DL News

Ripple, the company behind XRP, one of the world’s largest cryptocurrencies, made waves when it purchased prime broker Hidden Road earlier this year.

It won’t stop there, according to Ripple Chief Technology Officer David Schwartz.

“Our M&A people are very busy,” the executive told DL News in New York.

“We have multiple potential acquisitions in various different stages, from early stages to late stages.”

Ripple is the creator of the XRP Ledger, a blockchain that runs on XRP. The cryptocurrency had a market value of $124 billion Thursday, making it the fourth-largest, behind Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Tether’s USDT stablecoin.

The company has been aggressively courting traditional finance, pitching XRP and its new stablecoin, RLUSD, as assets designed to facilitate cross-border payments.

In April, Ripple acquired Hidden Road for $1.25 billion. The crypto firm said it would use RLUSD as a collateral across Hidden Road’s suite of brokerage services.

Previously, Ripple acquired the crypto custody firms Metaco for $250 million and Standard Custody for an undisclosed amount.

In January, a spokesperson told DL News the firm was “actively seeking companies to purchase.”

Crypto M&A

Schwartz said Thursday those efforts are ongoing — and buoyed by a relative lack of interest from titans of traditional finance.

“There’s a unique opportunity right now for cryptocurrency companies to acquire companies that create strategic value, like the Hidden Road acquisition,” he said.

“And we’re definitely aggressively looking for those opportunities, because it seems like Wall Street hasn’t quite caught on yet. … They’re not competing to acquire the companies that could give them a leg up in these spaces.”

Crypto mergers and acquisitions have soared this year. But they have been largely limited to crypto-first companies and fintechs eager to expand crypto offerings to their base of retail traders.

Last month, Coinbase acquired crypto options exchange Deribit in a $2.9 billion cash and stock deal, and Robinhood bought Canadian exchange WonderFi for $250 million Canadian dollars in an all-cash deal.

In March, US-based crypto exchange Kraken acquired NinjaTrader, a retail futures trading platform, for $1.5 billion.

And in January, Circle, the company that issues the USDC stablecoin, bought Hashnote, the world’s largest tokenised treasury fund.

XRP Ledger

Unlike other, more flexible blockchains on which developers are free to deploy virtually any kind of application, the XRP Ledger is tightly controlled and features only a small number of applications — a design choice meant to ensure user funds aren’t siloed across a variety of exchanges and lending platforms, Schwartz said.

Nevertheless, his team is currently working to make it more flexible, or “programmable,” in developer parlance.

“I don’t think you’re going to see, even in the medium term, the full programmability,” he said.

“We like the fact that we have a niche where we have things like concentrated liquidity. But what we’re looking at is, can we get some of the benefits of programmability without the downsides?”

The XRP Ledger could, for example, soon feature smart contracts that manage payments, converting the crypto a payee receives into their preferred digital asset, Schwartz said.

Ripple is also building a lending protocol for the XRP Ledger, set to debut in the the third quarter of the year, pending approval of “validators” who confirm transactions on the blockchain.

“There’ll be somebody offchain, who curates the set of borrowers, who sues them if they don’t repay, or who handles repayment arrangements if they declare bankruptcy or whatever,” Schwartz said.

“And then the ledger can tokenize your interest in the repayments and handle the distribution of the repayment. Which is sort of a nice split between TradFi on the frontend and DeFi on the backend.”

Ripple has made a flurry of announcements in June, including the debut of tokenised treasuries, an institution-friendly decentralised exchange, and a partnership with Wormhole, a so-called crypto bridge that allows for the movement of crypto assets across otherwise incompatible blockchains.

Aleks Gilbert is DL News’ New York-based DeFi correspondent. You can reach him at [email protected].

Resupply, a stablecoin lending protocol, is reeling from an exploit that resulted in the loss of $9.3 million.

Investor deposits on the protocol have dropped to $85 million from $135 million before the incident, according to data from DefiLlama, and the market value of its RSUP token has fallen to $7 million.

The attacker, funded through privacy protocol Tornado Cash, was able to target a bug in the system that allowed them to extract millions from a deposit of about $200,000.

“The attacker exploited a price manipulation bug in the Resupply pair contract,” Meir Dolev, chief technology officer at Cyvers, a blockchain security firm, told DL News.

Pair contracts control how liquidity pools for token pairs on DeFi protocols work. Dolev said the attacker got a huge loan, about $10 million, for very little collateral by exploiting the vulnerability.

“The affected contract has been identified and paused. Only the wstUSR market was impacted and the protocol continues to function as intended,” Resupply said following the incident.

Exploits

2025 has been an especially tough year for crypto-related hacks and exploits. According to DeFiLlama, over $2 billion has been lost in 2025 alone, an increase of more than 50% from last year.

Recent exploits such as zklend and Conic have been catastrophic, as the respective projects have since shut down.

Resupply allows users to lend their crvUSD stablecoins into Curve vaults to earn yield.

“There is no single person from Curve working on that project. It’s a sad incident because they helped crvUSD to grow a little bit,” Curve founder Michael Egorov said about Resupply’s relationship with Curve.

While only its insurance pool got hit in the exploit and there are millions in funds within the protocol, the exploit causes some to question the overall security of the protocol.

“This exploit could have been prevented with proper input validation, oracle checks, and edge-case testing,” Dolev said.

So far, the team has only just acknowledged the situation, stating that it will be releasing a full post-mortem on the situation once a complete analysis has been conducted.

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

US authorities have arrested a British cybercrime suspect accused of selling stolen data from major US firms — by convincing him to accept payment in Bitcoin.

Kai West, a 20-year-old cybersecurity student from the UK, was charged in the Southern District of New York this week with conspiracy to commit computer intrusions, wire fraud, and the sale of sensitive personal and corporate data.

Operating under the alias “IntelBroker,” West allegedly led a hacker collective known as CyberN\[------] and posted offers to sell stolen data on dark web forums at least 158 times between 2023 and 2025.

But for all his technical sophistication, West made a single, critical mistake: he agreed to a Bitcoin payment.

According to court documents released on June 25, West had insisted on using Monero — a “privacy coin” designed to obscure transaction details — for all illicit sales.

But in January 2023, an undercover FBI agent persuaded him to accept a $250 payment in Bitcoin in exchange for access credentials — login details connected to a software interface, known as API, the hacker had previously breached.

That payment became the thread that unraveled the operation.

The Bitcoin wallet West provided had been funded via another wallet, which had in turn been seeded by an account at Ramp, platform that covers between fiat money like British pounds and cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. The platform requires identity verification.

Investigators discovered that the Ramp account was registered to Kai West, using a UK driver’s licence. The same ID had also been used to open a Coinbase account under the alias “Kyle Northern”, which further linked West to the transaction trail.

Unlike Bitcoin, where all transactions are permanently recorded on a public ledger and can be traced with sufficient blockchain analysis, Monero employs cryptographic methods like ring signatures, stealth addresses, and confidential transaction amounts to obscure the sender, recipient, and value involved.

This makes it extremely difficult — even for sophisticated forensic tools — to link transactions to specific individuals or wallets. As a result, Monero has become the preferred medium of exchange in illicit markets where anonymity is paramount.

The European Union is looking to ban crypto assets like Monero’s native cryptocurrency XMR. Several crypto exchanges, including Binance, OKX, and Kraken last year delisted XMR across multiple jurisdictions, which resulted in the cryptocurrency’s low liquidity.

“Regulators need a boogeyman, and Monero is that boogeyman,” Riccardo Spagni, former lead maintainer of Monero, told DL News in November. Bitcoin’s growing acceptance has led regulators to target other cryptocurrencies, Spagni said.

$25m in damages

Investigators traced overlapping IP addresses, email accounts, and even YouTube watch histories to catch the suspect.

West’s personal Google account was found to have watched several videos that were subsequently posted by IntelBroker on the forum Forum-1. His Coinbase and email activity used the same names, IP addresses, and even passwords associated with forum logins.

Despite efforts to present himself as a Russian or Serbian-speaking operator in one media appearance, West was in fact a native English speaker living in the UK and studying cybersecurity at an unnamed university, the FBI said.

Prosecutors allege he used his alias to leak or sell data from telecom providers, healthcare systems, and government-related entities — often attaching samples to boost his reputation among peers.

At one point, he was listed as the “owner” of the now-defunct Forum-1, a dark web marketplace for stolen data, and regularly posted recruitment messages to grow his group. While some datasets were sold for five-figure sums in Monero, others were leaked for free to gain notoriety.

The US Department of Justice said West’s activities had caused an estimated $25 million in damages, with stolen data covering everything from internal corporate marketing documents to the health insurance information of more than 50,000 Americans.

West is expected to appear before a US magistrate judge later this month. If convicted, he faces decades in prison.

The floodgates for altcoin exchange-traded fund filings in the US have burst wide open this year.

And firms aren’t only filing ETFs for the likes of Solana or Cardano; they’re also packaging investment vehicles for weird and wacky memecoins.

There are fund filings for Dogecoin, Bonk, and US President Donald Trump-linked memecoins. But one gassy giant is missing from the lineup: Fartcoin, the seventh-biggest memecoin by market size, just shy of $1 billion.

“I’m surprised we haven’t seen a Fartcoin ETF filed yet,” Eric Balchunas, Bloomberg Intelligence’s senior ETF analyst, said on X, noting that its market value is bigger than memecoin rival Pudgy Penguins, which Cboe filed to launch a dedicated fund for this week.

“Perhaps issuers fear brand damage or are holding fire to not jinx the SEC’s good vibes right now,” Balchunas added.

His musings come as Trump’s pro-crypto stance has opened the floodgates for altcoin ETFs this year.

The Securities and Exchange Commission is reviewing more than 70 altcoin ETF applications.

Bitcoin ETFs’ success also drive the altcoin ETFs arms race. Bitcoin ETFs amassed $107 billion in assets under management last year, becoming the most successful launch in history.

The vehicle also broadened the asset’s appeal among institutional investors, which has continued this year even amid economic and geopolitical headwinds.

The FOMO among fund managers appears to be real, given the flurry of altcoin ETF filings as issuers look to leverage the next big narrative now that Bitcoin ETFs have proven institutional hunger for digital assets.

Several altcoin ETF filings are already in the review stage after being publicly acknowledged by the SEC. Last month, the regulator delayed its decision on applications for Doge and XRP ETF proposals.

Fartcoin launched amid the memecoin boom of 2024. It reached a market size of $3.2 billion at the peak of its run.

Crypto market movers

Bitcoin is up slightly by 0.3% over the past 24 hours and is at $107,382.

Ethereum is up 1.4% over the same period to about $2,460.

What we’re reading

Bitcoin ETF investors aren’t flinching amid conflict in the Middle East, says analyst ― DL News

DeFi Dev Corp. Launches Dogwifhat Validator ― Unchained

We have a new crypto unicorn — Milk Road

Barclaycard blocks credit card crypto purchases — Finextra

ZKsync’s Airbender Helps Prove Ethereum Blocks in Under 35 Seconds on Single GPU ― Unchained

Why shares of Coinbase, the ‘most misunderstood’ company in crypto, may jump 42% ― DL News

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

Does the average US homebuyer want to back their mortgage with volatile cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum?

Probably not.

Yet William Plute, the newly appointed director of federal housing, brought the idea into focus on Wednesday when he ordered mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to consider accepting a borrower’s crypto holdings in their criteria for buying mortgages from banks.

Analysts are digesting the notion, which could introduce a new layer of risk into the financial sector.

“Implementing this responsibly requires robust risk management frameworks,” Lamine Brahimi, a co-founder of Taurus, a digital asset custody firm, told DL News. ”Price volatility, custody security, and regulatory clarity are non-negotiables.”

Despite their increased institutional adoption in recent years, cryptocurrencies are still more volatile and risky compared to traditional assets.

According to a 2024 Fidelity report, Bitcoin has been three to four times more volatile than large cap stock indexes over the past four years.

“There are definitely reasons to be concerned,” Sean Tuffy, a financial regulation expert, told DL News. “A lot will depend on what the actual crypto underwriting guidance looks like.”

A better option?

Crypto-secured mortgages aren’t a new idea. In 2022, Florida-based startup Milo Credit started letting crypto-rich customers put up their Bitcoin and Ethereum for purchases of homes.

For some, borrowing directly against crypto is a better option than cashing out and incurring a hefty tax burden.

Private lenders accepting crypto collateral is one thing.

But Plute’s order, which he said is in keeping with President Donald Trump’s vision to make the United States “the crypto capital of the planet,” impacts government-sponsored mortgage buyers.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are vital cogs in the US housing market, which is the number one source of wealth for American households.

If crypto-secured mortgages become common, it threatens to bake the increased risk more deeply into this crucial financial system.

“History has shown that when people start playing fast and loose with mortgage lending standards bad things happen,” Tuffy said.

The move has also rung alarm bells for many in the crypto industry, who compared the idea to the reckless lending practices that brought about the 2008 financial crisis.

These mortgages are solely collateralized with fartcoin and SXP6900? https://t.co/3exxVG2IhW pic.twitter.com/9W9tKmzp3h

— Rob Paone (@crypto_bobby) June 25, 2025

And Bitcoin, after all, was launched in response to that historic crisis.

Questionable quality

There’s also the issue of which cryptocurrencies will be recognised by financial institutions and mortgage brokers.

Plute’s order directs Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac “to consider only cryptocurrency assets that can be evidenced and stored on a US-regulated centralised exchange.”

That casts a wide net.

While it includes more established crypto assets like Bitcoin and Ethereum, which benefit from exchange-traded funds issued by financial giants BlackRock and Fidelity, it also includes many more assets of questionable quality.

For example, Coinbase, the biggest US-regulated exchange, has in recent months launched markets for popular memecoins Dogwifhat, Pepe, and Fartcoin.

While unlikely, these volatile joke tokens could theoretically be used to collateralise mortgages under Plute’s order.

Recent guidance from the Securities and Exchange Commission suggests that many cryptocurrencies — including memecoins — shouldn’t be classed as securities.

“If this is the case, then it’s hard to understand why they should be considered as assets for mortgages,” Tuffy said.

‘A defining moment’

Yet recognising crypto as mortgage collateral is also an acknowledgement of the asset class’ widening role in personal and corporate balance sheets, Brahimi said.

After all, asset manager BlackRock recommends a 1-2% allocation in Bitcoin for investors who wish to hold it, and even typically conservative pension schemes are diversifying into crypto.

Not all crypto boosters are against the idea, either.

Strategy chair Michael Saylor called the move “a defining moment for institutional BTC adoption and collateral recognition” in an X post.

“This means over 300,000 mortgage brokers and real estate agents in the USA are about to discover Bitcoin,” Anthony Bassili, head of allocators and tokenisation at Coinbase Institutional, said in an X post.

While it’s still early days, Plute’s order could influence how other governments address crypto’s role in their economies too.

“We expect other jurisdictions to watch this development closely, especially those already advancing digital asset regulation,” Brahimi said.

Tim Craig is DL News’ Edinburgh-based DeFi correspondent. Reach out to him with tips [email protected].

Missiles are flying. Markets are jittery. Bitcoin ETFs? Still stacking.

As tensions flared between Israel, Iran, and the US over the past two weeks, Bitcoin exchange-traded funds notched 10 consecutive days of inflows, according to data from Ecoinometrics.

That’s not a record-breaking streak. But it’s telling, analysts say.

“Institutional demand for Bitcoin doesn’t flinch easily,” Ecoinometrics said on X on Wednesday.

“The streak is still intact and that sets the stage for Bitcoin’s upside potential to play out.”

A number of market watchers have predicted Bitcoin will soon surpass its all-time high of about $111,000. Geoffrey Kendrick, head of digital assets at UK-based Standard Chartered, sees $120,000 per coin by July. Arthur Hayes, Maelstrom CIO, sees Bitcoin soaring to $1 million by 2028.

Bitcoin ETFs hold more than 1.2 million Bitcoin worth about $133 billion. That’s a whopping 6% of the network’s total supply, according to Dragonfly data analyst Hildebert Moulie.

Moreover, the consistency highlights something deeper: institutions don’t seem to be speculating anymore — they’re allocating. And they’re doing it in size, despite market jitters.

Sticky investors

Bitcoin’s price has risen in line with ETFs recent growth.

On June 22, as the US struck three alleged Iranian nuclear sites, Bitcoin dipped to about $99,000. It has quickly rebounded, and now trades near $107,000, less than 5% below its all-time high.

Bloomberg Intelligence ETF expert Eric Balchunas has also underscored the stickiness.

“The ETFs and Saylor have been buying up all dumps from tourists, FTX refugees, GBTC discounters, legal unlocks, government confiscations and Lord knows who else,” Balchunas said on X in April.

“ETF investors are much stronger hands than most think.”

‘Decoupling’

Executives at BlackRock, the leading issuer with over 52% of the entire spot Bitcoin ETF market, have become the de facto ambassadors for the top cryptocurrency this year.

“Institutional investors are really largely focused on Bitcoin,” Samara Cohen, BlackRock’s CIO of ETF and Index Investments said on April 28.

Cohen’s colleague, Jay Jacobs shares the notion.

“If you zoom out, you tend to see the longer term fundamental thesis of Bitcoin really drives it to behave differently to traditional assets,” he said on April 25.

In April, amid a tariff war between the US and China, Bitcoin began to decouple from traditional equities.

To be sure, the cease-fire in the Middle East could prove to be short-lived, and interest rates remain high. And although the temperature has dropped in the China and US tariff war, they could flare up at any time.

But for now, the message from Wall Street Bitcoin investors is clear: missiles, tariffs or rate fears — they’re not going anywhere.

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

Wall Street fails to recognise Coinbase’s potential.

In a note to investors on Wednesday, analysts from $781 billion wealth manager Bernstein made that argument, saying that Coinbase is the “most misunderstood” company in crypto and that it’s primed for a hefty stock surge.

What’s the misunderstanding? Most investors still see Coinbase as a retail trading platform — not as an infrastructure giant that powers the crypto economy behind the scenes.

“Despite multiple growth levers — from stablecoins to staking and derivatives — consensus remains far too bearish on what is effectively crypto’s universal bank,” said Bernstein analysts Gautam Chhughani and his two colleagues.

Once investors wise up, Coinbase’s stock is set to pop, said Bernstein.

They forecast a $510 price tag for Coinbase’s shares, a whopping 42% jump from its current price.

Wake-up call

Bernstein’s note points to a company nestling itself at the centre of the crypto industry.

It already safeguards assets for eight of the 11 US spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds, processes billions in derivatives through its Deribit stake, and is building out Base, the second largest Ethereum layer-2 by total value secured.

The company is now set to benefit from a friendlier US regulatory regime, having already established its bonafides as a compliance-first exchange with an ability to find new revenue streams, the Bernstein analysts wrote.

“With growing dominance in custody, stablecoins, and derivatives, and regulatory tailwinds from the Genius and Clarity Acts, we believe the market is underestimating its earnings power,” they wrote.

In 2024, Coinbase reported it took in $6.6 billion in total revenue, while net income topped $2.6 billion. Moreover, the company holds a whopping $220 billion in assets under management.

Since May, it is also the only crypto company in the S&P 500.

Underestimated giant

Coinbase has a lot going for it, Bernstein said.

It’s been busy diversifying into products that offer steadier income, and are not beholden to crypto cycles.

Just last month, it inked a $2.9 billion deal with derivatives giant Deribit — a platform that accounts for about 85% of all Bitcoin and Ethereum options trading.

Options are tools for hedging, not just speculation, which means they attract activity even in sideways — or downtrodden — markets.

Additionally, volatility in both directions also brings traders in, which can help Coinbase earn fees even in bearish conditions.

Doors unlocking

Regulatory tailwinds in the US are expected to unlock opportunities for Coinbase to offer more options products to investors, Bernstein said.

Meanwhile, its Base network, the fastest-growing Ethereum Layer-2, is becoming a force to be reckoned with in tokenised finance.

In 2024, the network generated $24 million in profit.

Coinbase’s business not pertaining to trading could hit $4.2 billion in 2025, Bernstein said. Even its first-quarter dip in earnings, driven by paper losses on held cryptocurrency, was brushed off by analysts.

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

First, zkLend lost $9.5 million to a malicious exploit in February.

Then Railgun, a privacy protocol, refused to launder the proceeds for the exploiter before losing the funds to a Tornado Cash scam.

Now, four months later, zkLend is calling it quits.

“It is with a heavy heart that we announce our decision to wind down zkLend,” the team announced on Wednesday.

Delisting

The DeFi lending protocol blamed the exploit and also the delisting of its native Zend token from major exchanges like Bybit and KuCoin for its predicament.

ZkLend becomes the latest entrant to drop out of DeFi’s Darwinian race. If there was ever a time when a protocol could survive a hack or exploit, it appears to have ended.

Conic Finance, for instance, shut down in March after suffering losses from malicious exploits on two occasions.

To be sure, there are exceptions. Alpaca Finance was undone by the cold arithmetic of obsolescence and a failure to achieve a sufficient product-market fit rather than a hack.

The losses are piling up.

Hackers, exploiters, and other malicious actors have stolen more than $2 billion from crypto projects in 2025, according to DefiLlama. That’s an almost 50% increase from the whole of last year.

In its heyday, zkLend held almost $56 billion in investor funds as a money market protocol on the StarkNet blockchain.

Rounding error

But it lost $9.5 million when an attacker exploited a rounding error vulnerability in one of its smart contracts. The attack bore similarities to other rounding error exploits suffered by DeFi protocols like EraLend.

The zkLend team tried to negotiate with the exploiter to return the syphoned funds in exchange for a 10% bounty. Those proceedings became moot when the attacker reported the loss of the funds to an apparent Tornado Cash scam.

ZkLend said it has only about $200,000 left in its treasury, which will be used to support affected users. The protocol’s frontend will also remain open for users to withdraw their assets.

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

Stakeholders in Near, the layer 1 blockchain, are mulling a sharp reduction to staking rewards in a bid to reduce the issuance of new tokens.

On Tuesday, Hot Protocol, a blockchain infrastructure project, proposed halving the maximum NEAR token inflation rate to 2.5% in a post on the Near governance forum.

“Reducing NEAR’s inflation is an urgent priority,” Hot Protocol said in the proposal. “Every additional month of the status quo means millions of new NEAR entering circulation, which is not only dilutive but also unnecessary given the low fee burn.”

Blockchains like Near incentivise validators to process transactions by rewarding them with new tokens. At the same time, users on that blockchain pay for transactions with these same tokens.

The problem is that users aren’t spending enough tokens on transactions to offset the new tokens given out to stakers. Because of this, the supply of the blockchain’s token inflates, often negatively impacting its price.

Token inflation is a pressing issue for investors. The NEAR token has tumbled 89% from its all-time high in 2022.

So far, members of Near DAO, the crypto collective that governs the blockchain, are split on the proposal.

While many support a reduction in token inflation, others warn it could have a negative impact.

“The proposal to sharply cut NEAR emissions is reckless and risks triggering a destructive cycle of unstaking, selling, and collapsing price — with no offsetting demand,” Near_Maxi, a pseudonymous Near governance participant, said in response to the proposal.

Potential impact

Hot Protocol calculates that under the current 5% inflation rate, more than 60 million new NEAR tokens are minted each year, which are worth $128 million.

In other words, users need to burn that amount through transactions, or investors need to pour that much into the NEAR token to maintain its value.

With Near blockchain users spending an average of $8,000 on fees daily, the former doesn’t seem likely anytime soon.

For stakers, the change would reduce staking yields from around 9% to 4.5%. Staking yields are higher than the blockchain’s inflation rate because not all NEAR token holders stake their tokens.

Reducing the staking yield could also make decentralised finance on Near more competitive, Hot Protocol said. When staking yields are high, DeFi users have little incentive to park their capital elsewhere.

‘Token death spiral’

Not everyone is convinced, though.

Lowering staking yields could kick off a so-called token death spiral, Near_Maxi said.

“Some stakers at the margin may only hold for the high APY — take that away, and they sell,” they said.

The theory goes that if large stakers decide to sell it could negatively impact the token’s price, potentially pushing more users to sell in a vicious cycle.

“Emission cuts don’t automatically lead to price strength. Without demand, they backfire,” Near_Maxi said. “Let’s not make NEAR another case study in how to destroy your own token.”

Several other DAO participants expressed similar concerns.

Not the only one

Near isn’t the only blockchain grappling with high token inflation. Earlier this week, a co-founder of Celestia, the modular blockchain, proposed removing staking altogether in a bid to lower token inflation.

In March, Solana voted on whether it should reduce staking rewards, saving the blockchain around $3.5 billion in tokens granted to stakers each year. The vote failed after detractors argued the move could hurt the network’s decentralisation.

In February, Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake proposed putting a cap on the amount of staking rewards the Ethereum network gives out in a bid to fix its “broken” tokenomics.

Discussion of the inflation reduction proposal will continue for the rest of the week and is scheduled to go to a vote among Near blockchain validators in July.

“The change could be activated in the network by late Q3 2025, assuming a smooth voting process and technical rollout,” Hot Protocol said.

Tim Craig is DL News’ Edinburgh-based DeFi correspondent. Reach out to him with tips at [email protected].

Trading volume on Aster is heating up.

The decentralised exchange for onchain perpetuals, or perp DEX, has already achieved a massive monthly trading volume record in June, according to data from DefiLlama — and it’s still going.

Aster’s monthly trading volume for June at more than $33 billion represents a threefold increase from the previous all-time high achieved a year ago, the data shows.

Rival Hyperliquid’s trading volume in June is almost five times that, but Aster’s surging trading volumes and new initiatives highlight how competition is intensifying.

Dark pools

The trading buzz comes as Aster rolled out hidden orders, a trading feature to shield users from front-running and price manipulation.

The rollout comes just days after Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, known among crypto pundits as CZ, called on perp DEXs to launch dark pools like that.

“If you’re looking to purchase $1 billion worth of a coin, you generally wouldn’t want others to notice your order until it’s completed,” Zhao said.

“Otherwise, people might try to buy before you, effectively front-running you. In the case of a DEX, this can lead to MEV attacks. This results in increased slippage, worse prices, and higher costs for you.”

Aster says its hidden order feature creates a shadowy trade zone where users can place and match orders without broadcasting their positions to the entire network.

The key advantage? Traders don’t move the market against themselves like James Wynn’s oversized Bitcoin trading position did in May.

The trader attracted liquidation hunters and he lost $100 million in paper profits in the process. Wynn’s high-profile liquidation became an argument for why perp DEXs need shadow zones.

Hidden orders are common in traditional finance. Institutional investors use them to avoid frontrunning and market slippage by privately matching trades off-book

But onchain, a dark pool is a more complex feature to offer.

That’s because public blockchains are transparent by default which means to create an opaque zone for hidden orders requires innovations like zero-knowledge proofs to hide transaction information until the trade is executed.

While the response from traders has been swift and Aster’s trading activity has surged, the protocol is still in Hyperliquid’s shadow.

Hyperliquid is the biggest perp DEX with over $186 billion in trading volume this month, according to DefiLlama. That’s close to 62% of the total volume for the market segment over the past 30 days.

But unlike Hyperliquid, Aster’s hasn’t released its native token. The protocol has a points programme for a possible airdrop and users are already registering activity on the protocol to secure what could be the next big token windfall.

That flow is making the onchain perps space even hotter than it’s ever been. Last month, Hyperliquid’s trading volume amounted to about 10% of Binance’s figures for crypto derivatives.

Crypto market movers

Bitcoin has gained 1.8% over the past 24 hours and is at $107,173.

Ethereum is up 0.8% over the same period to about $2,427.

What we’re reading

Mining Bitcoin is about to get a whole lot easier — here’s what’s driving it ― DL News

Crypto Markets Rebound After Iran-Israel Ceasefire Deal ― Unchained

This one chain is crushing the competition… — Milk Road

Crypto coin for Russian shadow payments moves $9bn — Financial Times

EIP-7782: Ethereum’s Slot Time Could Drop to 6 Seconds ― Unchained

Solana casino Luck.io hits $65m in bets after $500,000 influencer promo ― DL News

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

Denny Morawiak says he’s been to Borussia Dortmund’s football stadium more times in the last six months than he has in his whole life.

It’s not because the native of Saxony is a diehard fan of the Bundesliga’s second-most decorated club.

Instead, Morawiak, Coinbase’s top exec in Germany, is rewarding some of the European nation’s highest earners for investing in Bitcoin and other digital assets.

Besides taking in matches and touring Borussia Dortmund’s historic ground, he’s also throwing other splashy events to get clients to spread the word.

“They tell me they have a friend who basically needs more white glove service before joining. Or another friend who didn’t understand the tax implications,” Morawiak told DL News in an exclusive interview on Tuesday.

“At Coinbase, we should be addressing these concerns.”

Risk averse

As Europe’s biggest economy, Germany is a prize for any market exchange or investment firm. But getting affluent Germans to buy and sell Bitcoin won’t be easy.

Germans are known in the asset management industry for their particular aversion to risk.

Unlike Americans or even other Europeans, German households prize savings, shun debt, and favour safe assets such as government bonds over stocks and crypto.

In 2024, Germany’s savings rate was 20%, according to Eurostat.

The US rate was less than 5% in April 2025, according to the US Bureau of Economic Analysis.

Germans have also been slow to embrace Bitcoin and its ilk.

About 8% of the German population holds cryptocurrency, according to estimates from Triple-A, a crypto payments firm.

That is well below the UK, where a quarter of the population is purportedly in the digital assets market, according to crypto exchange Gemini.

Robust pensions

Germans have also enjoyed a robust pension system that is largely insulated from the volatility of capital markets and has historically been a sure thing for many retirees.

“The money I contribute right now goes directly to my grandparents,” Morawiak said. “I’m not as interested in what’s happening with the money because I know it’s already going to the current pensioners.”

He also said financial education and German culture just don’t put a priority on taking on market risk.

Memecoins

So, how is Morawiak going to convince Germans to buy everything from Bitcoin to memecoins such as PopCat, a $289 million cryptocurrency on Solana inspired by a picture of a wide-mouthed cat?

Surely, these assets won’t find a place in German portfolios, right?

“I would not advise people to build a pension based on memecoins,” Morawiak, a former associate partner at McKinsey & Company, the global consulting firm.

If many Germans missed the boat on investing in equities, the Coinbase exec is hoping to convince them to generate personal wealth through cryptocurrencies.

“We’re a rich country with big companies, but we are a country of relatively unwealthy people,” he said. “It’s a pity.”

Now, he is targeting a network of high-net-worth individuals and asking what it would take to increase their activity in digital assets.

Lavish events

“There are people that have created wealth already, many of them through entrepreneurship, and many of them are already diversified into crypto,” he said. “But there’s an even bigger group that is not yet in.”

Sometimes clients call him directly on the phone.

At other times, it’s through lavish events, such as watching top-flight German football.

The crypto exchange has been a sponsor of Borussia Dortmund since 2023, offering a match day box sweepstakes and an educational campaign for the club’s employees.

The company doesn’t own a suite, a representative told DL News.

In the coming weeks, he’s hosting another exclusive event for some of the platform’s power users.

The strategy?

More of the same.

“Loyalty, growth, and referral,” Morawiak said.

Liam Kelly is a DeFi Correspondent at DL News. Got a tip? Email at [email protected].

Relief is coming for Bitcoin miners.

Bitcoin’s hashrate — a measure of the raw computing power securing the network — is on track for a major difficulty adjustment.

Estimates point to a drop of around 9% by June 29. That would be the steepest drop since July 2021, when China booted its miners, sending hashrate off a cliff.

“The primary catalyst is miner revenue pressure,” Nishant Sharma, founder of Bitcoin mining communications firm BlocksBridge Consulting, told DL News.

Hashprice ,a key measure of miner profits, is “sharply below breakeven for many operations, forcing older or higher-cost rigs to shut down,” Sharma added.

For miners that have struggled amid low hashprices and a near-zero fee environment, the looming difficulty drop is a lifeline.

A sharp downward adjustment will instantly boost earnings per unit of compute, buy smaller miners a little runway, and slow the exodus of machines.

Texas heatwaves

Seasonal variations are also expected to contribute to the drop, according to Nick Hansen, CEO of mining outlet Luxor.

During the Northern Hemisphere’s summer months, miners often have to switch off their machines due to heatwaves stressing local energy grids, he told DL News.

That’s happened before in Texas, a major mining hub in the US, and is happening again today. Areas of the state are getting walloped by heatwaves, forcing Bitcoin miners to — albeit temporarily — switch off.

Bitcoin’s backbone

When machines go offline, whether that’s because of technical or financial issues, the time between the production of new blocks can stray from its every-ten-minute target.

To keep production on schedule, the protocol adjusts every 2,016 blocks, or two weeks on average.

Moreover, mining isn’t some nice-to-have activity within the Bitcoin protocol.

It’s the backbone of the network’s security, determining who gets to write new transactions to the blockchain.

If enough miners go offline — or if only the biggest players survive — Bitcoin’s decentralisation and trust model start to erode.

Already, Bitcoin mining is consolidating like never before as less profitable miners flail.

Transient drop

The incoming relief may be fleeting.

Only two months ago, for instance, miners were complaining that “higher than ever” difficulty was squeezing margins.

“Rising difficulty squeezes hashprice,” Eli Nagar, CEO of mining outlet Braiins, previously told DL News. He said most miners won’t relax until hashprice tops $60.

It’s now at $53, according to Hashprice Index.

If Bitcoin holds above $100,000 and hashprice pops, however, efficient farms will spin up idle rigs, pushing hashrate —and mining difficulty — to new tops, depressing hashprice anew.

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

A new crypto casino on Solana has pulled in more than $65 million in bets just a month after launch — and it may have influencer payouts to thank.

Luck.io has been paying up to $500,000 per month to crypto influencers to promote its onchain gambling platform, according to Jordan Fish, better known as Cobie, the founder of angel investing platform Echo.xyz.

The rapid growth of Luck.io contrasts sharply with the fortunes of Rollbit, another crypto casino that once dominated the space. Rollbit generated more than $3 million in daily revenue at its peak in mid-February.

Since then, however, Rollbit has faced sustained criticism over its business practices, including questions around fairness and the treatment of winning users.

Its daily revenue has dropped to under $400,000 — a decline of nearly 90% from February levels, according to data from Rollbit.

Rollbit’s token, RLB, has plunged more than 85% from its all-time high.

Fish claimed the team behind Luck.io is the same as Rollbit “as far as he knows”. Luck confirmed the allegation days later, stating the platform “was created in collaboration by several investors with years of combined experience within the gambling industry, including Rollbit.”

Luck.io has been on the defensive in recent days following criticism of its mechanics and scepticism that its games are, as it claims, “provably fair.”

Provably fair?

Luck.io describes itself as a “trustless” and “non-custodial” casino, offering slot games it says are “provably fair” — a term of art in crypto gambling that refers to outcomes generated by cryptographic random number functions verifiable onchain.

But critics have challenged the platform’s fairness guarantees. Among them is Foobar, a pseudonymous crypto developer and former machine learning scientist at Google, who has questioned the validity of Luck.io’s random number generation.

The company claims to use a Verified Random Function, a cryptographic method designed to generate unpredictable numbers in a way that can be independently verified.

Luck.io’s documentation indicates that it relies on the Proov Protocol — a blockchain infrastructure layer that purportedly handles bets, settlements, and randomness verification, all recorded on the Solana blockchain. The Proov website links to a technical audit conducted by blockchain security firm Halborn.

Rather than a public GitHub repository, however, the codebase Luck.io provided auditors was reportedly shared via email — a departure from industry norms.

“Code audits are done through GitHub repositories 99% of the time,” Foobar said.

“That way, the public can verify that a specific commit hash matches the deployed code. This invalidates the entire audit, since nobody has any clue what was audited.”

Foobar also alleged that the random number function itself is controlled by a multisignature wallet operated by unidentified parties.

“It pushes signatures onchain saying ‘look at my VRF I generated by myself offchain.’ This is not a VRF,” he said.

“You can simply keep regenerating ‘VRFs’ until you get a result you like, then publish it.”

Luck.io has rejected the criticism, saying it is the result of a coordinated effort by affiliates of a competing crypto casino known as YEET.

In an attempt to rebut its critics, Luck.io has published a technical explanation of its randomness model and announced a multi-million dollar bug bounty to incentivise independent audits.

“Luckio is 1 month old and already disrupting the status quo of centralized casinos. We welcome that scrutiny,” the team stated on X.

“Transparency is the reason we built a casino where every bet, random seed, and payout can be verified on-chain.”

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

About $500,000 in investor funds are at risk after Re.al abruptly stopped working on Friday.

That’s according to Luca Donno, a researcher at L2Beat, a research platform, who flagged the halt on X and noted that the layer 2 network’s blockchain production halted due to inactivity from its data availability committee, or DAC.

“It is trivial to propose a state root to steal everything with no way to challenge,” he warned, referring to a malicious upgrade a criminal could install to syphon funds from a project.

A network’s DAC is a group of whitelisted addresses, and in Re.al’s case, is responsible for posting data offchain. Without data availability, the liveness of the chain, its ability to function, no longer exists.

Donno’s warning highlights a bigger problem for DeFi than the $500,000 at jeopardy.

It comes as cybercriminals have upped the ante in 2025 alongside crypto markets’ rallying this year.

Criminals have stolen over $2 billion in attacks against crypto projects this year, an almost 50% increase from the entirety of 2024, according to DefiLlama.

What is Re.al?

Re.al is the latest project from Tangible, the team behind the USDR stablecoin project that collapsed in 2023 after failing to manage its treasury exposure.

The stablecoin lost its dollar peg by almost 50% and wiped out token holders.

While still struggling to compensate users affected by the blowup and addressing the structural flaws in their design of DeFi protocols, they pivoted to Re.al, a real world asset project.

Launched in 2024, Re.al was set up to tokenise real estate. At its peak, it had attracted $18 million in investor funds, but the project’s asset base now languishes below $500,000, the amount that Donno warned could be in danger.

Donno said users can attempt to withdraw funds from the Ethereum network, but face a 12-day delay to receive their funds.

During this period, a bad actor can deploy a malicious upgrade to the system to steal the funds since the DAC isn’t serving the necessary offchain data required to process withdrawals from the network.

Tangible’s team didn’t respond to a request for comment.

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

A version of this article appeared in our The Decentralised newsletter on June 24. Sign up here.

Distributed and permissionless technology will win a remarkable victory if decentralised financial applications become the default venue for trading equities, currencies, derivatives, and crypto assets.

But that victory will also threaten the distributed nature of DeFi, according to a new paper authored by researchers at crypto firm Flashbots, the University of Lisbon, and the Technical University of Munich.

That’s because arbitrage — trading to take advantage of price discrepancies across different exchanges and blockchains — can lead to a rich-get-richer cycle whereby actors in the shadowy world of MEV become powerful enough to censor transactions, whether to crush competitors or comply with government orders.

The intricacies of blockchain-based arbitrage “create a powerful incentive for vertical integration,” the researchers write. “The result is a small set of centralised gatekeepers.”

MEV, short for maximum extractable value, refers to the profit that can be gained from the process of selecting and arranging pending transactions to build the blocks that form a blockchain.

Examples include front-running transactions, back-running, and so-called sandwich attacks.

Arbitrage is important: it helps keep prices in line across different exchanges and blockchains. When an asset is priced too low on a particular exchange, a trader can buy it there and sell it on another exchange where the price is higher, pocketing the difference.

Do that enough times, and the prices on the two exchanges will converge.

Today, most arbitrage is done through centralised exchanges. But some traders conduct arbitrage entirely onchain, attempting to profit off price differences on decentralised exchanges on different blockchains.

The paper found that more than 9,000 addresses engaged in cross-chain arbitrage worth $868 million between September 2023 and August 2024.

But that trading was extremely concentrated: four addresses accounted for half of the volume they were able to measure. One address accounted for more than a third of that volume.

The paper notes that high-frequency trading firms and layer 2 blockchains that order transactions using so-called sequencers are among the players well-positioned to gain disproportionate power under the current paradigm.

“These alliances concentrate both physical infrastructure (clustered in few data-centers) and economic power, creating a feedback loop: sequencing advantages yield higher MEV, which funds still more sequencing reach,” the researchers write.

The decentralisation of blockchains is supposed to make finance un-censorable. In a world where crypto rules, for instance, a tyrannical government won’t be able to freeze dissidents’ bank accounts.

Or so the theory goes. This paper shows that centralisation and censorship are always lurking around the corner. Of course, Ethereum developers have a plan for that.

“Decentralising block building and lowering entry barriers — thereby undercutting exclusive sequencer–searcher deals — are critical countermeasures,” the researchers write.

Several such proposals are in the Ethereum roadmap or currently being studied.

Top DeFi stories of the week

This week in DeFi governance

VOTE: Aave votes to expand to Aptos blockchain.

VOTE: Arbitrum DAO votes to consolidate treasury management committees.

PROPOSAL: Optimism Collective considers upgrade setting stage for “Superchain” interoperability.

Post of the week

There’s a theory that one can learn of an imminent military operation by tracking publicly available data on activity at pizza joints near the Pentagon. Of course, crypto folks have (probably illegal) ideas on manipulating that data to turn a quick profit.

if you bought a bunch of world war 3 bets on polymarket and kalshi then ordered a bunch of pizzas around Alexandria VA and sold the pump would that be considered securities fraud

— Senior PowerPoint Engineer (@ryxcommar) June 18, 2025

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

First it was Bitcoin. Then XRP and Solana, and Ethereum.

Now throw Binance’s BNB token into the mix.

On Tuesday, Nano Labs, a Chinese chip maker, released a $1 billion plan to turn BNB into a treasury asset for the company.

The firm said it would raise $500 million through the sale of a convertible note, a debt instrument with the eventual option of turning into equity.

The convertible notes will be unsecured, interest-free, and turn into shares priced at $20 each over the next 12 months.

Preferred stock

It’s a structure that closely mimics how Strategy, the software firm where Saylor is executive chairman, financed its Bitcoin stack.

Saylor has now pivoted to a preferred stock strategy.

Nano Labs’s goal? To eventually hold up to 10% of BNB’s circulating supply.

With a market value of $93 billion, BNB is the fifth largest cryptocurrency, according to CoinGecko.

This latest deal shows how rapidly companies are stockpiling cryptocurrencies ranging from Bitcoin to Solana to XRP and now BNB.

Companies are no longer just buying Bitcoin as a hedge — they’re also betting on Ethereum and XRP as long-term strategic assets.

SharpLink Gaming, an online casino, said last week that it was spending nearly half a billion on Ether as a primary reserve asset. Consensys CEO Joe Lubin helped ink the deal.

Symbolic buys

XRP is also getting attention.

Chinese ride-hailing startup Webus laid out plans for a $300 million XRP stockpile, while Saudi-backed VivoPower is targeting $121 million in XRP.

Nano Labs isn’t new to the crypto corporate treasury business, however.

By March, it had acquired $30 million worth of Bitcoin through a subsidiary, at an average cost price of $99,700.

In January, the firm picked up 47 of President Donald Trump’s memecoin. It was a symbolic buy, said the company, which cost it a little over $1,100.

BNB, formerly known as Binance Coin, is the native token of the world’s biggest crypto exchange.

Holders get trading fee discounts on Binance and can use the token to pay for transactions on BNB Chain — a blockchain that powers dozens of crypto apps and games.

A large chunk of trading goes through Binance. The platform processed $24 billion in the past 24 hours, nearly six times its closest follower, BitGet.

‘Alarming trend’

While optimism brims the crypto treasuries will pay out big profits for companies, some analysts are sounding a cautionary note.

Noelle Acheson, the influential macro analyst, said the Bitcoin treasury strategy is an “alarming trend,” in that surely this is not a no-risk investment.

“Especially for those getting into the structure at a much higher Bitcoin price.”

That’s because for these firms, said Acheson, Bitcoin is not a treasury diversifier, but rather a speculative base asset that can be leveraged.

Indeed, that’s cause for concern for legendary short seller Jim Chanos who has also taken aim at Strategy by criticising Saylor’s latest move.

Chanos, who has been publicly shorting Strategy, said selling preferred shares designed to rescind dividend payments at any moment is “complete financial gibberish.”

Anyone buying in “must be crazy,” he said.

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

Thorchain, a decentralised finance app that lets users swap assets between incompatible blockchain networks, is expanding.

Over the coming months, it plans to integrate several new blockchains, including Solana, Tron, Cardano, and the Telegram Open Network, said John-Paul Thorbjornsen, a prominent Thorchain community member.

“We are all-in on adding one new chain per month,” Thorbjornsen, who was part of the project’s original developer team, told DL News.

Yet adding more blockchains doesn’t necessarily translate into more swap volume.

DeFi infrastucture

Since Thorchain integrated XRP on June 5, users have only swapped $781,000 worth of assets through the new route.

In any event, the expansion is well under way. This year, Thorchain has also integrated Coinbase’s Base blockchain.

Since its launch in 2022, Thorchain has become a widely-used piece of DeFi infrastructure.

Users value the app because it lets them swap assets between blockchains directly. Without Thorchain, they would have to use intermediaries such as Binance and Coinbase to make the swaps.

Yet Thorchain’s lack of know-your-customer and anti-money laundering checks makes it risky.

Thorchain faced criticism earlier this year after North Korean hackers used it in the laundering of hundreds of millions of dollars worth of crypto stolen from exchange Bybit in February.

New integrations

Integrating new blockchains into Thorchain poses technical challenges.

Before Thorchain can integrate Solana, for example, it needs to add a new encryption type called Edwards-curve Digital Signature Algorithm, or EdDSA, said FamiliarCow, a pseudonymous Thorchain developer.

“EdDSA is going live next month and SOL should soon follow, probably in August,” he told DL News.

Integrating Tron, the blockchain founded by crypto billionaire Justin Sun, is relatively more straightforward.

It is already set to go live in the coming version 3.8 upgrade, scheduled for July.

The Open Network and Cardano are also in the works but there are no concrete dates set yet.

“There should be one release every three to four weeks,” FamiliarCow said.

More fees

For many of the planned integrations, it will be the first time users are able to move assets between those blockchains and other incompatible blockchains, like Bitcoin and XRP, without a middleman.

Over the past year, Thorchain hasn’t prioritised integrating new blockchains. Its developers were instead focused on upgrading its so-called App Layer.

But now that’s completed, there’s a renewed priority on integrating more blockchains to boost swap volumes. Doing so means more fees generated for the node operators who run the infrastructure that processes swaps.

“New chains that move volume have been the priority,” FamiliarCow said. “We look at data from our swap partners like Trust Wallet and Ledger to help prioritise these decisions.”

While Thorchain’s XRP’s numbers are small, Bitcoin swaps accounted for more than $676 million in volume over the same period.

According to FamiliarCow, 80% of Thorchain’s swap are between Bitcoin and Ethereum, so the return on investment of adding new chains is comparatively low.

Still, with other upgrades out of the way, it’s time for Thorchain to expand to the most economically significant blockchains, FamiliarCow said.

Tim Craig is DL News’ Edinburgh-based DeFi correspondent. Reach out to him with tips at [email protected].

XRP’s jumped 9.2% over the past 24 hours after US President Donald Trump announced a ceasefire on Monday between Israel and Iran.

The Ripple-linked cryptocurrency led a recovery in the top 10 digital assets, although the gains may be short-lived if the cease fire fails to hold.

“The Iran-Israel ceasefire sparked a swift surge in sentiment and liquidity into crypto markets,” Vincent Liu, chief investment officer at Kronos Research, a crypto research firm, told DL News.

“But for this trend to sustain, it may need an extra lift in the future, whether progress in trade talks or a pullback in dollar dominance.

Risk-on assets like stocks and cryptocurrencies surged as Trump announced the ceasefire. Brent crude slid almost 5% in early Asian trading and briefly dropped below levels not seen before Israel attacked Iran’s nuclear sites on June 13.

Gold, which is a safe haven asset, dropped over 1%.

“The Iran-Israel ceasefire has meaningfully reduced immediate geopolitical risk, prompting a broader shift back toward risk-on sentiment across global markets,” Philipp Pieper, co-founder of Swarm Markets, a blockchain-based finance firm, told DL News.

“We’re seeing Bitcoin respond accordingly, trading more like a high-beta tech asset than a hedge asset, or at least in the short term. At the same time, the brief drop in Iran’s hashrate during the escalation highlighted just how physically tethered parts of the crypto infrastructure are to the real world.”

While de-escalation in the conflict has provided a breathing space for the market, it’s a fragile relief, Simon Peters, crypto analyst at eToro, the trading platform, told DL News.

“Either side breaking the terms of the ceasefire however could cause markets to retreat, unwinding the rally we’ve seen over the past 24 hours,” he said.

Other price drivers

The conflict in the Middle East is not the only key driver of crypto prices this week.

“Outside of geopolitics, markets will be waiting to see what Trump does about imposed tariffs, as the 90-day reciprocal tariff pause is due to expire in the coming weeks,” Peters said. “This could also prompt some market volatility, as we have seen previously.”

Investors also anticipate the release of key economic data this week.

That includes new US gross domestic product data on Thursday, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell’s testimony before congress onTuesday and Wednesday, and consumer spending figures being released on Friday.

Crypto market movers

Bitcoin is up 3.7% over the past 24 hours to trade at $105,281.

Ethereum is up 7.5% to trade at $2,417.

What we’re reading

Ledger launches new one-tap recovery key for crypto wallets — DL News

Reddit Explores Iris-Scanning Tech to Verify Humanity Online — Unchained

Goldman Sachs and Citadel back crypto firm Digital Asset in $135 million funding round — CNBC

Should we be worried about Iran? — Milk Road

Solana copycat Gorbagana reaches $60m as joke turns serious — DL News

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

A new blockchain that was jokingly launched last week as part of an online debate over decentralisation briefly hit a market value of $60 million.

The copycat blockchain, dubbed Gorbagana, originated from a satirical back-and-forth between crypto lawyer Gabriel Shapiro and Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko over whether decentralisation can exist when one entity controls a protocol’s branding.

What began as a hypothetical scenario quickly turned real: developers cloned Solana’s codebase within 24 hours, launched a functioning blockchain, and issued a tradable token that drew millions in investment.

Though the blockchain is not yet live, it has processed over 14 million experimental transactions and drawn contributions from a growing group of developers.

Gorbagana: a joke that became real

The dispute began as a disagreement about what “decentralisation,” a lodestar in the crypto industry, really means in practice.

Shapiro contended that technical openness is not enough — branding, too, must be governed by neutral rules if a blockchain is to be meaningfully decentralised. His comments struck a nerve in an industry where projects often tout decentralisation while remaining tightly controlled by founding teams or corporations.

Yakovenko, whose company Solana Labs stewards Solana’s development, downplayed the role of branding.

“It doesn’t matter what people call Solana in China,” he wrote, “as long as they are using the same ledger.”

In reply, Shapiro issued a public challenge: imagine two identical versions of Solana — one with its existing name and visual identity, and another with none of its trademarks, rebranded as “Gorbagana” and represented by Oscar the Grouch. Which would the market value more?

Yakovenko took the idea further, telling followers he would be “severely disappointed” if such a chain didn’t exist within 48 hours. What followed was part performance, part community experiment.

Within a day, a group of pseudonymous developers spun up a working clone of Solana’s software, complete with a functioning blockchain and newly minted token. By then, Gorbagana had moved beyond mere satire.

Gorbagana blockchain

The first version of the Gorbagana blockchain and its token were launched by a pseudonymous developer who goes by MidTermDev.

But the project quickly ran into trouble. Within hours, the same developer launched an unrelated spin-off token called Baby Gorbagana, which collapsed almost immediately, plunging to a market value of just $8,000 and leaving investors with losses.

Shapiro publicly distanced himself from the fiasco, claiming he had no control over MidTermDev‘s actions. Shapiro reaffirmed his intention to fork, or copy, Solana properly and bring in a new team of publicly identifiable developers to meet the original 48-hour challenge.

To fund development, Shapiro on Thursday opened a donation wallet, which received $20,000 in its first six minutes and has since grown to nearly $40,000. Leadership of the project has now shifted to another pseudonymous figure, Sarv Shaktiman, with Shapiro describing his new role as “chairman-style,” offering guidance while stepping back from daily involvement.

Several crypto developers have already expressed interest in building applications for the new blockchain — an early show of traction that most new projects struggle to achieve without offering generous incentives or development grants.

Still in its first week, the project has already experienced a full market cycle. The Gorbagana token reached a peak valuation of $60 million on June 21, before falling to around $20 million by June 23.

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

Bitcoin traders yanked the ripcord on Monday as they exited leveraged positions amid an escalation of geopolitical tension in the Middle East.

With US airstrikes hitting Iran’s military infrastructure over the weekend, crypto markets retreated and Bitcoin briefly dipped below $100,000 but has since recovered slightly to $102,000.

Bitcoin’s estimated leverage ratio, or ELR, cratered dramatically as the asset tumbled to its lowest price in two months, CryptoQuant shows.

ELR measures how much leverage traders are using compared to how much actual Bitcoin is on exchanges. It’s a risk metric, and a massive fall indicates widespread risk-off behaviour.

That means traders are closing high-leverage positions, either proactively or because of forced liquidations. Data from Coinglass shows more than $420 million in liquidations in the last 24 hours. Over two-thirds of those closed positions were in positive bets on long positions.

The prevailing risk-off approach likely indicates that traders are fleeing volatility rather than chasing the upside of a possible swift Bitcoin rebound.

And that’s a curious irony since the conventional narrative, at least among Bitcoin proponents, is that it’s a hedge asset that’s invulnerable to geopolitical shocks.

Some traders are even lining up bearish bets on options contracts that will pay out if Bitcoin drops to as low as $95,000 this week.

And punters on the crypto market crystal ball Polymarket are also similarly pessimistic about Bitcoin’s near-term performance. In only one week, they have reduced their expectation of Bitcoin setting a new all-time high in July from a 70% chance to 10%.

Still, the immediate pessimism might be a knee-jerk reaction rather than a full-blown crisis of confidence. BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes said Bitcoin’s current weakness was only temporary. Hayes has predicted that Bitcoin will reach $250,000 this year.

While Bitcoin has recovered some, that could change if the situation in the Middle East continues to deteriorate.

“The caveat today and into this week is the Strait of Hormuz being a critical passage for global oil trade, which handles about 20% of the world’s supply,” Jonathan de Wet, chief investment officer at Zerocap, a digital asset trading firm, said in an email. “Iran may block this, providing the next test for Bitcoin’s changing nature.”

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