Unchained - Why Phantom Is Launching Perps + Why Bit Digital Ditched BTC for ETH - Ep. 866

Episode Date: July 11, 2025

In the first half of this dual episode, Phantom co-founder Brandon Millman joins Unchained to break down why his Solana-first wallet is launching perpetual swaps, and why it chose to integrate with Hyperliquid over any Solana-native option. Then, Bit Digital’s Sam Tabar explains why the public company ditched its profitable Bitcoin mining business, went all-in on ETH, and what happened when he told Michael Saylor. FalconX Sam Tabar, Chief Executive Officer of Bit Digital, Inc Brandon Millman, CEO and co-founder of Phantom Phantom Unchained: Phantom Wallet Launches Direct Perpetual Trading With Hyperliquid Phantom blog post: Introducing Phantom Perps Dragonfly’s Austin Marrazza tweet Bit Digital The Block: Bit Digital swaps entire treasury into Ethereum, says it's now a top public ETH holder after a $173 million splurge Treasury companies Unchained:  These 4 Crypto Treasury Companies Are Primed for a Price Crash BitMine Crashes 39% After It Files to Raise $2 Billion for More ETH Timestamps: Phantom 🎬 0:00 Intro ⚡ 1:36 Why Phantom is launching perps—and why now was the moment to do it 💥 6:08 How they landed on 40x leverage 💸 7:48 How Phantom plans to make money from its new trading product 🚫 8:50 Why U.S. users are left out (for now) 🔗 10:36 Why Hyperliquid won out over Solana-native DEXes ⚔️ 12:55 Whether wallets and dapps are headed for a showdown 🪪 17:22 Why Brandon believes wallets will be the new gateway to crypto 📱 18:45 How social features could redefine the wallet experience 🌅 22:45 What Brandon hopes Phantom becomes over the next five years Timestamps: Bit Digital 💥 26:35 Why Bit Digital ditched Bitcoin for Ethereum—and how Gary Gensler played a role 💰 28:31 How they walked away from a profitable BTC mining business 🪙 32:58 Why Sam says there’s no better home for stablecoins than Ethereum 🗣️ 34:09 What came out of Sam’s surprising conversation with Michael Saylor about crypto treasuries 🤔 37:10 Whether ETH’s value accrual model needs a fundamental rethink 📈 42:21 How Bit Digital plans to ramp up its ETH accumulation 🧠 44:40 What their new AI venture is really aiming to do Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi, everyone. Welcome to Unchained, your NOHite resource for all things crypto. I'm your host, Laura Shin. Heads up, everyone. Today is another double-heder interview. First, I chat with Brandon Milman, a phantom wallet, about its perpetual's launch, and then with Sam Tabar of Bit Digital, which sold 280 BTC as part of its fundraising for its new Ethereum treasury strategy. Plus, we have a bonus interview on some research we did here at Unchained that looks at the crypto treasury company trend and found that four of these companies are probably primed for a price crash. We feature quotes from listeners in every episode. Today we have some in response to our recent show on Coinbase v. Robin Hood with Diocasaurus and Ryan Yee.

On X, Elchin Malik 114 said crypto is entering its consolidation era. Robin Hood and Coinbase are just the beginning. The next battle is Community versus Interface. Let's see who builds conviction, not just products. You have your comment featured, write a review of the podcast overall or leave a comment on our video on YouTube, Farcaster, or X. This is the July 11th, 2025 episode of Unchained. Imagine an AI that speaks crypto and does the work of a team of analysts. Introducing Focal by Falcon X, bringing in clarity to a world of noise. Visit askfocal.com. Today's guest is Brandon Millman, CEO and co-founder of Phantom.

Welcome, Brandon. Thanks. Appreciate the invite, Laura. And yeah, been a long-time listener of the podcast and show. So, yeah, pretty awesome to be on. Yeah, it's great to have you. This week, the crypto community was super excited when on Tuesday, Phantom announced that it was launching perpetual swaps using hyperliquid. Tell us about this product. Well, yeah, like you said, we put out a launch announcement earlier this week and actually started rolling out the feature to users.

yeah, targeting sort of like 100% rollout before the end of this week. And yeah, the reception's been overwhelmingly positive. The crypto community at large is sort of really excited about it. And yeah, I think it was sort of a pretty obvious thing for us to do, frankly, in the sense that, you know, our mission is basically to try to take crypto and accelerate the adoption of it by focusing in specifically on sort of the safety and usability aspects and just making sure that as the space gets more complicated and the ecosystem gets more robust, that users are able to really safely and easily discover and interact with everything that's happening.

And yeah, we just basically recognize a huge opportunity to sort of apply that thinking to Perps. And, you know, I think a lot of listeners probably have contacts on what purpose are, but they're sort of one of, they're a derivative type of product that allows users to bet, essentially bet on the price of an asset without necessarily buying the underlying asset. And most importantly, allows you just sort of, as opposed to just buying an asset, allows you to bet on the price going up or down and with additional leverage. And so, proofs are super exciting because it's actually one of the most crypto-native, I'd say, innovations. And they dominate trading volume. They dominate usage. Users love them. But traditionally, they've been a bit too hard for sort of like the normal user and trader to access, especially on mobile.

And so, yeah, basically, you know, we really took an opportunity to see if we can sort of apply our specific strengths and provide some. something new for the market that we thought was missing. But that's sort of the TLDR. Yeah. I mean, you know, so perps have been one of the most popular products in crypto for quite a while. Famously started at BitMax. I think Arthur Hayes was one of the people who came up with the idea. You know, but Phantom also has been around for a while.

And, you know, during that time, perps were also available. So why did you decide to launch perps right now? Yeah, it's a good question. question. Well, I'd say, yeah, PURPS have definitely been around for a while in sort of different forms. So you've always had sort of like initial centralized venues like BitMex, but there's never really been like a true like centralized exchange scale decentralized opportunity or decentralized option for users. And that has really come on the scene this year with hyperliquid.

There were a number of different attempts in the past. Obviously, D-Y-D-X, GMX, and some folks like that. But I think the operative word for me is sort of centralized exchange scale. None of them had ever really been able to hit the same sort of scale in terms of liquidity, which ultimately trickles down to price execution and ends up in a better user experience for users. And so I think hyperliquid is definitely changing the game. It's definitely a big part of it.

But I think in general, there's just been a general rise of perks sort of entering the lexcon of the general traditional financial world in the EBC folks like Coinbase and Robin Hood, They all have announced that they're going to be rolling out purse features soon. And so, yeah, we just felt like, you know, with the rise of hyperliquid and the rise of the general appetite for this type of thing, you know, we really felt like it was the right time to do it. And so the perps on Phantom will have 40x leverage. You're going to start with 100 markets. How did you decide on the 40X?

and then, you know, how will you decide which new markets to list? Yeah. So we're basically treating, you know, treating hyperliquid as an open permissionless system that we're helping users get access to. So sort of the access to the markets and the amount of leverage available is sort of a function of what's just available on hyperliquid itself. So it's not necessarily that we chose markets or specific. big leverage, more that we just chose to give access people to what's available on

hyperliquid. And so, yeah, I believe not all markets have up to 40x, but I believe some of the more robust ones do, for example, Bitcoin. But yeah, more and more market. I think one of the huge, I think, advantages of building on top of the open permissions ecosystem is that it's exactly that. it's open and permissionless and that, you know, there's going to be, this is the sort of the foundation for anyone to be able to launch their own perps markets. That is something that is

coming down the pipeline with HIP3, which is one of the most recent hyperliquid improvement protocols. And so, yeah, I think just building on top of something that's open and permissionless allows us to, you know, give access to users, give the biggest and widest range of access to users. Okay. So just to make sure I understood, the wallet basically is serving almost like a front end to just what's already available on hyperliquid. Is that what you're saying? Okay. I see. So users deposit Sol and then that gets converted to USDC and Phantom, I believe, makes money from these perps by charging fees on those conversions. Is that correct? So the way that it works is that from a user perspective,

there will be depositing into sort of like a perps area of the app, not necessarily thinking about it as a bridge or anything like that. Right now you can only deposit Seoul, but you will be, it's more of a technical limitation in the future. It will be able to deposit any range of assets, including raw USDC. And we actually don't make any fees on the convert, like that kind of bridge conversion, but we do make fees on, like, opening and closing positions, which is sort of the typical, like, monetization method for any normal purpose exchange.

Okay. And then, so in the initial launch announcement, it said that you'll launch first in the EU. But then just now in the show, you said that it will launch to all users. So, like, you know, will this product be available in the U.S. within this week as well? Yeah. Well, I think what I specifically said is we'll act to. 100% I guess what I know is 100% of every user that is, you know, able to access it. It's not going to be available in the U.S.

Basically, each country and each jurisdiction has a different set of rules and regulations. We do everything to, in our power to comply with regulations. And we're rolling out purpose as fast as we can and we hope to offer them in as many jurisdictions into as many folks as possible. But yeah, we do everything we can to comply with, you know, local rules and regulations. So when I met all users, I met everyone who is actually able to access them. Oh, okay. And so it sounds like you were saying they will never be available in the US or you just mean like right now, given regulations it doesn't look like that will happen at this point.

Is that what you meant? Yeah. I mean, I would say, I would never say never. I mean, I'm not writing the rules and regulations, obviously from the US perspective. But they are, you know, it is, as everyone knows, an ongoing and dynamic sort of regulatory environment. And so we're always keeping our eyes on what's going on there. But I mean, the bright news is that, you know, the posture from the U.S. perspective has really

changed lately as it relates to crypto broadly. And so, yeah, I'm excited to work with, you know, regulators to help open up access as much possible. So a lot was made about how Phantom has long been a Solana first wallet. Of course, you support other chains like Bitcoin, Base, Sui, and others. But obviously, as you mentioned, for this Perp product, you chose hyperliquid. And, you know, Solana itself does have other Purp Stexes. Drift, Jupiter, you know, those could have also been options. So why did you decide to go with hyperliquid? Yeah, well, I guess just to emphasize on something you said, you know, Phantom is a Solon first wallet and a Salonifers product. And that hasn't changed because we've added hyperliquids-perps integration.

So I think that's the first thing I'd say there. But yeah, second thing is, you know, kind of going back to what I said originally about why we're doing this in the first place. And the whole purpose of the company is to accelerate the adoption of crypto by making it safe and easy to use. And it really is thinking about what's best for the end user and what's going to provide the best experience for them. And so when we're evaluating different types of perps venues and backends to use for this type of product, I mean, there's a pretty clear decision from that lens. You know, in order to provide the best user experience from a trading perspective, you need the best liquidity.

That equals the best prices for users. and ultimately the best user experience. And yeah, if you just look at the stats, it's not even really comparable what hyperliquids been able to do in terms of, yeah, really kind of aggregating liquidity in this kind of decentralized way.

And so that's kind of the long and short of it of why we chose to do this hyperliquid integration. And on top of, on top of that, in top of just raw liquidity, hyperliquist has done a very great job. Actually, forming a whole community around the product and around the tech. And you have dozens of teams who are all working to improve and improve hyperliquid, add new features,

and keep the innovation going, which is something that's hard to replicate when it's just like a single team working on something. So those are a couple of different reasons. I saw Austin Maraza at Dragonfly tweeted, quote, Phantom understands that wallets as we know them are dying. The monopoly on user access is over. New users won't download Phantom to connect to external apps because of what he calls the threat to embedded wallets.

So do you agree with his assessment? And if so, how do you plan to fight these apps that already have embedded wallets? Yeah, there's a lot that's being set there. I'd say in general, I'd say in general there's sort of a broader trend that's fueling a lot of different things going on in crypto, which is that crypto is moving more and more mobile first. That was not the case, you know, just a couple of years ago and has actually really been enabled by the rise of like infrastructure like Solana and blockchains that actually offer, you know, fees and cost and speed that actually make. apps enjoyable to use in a mobile context. And because things are moving more and more mobile,

everyone knows how the world of mobile apps have developed and that people have come to preferred native experiences versus mobile web or things like that. And so I think that's the primary trend that's driving a lot of transformation that we're seeing around how people use crypto in general, I think embedded walls have proven to be a very great tool for people to build native mobile apps. And because of the mobile app trend, you see people like moving more, like apps moving more and more towards that kind of model to get started. So that's part of it.

And I think the other part of it is that folks are generally just want more and more native experience. And so even within Phantom, you know, we chose not to, hey, make like a general, window into any perps decks that you want, but to actually really take like an opinionated, um, you know, opinionated take on how like the ux of like a mobile first you actually look for perps. Um, so yeah, there's a couple of channels. I'm not sure if I answer your question directly, but those are a couple things I'd comment on. Yeah. Well, I want to expand on it a little bit because, um, you know, if you sort of zoom out and we look at the activity on, um, well, Well, it's really, yeah, activity from base.

There's Robin Hood chain. We're seeing that both of these companies are going to offer perps, as we mentioned. There's chatter that Stripe is going to launch its own chain. You know, X supposedly is on this path to trying to be more of a financial app. And so, you know, just if we like maybe focus a little bit more on the Coinbase Robin Hood area, then it sort of feels like wallets and exchanges are, you know, potentially. potential ways that people could like go on chain, like one of the main conduits. And so I wondered if you had a thesis about like how the competition between those two types of

crypto venues will play out. Well, yeah, I definitely have a thesis there. I'd say one interesting comment on what you had just mentioned is that, you know, the competition for chains and ecosystems is something that's. not really dying down or still very much in an emerging multi-chain world. And that's actually a really big, you know, pro for why wallets, as they, you know, they, you know them today are going to continue to exist. It's because the ecosystem is going to continue to get more and more fragmented.

And people are coming to crypto often to use one single app that they've heard about. But then when it comes time to, you know, start to explore a broader, ecosystem or broader world, the sort of embedded wallet, one app wallet per app kind of like model breaks down because you're not really able to pick up and then go to all these different places that are going to emerging. And, you know, it's not really slowing down, right? As you mentioned. So that's one, I guess, points related to your previous question. The second thing you were mentioning around the role of centralized exchanges and wallet. in these emerging ecosystems.

I think what you'll see is that, and obviously this is my thesis, but that wallets are going to become more and more the entry point to crypto as we know it, because crypto itself has undergone this transformation in the last couple of years, right? Most people originally thought of crypto is like, hey, I just need to buy Bitcoin or Ethereum,

and I get access to that by going to an exchange or a broker. over the last years, the definition of what people want access to has massively expanded to whatever is being built on open permissionless networks. And I think you'll see people going wallet first when reaching for these things a lot more. And that's going to be a rising trend. And you'll see sort of like the on-ramp and centralized exchange portion of that pipeline getting more and more commoditized as technology gets better. And so, yeah, as long as open permissionless ecosystems win,

I'd say wallets are probably going to be the place where users are going to flock, and centralized exchanges will become more and more of a commoditized on-ramp. Yeah, I mean, you can kind of see that maybe Coinbase has the same thought because they are sort of pivoting more toward base. as we all know, that this Coinbase wallet announcement is happening next week. You know, that's actually a perfect segue to my next question, which is, there's also this element that, like, social will play a role. And, you know, we see like glimmers of it.

It's not really clear how this will happen. But obviously, Phantom itself had added a social element in May. As I just mentioned, Coinbase is hinting that this next announcement about Coinbase wallet will have a social element as well. So what does that vision look like to you? Like, how do you see social playing a role in future wallets? Yeah, no, that's a really interesting topic. I think one important point to make is that crypto itself is a very social movement and social phenomenon.

I mean, it's a it's a decentralized group of human beings. We're all kind of coordinating across the globe to, you know, move in all move in the same direction. I'm pretty sure vast majority of people that you ask or know in crypto, if you ask them, how did you enter crypto? It'll literally be like, oh, my friend told me about it. Or my friend X told me about it, why, et cetera. They actually sent, and they may have actually sent you your first crypto as well or helped you get on board.

So it's a very inherently social movement. And oftentimes a lot of times when you're finding something new to do, It's coming from a recommendation from someone you know. And so our approach to social is really about taking that kind of social discovery dynamic and really hypercharging it. And so, you know, all the things that people already like to do, trade tokens, trade NFTs, mint things, discover new daps and things like that. our approach to social is going to take all those core things that people are already doing and help make it safer and easier by infusing it with social discovery and social elements. So like, hey, this new token is coming up.

You know it's the real, you know, whatever token because five of your friends, you know, just bought into it. For example, or this new mint or this, you know, 10 of your friends. your friends voted against Trump on this prediction market, kind of letting you know that this even exists, right? Otherwise, you'd really be hearing about that stuff from Telegram or Twitter or something like that. So that's our broad vision for social is really about taking sort of things that people already like to do in crypto and supercharging them as social. I think that's slightly different from the vision of social that a lot of other folks have taken. And it, you know, obviously, this new base or this new company's wallet app's not out yet.

I'm not sure what's going to look like, but I think a common thing that people think about when you say crypto social is like taking crypto Twitter and like grafting it on to the blockchain and like providing another place for you to like share a picture of your dog or kids or something like that. And that's that's like explicitly what we're not doing is like trying to compete with the same job to be done that Telegram are doing because they're doing them just on and you know, one can even argue, especially after Elon Musk took over Twitter and acts like a lot of arguments around censorship resistance or whatever, like that's kind of a little bit out the window and in general, yeah, we're not trying to try a new social media app. It's more about how do we take

the things that people already like to do in crypto and make it a lot more social. All right. So last question. So, I mean, this ties together like a number of strands that we've discussed, like mobile and, you know, this competition with exchanges and all of this. But what would be your vision for what Phantom could look like in, I don't know, five years or so? Yeah. No, the vision is to become the biggest consumer finance platform in the world within the next five years. And that means, you know, a user is able to run their everyday financial life out of the app. And that, yeah, basically tools like Revolut or Square Cash or Robin Hoods as well, like things that people reach to those apps for are ultimately what they're going to be reaching for Phantom for. Because A, we're going to make it the best and most usable experience.

But B, we're actually harnessing the strength of on-chain open permissionless networks. And we have a very strong belief that that's just where the world is going, is that the world of finances is going to be basically swallowed up by this sort of black hole, which is this growing on-chain ecosystem. And that it's going to be very difficult for individual players to compete that for a number of different reasons. A, you know, traditional finance institutions are landlocked. Even though they may appear very digital internet force first in nature,

traditional finance countries are still very much landlocked despite that. And they could, you know, a player like Robert Hood could expand the EU and the US, but you're actually not really going to be able to have those users interact with each other very easily. easily by virtue of being built on sort of these old rails. So that's that's one huge advantage that building on open permissionless networks gives us. And then the second is being able to harness, you know, the momentum of the community, all the innovations from teams around us, building new things, prediction markets, tokenized stops, et cetera.

So yeah, we believe pretty strongly that, you know, most things that people are going to be doing their traditional financial lives, going to be replicated better and faster on-chain. And the phantom's going to be the best place to access all that. All right. Well, it's been such a pleasure chatting with you. Thank you so much for coming on on-chained. Thanks, Laura.

I appreciate it. Next up, we have an interview with Bit Digital, a Bitcoin miner and crypto staker that actually sold a bunch of Bitcoin to go all in on its new Ethereum Treasury strategy. Stick around from my chat with Bit Digital CEO, Sam Tabar. Markets are ripping, but not every pump is created equal. You need to make sense of the action and what's coming next. But where do you start?

Meet Focal by Falcon X, your AI-powered crypto analyst. It's like having a legion of experts at your fingertips, ready to break down market-making events, chart protocol TVL, and track ETF flows. Get clarity in a world of noise with Focal. Learn more at askfocal.com. Here are more listener comments on Coinbase versus Robin Hood. On YouTube, Gatecrasser 1 said, Robin Hood versus Coinbase, probably neither.

I think hyperliquid is the future. And on whether Robin Hood's new chain is actually a fintech leapfrog move, on X, Sethuf Ula Dog said, sounds too good to be true. Share your opinion. We might feature it. Please write a review or leave a comment on an episode on YouTube, Farcaster, or X. Bit Digital has been a crypto miner and staker,

but your company made waves this week for use. $173 million from an equity raise plus an additional roughly $30 million from selling 280 Bitcoin to buy Ether to turn Bit Digital into an ETH Treasury company. Why this switch? Just to add to that point, I also put some of my own savings into that offering. Why the switch? Well, it's the right time. You've seen a lot of capital market proxies for Bitcoin, which frankly is now saturated. We've actually been an ETH proxy for, we've been preparing for that for a few years. We started putting ETH on our balance sheet as of 2023, and we staked that ETH.

And we've been slowly but surely in the tens of millions during that so that we knew that our infrastructure was working. But we think the switch is correct. There's a lot of congressional. The timing is really good because of the congressional clarity that's finally happening on the regulatory side. you're seeing now acts such as the Genius Act that's providing a lot of rules about stable coins and as many of us know, more than half of stable coins are built on Ethereum.

You have other upcoming acts like the Clarity Act and so on. And also the era of Gary Gensler is over. We don't have the SEC going after developers on the Ethereum ecosystem. And I've had friends who are engineers and they're wondering if they're going to go to jail, the next day if they worked on a technology that there's just no clarity around it. So now Gary Ginstor gone and you have a much more friendlier chairman of the SEC.

And it's quite nice to know that Ethereum is now being finally classified as a commodity, just like Bitcoin is. And you just have a much more friendly administration, political environment, legal environment, regulatory environment. And it's now time for ETH to have a stay in the sun. Bitcoin, especially in 2024, performed quite a bit better than ether. And I noticed that in Bit Digital's fiscal year 2024 report, you reported that your Bitcoin mining revenue had actually increased by 32% compared to the year prior. So I was wondering why you decided to switch away from Bitcoin mining.

Yes, we have a profitable Bitcoin mining business. But, you know, I'm Canadian. There is a saying in Canada, you got to, in order to win a hockey. Again, you don't go where the puck is. You go where the puck is going. And so for us, you know, yes, we had the puck with Bitcoin, but we know that the puck is going towards Ethereum. You have to remember, I think Bitcoin, I think yesterday or today,

is hitting an all-time high right now. Ethereum has a long way to go from all-time highs. So, you know, if you're going to, there's more juice now in Ethereum, now with the legal landscape clearing the way. And I really believe that the legal landscape was impairing the value of Ethereum over the past few years with Garrigan's, they're just going after every single project on Ethereum. Those were really dark days.

That era is over, and that's why you're seeing Ethereum now finally uppacing Bitcoin, and we think that's going to continue for the short, medium, and long term. Frankly, if Bitcoin and Ethereum came out at the same time, on the same day, many people probably now have heard of Bitcoin. Bitcoin has a first mover advantage. It's the mother coin. But if Ethereum came out on the same day, I don't think there'd be any contest. Ethereum has much more utility, much more programmable.

You can't really program Bitcoin. Bitcoin is basically digital yellow gold, which is great. But it's just a store of value. Ethereum is a whole different situation. So I find this commentary very interesting because I think most people view the narratives around Bitcoin and Ethereum as, well, obviously they're quite different. different because Bitcoin is really more around money. And obviously, Ethereum's is more around tech, as you were just mentioning. However, that also means that for Bitcoin, because it's built more around

money, that the value proposition is more easily grasped, I think, by newbies or outsiders. And, you know, clearly we have seen that especially some of the choices that Ethereum has made in its development has affected the monetary policy, which then has also affected the price. So, you know, I think there are a lot of people who would say that the price of ether has not only been affected by the regulatory climate under the Biden administration and Gary Gensler, but also by, for instance, Den Kuhn, which, you know, increased the scaling on the L2s and basically, yeah, allowed for transaction activity to happen elsewhere. And, you know, kind of what's the word?

It just took away from the ultrasound money thesis where, you know, activity on the chain was actually making ether itself more valuable. Suddenly now there was a lot of activity and ether was not capturing value from that. So can you talk a bit about how you think that also affected the price? Or maybe you just disagree with what I said. No, I don't disagree. I would add, though, that there are tens and tens of, this is related to your question. There are tens and tens of thousands of developers on Ethereum, more than any other

blockchain, including Solana and by far way more than Bitcoin. There aren't really any developers on Bitcoin. And that kind of development activity is the kind of activity that helps with the price of Bitcoin. Sorry, Ethereum. And as mentioned earlier, these developers were gun-shy in many ways because of the legal landscape and Gary Ginsler. So with all this activity on Ethereum now finally unleashing and you see stable coins, which is going to be a very big thing over the next year or two,

and there's only really one viable blockchain that can support stable coins. And that's just Ethereum. There's no other blockchain. There is no second best on that. So I just believe that that kind of activity, in fact, there is more, there are more developed. Wait, wait. What about, I mean, a lot of people talk about how Tron is, you know, very widely used for stable coin activity, especially in developing markets. And we are also now seeing there's these new chains, you know, there's this new staple chain, actually, that, you know, has some version of tether on it. there was the ICO for the plasma chain, which will also be purpose built for stable coins.

So, yeah, but why, like, it feels to me like there is actually competition that's existed for a while and that it's even heating up. Yeah, I mean, look, more than 50% of stable coins are built on Ethereum, and I would be very surprised if that changes. In fact, I think now that Ethereum is finally being unleashed, that virtuous cycle on stable coins built on Ethereum is going to increase even more so. Of course, there's going to be some competition, and that's welcomed. That's always a good thing. But I just think there's just really no second best, and I think it's going to happen even more so now that we have the way cleared on the legal side. All right. So one other thing that I wanted to ask about was the crypto treasury company trend really started with Bitcoin, obviously, with micro strategy.

It picked up steam with other coins. It actually was Salana first before Ethereum. And I was curious why you thought that was. I don't know why Solana before Ethereum. I'm not familiar with that. I did have a meeting with Michael Saylor last year. And I gave him, he was trying to, it was a private conversation. I'm happy to talk about it.

He was trying to tell me that Bitcoin mining is a very tough business, and we should just be a Bitcoin treasury strategy. And I said it is actually a really tough business. It's a business where your profits are guaranteed to be cut in half every four years because of the having. And it's a hamster wheel in terms of getting a bunch of the latest technology in terms of the hardware and securing power. It's just very, it's a very difficult business. And it's only getting harder with the hash rate going up. So he's right that Bitcoin miners should definitely look at becoming Bitcoin treasuries.

I agreed with him halfway. I said, except I would switch Bitcoin with Ethereum. And when I told him that, he gave me a very dirty look and the conversations were affected. So, you know, this is right. I've been, I've been in the Ethereum space since 2017. I co-founded Fliidity, which helped build AirSwap. And I sold that company with my co-founders to Joe Lubin in 2020. And I'm just pretty familiar with the ecosystem and the space.

So then I went off to run a Bitcoin miner, but I realized that Ethereum was really the way to go. And on these ETH Treasury strategies, it's really a simple strategy. And it reminds me of oil companies in a way. Oil companies trade above their proven reserves, their proven oil reserves. And the reason why they trade above their oil proven reserves is because the markets believe that they'll find more reserves. That is why. The reason why we trade above our nav and all ETH treasury or Bitcoin treasuries trade above their nav is because the market believes that in Michael Saylor's case,

he's going to buy more Bitcoin. And that's the Treasury strategy that the market believes that you're going to buy more Ethereum. And so they're sort of projecting. That is the correct rationale. That is why these treasuries trade above their underlying nav. It's a very simple strategy. You just have to be very aggressive. So there is some competition right now.

I had a chance to speak to Joe Lubin a couple of weeks ago. And, you know, I see S-Bet right now. And that's the one to beat. It's a friendly competition. And all this competition is good for the Ethereum ecosystem for obvious reasons. So how is it that you think Ether will accrue value now, you know, where they have this roadmap, where they do plan to keep adding scaling for the L2s? Do you see kind of any changes around how Ethereum plans to, you know, bring more value back to ETH itself? Well, I think a lot of institutions are using Ethereum.

J.P. Morgan's involved with Ethereum. In fact, I think J.P. Morgan even has a stake in some very large Ethereum companies. So I just see banks using Ethereum and institutions using Ethereum more than any other blockchain and that kind of activity and that kind of mind share is a virtuous cycle for this blockchain. And you're seeing it right now in the price movements. And it's just started. These ETH Treasury strategies are basically the catalyst for Ethereum to catch up in its proper value. And in terms of the utility, you know, it has this utility called smart contracts, as you know,

which is something that Bitcoin doesn't have. And it really can rewrite the entire financial system. These if-then statements that you can program in Ethereum really, does, it really removes a lot of the intermediary functions that the financial system currently has in place. The financial system makes money through friction. It makes money through just being in the middle between parties. When values transferred from A to B, it takes a little cut. You have bank bankers and you have lawyers just basically taking a little cut between the transaction that happened between party A and party B. But these smart concepts, you don't need, you don't need the banks. You don't

need the, you don't need the lawyers. Yeah, I'm, I'm sure, like, the, the audience of Unchained understands all that, you know, that this software can replace. I'm sure that, I'm sure the, your audience understands that, but this, this, um, that thesis is becoming mainstream now. And that is, that is the reason why Ethereum is starting to have its day in the sun. Right. But, but, but I guess, like, I'm saying is if Ethereum keeps, you know, scaling the L2s, and as we know, as we know, at the moment, the L2s, they don't like, basically they don't really pay Ethereum very much for hosting that activity. So how do you see value accruing to ETH? I see value accruing to ETH. It's all network effects. It's going to be all very indirect. I'm sure that obviously the ETH treasury

strategies are going to directly increase value to EF because we're buying hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars of ETH. If you probably add all of us up, it's, it's, going to be definitely in the billions. So I just see all of this. I understand your question. So it's not necessarily connected to the activity. It's just like speculation or? It could be specular. No, it's it's it's all network effects. If these L2s are building and they're not directly contributing to the price of Ethereum, surely there is increased mind share that's happening of Ethereum based on those L2 projects that creates awareness. That creates a virtuous cycle. that creates a mind share.

And then you have retail buying Ethereum because they're beginning to understand the thesis. It's just about mine share. That's why Bitcoin is up where it is now. It had first mover advantage. So it has this large mine share. Okay. Yeah. I still don't feel like your answer addresses tokenomics.

It's more like marketing or something, the way you're answering this. It is. I'm answering it in the form of mind share. It is marketing in some ways, absolutely. And marketing is the only way you're going to really get a large section of retail to buy Ethereum. There are a lot of people who are speculating on Ethereum and Bitcoin. They don't quite understand the L2 project. So I'm trying to answer your question directly in terms of how Ethereum pricing is going to be affected by L2 projects.

I understand not directly, but through MindShare and through marketing and through narrative that's being finally distributed, you're going to have retail understanding what Ethereum can do because you can't have these kinds of L2 projects on Bitcoin. So you're going to find these retail buyers buying Ethereum instead of Bitcoin because of this mine share. But there's no direct connection, I agree with you. There's no direct connection between those projects and the price of Ethereum. But there is a connection between the narrative, mine share, and marketing, as you call it.

Okay. Yeah. And so I understand your point about Bitcoin, but obviously we both know there's a lot of people working on, you know, making programmable, you know, smart contracts on Bitcoin as well. So. How's that working out, though, Laura? Yeah. Well, I mean, it's, it's obviously newer. So it's more like TBD. But let's not. It's not working out. Well, let's talk about Bit Digital because so at this point now you have 100,6003Eath. So that makes it one of the top corporate holders of Eath. And according to a presselese, the company plans to aggressively add more. So explain your plans for how to do that.

Yeah, I mean, we're going to do it through financial engineering. We're basically shamelessly copying the MSTR playbook that Microsoft. has given to us to the entire world. And that's what we're doing. We're just going to copy that playbook very aggressively. And, you know, we intend to be the largest one. That is the intention. And so by that you mean like structuring your purchases in a way that allows you to not take on too much risk, but just acquire more ETH. That's right. That's right. There are lots of financial engineering tools that you could use in the capital markets. It's exactly what MSTR is doing. And that's what we're going to do. We're just, we're literally copying his playbook. I'm not,

I mean, I understand I shouldn't be so proud to say that I'm copying his playbook, but I'm not going to lie. And then, you know, you kind of alluded to the staking component. Can you talk about that as well? Yeah, we stake our, our all, our entire ETH is staked, which I think is interesting because from a capital markets perspective, a lot of people can choose ETH ETFs to get exposure from Ethereum, of Ethereum, but ETFs, at least today, cannot stake their Ethereum. So we can. So when you're buying BTBT or any ETH Treasury strategy that's in a public format, and if they're staking, the investor can also get staking exposure economics. And that's something that you can't get from ETH-TFs because, again, they can't stake.

Okay. And last question. So are you going to be abandoning the Bitcoin mining completely or what happens to that side of the business? Yeah, we're just going to let that run its course. It's currently profitable now. And we're going to just let the machines run until it's no longer profitable. And then they become very expensive paperweights. And then you have one subsidiary that I believe does some work in. AI. Can you talk about White Fiber? Can you talk about that? What will happen to that? Yeah. So white fiber is a very, very exciting subsidiary of ours. It's currently at just over $100 million in contracted revenue per annum and growing. We have about 24 customers and growing.

And that involves data centers. We have data centers. We have facilities that are being built into data centers, including one that already is running, three in Canada and one in North Carolina. The one in North Carolina has 99 megawatts associated with it, which is pretty huge. It's a 1 million square foot facility.

We also have a cloud business, and that is all within the white fiber subsidiary. So that's a very exciting, very exciting business for us and more to come on that. All right. Well, thank you so much for coming on Unchained. Thank you, Laura, for having me. Coming up, I chat with Unchained Executive Editor, Steve Erlich, on how four crypto-t treasury companies look like they're headed for a crash.

Be sure not to miss this one. Hi, everyone. I'm back with Steve Ehrlich. So, Steve, you wrote a great story this week about how one funding mechanism for this whole crypto treasury company trend can really affect the potential performance for investors. And in fact, based on your research, you actually identified potentially four treasury companies that you believe are primed for a price crash. Tell me about the key findings from your story.

Thanks, Laura. So I was very interested in the collapses that happened, I guess, a couple weeks ago with two companies. Apexie, which is focused on Solana and Sharplink, which is building an Ethereum church. Treasury. What I wanted to find out was whether or not what are the chances of history repeating itself for the most part? Because as anyone who has been following the crypto treasury, I guess, trend in the space, we knew that there were many other companies that were following a similar playbook. I mean, those were Bitmine, which is focused on Ethereum, asset strategies, or I'm sorry, asset entities, which is merging with Strive, Bitcoin, Justin Sun's Tron Company, that's merging

with a firm called SRM Holdings. And then the final one was David Bailey's Nakamoto, which is merging with kindly MD also focused on Bitcoin. And each one of them raised at least $100 million off times more through pipes in order to sort of kickstart this accumulation phase that comes with launching one of these companies. Pipes can be a very useful tool in creating, in launching these firms, especially when size and time really matter because you can get all this money up front.

You can use it to then deploy it to get the crypto, and you don't really have to pay the bill later in terms of having to, you don't have to pay that bill until later in terms of having to give the shares to the shareholders and then ultimately flooding the market. So that was what we all knew that was going to happen. But what I really wanted to find out was one of the chances of mass dilution events scaring investors in the same way that they did for investors in Sharplink and Paxi. So I was very curious to kind of go into the SEC filings to find out exactly how many shares were sold in these private rounds to investors, many of which were the same crypto VC firms that have been dominating the space for years. and what base of a circulating supply of shares they're building on top of.

And the numbers were surprising to me, I would mention to you and to many readers we heard about ever since we published the story. Because in virtually every single case, the companies that were either doing the acquiring of emerging, I mean, these were penny stock firms with very little traditional businesses, small revenue, small circulating share bases. and what we found in the research, or what I found in my research, is that the new shares were going to massively dilute the current base,

sometimes somewhere between the 10 and 20x increase in the shareholder base. And that's just essentially, that's just a time bomb waiting to go off. And the real question was when. And up until that point, no one had really taken the time to do the work to really figure out and what types of dilution events, what size of dilution events were we looking at? And that's what I wanted to understand with this story. Yeah, and actually, you said 10 to 20 times, but one of them was almost 90 times, which was,

I mean, that one already, that was Sharp Link and already the shares had been, you know, able to be sold. And that may have been part of the reason that the price tanked. So it was, so both that one and OPECCC dropped by about. 70 and then they sort of leveled off a little bit higher. But, you know, that that was what kind of led you to say that these others could could also drop. So, you know, explain why it is that pipe deals are especially problematic for these treasury companies. Well, again, as I said, there's different ways for companies to raise money for these types of companies. Pipe shares is a good way because

you basically hire some sort of broker or a placement agent. You can raise a lot of money quickly and you don't have to sort of deal with the problems of going to the public markets and having to sell to shareholders that don't know the company and don't understand what you're trying to do. And if you're trying to sell to these people off of a very small shareholder base, there's a lot of labor. So you may not be able to raise the amount of money you want as quickly as you can. Convertible debt is another way. and many of the rounds that I detailed in the story also included a convertible debt component. These have been very popularized by MetSailer and Strategy.

That's one of the ways that he's raising his tens of billions to build his stockpile. Corridable debt shares often have a term or maturation date several years into the future, at which point the holders of the debt can then either get the principal back or they can convert into shares it hopefully an advantageous price, compare to the spot price at that point in the future. But the risk with convertible debt is that if the company is struggling or it's not trading at a premium to NAV, then the company would have to sell its crypto to pay back the principal.

And that can lead to sort of a cascade of liquidations and other types of price issues that companies want to avoid with equity. They don't have to do that. So pipe, in certain ways is a Goldilocks scenario. And actually, for the story, I was able to speak with Brian Rudick, who is the new chief strategy officer at Bupexie and actually helped lead the funding deal for Pexi when he was at GSR.

And he basically kind of walked me through the thought process because I asked him, when I interviewed him, like, why did you choose to go this route? Because it was plainly obvious that this was a risk that could happen. And essentially, readers can see his full comment. comments in my story, but it kind of boiled down to the company knew that this was a possibility, but the ability to get scale and speed was worth the potential downside, the potential tradeoff. And as you said, too, I mean, despite the big price drop, Laura, Opexie and Sharpling, I mean, they're still about where they were when this started.

So it's not like they've given up all the gains. It's just that there was a huge run-up that was clearly unsustainable, and then it has, in its retreated. So something interesting happened after you published on Wednesday, which is that one of the stocks that you mentioned, Bitmine saw collapse. It dropped by about, well, in intradite trading, I think it dropped more than 50%. And then by the end of the day was at 39% and, you know, lower than where it had started. What happened there?

And, you know, what are the takeaways from that incident? So actually, I think it also dropped a further 20% or so today. So I'm not sure where it'll be by the time people listened to this on Friday, but it looks like the sell-off did not completely end on Wednesday or by Wednesday evening when we published that story. But what happened in that case and was that BitMind filed basically a registration form to issue new shares with the SEC called an S3 ASR. And by the way, one last thing I just wanted to throw in

there is this was the one for people who you know having to following this trend this is the one that um you know got steat um sorry tom lee to be what it's like chairman or something yeah yeah yeah so so what they did was uh and anytime someone wants to sell shares um to the public uh unless there's some sort of exemption where you're only selling to a credited or institutional investors that don't need the same types of disclosures you have to file um a registration form at the SEC that can be an s one or an s3 BitMine filed something called an S3 ASR for a shelf registration to raise up to $2 billion in securities. And this filing meant that they could raise money in any number of ways from equity to inviutable debt and anything in between. It wasn't just one particular type of instrument that they were going to use.

But they filed it with I guess with the distinction of being. for the first time, a well-known seasoned issuer of securities. And that basically means, I know one other industry analysts refer to it as almost a golden ticket. Because what that means is that when you kind of sell those shares, they're immediately then retradable on the market. They're resellable on the market. There's no waiting period. The pipe shares, which was the big part of my story, those were sold to private investors. And each issuer had to then file a registration statement with the SEC after that.

order to be in order to let those investors then sell those shares onto the market. That that is what actually led to the price crashes of Paxi and and Sharplink. But what was very interesting about this case is that this filing from Bitmine had nothing to do with those pipe shares. In fact, I spoke with two investors who did not want to be named and the Bitmine pipe fundraise pipe and they told me that they were not allowed to trade their shares. But one that ended up happening is that the market got very spooked just by the fact that Bitmind was looking to raise $2 billion to buy more to buy it, to sell $2 million in securities to buy more Ethereum.

And the market just did not like it. It's hard to know exactly what the sentiment was. Maybe some misinterpreted this filing as the same type of filing that impacted Sharplink and Pepsi. Or maybe some investors just felt like enough was enough and they were worried by future dilution, but the market clearly got spooked. And what was especially fascinating about this and we put in the story is that on the data that filing, they had not sold any of it.

They had not sold any more stock. There was actually no dilution event. The circulating supply of shares was the same is the same today as it was on Tuesday or Monday or whatever. It just, I think what it showed is that investors have gotten hypersensitized to, um, to what's happening. And, um, and, and, I think now they're on the lookout for any sign of someone looking,

of Nesta, looking to rush out the door because they know that these runups were built on top of very low floats. And therefore, it does not take, it doesn't not take many sellers to start the ball rolling where everyone's going to rush for the exits and the price will crash. I mean, it does indicate that there will be a future dilution, right? But it's just unclear when that will happen. Yeah. And the other interesting part, too, yes, there will be. future dilutions, but it's unclear when that will happen. But again, two things.

One, everyone knew that was going to happen. I mean, at this point, in this market, every company is trying to raise as much as they can as often as they can. I don't think anyone realistically expected BitMind to stay at its $250 million pipe. The second thing, though, is the dilution by itself doesn't have to be a bad thing. It really just depends on how companies use their balance sheets and their cap tables. The real metric that people need to pay attention to is that like the Ethereum yield or the Solana yield or the Bitcoin yield metric that was again popularized by Michael Seller. And essentially it's a way of tracking the rate of accumulation of crypto in relation to the dilution or the increase, the rate of increase in the circulating supply of shares.

And as long as that number is positive, it's theoretically a good thing. So this the problem with the pipe shares is that at that point, the cryptocurrency, the cryptocurrency, was already there. So the dilution is just going to dilute. The denominator is going to increase, but the numerator has already increased. So that that's sort of like the mass problem that people are trying to figure out in her head. But what Bitmind's doing doesn't necessarily have to be, doesn't necessarily have to be a mass dilution event, especially if they sell convertible debt, which may not translate into shares until years down the line. So I think it really, the movement that we saw yesterday and then I guess continuing to today,

just shows the level of investor angst. And I think certain fears that, like, trying to play, like, the nav game when it comes to, like, the price to book value of these types of companies is not for the faint of heart. So what do you think it makes sense for retail investors in these crypto treasury companies to consider before they invest? So I would say be very careful, but you don't have to take my word for it. Again, I spoke for the story. I spoke to one investor.

in both Sharplink and Upexy deals, who told me that he did not sell his stake in other company. I asked him why, and he basically said that, like, look, if we believe that they're good companies, they're going to be able to maintain NAV over time, even if it was bloated at the very beginning. Even from a tax point of view, it's just very, it's not practical to do it, because why pay like a 40% income tax when you hold for a year, and the NAV continues to grow? You only pay capital gains tax whenever you try to sell. But that notwithstanding, what he told me is that, like, this is a game for hedge funds, like, like, and real professional investors that understand how these mechanics work.

And his advice to individual retail investors is to not try to play the Nav guessing game. And like, if you have high conviction by the stock, you can buy it. But like, the best thing probably to do is to just wait until all dilution events have happened. So there's like there was a strong float. and a real price discovery can happen so that individuals, investors can understand what the actual true nav of a company should be. All right. And for the companies themselves, is there anything that you think they could do to prevent

these massive sell-offs? So that's a good question as well. I spoke to one lawyer who's familiar with these types of deals. And he said there's nothing that would theoretically stop companies or the boards of directors of these companies that are supposed to be independent and looking after the shareholders from encouraging them to lock up their shares even proactively to calm fears or create some sort of agreement among like the big institutional investors to not sell for a little while to avoid what he said and I quoted in the story as some bad optics but there's really not much that that can

be done and again one thing I want to get across in the story is that I'm not trying to create the impression that I thought that these companies did anything. wrong. I mean, they saw a market opportunity. This is how capitalism works. And they put together a strategy they thought was best suited to achieve their goal. It's just that when they sort of take over these penny stock companies and they do it in a world where like FOMO is just off the charts when it comes to these companies, like these types of runups where stocks go up a thousand to 3,000 percent in a matter of days, it's just inevitable. And then the climb back now. The, the, the, the climb back down the mountain is also inevitable. But I think what the best, the best thing to do is

probably for companies, and again, it comes down to the individual circumstances of each company. And we try to find a diversified approach to raising money so that you don't have these big, these big sell walls. And just, I would imagine maintain big communication with their shareholders so that when things like this happen, they can just be transparent about who's selling and when and for what purposes. But really, it's all going to come down to over time, how, well, they're able to kind of steward their cap tables and if they're able to sort of like a creatively raise capital in order to purchase crypto and maintain the premiums on the shares, which is really what they should be judged by.

All right. Well, thank you so much, C, for sharing about this really, really interesting. And I mean, I just know you put so much work into this story. So yeah, I'm glad you were able to share your insights here. Great. Thanks, Laura. Welcome to this week's Crypto Roundup. In today's recap, we've got details on the ICO from Pump. Dot Fun, a $237 million polymarket controversy over Zelensky's suit or not a suit, and Metaplanet's bold plan to buy a digital bank with Bitcoin. We'll cover CoreWeave's $9 billion bet on AI, circles expanding

USDC partnerships, and a wave of crypto MNA featuring Monad and OpenC. Plus, Tornado cash sanctions are dropped. Tahn walks back its UAEV. claims, and the GMX exploit pairs with a $148 million bank hack in Brazil. Thanks for tuning in to the weekly news recap. Let's begin. Pump. Dot Fun to launch PumpToken this weekend. Solana-based meme coin launchpad, Pump. Dot Fun, has confirmed the public sale of its new token, Pump, beginning July 12 via an ICO. The offering will allocate 150 billion tokens, 15% of the 1 trillion total supply across major exchanges including Bybit, Cracken, Q-Coin, and Gate.io.

However, users in the U.S. and the UK are excluded due to legal restrictions. The announcement follows accidental early postings by Bybit and Gate-Di-O, which revealed pricing and allocation details before official confirmation. Tocins are priced at $0.004, implying a fully diluted valuation of $4 billion. Air drops for users are planned, but not yet scheduled. Meanwhile, trading has already begun on Hyperliquid, where pump futures went live July 9th and surged 40% above ICO price, reaching $0.0056.

Over $30 million in volume was recorded within 24 hours. Several large traders deposited more than 10 million USDC to hedge allocations, signaling intense demand. ICOs have proven to be the best mechanism to quickly distribute tokens, said Pump. Fund co-founder Alon Cohen, calling the move a return to crypto routes. Polymarket faces backlash after Zelensky, suit bet resolves to no. A $237 million prediction market on Polymarket, asking whether Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky would wear a suit before July has sparked controversy after resolving to no. The market originally settled.

as yes, but was later disputed and overturned by UMA, the decentralized Oracle responsible for final outcomes. UMA's July 1st ruling cited a lack of credible reporting consensus, despite extensive media coverage, and photos showing Zelensky in a black jacket, matching trousers, and a collared shirt at a NATO event. The outcome has reignited scrutiny of UMA's token-weighted voting system, with concerns that large holders may unduly influence resolutions in high-volume markets. Several community-led proposals to review the decision were rejected, even as users compiled dozens

of media references describing the outfit as a suit. Polymarket has not indicated plans to revisit the decision. Metaplanet targets Digital Bank as Bitcoin Treasury Strategy enters next phase. Metaplanet, a Japan-based firm that has pivoted from hospitality to Bitcoin investment, is preparing to use its growing crypto holdings to acquire revenue-generating businesses. Among the potential targets is a digital bank in Japan, as part of the company's long-term plan to integrate Bitcoin into broader financial services. The firm recently added 2,205 Bitcoin worth roughly $250 million to its balance sheet, bringing total holdings to 15,55 Bitcoin.

It aims to hold over 210,000 Bitcoin by 2027, equal to about 1% of the total Bitcoin supply. CEO Simon Gerevich says the strategy's next step involves using Bitcoin as loan collateral, enabling acquisitions without selling the asset. CoreWeave to acquire Core Scientific in $9 billion AI-focused merger, AI infrastructure firm. CoreWeave has announced

plans to acquire Core Scientific, a leading Bitcoin mining and data center operator in an all-stock transaction valued at approximately $9 billion. The deal, expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2025, would grant CoreWeave ownership of 1.3 gigawatts of data center capacity and eliminate an estimated $10 billion in future lease obligations. Core scientific shareholders will receive 0.1,25 CoreWeave shares, per share held, implying a $20.40 valuation and a 66% premium over pre-announcement trading levels. The acquisition highlights a growing trend in which Bitcoin mining companies are

repositioning their infrastructure to support artificial intelligence. Core Scientific, whose mining operations accounted for nearly 90% of its first quarter revenue, may now convert parts of its fleet to accommodate AI workloads. As demand for computing power rises across the AI sector, data centers originally built for crypto mining are increasingly being seen as adaptable assets for high-performance computing. Tornado Cash sanctions dropped. The U.S. Treasury has officially withdrawn its appeal in the Tornado Cash Sanctions case, bringing an end to the legal fight over the Cryptomixers blacklisting. The 11th Circuit Court approved a joint motion to vacate the case, effectively nullifying the

sanctions and removing tornado cash from the U.S. blacklist. The Treasury's original designation in August 2022, had barred Americans from using the protocol, sparking legal challenges from crypto advocacy groups. The development comes just days before the criminal trial of Roman Storm, co-founder of Tornado Cash, begins in New York. U.S. District Judge Catherine Polk Faiila indicated that the now-repealed sanctions would likely be excluded from the trial. She said it would be inappropriate to suggest guilt based on measures that were later withdrawn. However, references to North Korea and the last Azores Group are expected to remain part of the prosecution's case, which centers on allegations of money laundering and sanctions violations.

Circle expands USDA revenue sharing to Bybit, sources say. Circle has entered into a revenue sharing agreement with Bybit, the world's second largest crypto exchange, according to sources who spoke with CoinDesk. The deal mirrors Circle's existing partnerships with Coinbase and Binance, aimed at boosting adoption of its USDC stablecoin by splitting yield from the reserve. backing the token. While the terms of the by-bit agreement remain undisclosed, Circle's arrangement with Coinbase involves sharing 50% of reserve-generated yield. In its recent pre-IPO filing, Circle also revealed it paid Binance a $60 million

and 25 cents upfront fee, along with ongoing monthly incentives tied to USDC balances on the exchange. Assume any exchange that has some material amount of of USC, has an agreement with Circle, one person familiar with the matter told Coin Desk. Crypto MNA heats up. The Monad Foundation has acquired Stablecoin Infrastructure Project Portal, aiming to position Monad as a leading blockchain for global stablecoin transactions. Portal will continue operating independently, while founder Raj Perak will now serve as Monads, head of payments, and stablecoins. The deal enables the integration of portal's wallet and bridging tools with Monads blockchain, which is expected to launch its main net soon. Meanwhile,

NFT Marketplace OpenC has acquired Rally, the company behind a mobile-first crypto wallet. Rally's CEO, Chris Madern, will take over as OpenC's chief technology officer and co-founder Christine Hall will join as chief of staff. The acquisition strengthens OpenC's transition into a multi-chain token trading platform with mobile functionality at its core. Tahn Foundation walks back, UAE Golden Visa claims. The Taun Foundation has issued a clarification distancing itself from earlier claims that staking Toncoin could qualify investors for a 10-year UAE Golden Visa. The announcement came after multiple UAE authorities, including the Federal Authority for Identity, Citizenship, Customs, and Port Security, and the Securities and Commodities Authority denied any affiliation with the offer.

Initially, Tahn had promoted a program offering residency in exchange for staking $100,000 worth of Toncoin and paying a $35,000 fee, positioning it as a more accessible alternative to traditional visa routes. Following swift pushback, the Foundation acknowledged the program was not officially endorsed and said it was still in early development through an independent partnership. Crypto ecosystem rocked by GMX exploit and Brazil bank hack. Decentralized exchange GMX has suffered a $42 million. exploit targeting its GLP liquidity pool on Arbitrum and Avalanche. The attacker used a flaw in the platform's pricing mechanism to mint tokens without proper collateral. GMX fee one trading and minting have been suspended and a 10% white hat bounty has been offered for the return of funds. Meanwhile, in Brazil, hackers stole approximately $148 million from the Central Bank Reserve accounts

of six financial institutions after bribing an IT worker, just $2,000. $770. While the breach occurred in traditional banking infrastructure, investigators say between $30 million and $40 million was laundered into crypto assets such as Bitcoin and USDT through over-the-counter exchanges. Authorities have frozen $50 million in related accounts and $29.5 million has been recovered.

Thanks so much for joining us today. To learn more about Brandon, Phantom, Sam, and Bit Digital, check out the show notes for this episode. Unchained is produced by me, Laura Shin, with help from Matt Pilcher, Juanair Manovich, Pamajumdard, and Marco Correa. Thanks for listening.