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JPMorgan Chase & Co. is opening its doors to crypto in a way it has never done before.

The $3.7 trillion bank will soon let clients use shares of Bitcoin ETFs as collateral for loans, starting with BlackRock’s IBIT, according to Bloomberg. The New York-based bank will also factor in crypto holdings into net-worth calculations.

Previously, the bank reviewed this type of financing on a case-by-case basis.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that BlackRock’s Bitcoin ETF will be the first of its kind to be used as collateral for loans from JPMorgan.

The fund commands more than half of the $125 billion spot Bitcoin ETF market. In fact, its $67 billion Bitcoin stash has prompted some to say it could soon leapfrog Satoshi Nakamoto as the largest Bitcoin holder.

‘Fraud’

The policy shift is a dramatic about-face for one of America’s largest banks.

JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon has previously called Bitcoin a “fraud,” “worthless,” and a “pet rock.”

“If I was the government, I’d shut it down,” he told Congress in 2023.

Even as JPMorgan experimented with private blockchains and tokenizing real-world assets, it kept Bitcoin at arm’s length.

But Dimon began to soften his tune last year.

”I don’t know what the Bitcoin itself is for, but I defend your right to buy a cigarette, I’ll defend your right to buy a Bitcoin,” Dimon reportedly said during the Australian Financial Review business summit.

Regulatory thaw

Now, it is adapting to growing demand for crypto products amid the regulatory thaw promised by US President Donald Trump.

Indeed, the changes offer a glimpse into how traditional finance is embracing — instead of rejecting — crypto. Other Wall Street giants like Charles Schwab and Morgan Stanley have also joined the crypto race.

A lot of the fuel comes from the wild success of Bitcoin ETFs — especially BlackRock’s IBIT. Barely 16 months old, the fund has become one of the 25 largest ETFs.

Bitcoin ETFs collectively hold more than 1.1 million Bitcoin worth around $125 billion.

JPMorgan will eventually allow customers to borrow against other Bitcoin ETFs, Bloomberg reported.

Pedro Solimano is a markets correspondent based in Buenos Aires. Got a tip? Email him at [email protected].

Wolfgang Münchau is a columnist for DL News. He is co-founder and director of Eurointelligence, and writes a column on European affairs for UnHerd. Opinions are his own.

There is an old saying in journalism that a story is not true until it is formally denied. I am therefore pondering with great interest the comment from Scott Bessent, the US Treasury Secretary, that the US “is never going to default” on its debt.

Bessent, a hedge fund manager, is new to the political game. Experienced politicians know that they should never give a straight answer to a question.

They certainly should refrain from giving blunt answers to blunt questions. I don’t think that Bessent is lying.

But I do think he is wrong.

Exorbitant privilege

The US will default — because it can and because both Republicans and Democrats believe in deficit spending.

When you possess “exorbitant privilege,” the ability to issue debt in a currency that you can print without limitation, it’s not a big leap to finance deficits without limitation as well.

We have to be clear what we mean by default.

Of course, the US is very unlikely to default formally on its debt obligations. It will, of course, meet its contractual obligations.

A formal default can still happen if Congress were to refuse to raise the debt ceiling, for example. We had a few close calls in the past. But such an accident is not my main scenario.

I’m focused on the implications of Donald Trump’s budget, which he calls The One Big Beautiful Bill. It isn’t just another Trumpesque moniker — it’s the actual name of the act.

The 1,000-page bill would extend the tax cuts Trump pushed through in his first term and implement a number of new spending priorities.

This would be a new type of Ponzi scheme. Issuing crypto debt is just another way to default.

The Congressional Budget Office did calculate that Trump’s budget will increase the annual federal deficit to around $3.8 trillion from $1.6 trillion over the next decade.

Even before this bill was introduced, the US was headed towards a debt-to-GDP ratio of 172% by 2054 thanks to the irresponsible fiscal policies of President Joe Biden and Janet Yellen, the former head of the Federal Reserve and Biden’s Treasury Secretary.

Even so, the budget reveals what Trump’s economic policies are really about.

He is not interested in rebalancing global trade. He just plainly needs the money to fund the deficit.

This is not very different from the medieval kings who debased the currency because they needed the money to fight a war.

The tariffs will raise a lot of money, but not nearly enough.

The US imports some $3 trillion worth of goods per year. A 10% tariff translates to $300 billion in revenue. That’s almost 20% of the deficit.

But it doesn’t work like this. The tariffs will lower growth and reduce income and corporation tax revenues to the US government.

Big ugly bill

They will also cost money to collect. And they will be more than offset by the tax cuts. In other words, this is One Big Ugly Bill.

For me, the main question is not whether the US will default, but how? The exorbitant privilege allows you to default in more ways than one.

One traditional choice of default is inflation, the oldest trick in the book.

They could do some financial shenanigans like transforming the 10-year Treasury bond into a zero-coupon perpetual bond. This is like owning a piece of paper that says the US government owes you absolutely nothing.

They also have more subtle ways to default.

One such way is already contained in the budget itself. If you manage to get to Section 899 on page 959, you will see that the Trump administration wants to tax foreign holders of Treasury bonds if they come from countries the US says discriminate against American companies.

We are not talking about withholding taxes where the government deducts taxes at source, which are legally owed by the holder.

Haircut

This is a tax on foreigners, or what bond market people call a haircut. You could also call it the financial market version of reciprocal tariffs. Section 899 is a default scheme dressed up as a tax.

Another way to default is through cryptocurrencies.

A US Treasury bond is not fundamentally different from a stablecoin — except it is one step up the sovereign ladder.

A US dollar-pegged stablecoin is backed by Treasury bonds. A Treasury bond is backed by the United States government.

Backed by Bitcoin

Behind the government stands the Federal Reserve. The US cannot run out of dollars, because the Fed can just print them, or rather, create them out of thin air by depositing them in someone’s account.

The US could, for example, transform its Treasuries into a US-government issued stablecoin, backed not by government debt but directly by the Federal Reserve.

It could be backed by Bitcoin — and become further removed from the US dollar economy. They could pay a coupon with more stablecoins.

This would be a new type of Ponzi scheme. Issuing crypto debt is just another way to default. This is also one of the reasons why the smarter members of the Trump economics team are enthusiastic about crypto. They may need it.

Paul Volcker, the former Fed chairman, famously joked that the only financial innovation he witnessed in his long life was the introduction of the ATM.

All the other stuff that comes under the heading of “financial innovation” were just clever ways to repackage debt and hide risks from investors.

Real innovation

I think crypto has the potential to offer real innovation by cutting out financial middlemen or acting as an insurance against fiat money debasement. But tokenised government debt falls into the Volcker category of innovation.

Bessent’s story is that the US will grow out of its debt, as it always did in the past. For as long as that hope is kept alive, and as long as people believe the growth story, the whole show will stay on the road.

When doubt starts to creep in, this bubble will collapse like no bubble ever did before.

So Bessent is formally right – the US will probably not default in the formal sense.

He is just not telling us the whole story.

The president of the United States wants to be in the money management business. Not when he ends his term, but right now.

This is the unprecedented upshot of the development on Tuesday when Trump Media & Technology, the company that owns the Truth Social platform and has been delving into crypto ventures, applied to bring out a Bitcoin exchange-traded fund that will be listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

The fund, which will be called the Truth Social Bitcoin fund, must be approved by the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

If it gets the green light, the fund will be a bit late to the boom in crypto ETFs that began in January 2024.

Led by BlackRock’s Bitcoin offering, the funds have reshaped the crypto market by drawing in legions of investors and amassing $130 billion worth of the top digital asset.

Just this week, one analyst said BlackRock was destined to overtake Satoshi Nakamoto as the No. 1 holder of Bitcoin as its $70 billion stockpile keeps growing.

Taking a bite

TMT is determined to take its own bite of this ever expanding pie via a purported fintech division called Truth.fi.

In January, the company approved investing $250 million in crypto as part of a push into what it called “the patriot economy.”

TMT’s shareholders seemed lukewarm on the Bitcoin ETF gambit — on Wednesday its shares were down almost 1% when most other stocks were up.

Of course, no commander-in-chief has ever been involved with a company that introduces and manages investment funds even as his administration helps to draw up new rules and regulations for the same industry.

Trump owned roughly 57% of TMT’s shares, which trade under the ticker DJT, before transferring his holdings into the Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust after winning the election in November 2024.

Donald Trump Jr, the eldest of the president’s five children, controls the trust, according to SEC filings.

Memecoin dinner

Even though Democrats have decried the president’s crypto involvement as “open corruption,” TMT is just one arm of the Trump family’s crypto businesses.

World Liberty Financial, the purported DeFi project backed by the family, introduced a stablecoin called USD1 in March.

And the president himself released a memecoin in January and then hosted a dinner for the 220 top holders at his private golf club in May.

At the same time, the Trump administration has ended the crackdown on the industry pursued by former SEC Chair Gary Gensler.

The agency, now under new Chair Paul Atkins, a Washington lawyer, has dropped or delayed virtually all the enforcement actions it brought against Coinbase, Binance, Ripple and other crypto projects.

Last week, TMT said it plans to amass a $2.5 billion Bitcoin treasury. In late April, Trump’s media conglomerate said it was exploring a “utility token” for subscriptions to its streaming platform Truth+.

Moreover, Trump’s sons, Eric and Donald Jr., announced in late March they were forming a new Bitcoin mining company, dubbed the American Bitcoin Corp.

Pedro Solimano is a markets correspondent based in Buenos Aires. Got a tip? Email him at [email protected].

Ethereum is suddenly the belle of the crypto ball once again, leaving rivals like Solana in its wake.

After stagnating for more than a year, Ethereum has clawed its way back into relevance this quarter.

Its price is up 44% in the last month, massively outperforming Solana’s modest 7% and even besting Bitcoin’s 26% uptick during the period.

And the main reason why? Ethereum, once again, is winning the confidence of investors that it can rewire finance.

“The recent rally in Ethereum’s price isn’t just about short-term positioning, but rather is a reflection of a deeper shift in the market’s understanding of what the future of blockchain infrastructure will look like,” Dom Harz, cofounder of BOB, a hybrid layer 2 blockchain, told DL News.

That proposition is appealing to institutional investors.

Ethereum exchange-traded funds have consistently notched positive daily flows in the last month. Meanwhile, Bitcoin ETFs have recorded $1.2 billion in outflows this week.

Pectra upgrade

There’s more. Ethereum has drawn attention for its recent Pectra upgrade, and investors are taking note of the “narrative shift.”

“Ethereum is the likeliest platform choice for many financial institutions due to its superior security and stability,” Sygnum analysts wrote in the bank’s monthly investment outlook report for June.

There’s onchain data to support that.

Ethereum has recorded more than $1 billion in flows into the network in the last three months, dwarfing all other blockchains, including its layer 2 networks.

This massive inflow spike coincided with the Pectra upgrade, which analysts say has helped Ethereum regain the initiative from layer 2 networks that some critics said were economically strip-mining it.

Scalability

Meanwhile, Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin has laid out plans to increase Ethereum’s scalability tenfold by next year.

Buterin has proposed expanding the network’s ability to handle more transactions per block and also implementing stateless clients, network nodes that don’t store Ethereum’s entire history, a move that could reduce hardware demands for some participants.

Still, the question remains whether Ethereum’s recent sprint will translate into sustained momentum for the blockchain marathon.

Despite the price uptick this quarter, Ethereum is still 46% below its all-time high of over $4,800.

A staking-based ETF, previously seen as a regulatory long shot, could be the catalyst to boost Ethereum’s price prospects. Such products suddenly seem possible thanks to the Securities and Exchange Commission softening its stance on staking-based vehicles not qualifying as securities.

But Ethereum isn’t lapping the field just yet as its rivals are looking to reclaim lost ground. Despite losing its edge amid backlash over the memecoin-fuelled craze, Solana proponents say the network is working to course-correct.

Solana’s move

Solana is working on a major network overhaul, Alpenglow, that is expected to be rolled out in stages. The Alpenglow upgrade aims to reduce local fees markets and make the network 100 times faster.

XRP is also quietly gaining traction as a crypto asset for corporate balance sheets. Companies like VivoPower and Webus have announced plans to begin stockpiling XRP.

Crypto market movers

Bitcoin traded flat over the past 24 hours and is at $105,469.

Ethereum is up slightly by 0.9% over the same period to about $2,634.

What we’re reading

BlackRock’s $70bn Bitcoin trove is ‘likely to pass Satoshi,’ says analyst ― DL News

Tether Launches Omnichain Gold Stablecoin on TON ― Unchained

Why you’re still here (but most aren’t — Milk Road

Circle Scales up IPO Amid Strong Demand ― Unchained

Classover doubles down on Solana bet with $500m deal ― DL News

Osato Avan-Nomayo is our Nigeria-based DeFi correspondent. He covers DeFi and tech. Got a tip? Please contact him [email protected].

BlackRock is on course to become Bitcoin’s biggest holder.

That’s right… a stalwart of Wall Street may soon overtake Satoshi Nakamoto’s trove of the world’s most valuable cryptocurrency.

In just 16 months, Wall Street’s largest Bitcoin exchange-traded fund has quickly amassed 664,954 Bitcoin worth about $70 billion.

And it’s only a matter of time before it overtakes the 1.1 million Bitcoin long believed to be held by the network’s pseudonymous creator, says Eric Balchunas, Bloomberg Intelligence’s ETF analyst.

“IBIT is likely to pass Satoshi as the world’s biggest holder by the end of next year,” Balchunas wrote on X on Tuesday.

“It’s a testament to the power of convenience, low cost, liquidity, and trust that the ETF brings to table.”

‘Satoshi-level understanding’

The coins attributed to Satoshi Nakamoto have never been confirmed to be theirs.

That’s because the 1.1 million stash comes from an early day miner who showed a deep understanding of Bitcoin — “Satoshi-level understanding” wrote Bitcoin OG Jameson Lopp — but who has never claimed or moved them.

The speed and scale of BlackRock’s ETF shows the dramatic shift in Bitcoin’s ownership landscape.

Before Wall Street and other giants such as Robinhood got into crypto, Bitcoin was mostly a place for risk-tolerant investors who navigated poor user experiences and insecure wallets.

But many investors, especially older ones eager for exposure to crypto while not sold on the idea of a crypto-native platform, are using traditional brokers to buy digital assets.

Longstanding credibility

It’s the reason why other Wall Street behemoths such as Charles Schwab and Morgan Stanley are now exploring crypto products for their clients.

BlackRock, which has $11 trillion in assets under management, not only offers Bitcoin exposure on the cheap within its existing app, it also enjoys longstanding credibility with its clients.

Indeed, institutional demand is surging.

Across all Bitcoin ETFs, the total assets under management has surpassed 1.1 million Bitcoin and is now worth about $121 billion, according to data collected by Dragonfly head data scientist Hildebert Moulié, known by his online pseudonym Hildobby.

That’s more than 5% of all the Bitcoin that will ever exist — and this doesn’t even take into account the coins held by Bitcoin treasury companies.

Bitcoin at $200,000

Bernstein analysts have also said that Wall Street will replace Satoshi as Bitcoin climbs to $200,000.

For Balchunas, there’s a bigger story brewing behind BlackRock’s pursuit for top spot: how fast IBIT has earned a spot among the largest ETFs in the world.

Barely 16 months old, IBIT is the youngest among the top 25 biggest ETFs by a factor of nine.

“It’s like an infant hanging out with teenagers and twenty-somethings,” said Balchunas. “Quite possibly the most insane IBIT stat yet.”

Pedro Solimano is a markets correspondent based in Buenos Aires. Got a tip? Email him at [email protected].

A little-known educational technology firm is doubling down on Solana.

New York-based Classover Holdings, a provider of interactive online learning, said Monday it plans to borrow up to $500 million to add the Solana cryptocurrency to its corporate treasury — just one month after announcing it struck an agreement to sell as much as $400 million in equity for that very purpose.

Per the agreement, venture capital firm Solana Growth Ventures LLC will buy up to $500 million in secured convertible notes from Classover — debt that Solana Growth Ventures can choose to convert into Classover equity.

Classover can use up to 80% of the proceeds to purchase Solana, according to the agreement. Shares of the company’s stock rose more than 100% following the announcement.

How much Classover ultimately invests in Solana remains to be seen. But the company now has $900 million available to purchase the cryptocurrency.

On May 1, Classover said it had reached a $400 million equity purchase agreement with Solana Strategies Holdings LLC and would allocate a “significant portion” of the proceeds to buying and staking Solana.

Classover has already bought 6,472 Solana, worth about $1 million, the company said Monday.

The online learning company’s crypto treasury move is part of a growing trend in which companies buy crypto in a bid to boost their share price or hedge against inflation.

While Bitcoin has been the primary target of these strategies, a number of other tokens have also come to focus, especially Solana.

Solana treasuries

Classover isn’t the only company that has moved toward a Solana-focused treasury strategy.

One of the first initially operated as a Bitcoin holdings company. Originally known as Cypherpunk Holdings, the company rebranded in September 2024 to Sol Strategies, transitioning into an investor in and infrastructure provider for the Solana ecosystem.

Cypherpunk began with the operation of one Solana validator with 101,200 Solana, worth over $20 million. As of May 31, Sol Strategies operates four validators and has acquired more than 395,000 Solana, worth over $63 million.

On May 27, Sol Strategies announced it had received permission to sell shares worth as much as $1 billion. While the company doesn’t have immediate plans to sell those shares, it sought flexibility to access capital “as future opportunities arise in the rapidly evolving Solana ecosystem,” CEO Leah Wald said in a statement.

DeFi Development Corp, which took direct inspiration from Michael Saylor’s Strategy, began Solana purchases in April.

Initially a real-estate fintech company called Janover, it made a complete pivot after a majority stake of the firm was acquired by a team of former crypto executives.

Its strategy is to stake Solana to generate yield, which can be used to purchase and stake more Solana. It currently holds a total of 621,313 Solana, worth about $100 million.

Upexi, a consumer brand producer, announced last month that it plans to raise $100 million through the sale of equity to fund the purchase of Solana. Meanwhile, NewGen Group, an Asia-based healthcare firm, said on Monday it is set to invest $30 million in staking Solana.

Solana is currently trading at $160.

Zachary Rampone is a DeFi correspondent at DL News. Have a tip? Contact him at [email protected]

A version of this article appeared in our The Decentralised newsletter on June 3. Sign up here.

While Andreessen Horowitz proclaims the end of crypto’s “foundation era,” the most important foundation in the business is in the midst of a, well, foundational shakeup.

Earlier this year, Hsiao-Wei Wang and Tomasz Stańczak replaced Aya Miyaguchi as the Ethereum Foundation’s executive directors (the latter assumed a new role as the organisation’s president).

Now, the single largest team within the foundation has undergone a substantial restructuring, shedding more than a dozen employees in the process.

In a blog post on Monday, the Ethereum Foundation said its Protocol Research & Development arm would continue under a new name: Protocol.

At the same time, its headcount will drop from more than 110 employees to fewer than 100, according to organisation charts shared before and after the restructuring.

This is the team that works on Ethereum itself. The foundation also has an operations team as well as teams that research privacy-enhancing technology and support software developers building applications atop Ethereum.

The streamlining is the latest in a series of moves meant to address the belief that Ethereum’s love affair with decentralisation has come at a cost, to wit: the focus and efficiency that comes with decisive, top-down leadership.

Earlier this year, the Ether cryptocurrency languished while Bitcoin and Solana hit all-time highs.

Critics blasted Ethereum co-founder and foundation board member Vitalik Buterin for the foundation’s seemingly hands-off approach to Ethereum development and called for Miyaguchi’s ouster.

While Buterin insists Miyaguchi’s transition from executive director to president began long before critics’ frustration boiled over, the new co-EDs wasted no time signaling they had heard the criticism and would lead accordingly.

In April, they said they had three priorities for the next year: making Ethereum more performant, ensuring layer 2 blockchains remain affordable, and improving user experience.

As I wrote at the time, that was a bit of a pivot for an organisation that had long believed the road to mass adoption ran through layer 2 blockchains alone.

Monday’s changes were all about delivering on that pivot, senior EF employees wrote.

“We encourage every team in Protocol to consider how their work is supporting our execution of these strategic initiatives,” the blog post reads.

“Critical to our execution is the presence of leaders in our group whom the community trusts. We are being more explicit in assigning leaders to accelerate our strategic initiatives in order to increase accountability.”

Not everyone was pleased.

Ethereum developer Péter Szilágyi — who appears to have left the foundation amid the restructuring — said “this is where the word ‘decentralised’ was quietly, forever removed from #Ethereum’s roadmap.”

Others were less concerned that a more assertive foundation would compromise Ethereum’s decentralisation.

“I applaud strong leadership that facilitates decentralization to actually happen instead of the kumbaya of the past that couldn’t even get a basic website done to convey what Ethereum is even about,” Sebastian Bürgel, a vice president at Gnosis DAO, said.

Top DeFi stories of the week

This week in DeFi governance

VOTE: Aave DAO votes to activate “umbrella” security feature

VOTE: Arbitrum DAO votes to transfer multisig admin and payment processing responsibilities to Arbitrum Foundation

VOTE: Aave DAO votes on events budget for 2025

Post of the week

Ethereum has performed well in recent weeks, but that doesn’t mean investors have forgotten the days when it was trading above $4,000.

how it feels holding ethereum for the last 3 years pic.twitter.com/urG0ckxjuy

— Daniel (@danielgothits) May 29, 2025

Got a tip about DeFi? Reach out at [email protected].

Bitcoin treasuries are booming — but they could just as easily bust as they scale up.

The problem is that half of the 61 listed companies who have copied Michael Saylor’s stockpiling strategy have bought Bitcoin at prices higher than $90,000.

And Geoffrey Kendrick, head of digital assets at Standard Chartered, the UK bank, said that could be an issue down the road.

“Bitcoin treasuries are adding to Bitcoin buying pressure for now, but we see a risk this may reverse over time,” he said in a report sent to clients this week.

Pressure and volatility

These companies “could become a source of downside price pressure and volatility,” said Kendrick.

Standard Chartered said the five dozen or so companies pursuing the Bitcoin treasury approach hold 3.2% of Bitcoin’s total supply. That’s 673,897 Bitcoin worth about $72 billion.

Bitcoin’s price was at $106,661 in late afternoon trading UK time.

If for whatever reason these companies are forced to sell their Bitcoin en masse, they have the scale to torpedo the market.

A 22% drop from their entry price could turn them into “forced sellers,” the bank’s analysis said.

First, there would be a cascade of liquidations and if the companies’ balance sheets break, so, too, would the Bitcoin-as-treasury model.

100,000 Bitcoin

The warning comes just as the Bitcoin treasury craze is accelerating. Just last week, Trump Media & Technology Group, or TMT, said it was planning to raise $2.5 billion to buy Bitcoin.

On May 28, GameStop, the video game retailer turned meme stock, announced it had bought 4,710 Bitcoin.

In just two months, firms that aren’t Saylor’s Strategy have doubled their holdings to nearly 100,000 Bitcoin, according to Standard Chartered.

Still, Strategy dominates the Bitcoin treasury market. The firm holds 86% of all corporate Bitcoin, with an average buy price of around $70,000.

Noelle Acheson, the influential macro analyst, said Saylor copycats’ convition that this scheme is not risky is “alarming.”

“Especially for those getting into the structure at a much higher BTC price,” she said.

One such risk is the NAV premium. NAV stands for net-asset value, and represents what a company’s holdings are worth on paper.

When there’s a premium — or mismatch — it means a company’s stock price gets out of line with the actual value of what it owns.

Take Metaplanet, the Japanese-version of Strategy, and former budget hotel operator. The company’s stock is priced as if Bitcoin were worth more than $596,000 — that’s more than five times the current market price.

Shorts circling

Short sellers have begun to hone in on Metaplanet. Same goes for Strategy. Legendary stock trader Jim Chanos has begun to short Strategy’s NAV premium — in a bid to buy more Bitcoin.

How long will it last?

Bitcoin is known for its boom and bust cycles. What looks like an endless bout of euphoria can quickly give way to a bear market.

And it can all come quickly down thanks to these nifty financial novelties.

“Innovative financial engineering always starts out as a fascinating new tool to generate returns,” wrote last week macro analyst Noelle Acheson in her newsletter Crypto Is Macro Now.

“But inevitably it becomes fragile as interest and risk get saturated.”

Pedro Solimano is a markets correspondent based in Buenos Aires. Got a tip? Email him at [email protected].

Robinhood’s shares jumped almost 3% on Monday after it completed its acquisition of Bitstamp, a crypto exchange.

But analysts say the growth from the online trading platform’s crypto push may just be starting. According to Bernstein, Robinhood’s digital assets offerings will drive its shares another 54%, to $105, by this time next year.

“We expect [Robinhood] to continue gaining market share in trading revenues driven by strong product pipeline across equities, crypto, and disruptive products such as prediction markets and tokenisation,” wrote Guatam Chhugani and other analysts in a May note.

Robinhood’s acquisition of Bitstamp, announced in June 2024, marks the latest way in which financial firms are muscling into the crypto space.

Both traditional players such as Morgan Stanley, which owns the E*Trade platform, and fintech powerhouses like Revolut are ratcheting up their digital asset businesses.

On Tuesday, Sifted reported that Revolut, a British licensed challenger bank, is plotting a move into crypto derivatives.

At the same time, Kraken and other crypto stalwarts are going the other way by tapping into traditional financial services like stock trading.

And more may come, with banking giants JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, and Wells Fargo reportedly exploring the launch of their own stablecoins.

The Trump effect

The growing competition is a sign of the times.

Things were changing even before US President Donald Trump won last year’s election on a pro-crypto platform.

Two key watershed moments were when former Securities and Exchange Commission chair Gary Gensler’s begrudgingly having to approve first spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds, and then Ethereum ETFs.

Suddenly, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink and other Wall Street leaders were touting the benefits of tokenisation and cryptocurrencies as a new asset class. Robinhood’s home advantage

While Robinhood isn’t a native crypto firm, it does have a home advantage of sorts thanks to it having offered crypto-trading services since 2021, Bernstein wrote.

In May, the analysts estimated that the fintech firm controlled some 30% of the US retail crypto-trading market.

Crypto market movers

Bitcoin is up 1% over the past 24 hours to trade at $105,310.

Ethereum is up 5% to trade at $2,614.

What we’re reading

Hyperliquid rides $244bn trading surge into the top league with Binance and OKX ― DL News

Bitcoin Goes All In on MAGA, Shedding Its Antigovernment Slant — The Wall Street Journal

Ethereum EIP-7702 Brings New Risks, Wintermute Says ― Unchained

What you missed this week — Milk Road

MetaMask wallets will get easier to access after latest Consensys acquisition ― DL News

Eric Johansson is DL News’ News Editor. Got a tip? Email at [email protected].

Consensys, the blockchain development venture run by Joe Lubin, said on Monday that it is acquiring Web3Auth to strengthen its crypto wallet offering, MetaMask.

Web3Auth, based in Singapore, lets users access their cryptocurrency wallets using the same credentials as signing in to Google, Facebook, Discord, and other popular social accounts.

Setting up a crypto wallet typically requires writing down a “seed phrase” of 12 to 24 words. If a user loses that phrase, they will be unable to access their funds.

Seed phrase

With 250 million users, MetaMask, is a top provider of non-custodial crypto wallets.

Attracting newbies is always a challenge. Consensys expects the latest acquisition to attract rookies intimidated by managing their seed phrase to download a crypto wallet.

“This is definitely about getting more people in,” Dan Finlay, a co-founder of MetaMask, told DL News. “It’s also about preventing people from falling out in devastating ways.”

Finlay added, “This is an answer to the fact that some people are just not ready to learn what it means to back up a private key in a fully self-custodial way, and that’s all right.”

The acquisition will see the 30-person Web3Auth team join MetaMask. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

MetaMask makeover

The acquisition is part of a larger overhaul of the eight-year-old Ethereum wallet.

In February, Finlay announced several key new changes, including the ability for users to hold Solana and Bitcoin, a redesigned mobile app, and a new metal Mastercard exclusive to MetaMask users.

“We’re in a period where we’re accelerating our ability to adapt,” Finlay said. “We’re starting to really pour on the gas.”

Competition among wallet providers is fierce, with many building a business over the last few years around MetaMask’s shortcomings.

Phantom, which launched in 2021 as a Solana-specific crypto wallet before adding Ethereum and Polygon two years later, has 15 million users and has become the wallet of choice for Solana.

“It took a long time for wallets to really start innovating in ways that were worth copying,” Finlay said. “At a certain point, it’s time to eat some humble pie and get better in that dimension, too.”

$150 million round

Phantom also attracted leading investor groups. In January, the venture raised $150 million in a round co-led by Sequoia Capital and Paradigm.

Consolidation in the crypto industry is on pace to hit its highest level since the 2021 bull market, according to analysts at Pitchbook.

Through the first five months of 2025, there have been 97 different crypto deals by the market’s biggest players worth roughly $5 billion.

Crypto exchange Coinbase splashed out $2.9 billion in a cash and stock deal to buy the options exchange Deribit in May.

Ripple, the company that created the XRP token, acquired the London-based prime brokerage firm Hidden Road in April for $1.25 billion.

Consensys has also been busy on the deals front.

In May, the company helped finance a $425 million investment in SharpLink gaming, enabling the listed sports and online casino marketing company to add Ethereum to its balance sheet.

“It’s a time of a lot of invigorating enthusiasm to take on things in fresh ways,” said Finlay.

Liam Kelly is DL News’ Berlin-based DeFi correspondent. Have a tip? Get in touch at [email protected].

Changpeng Zhao, the founder and ex-CEO of Binance, proposed on Sunday a new type of decentralised exchange. The hook: it hides trades and market positions from the public.

Zhao’s pitch may fly in the face of DeFi’s embrace of transparency. But his idea came following the $100 million liquidation of the trader known as James Wynn on May 29.

Some traders said the fact his trades were visible onchain may have helped drive down the price of Bitcoin and liquidate his position.

“Given recent events, I think now might be a good time for someone to launch a dark pool perp DEX,” Zhao, who goes by CZ, said on Sunday.

“I have always been puzzled with the fact that everyone can see your orders in real-time on a DEX.”

Dark pools

A “dark pool perp DEX” is a decentralised exchange that allows users to trade with leveraged derivatives while their positions are kept hidden.

This prevents market manipulation by avoiding front-running and maximal extractable value (MEV) attacks.

CZ’s post on X sparked a debate on whether transparency in DeFi is always beneficial to the trader, specifically those trading leveraged derivatives.

In the current DeFi market, onchain positions are fully transparent and publicly traceable, meaning that anyone can see where one’s stop losses are or liquidations could occur.

While this structure has been long praised for its openness, Zhao and others are questioning whether changes are needed to ensure privacy.

This is important for traders using leverage because showing their positions in public reveals their liquidation point and makes them vulnerable to an organised attack.

Liquidation point

“It is important to not let others know/see your orders. If others can see your liquidation point, they could try to push the market to liquidate you.

“Even if you got a billion dollars, others can gang up on you. This was possibly what we have seen recently,” Zhao said.

Zhao acknowledges that there are differing opinions on the matter, and traders will have preferences on which type of exchange they use.

After pleading guilty to violating US banking law in 2022 and resigining as Binance CEO , Zhao focused on his venture capital firm, YZi Labs, which backs crypto and AI startups.

Zachary Rampone is a DeFi correspondent at DL News. Have a tip? Contact him at [email protected]

A version of this story appeared in our The Guidance newsletter on June 2. Sign up here.

With the US Senate returning from a recess on Monday, all eyes will turn to the most important legislative development in the crypto industry’s history — passage of the Genius Act.

The landmark stablecoin bill is on a fast-track to be approved thanks to a 66-32 vote on May 19 that drew crucial support from Democrats.

There’s a good chance the bill, which is designed to register and regulate US dollar-backed stablecoin issuers, will get the green light and head for the House of Representatives by the summer recess in August.

New version

But to win over Democrats and a couple of sceptical Republicans, the bill now looks quite different from its original iteration in March.

At that time it drew fire from Senator Elizabeth Warren and other colleagues for failing to protect consumers, the financial system, and even national security from potential risks.

Indeed, the opposition was strong enough to sink the bill’s initial bid for fast track status in early May.

So how has this bill, which is poised to galvanise the $250 billion stablecoin sector, changed?

For starters, lawmakers have beefed up federal protections for consumers by applying existing laws for financial products to stablecoins, according to a memorandum released by Senate Democrats.

These protections will be enforced by the Federal Trade Commission, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the latter of which has been targeted for closure by the Trump administration and its Republican allies. The crypto industry has criticised the CFPB’s watchdog role.

Full faith

The Genius Act will also prohibit stablecoin issuers from claiming that their offerings are protected by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, or FDIC, which guarantees up to $250,000 for depositors should their lenders fail.

To prevent issuers from pretending their stablecoins are endorsed by the “full faith and credit” of Washington, the legislation bars stablecoin issuers from using terms such as “United States,” “US,” or “USG” in their branding and marketing.

What’s really notable is how the bill has become an exercise in bipartisanship in a political climate marked by polarisation. Democratic senators Ruben Gallego of Arizona and Mark Warner of Virginia flipped back to yes votes after the modifications were made.

High vote count

Warren still opposes the legislation because it has not addressed what she says is a conflict of interest on the part of President Donald Trump.

The Trump family’s crypto ventures, including a stablecoin with a market value of $2.2 billion, have drawn fire from Democrats and governance experts as “open corruption.”

Given the high vote count across the aisle, it looks like the Genius Act is in the home stretch toward passage in the weeks to come.

Edward Robinson is the story editor for DL News. Contact the author at [email protected].

Just a couple of months ago, Hyperliquid was just one of many decentralised exchanges in the marketplace.

Now it’s suddenly mixing it up with Binance, OKX, and other exchange heavyweights thanks to a shift in how traders are allocating capital across crypto markets.

The onchain derivatives platform clocked $244 billion in trading volume in May, which is only 10% of Binance’s $2.3 trillion derivatives haul for the month.

But still, to notch that level seemed highly unlikely a short time ago.

“There’s clearly a broader rotation toward newer DeFi primitives that solve for speed and usability, and Hyperliquid benefits from this,” Mike Cahill, CEO of Douro Labs, a Pyth Network contributor, told DL News.

“Especially as users get tired of the limitations and slow iteration cycles of legacy protocols.” Doug Colkitt, CEO of Ambient Finance, a DeFi exchange, said Hyperliquid “checks a lot of boxes” in terms of low latency and good user experience.

While Binance is still the market leader in crypto trading, even in the derivatives sector, Hyperliquid has taken a massive leap into the upper echelons of the market.

Back in November, when it launched its HYPE token, it could only notch up the equivalent of 2% of Binance’s volume.

Now, it’s the fifth largest by both open interest and trading volume across both centralised and decentralised platforms behind Binance, Bitget, Bybit, and OKX.

Hyperliquid’s trading bump has also caused its native token, Hype, to soar.

Hype is up 60% in the last month, besting Bitcoin and Solana’s respective 8% and 5% upticks during the same period.

Hype is courting attention from big investors amid a shift towards DeFi projects seen as high-beta bets with sticky users and cash flow.

Colkitt said the market was “clearly in a rotation cycle,” and that Hyperliquid is in the conversation as traders search for the coin that will provide outsized returns.

“Traders want the next Solana or the next dYdX.”

But the new-blood appeal cuts both ways, and the prospects of asymmetric returns on investments come with the potential for volatility.

Perception and performance often work in tandem in crypto, and Hyperliquid has already experienced a dose of this reality.

In March, Hype’s price fell to $10, a slump that coincided with a decline in trading volume on Hyperliquid. The timing of this market slump indicates that mindshare is a significant part of Hyperliquid’s value proposition, according to Illia Otychenko, lead analyst at CEX.IO, a crypto exchange.

Osato Avan-Nomayo is our Nigeria-based DeFi correspondent. He covers DeFi and tech. Got a tip? Please contact him [email protected].

Bitcoin is about to hit a new record.

That’s according to traders who are pouring into bets that the price will climb 20% and hit $125,000 in June.

Over half of the calls on derivatives trading platform Deribit are on trades that only pay out if the top cryptocurrency trades above $125,000 by June 27.

And by the December 26 expiration, 42% of calls are on bets that the price will surge past $170,000.

“There are plenty of signals that there is more to come before the end of the year,” Mena Theodorou, co-founder of Coinstash, a crypto exchange, said in an emailed comment.

Bitcoin is riding several tailwinds, analysts say. Those include growing institutional interest in crypto, political support in the US and elsewhere, and the prospect of liquidity hitting the market.

Depending on who you ask, those factors could drive the price to anywhere between $174,000 and $200,000 by the end of 2025.

The Trump effect

President Donald Trump’s support for the crypto industry — and his own family’s digital assets ventures — is clearly bolstering the bull market.

Last week, Vice President JD Vance and Trump’s two oldest sons headlined the Bitcoin 2025 conference in Las Vegas.

At the same time, Trump Media unveiled plans to raise $2.5 billion to buy Bitcoin, adding to president-linked crypto initiatives that already include memecoins, NFTs, and Bitcoin mining.

Those projects have drawn the ire of political opponents who have labelled them as “open corruption,” but analysts argue they’ve incentivised Wall Street giants to tap into digital assets.

To be sure, the White House’s on-again-off-again trade war with about half the world’s nations is expected to affect Bitcoin’s price in the weeks to come.

Over the past week alone, Bitcoin’s price jumped above $110,000 when Trump delayed tariffs on the EU, only to then slump back around $104,000 after an ongoing legal battle challenged the legality of the tariffs, adding further uncertainty into the market.

“Tariff headlines will continue to make for short term volatility,” said David Brickell, head of international distribution at FRNT Financial, and former forex trader Chris Mills. They wrote the comment on Sunday in their London Crypto Club newsletter.

They noted, however, that whole tariffs have rattled markets, that they see reason to be bullish.

At the forefront of those reasons? The fact that China keeps pumping liquidity into the market. In May, the Chinese Central bank injected $97 billion into its banking system through an outright reverse repurchase tool, Reuters reported.

“This is all massively stimulative for risk markets and of course Bitcoin,” Brickell and Mills wrote.

Eric Johansson is DL News’ News Editor. Got a tip? Email at [email protected].

Just a few months ago, Ethereum was scraping multi-year lows and sentiment was in the gutter.

Now it’s one of the hottest trades in crypto.

It closed out May at $2,530 after nearly tapping $2,800 last week. It’s a sharp turnaround from early April, when it plunged to $1,400, marking its lowest point in over two years.

Prediction market bettors are putting their money on even more upside.

Despite a fairly even mix of bets between Ethereum jumping to $2,700 or slipping back to $2,300, traders are leaning bullish. The chances of a move above $2,800 outweigh those predicting a deeper breakdown.

“Ethereum’s trifecta of scaling momentum, supply squeeze dynamics, and DeFi innovation positions it for volatility-sensitive growth,” crypto research firm CoinMarketCap wrote on June 1.

CoinMarketCap noted several factors driving the price, including upgrades to the network and institutional adoption. It also warned that while Wall Street increasingly taps into crypto in general, macroeconomic uncertainty may kneecap Ethereum’s comeback.

Institutional confidence

The second presidency of Donald Trump has incentivised traditional finance players to venture further into digital assets, analysts say.

Lately, Ethereum has been one of the winners of that.

Spot Ethereum exchange-traded funds have built steady momentum, racking up $578 million in inflows over the past three weeks. Nearly half of that came last week alone, when inflows hit $286 million.

By contrast, Bitcoin ETFs saw $157 million in outflows last week, snapping a six-week streak of net inflows.

Derivatives traders are leaning in too. Ethereum’s open interest on Deribit has surged past $5 billion, with over two million contracts outstanding.

Call contracts outnumber bearish puts by more than two-to-one, meaning the bulk of traders are leaning bullish.

At the same time, big investors have returned. One whale bought almost $5 million worth of Ether on June 1, CoinMarketCap noted.

“Whale accumulation and ETF inflows signal institutional confidence,” the firm wrote.

Fundamental tailwinds

Beyond price action and ETF flows, Ethereum is seeing a wave of structural progress and drivers.

At the ETH Global event in Prague between May 30 and June 1, Vitalik Buterin outlined plans to scale Ethereum’s base layer 10 times over the next year through upgrades like delayed execution and distributed storage.

“That would be a good time to take a breather and verify we’re doing okay on decentralisation,” he said, suggesting a future hard fork to address things like censorship resistance and account abstraction.

While some advocate for a more aggressive roadmap, Buterin added, “I don’t believe in the 1000x overnight camp, but I do think there’s a lot of room to scale safely.”

Ethereum also just got its own version of the Michael Saylor playbook.

Online casino firm SharpLink Gaming raised $435 million in Ether for its treasury, sending its stock up 2,700% in a week.

It’s possible that if the market starts perceiving and pricing in bigger upsides for Ethereum, more corporate treasuries could start to pivot to it over Bitcoin.

Staking ETFs could also be on the horizon. The SEC recently clarified that solo and delegated staking don’t qualify as securities offerings, opening the door for more Ethereum-linked products.

While two early filings hit regulatory pushback last week, analysts like Bloomberg Intelligence’s James Seyffart say approval is still a matter of “when, not if.”

Headwinds

To be sure, macroeconomic uncertainty risks scuppering the rally. For instance, Trump’s on-and-off-again trade war with half of the world’s nations has rattled cryptocurrency prices over the past five months.

The White House’s tariffs are on pause until July 9.

“Ethereum price prediction hinges on whether institutional tailwinds can outweigh technical and macroeconomic headwinds,” CoinMarketCap wrote.

Crypto market movers

Bitcoin has gained 0.3% over the past 24 hours and is trading at $104,350.

Ethereum is down 0.7% in the same period to $2,485.

What we’re reading

Ross Ulbricht nets $1.3m in prison memorabilia auction, gets $31m ‘donation’ soon after ― DL News

Crypto Treasury Companies Are All the Rage. Could They Cause an Industry Collapse? ― Unchained

What you missed this week — Milk Road

Meta’s Bitcoin treasury play flops as 99% of shareholders say no ― DL News

Kyle Baird is DL News’ Weekend Editor. Got a tip? Email at [email protected].

It may not be the top campaign issue, but crypto has quietly secured bipartisan backing in South Korea’s upcoming snap presidential election.

Both frontrunners, liberal opposition leader Lee Jae-myung and conservative candidate Kim Moon-soo, have outlined market-friendly positions on digital assets, from stablecoins to spot exchange-traded funds.

Lee Jae-myung, representing the Democratic Party, has proposed the introduction of a stablecoin pegged to the Korean won, aiming to reduce reliance on foreign digital currencies.

“We need to establish a won-backed stablecoin market to prevent national wealth from leaking overseas,” he said in a recent policy discussion.

Additionally, Lee supports the legalization of spot crypto ETFs and advocates for allowing major institutional investors, such as the National Pension Fund, to invest in cryptocurrencies under appropriate regulatory frameworks.

“I will create a safe investment environment so that young people can build assets and plan for the future,” he added.

On the other hand, Kim Moon-soo of the People Power Party also endorses the legalisation of spot crypto ETFs and proposes permitting government bodies like the National Pension Service to invest in virtual assets.

Kim’s campaign also emphasises dismantling restrictive regulations, including the “one-exchange-one-bank” rule, which requires each crypto exchange to partner with a single domestic bank for real-name account verification.

Critics argue the rule stifles competition by making it difficult for smaller exchanges to secure banking access.

According to the latest Gallup Korea poll conducted before the polling blackout period, Lee Jae-myung leads with 49% support, followed by Kim Moon-soo at 35%, and Lee Jun-seok of the Reform Party at 11%.

The election is set to be held on June 3.

Crypto market movers

Bitcoin has gained 0.4% in value over the past 24 hours and is trading at $103,950.

Ethereum is down 1.5% in the same period to $2,485.

What we’re reading

Meta’s Bitcoin treasury play flops as 99% of shareholders say no ― DL News

Animoca Could Be Crypto’s Next U.S. Public Offering. Is It a Strong GameFi Bet? ― Unchained

What the market isn’t telling you — Milk Road

Ross Ulbricht nets $1.3m in prison memorabilia auction, gets $31m ‘donation’ soon after ― DL News

Kyle Baird is DL News’ Weekend Editor. Got a tip? Email at [email protected]

Of the 14 proposals on Meta’s 2025 ballot, Bitcoin came in dead last.

Shareholders overwhelmingly rejected a plan to explore adding Bitcoin to the company’s corporate treasury, with less than 1% voting in favour, according to a SEC filing.

It drew the lowest support of any proposal on the agenda.

The plan was submitted in January by Ethan Peck, an employee at the conservative think tank National Center for Public Policy Research, using his personal Meta shares.

He argued that Bitcoin, with its 124% price surge in 2024, offered a superior alternative to Meta’s $72 billion in cash and short-term investments.

His proposal urged the company to evaluate Bitcoin as an inflation hedge and “responsible asset allocation” tool.

Peck has also tried — and so far failed — to get Microsoft and Amazon to consider similar measures.

Backing the idea was Matt Cole, CEO of Strive Asset Management, who made a livestreamed pitch to shareholders from the Bitcoin Conference in Las Vegas on Thursday.

“You’ve already taken step one — you named your goat Bitcoin,” Cole said, addressing Mark Zuckerberg directly. “Now it’s time to take step two.”

But the response was one-sided. Nearly five billion Meta shares were voted against the proposal, compared to just under four million in favour. Over 8.8 million abstained.

The playbook follows Michael Saylor’s Strategy, which has made Bitcoin central to its corporate identity. It’s even inspired a wave of copycats.

GameStop and Metaplanet both recently unveiled major Bitcoin buys, aiming to eventually hold over a billion dollars’ worth each.

Kyle Baird is DL News’ Weekend Editor. Got a tip? Email at [email protected].

It was a flawless 30-day run of daily inflows and no red for BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin exchange-traded fund. But it couldn’t last forever.

On Friday, the fund saw more than $430 million in outflows, ending a streak that pushed its assets under management briefly over $72 billion, all in just over a year since launch.

“What a run,” Nate Geraci, president of The ETF Store, wrote on X. “Not sure I have words to describe how ridiculous this is.”

The outflow caps a strong month for Bitcoin, which tapped a new all-time high of $112,000 despite falling back to the $103,000 level hours ago.

As a result, IBIT has dipped back below $70 billion in assets.

Even so, it remains the 24th largest ETF in the US, a feat unmatched by any fund this young.

“Absolutely bonkers for a one-year-old,” tweeted Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Eric Balchunas, noting that the next youngest ETF in the top 25 is more than a decade old.

Net cumulative Bitcoin ETF flows sit closer to $45 billion, once the $23 billion in outflows from Grayscale’s Bitcoin Trust are taken into account.

The fund has consistently lost assets since converting to an ETF, as investors rotate out due to its higher fees and long-running underperformance.

With a more crypto-friendly Securities and Exchange Commission, issuers are turning to altcoin projects from Solana to Dogecoin, hoping to capture a slice of the flows that spot Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs have unlocked.

The agency’s changing stance on staking, now viewed as a non-security activity in many cases, is also opening the door to US-listed staking ETFs, a product European markets have offered for years.

Crypto market movers

Bitcoin has lost 1.3% in value over the past 24 hours and is trading at $103,550.

Ethereum is down 3% in the same period to $2,520.

What we’re reading

How a Hyperliquid whale lost $100m on leveraged Bitcoin bet ― DL News

Animoca Could Be Crypto’s Next U.S. Public Offering. Is It a Strong GameFi Bet? ― Unchained

More Americans hold BTC than gold? — Milk Road

Who are alleged crypto kidnappers William Duplessie and John Woeltz? ― DL News

Kyle Baird is DL News’ Weekend Editor. Got a tip? Email at [email protected].

The crypto trader who goes by James Wynn caught the attention of the crypto community after making a bullish bet on Bitcoin worth over $1 billion last week on the decentralised exchange, Hyperliquid.

What happened next was eye-popping.

Wynn put $20 million at stake initially, and borrowed funds to place a bet 40 times larger than his initial investment, as shown on Hyperdash, a tool that tracks Hyperliquid traders

As the price of Bitcoin hit a new all-time high, his unrealised profits reached approximately $100 million.

Calamitous drop

But then Bitcoin’s price dropped more than 6%, to $105,000, after President Donald Trump on May 23 said the US was poised to slap 50% tariffs on imports from the European Union.

The markets took the development badly.

Bitcoin’s slide triggered two major liquidations, totalling 949 Bitcoin or about $100 million.

Meanwhile, the market value of Wynn’s memecoin, Moonpig, dropped 80%, to less than $20 million.

One trader took advantage of Wynn’s brinkmanship by shorting Bitcoin and Ether when Wynn went long, and conversely going long when Wynn went short.

Within the last week, this trader is up about $17 million, Hyperdash data shows.

Despite the massive swing, Wynn appears to be unfazed.

Perps casino

“The perps casino was fun. Zero regrets. Flipping $4m to $100m and back down to -$13m is one hell of a thrill. Hope many of you enjoyed it as much as I did,” Wynn said on Friday.

With a portfolio value of about $2 million, Wynn has not given up just yet.

On Friday, he opened up leveraged long positions on Pepe and Bitcoin, placing just over $1 million into each trade.

The losses continue to pile up with these positions saddled with an unrealised decline of more than $1 million.

Zachary Rampone is a DeFi correspondent at DL News. Have a tip? Contact him at [email protected].

Ethereum’s first treasury company is paying dividends — big time.

Shares in SharpLink Gaming, an online casino company that raised a $435 million Ethereum treasury this week, have skyrocketed 2,700% this week. And its market capitalisation is up 11-fold.

Not bad for an outfit with five full-time employees.

The performance is sure to burnish Joe Lubin’s credentials as an Ethereum Treasury tactician. The CEO of Consensys led the fundraising deal that drove the treasury move, plus he just joined SharpLink as chairman.

The deal marks the first time an Ethereum stalwart has followed Michael Salor’s footsteps at MicroStrategy, now called Strategy.

Potential shift

For years, Ethereum has played second fiddle to Bitcoin when it came to narratives around institutional adoption.

But this deal — and its eye-opening market reaction — could signal a shift. One especially prescient as several new Bitcoin treasury companies that launched this week suffered a drop in their stock prices.

On May 27, Trump Media & Technology, or TMT, announced it was raising $2.5 billion to finance Bitcoin purchases. The firm’s stock dropped 11%.

One day later, video game retailer and beloved meme stock GameStop said it bought 4,710 Bitcoin. Shares dropped 9%.

Alternative treasuries

Both are part of an “alarming” trend of companies following Michael Saylor’s footsteps, according to macro analyst Noelle Acheson.

Risks abound for firms that decide to mimic Strategy.

Moreover, if new Bitcoin treasury companies don’t see the success of Strategy — its stock is up 10-fold since it began its Bitcoin buying spree in 2020 — they could potentially start looking at other cryptocurrencies to beef up their balance sheets.

For instance, Saudi-backed VivoPower made a $121 million XRP treasury bet this week. But its investors enjoyed a short-lived 28% gain in their holdings.

SharpLink is bucking the trend, so far.

Pedro Solimano is a markets correspondent based in Buenos Aires. Got a tip? Email him at [email protected].