending on the motivations of the founders and the core team. So when I see the Athena news, it just seems like, one of many in a trend of applications that are moving towards this. And you can think of

Jupiter, you can think of pump, you can think of uniswap. I mean, many applications that have started off by doing one thing and are now trying to do many things in order to capture a greater share of the fee pool. And this ultimately deliver a better product to their users. Yeah. So in that essay from a few months ago, you dubbed your thesis the fat app these which for people who've been in crypto for a long time, they probably remember the FAP Protocols thesis. So explain the FAT Protocols thesis for people who may not be familiar and what your new FAT app thesis was. Yeah, sure. So the FAT protocol thesis written by Joel Monegro, almost a decade ago at this point,

maybe about eight years. And basically, it was just an observation that Bitcoin tended to outperform the companies that are built on top. And it posited this framework for thinking about value accrual in the crypto economy, where the protocols would out earn the applications, and that is the opposite of what happened on the internet, where the underlying internet protocols are not monetized at all, and all the value accrued to the applications on top, like Facebook and Google and all that. So what I'm starting to suggest is that we're now at an inflection point in the crypto economy

where we're starting to really test out this thesis. And going back to Athena, the thesis that it's testing out is what matters most to winning the crypto economy right now? If you think of blockchains as their core functionality being that enables you to create assets, move these assets around and force contracts between them, then the goal of a blockchain should be to get more quality assets on there,

get people to trade those assets, and that's a performance question of can you trade these well, you can create them fast, and then create all these financial applications on top of it. So what the Athena's securitized announcement is, is an admission that we are still very early. and the assets that could be uploaded from the traditional financial system of the blockchain way outnumber the amount of assets that exist on blockchain today.

So you look at Ethereum and Solana's day. There's about about maybe tens of billions of dollars of assets that are issued on Solana. Ethereum is probably like maybe order and attitude higher. You look at the assets that could come on chain that are in stocks, bonds, currencies, real estate, you name it, and we're talking about tens of trillions, if not 100 trillion lost assets that could actually come into blockchains. And if you own the distribution for onboarding all these assets and these assets by default will be onboarded to your blockchain, then there's a decent chance that you could end up being one of the big winners

in the crypto economy. And I think that's what the Athena team is seeing as an opportunity. And the first product was simply a way of building out network effects for one of the most important products in the crypto economy, which is the stable coin. And now they're thinking, okay, we can actually expand beyond that. Now we kind of really establish a foothold in this specific niche, which is a dollar savings account. Yeah, there was something interesting in that essay that you wrote. This line spoke to me. It said the Fed App thesis has nothing to do with tech.

technical specialization and everything to do with go to market. In reality, it's just an evolution of the L1 trade hiding a new skin. And I actually saw it. So I'm not sure if this person had read what you wrote, but somebody named Hans Solar on X tweeted, find market fit, then launch an L1, not the other way. And then he gave these examples, game to L1, Axi Infinity, Dex to L1, Uniswap, Perp Dex to L1 hyperliquid and now stablecoin to L1 Athena. And then he said, and likely attention marketplace to L1, Kato AI.

And then he said because of the end of the day, at the end of the day, it's all about the apps. So now after we explained your fat app thesis, what was interesting is when you wrote up at this, you kind of also talked about how this isn't necessarily just a one and done and like it's going to be like this forever. You had another bit in there about how value capture on blockchains generally would go forward. So just talk a little bit about what you think about that, like how it will work for apps versus protocols. Yeah, sure. So going back to the tweet, if we look at the period from 2017 until, even recently, say like 2023, the, what were the biggest hams in the cryptocurrency economy. It was basically three areas. There were stable coins,

and that's the broad thesis that we can replace dollars worldwide with digital dollars. There's exchanges, and we can empirically see that these are very valuable businesses. We look at finance, look at Coinbase. These are all worth tens of billions of lot more. And there are the smart contract platforms. And those were the basic idea that we could add greater functionality to blockchains beyond just digital gold. And perhaps I could lead to a wide variety of applications. It could be very valuable long term. Well, in the beginning, like so from that 2017 to 22nd period, we didn't know how to build this stuff. So I remember being in that period, especially like maybe the 2017-2020 period, where the debates we'd have to be.

between different smart contract platforms is about what consensus mechanisms they're using, or how are they going to propagate data around the network? I mean, these really thorny technical issues that weren't solved. And that's how you differentiate yourself as a new smart contract platform. It was through all of these different technical issues that existed at the time. Today, I don't think that that is as important. We generally have a roadmap to scale block space, another 100,000 X from here.

It is quite clear. It's a matter of execution. It's no longer theory. So what matters more if you want to create a weighing platform in the crypt economy? I would argue that today, what matters more is go to market, right? In strategy. So what many of these applications are doing,

and that's what the suite is alluding to, is they're using the application as a wedge so that they can then win out a specific niche and then expand generally from there. So we look at Hyperliquid as an example. Hyperliquid started off by saying that we don't have a compelling on-chain trading experience for professional swaps, which is the most popular trade in this industry.

So it started off by creating a great product for that. And you look at it today as 60, 70% market share of on-chain herbs. It's dominating. Then from there, and mind you, it actually specifically designed its chain towards this use case. Right. Then from there, you can expand. You can go general purpose. You can add spot trading to hyperliquid.

You can go in add lending and all these different. features that you'd expect on a smart contract platform using that as a foundation for all these different and almost like an anchor for for users to come and then to go explore the rest of ecosystem. So when I say that the chat app thesis to an extent is an evolution of the L1 trade, what we're getting at is that why do these projects want to expand horizontally anyways? It's because that's the biggest tamp. You know, you start, it's like the classic Amazon example. If you start by selling books, then you sell everything. That's exactly what all these apps want to do. And like I said earlier, the thesis that all these apps are testing is that it is still early.

And what they have is a second mover advantage in a way where they can see how projects before them have succeeded. In fact, they can just literally rip out some of the technology because it's all open source. And then they can use that those learning. maybe points where they failed and build a better product. And that is what I think is happening. And I think that that will be a huge narrative moving forward, is seeing these. And it's not just about, like I said, the go-to-market as well. It's also about the types of founders that are doing this.

So many these founders are significantly more commercially oriented than the founders of the past. There's not to say that people have been here for a very long time cannot adapt. to the new environment, but there are people that are very ideologically motivated and may be disillusioned with the prospect, say, of Athena, of launching a blockchain where you're partnering with this institutional partner to launch tokenized assets and permission protocols. But for someone like that team, they may be like, right, this is very practical because this is how we actually onboard trillions of dollars onto blockchain and get this into hands of people that actually want to use it, right? So there's a this cultural tensions that this creates in addition to,

I think, competitive, new competitive realities for many of these projects. Yeah, there was another way you phrased it in your essay, which is, um, you said that we're at an inflection point that could precipitate an application generating an infrastructure like outcome, which I think is, you know, what we're, what we're doing here. So in a moment, we'll pick up on your comments about that competitive nature, but first a quick word from the sponsors you make this show possible. BitKee is the only Bitcoin wallet on Time Magazine's best inventions list of 2024. Built by the team behind Square and Cash app, BitKee is a 203 multi-signature wallet and the first hardware wallet with an innovative recovery suite that eliminates the need

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a world of noise with Focal. Learn more at askfocal.com. We have another listener comment, this one responding to my interview with Joe McCann, specifically Joe's pushback on the Pump Fun extraction debate. On X, Nozomi Network says, quote, it's a public market. If you want to be successful, find a niche and run a business. It's always the spectators, never the doers who will complain. Again, if you want to hear your comment featured on the show, please write a review or leave a comment on an episode on YouTube or X. Back to my conversation with Ryan. So just before you and I hopped on to record, we saw that Pump Fund announced their own decks, pump swap, which goes to your comments earlier about how it's easy to steal tech because it's open source.

And again, it's not an example of they have a toehold somewhere. And now, yes, I mean, there are plenty of other AMMs where people could go to. You know, radium is probably the most obvious example. And yet they're launching their own deck. So, yeah, talk a little bit about your reaction to that news. Yeah, yeah. I know that was something that was rumored for a while. And I believe that pump, I hinted at it, or they deployed like a, almost like a testament version of their AMM weeks ago.

So the way I see it is, you know, when we talk about this thesis of applications vertically integrating, I believe there's three different ways. I'm almost like a spectrum for how this could look like in its end state. there was the maximally modular vision that is basically a cosmos where you have many fully integrated, fully vertically integrated applications that do everything from host their own front-in to have their own blockchain, have the protocols on top of the blockchain, and it's completely independent. And the way that all these applications would communicate is through a interoperable.

probability protocol, like a standard for communication. And that basically is the Cosmos vision that they imagine, you know, for a long time. Then at the other spectrum, there is the more integrated thesis like Solana, where you can still have these vertically integrated applications, but they only vertically integrate to the point of, you know, consensus, data availability, settlement, block reduction. They leave all that to Solon. and they just build up from there.

So I think Pump is a great example, where it starts off with a simple protocol and interface for creating assets on Solana. And now what are they doing? Well, they've kind of moved down the stack to create their own AMM and basically ripped radium out from under them. And then they're also moving up as well, having created their own mobile application

so that they can meet users where they are, which is on their phones for all this treating. And I think the goal for anyone that's doing this is they basically want to create, almost like a Robin Hood for the static classes. It's kind of how I would think about it. And then there's also the in-between. So I talked about the Maxley integrated and the Axley modular. And the in-between is something more like Ethereum or Celestia, for example,

where these apps are still very vertically integrated. They're crazy controlling their own execution environment. but there's still like the consensus art that is still done by a basler like Ethereum and and Celestia. And the benefit of that vision is that there is like native interoperability between these. So these are different ways of going about it, right? The question I have for what vision is most likely and some of this is path dependence, right? Other parts of this are just technical considerations.

is to what extent do these underlying blockchains have network effects? And is this infrastructure ultimately a commodity? Right? Because if like this is the whole thing we call settlement or consensus is a commodity, and that's not my personal belief, then you know what? That cosmos vision probably looks more correct, where it doesn't matter where you issue any of,

these assets because you can move them around regardless, right? If there is a really easy way to make these protocols all interoperable, you don't lose out on any security concerns. But the flip side of this is that settlement is not commoditized and there are real benefits to having these assets on a single shared state. And that, like I said, that's like Solana. That is to make sense, celestialian Ethereum. And that is still my base case where you do have, you know, Salana, for example, where it is widely integrated across the ecosystem. There are a huge developer ecosystem.

There are plenty of assets that are issued on top of it. It is, these are compounding network effects that Solana has and why you would want to build on Solana, right? You can go and copy Salinas code. You can't copy the 3,000 validators around the world that are running this infrastructure. You can copy Salana's code. You can't copy all the protocols and all the assets that live on top of it. These are real and these are sticky and these create network effects. So to go back to the original part about where are these super apps doing, right, when we talk about like a hyperliquid or Athena, they're just challenging how strong those network effects are. Right. So maybe they're like, all right, cool.

Solana is this great place, but maybe it's all for this degen trading right now. It's for meme coins, right? And in reality, the bigger opportunity is to beat a place where stocks get settled and bonds get settled. And that's what you want to be going for. So it's going to be very interesting to see how this plays out because maybe another implication of this as well is that if there is actually any room for an Athena or hyperliquid to go in carve out market share from the salinas and Ethereum's the world, then what does I say about the chances of a Robin Hood coming in and doing the same thing? They have even better distribution than any of those players, and they can just leverage his open source code. Yeah, that is an interesting

question because I don't remember who tweeted this, but But somebody tweeted something like, I don't remember the exact quote, but it was something like, oh, great, we spent, you know, all this time building out this defy infrastructure just for Robin Hood to come and take it all from us or whatever. I don't remember the exact phrasing, but. But so what was interesting about the essay that you wrote is that you did indicate that it wasn't necessarily over for layer ones, that you felt like this notion. of the fat protocols thesis probably still was at play in some respect.

Can you explain how it is that you think these base layer assets will compete? Yeah, I'll approach it from two angles. One is around Valiak rule and the others around the kind of go-to-market and ultimate market structure of the L1's long term. And I'll start with the last one. So one of the reasons why I suggested that this rise of fat applications is more about go to market than it is about technical specialization is that there is a world where one of these applications just ends up being the winning smart contract platform because it just

got to market better and got the users and it just ends up winning. right and it creates this you know almost like we chat of finance that i think is what would be incredible if this industry could create where you can just open up a single application on your phone and you can do anything you want in finance that would be that that doesn't exist today that would be a home run opportunity for anyone that could build it so there's that angle and in that in that respect this whole fat app thing is just it is literally just the L1 trade, except they're just competing on go-to-market

instead of the technical considerations, like I said before, where we're talking about what consensus mechanism these people are using. That just doesn't matter anymore. And then there's the value cruel side of it, which is that right now there's a common belief. And this is still for debate. I wouldn't say everyone believes this,

that the way that blockchains accrue value or capture value is through MEV or transaction feeds. And it is, I understand the motivation to value blockchain in this way. It is sensible on the surface. It is explainable to someone that comes from a traditional background finance or business. If you were to say that the way that salon is valued is you just run a DCF on it. But there are a couple challenges to this thesis.

one being that the fees are circular, right? Apple doesn't sell iPhones for Apple shares. It sells iPhones for dollars. But all blockchains are effectively doing that. So to use Alana, you have to pay and sold. To use it the year to pay and eat. It's a weird circular reference that to me hints at that something is going underneath, it's going on here that isn't quite the same as a company.

that is generating cash flow and issuing equity to distribute that cash flow to those owners of the company. And the second part of this is around MEV, right? And MEV today is a, it's a large industry, but I believe that MEV is larger than it should be today. And this is in part because of immature wallet infrastructure and all these. and trading infrastructure, all these different things that make us so that users are paying more than they have to and getting worse execution they have to. And you know what? Maybe that's fine today when, you know, the dominant use case is someone just opening up

their phone and buying a meme coin. They're willing to pay, you know, exorbitant fees to do that. But eventually if we're going to move like the financial system onto blockchains and do serious stuff here, that can't be the case. MEV will come down as a percentage of the global activity on blockchains, and there's many forces that are going to drive this as well. So when we think about how this looks like over time, and mind you, just to put this in numbers, I think today, you know, the MBV industry in blockchain is in the order of like billions.

And then if you look at like the, as an analogy, high frequency trading profits around the world, that's an order of tens of billions today. So unless you think that the MEV industry is going to bigger than, all like high frequency trading profits globally anytime soon, I don't know how we can justify the valuations of any of these our contract platforms in hundreds of billions. It just doesn't make sense right now. And you can argue that, okay, it's going to be expansion of the TAM.

We're going to have even more trading done here than it happens in the real world. So we're going to have new asset classes on here. And there's going to be more people who can access to financial system because it's actually more accessible. And that is like one way of framing it. But I'm just very skeptical because what also is a counteractual. from force is that this MEV is not going to be captured by validators entirely. MEPV value capture will move up the stack. Some protocols will capture Mavie, some interfaces will

capture Mav because they're the source of this odor flow in the first place. And then, hopefully, the users will capture this MEP and the fact that they get to get end up getting back execution. So then what is left for these Mar-Contrae platform is, if, like I said, the M.EV profits are going down. There's a larger share of MEP going to validators, and there's a circular reference for these smart contract platforms anyways in that they're collecting fees and it occurs to the issue. Well, I mean, there's two answers. One is that they're just tremendously overvalued and these things are going to trade sideways, if not down, for the next decade. Or it's that the actual way that these asked when valuable long term is they're more

similar to Bitcoin and that they're like these non-sovereign source of value. And in fact, that's not like a wild idea because I remember when the first few years in Ethereum's life cycle, when it's a proof of work cryptocurrency, no one valued Ethereum on the basis of fees because the fees were going to the miners. It was just a currency that had smart contracts around it. And you could imagine that these smart contracts could create an entire economy in the Ethereum blockchain that demands ETH for different use cases that drive that monetary value for it. And I still think that is likely, right? Now, it's a long road to getting there where, you know, there's like meaningful economic activity that's driving values of this, these assets, these non-sableness forms of value. But I think

that is still like the best outcome for these smart contract platforms long term. And to wrap this up, if that is in fact the way that these assets do grew value long term, then that is how you can still have a scenario where applications do in fact capture the majority of the fees, which are already starting to do. But still, the underlying L1s can generate huge outcomes because they are these non-sovereign source of value. And that is a huge multi-sharlyan dollar attempt. Yeah. Yeah, I found it was interesting at the end of your SAU road. All L-1s are ultimately competing with Bitcoin to be the leading non-sovereign digital store of value. So, yeah. So I guess we'll see what happens because I do agree with you. I think we're not even just at one inflection

point, but multiple inflection points. Multiple. Yeah. Yeah, it's exciting. Yeah, yeah. It's been super fun chatting. Thank you so much for coming on Unchained. Yeah, thanks for having me on. Don't forget. Next up is the weekly news recap, today presented by Wondercraft AI. Stick around for this week in crypto after this short break. Mantle is revolutionizing its on-chain financial hub. Powered by a $4 billion treasury and proven products like Mantle Network and MEath Protocol, Mantle is launching three innovation pillars.

Enhanced index fund for optimized crypto exposure, mental banking for blockchain-powered banking, and Mantle X for AI-driven innovation. Experience the future of finance with Mantle, and follow Mantle on X to stay tuned. Welcome to this week's Crypto Roundup. In today's recap, we break down the SEC's dropped appeal against Ripple, the fallout from Solana's controversial ad, and Radium's move to challenge Pump. We'll also cover the DOJ's tough stance on crypto crime, major policy proposals from the White House Crypto Summit, and Crypto.com's contentious vote to remit 70 billion CRO.

Plus, we dive into Solana's underwhelming futures debut, Avey's decision to scrap a new token, Coinbase's launch of verified pools, and Robin Hood's new prediction markets hub. Finally, we look at Taun's price surge after Telegram's founder was allowed to leave France, and EOS rebranding to VALTA amid security concerns. Thanks for tuning in to the weekly news recap. Let's begin. SEC drops appeal against Ripple. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has decided to drop its appeal against Ripple Labs, according to a statement from Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse.

The long-running legal battle, which began in December 2020, revolved around the SEC's claim that Ripple unlawfully sold $1.3 billion in XRP as an unregistered security. Garlinghouse hailed the development as a resounding victory for Ripple, adding that it represents a broader win for the cryptocurrency industry. However, Unchained reported that while the SEC has abandoned its appeal, a $125 million fine imposed on Ripple for institutional XRP sales remains unresolved. Ripple has indicated that it will continue its own appeal to challenge the penalty. The SEC, under acting chairman Mark Uyra, has dropped several lawsuits against crypto firms in recent months.

The decision follows Ripple's multi-million dollar donations to pro-cryptopolitical initiatives, though a White House spokesperson dismissed speculation that the contributions influence the SEC's decision, calling such claims outlandish. Solana Polls Controversial Ad. On Monday, Solana released a patriotic-themed advertisement to promote its accelerate conference, but the campaign quickly sparked controversy for its political messaging. The ad depicted a personified America in a therapy session, where the therapist advised him to focus on pronouns instead of innovation.

The character ultimately rejects the advice, declaring, I want to invent technologies, not genders. The video immediately drew backlash, with critics labeling it cringe, tone-deaf, and divisive. Many in the crypto space accused Solana of alienating users and attempting to appeal to right-wing figures like Donald Trump and Elon Musk. Base product lead Honorie van der Merway criticized the ad, saying, Base is for everyone. Facing widespread criticism, Solana deleted the ad just nine hours after posting it,

but not before it had racked up over 1.2 million views and 1,400 reposts. Solana co-founder Anatoly Yaakovenko commented on X, The ad was bad, and it's still gnawing at my soul. I am ashamed I downplayed it instead of just calling it what it is. Mean and punching down on a marginalized group. I am grateful for the ecosystem devs and artists that immediately called it what it is both publicly and privately. Radium and Pump. Fund intensify rivalry over Solana's token trading market. The competition between Radium and Pump. Fund, two of Solana's largest defy platforms, is escalating as both launch new products aimed at dominating the token launch and trading sector. Earlier this week, Radium announced Launch Lab, a token launch pad designed to

offer an alternative to Pump.Fund's existing model. The platform will allow teams to set their own fees, use custom bonding curves, and create liquidity pools within the radium ecosystem. This move came after Pump.funkn announced plans to launch its own automated market maker, which could reduce Radium's role in the token migration process. And on Thursday, Pump. PumpDutFun launched PumpSwap, a native decentralized exchange built to bypass Radium entirely. Pump swap allows tokens that complete their bonding curve on Pump. Fun to migrate instantly and for free, eliminating the previous six-sal migration fee. The new platform enables liquidity providers to create pools at no cost,

while also integrating a revenue-sharing model for token creators, expected to roll out in the near future. Pump swap operates similarly to Radium v4 and Uniswap v2, using a constant product AMM model with a 0.25% trading fee, 0.23% going to liquidity providers, and 0.05% to the protocol. Pump.Dot Fund has also announced that select verified partner tokens, such as APT, Tron, and CBBT are now available for trading. DOJ stands firm on crypto crime.

The U.S. Department of Justice remains steadfast in its aggressive approach to crypto-related crime, even as other federal agencies soften their stance on digital assets. As reported by Unchained, the DOJ continues to pursue high-profile cases, including the prosecution of Roman Storm, co-founder of the Ethereum-based privacy protocol, Tornado Cash. Storm, a naturalized U.S. citizen faces charges of money laundering, unlicensed money transmission, and violating U.S. sanctions under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. The case, which is set to go to trial in April, has raised alarms among defy advocates, who argue that targeting developers of autonomous smart contracts could stifle innovation

and weaken financial privacy in the crypto space. While the SEC and Treasury Department have begun scaling back enforcement actions under President Trump's administration, the DOJ remains committed to investigating crypto-related national security threats, including those tied to sanctions violations and illicit finance. Legal experts suggest the outcome of Storm's case could set a precedent for the broader defy industry, influencing future regulatory treatment of decentralized finance and privacy technologies. Five key proposals for U.S. policy. At the White House Crypto Summit on March 7th, industry leaders had the chance to pitch policy ideas to top regulators and advisors, including Crypto-Kazard David Sachs, SEC, Hester Perce, and Treasury Secretary Scott Besant.

While President Trump attended only the public portion, the closed-door session revealed at least five major proposals, unchained reported. Former CFTC Chair. Chris Jingcarlo suggested reviving letters of Marque to authorize private firms to hack foreign adversaries, targeting stolen crypto assets like the $6 billion, taken by North Korea's Lazarus Group. Michael Saylor urged the government to acquire up to 25% of Bitcoin's total supply, aligning with a growing push for a U.S. Bitcoin Reserve. Paradigms Matt Huang advocated for dropping the DOJ's case against Tornado Cash developer Roman Storm, warning of its chilling effect on defy innovation.

Additionally, Bitcoin magazine CEO David Bailey called for strategic Bitcoin acquisitions, while Robin Hood's Vlad Tenev proposed tokenizing private equity to expand investor access. The White House made no commitments but described the summit as a success in engaging industry leaders. Crypto.com pushes through contentious vote. Crypto.com has passed a controversial proposal to reissue 70 billion Sero tokens, despite strong opposition from sections of its community. The vote, which took place from March Sanctum 16th, was initially struggling to reach the required 33.4% quorum.

However, a last-minute surge of 3.35 billion CRO votes, primarily from crypto.com-controlled validators, pushed the proposal over the threshold. The final results showed 61.11% in favor, 17.61% opposed, and 20.1% abstaining. Community members expressed frustration, arguing that Crypto.com's dominance over the validator set,

controlling between 70 to 80% of total voting power, allowed it to force the decision. With the vote now official, the Kronos blockchain has minted the new tokens to vest over a five-year period, with plans to use them for various initiatives, including a potential CRO-E-TF. Just one day after the vote, crypto.com introduced another proponent.

to burn 50 million CRO, further fueling criticism from discontented token holders. Solana Futures launch on CMEC's tepid interest. The debut of Solana Futures on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange this week generated low trading volume signaling weak institutional demand, according to K33 research. On its first trading day, Solana Futures recorded just $12.3 million in volume, with $7.8 million in open interest, a stark contrast to the $100,000. $102.7 million Bitcoin futures launch in 2017 and Ethereum's $31 million debut in 2021. K333 analysts Vett Le Lundee and David Zimmerman noted that the lackluster reception suggests

a muted impact for any potential Solana exchange traded fund approval. While Solana's futures launch aligns with previous rollouts when adjusted for market cap, the absolute demand remains significantly lower. In related news, asset manager volatility shares has launched two Solana futures ETFs, with Solz offering standard futures exposure and SolT targeting double the daily price movement. Ave scraps new token plans. After community backlash. Ave, the largest decentralized lending protocol, introduced Horizon, a new initiative aimed at attracting

institutional investors and integrating real-world assets like tokenized U.S. Treasury bonds and stocks into defy. As institutional interest in blockchain-based financial products grows, exemplified by BlackRock's billion-dollar tokenized treasury fund, AVE sees Horizon as a way to expand beyond its traditional defy user base. However, an early proposal suggested creating a new token for Horizon, with 15% allocated to the AVE Dow and a revenue-sharing model, sparking intense debate. Community members opposed the idea, arguing it could dilute Avae's value and

undermine its role as Ave's core governance and utility token. Facing strong backlash, AVE founder Stani Kulichov confirmed on X that no new token would be introduced, stating that the Dow's consensus would be respected. Coinbase launches verified pools. Coinbase has introduced verified pools, a new set of KYC authenticated liquidity pools designed to enhance transparency in on-chain trading. Available in the U.S., Singapore, the Netherlands, British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, and Channel Islands, the pools aimed to reduce counterparty risks while maintaining D-Fi's openness. Users can access them through Coinbase wallet, prime-on-chain wallet, or other verified wallets. Built on Coinbase's layer-to-base, and utilizing Uniswap v4,

the initiative has drawn attention for bypassing Aerodrome, base's largest decentralized exchange. While some community members saw this as a snub, Aerodrome founder Alex Cutler clarified that the project opted not to prioritize early involvement. Robin Hood introduces Prediction Markets Hub in US. Robin Hood launched a new prediction markets hub within its app, enabling users to trade contracts on events such as Federal Reserve, interest rate decisions, and the NCAA basketball tournaments. The feature is powered by Kalshi, a CFTC regulated exchange,

and is available to users across the United States. The platform charges 0.02 cents per contract, with revenue shared between Robin Hood and Kalshi. This move follows Robin Hood's past attempts to enter the space, including a briefly available 2024 election market and a shelved Super Bowl betting initiative. Prediction markets are still under regulatory scrutiny, with some contracts restricted by state laws.

Robin Hood has stated that it remains in ongoing discussions with the CFTC to ensure compliance while fostering innovation in derivatives and crypto markets. Pavel Derov allowed to leave France. Toncoin surged 17% after reports confirmed Telegram founder Pavel Durov was granted temporary permission to leave France following months of legal restrictions. A judge approved his request, allowing him to travel to Dubai for several weeks. Durave had been detained in France since August 24, facing allegations that Telegram enabled illegal activities, including money laundering and drug trafficking. Under legal pressure, the platform expanded its moderation team and tightened content policies. Following the news, Tonjumped to 3.5, pushing its market cap above $8.5 billion

EOS rebrands to VALTA amid security concerns. This week, EOS Network announced a rebrand to VALTA, making a pivot toward Web3 banking. As part of this transformation, VALTA will integrate the Bitcoin-based digital banking solution X-SAT, while retaining EOS's core blockchain architecture, including its C++ Smart Contract System, and decentralized on-chain RAM data, database. The rebrand will also introduce the VALTA Banking Advisory Council tasked with overseeing compliance and strategy. A token swap is tentatively scheduled for late May. The rebranding news drove a 30% surge in EOS Native token, which reached a four-week high of 6'5 on Monday evening. However,

the transition comes at a time when the network is grappling with security concerns. On Wednesday, blockchain security firm SlowMist detected an address poisoning attack on EOS. Attackers sent small EOS transactions from a fraudulent address, Octothamoon, which closely resembled OkX's legitimate address, OkBetothamoon. This tactic exploits users' habits of copying and pasting transaction addresses, increasing the risk of funds being misdirected. And that's all! Thanks so much for joining us today! If you enjoyed this recap, go to UnchainedCripto.com newsletter,

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