Adam Efrima is the SSV Core team Co-founder. He has been active in the crypto industry since 2013. Over eight years living in China working in the financial industry and fintech space, Adam has worked in CITIC Bank covering outbound investments for Chinese SOEs, he was also in charge of setting up the eToro Shanghai operation. Since then, Adam has been deeply involved in Ethereum staking, co-founding top performing staking project Bloxstaking as well as co-founding SSV Network, a decentralized validator infrastructure for ETH staking.

Adam Simmons is Chief Strategy Officer at RDX Works, a key contributor to the Radix public ledger. He has over 13 years of experience in building &amp; growing businesses in a range of industries including online video, blockchain &amp; digital marketing. With experience in both senior leadership &amp; hands-on roles, he has repeatedly recruited, managed, and trained highly successful teams within marketing, customer success and operations functions. Adam is also a previous member of the UK Paralympic Sprint Kayaking Team and has competed in multiple World and European Championships.


Adam Swick is the Chief Growth Officer at Marathon Digital Holdings. Prior to joining Marathon, he served as a principal at Refinery Ventures, where he was responsible for identifying and recommending business strategies to accelerate the growth of all companies in Refinery’s portfolio. Before Refinery, Swick was the director of strategic finance at Kraken Digital Asset Exchange, where he managed the company’s balance sheet, debt program, investor relations, and all forecasting activities. Prior to Kraken, he founded Swick Capital, a crypto-asset hedge fund, worked at Pritzker Group Venture Capital, and was a consultant at Boston Consulting Group. Swick holds an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and a BS in finance from the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania.

Adrian Brink is the co-founder of Namada and Anoma, where he focuses on building privacy-preserving systems that are resilient to global crises. Previously, he was a core developer at Tendermint (Cosmos) and worked at the Web3 Foundation. He also co-founded Cryptium Labs, which was later sold to Chorus One, and Metastate, where he contributed to major upgrades to the Tezos protocol​.

Adrien Stern is the founder &amp; CEO of Reveel, the omnichain payments infrastructure that enables one-click cross-chain payments to connect people across borders and networks. Before founding Reveel, Adrien led digital transformation efforts at BNP Paribas CIB. He was also previously a venture builder, and owns Bridge Music, a record label and recording studio. Adrien has a Bachelor’s degree in Sciences of Management from The University of Lausanne and a Master’s degree in Business Administration from Esade. 

Alex Hoffman is Head of Ecosystem at Superposition Finance. Superposition is revolutionizing DeFi by addressing its core challenges through robust risk management powered by Concordia’s best-in-class risk engine, omnichain functionality, and transparency.

Alexei Zamyatin is a co-founder of BOB, a first-of-its-kind hybrid Layer-2 powered by Bitcoin and Ethereum. He has been a Bitcoin and interoperability research contributor since 2015 and is most known for his work on trustless cross-chain bridges and L2s. Alexei holds a PhD in computer science from Imperial College London.


Alison Haire is the CEO and founder of Lilypad, a serverless, decentralized compute network that democratizes access to computational power by providing scalable infrastructure for AI, machine learning and other high-demand processes. Before founding Lilypad, she held roles at companies such as Filecoin, IBM and Accenture. Under her leadership, Lilypad leverages idle GPU capacity worldwide to fuel an open AI economy, providing cost-effective and scalable compute resources. Her work focuses on making high-performance computing accessible to more developers and researchers, while challenging the dominance of large centralized cloud providers​​.

With over 20 years of experience leading and designing games and tech companies, Alun is well-versed in creating innovative products that tackle experiential and developer challenges. In addition to his stewardship of LAOS Network, he is CEO and co-founder of the company building LAOS, Freeverse, which focuses on building scalable blockchain infrastructure. His history as the co-creator of ‘Barcelona World Race - THE GAME,’ a cutting-edge video game enabling virtual participation in real-world events, and his wider passion for gaming, have fed into his vision for LAOS Network as a solution for the intersection of Web3 tech with both gaming and real-world applications. Alun also led Shar3d.io, a pioneering company enabling collaborative 3D web applications, and served as CTO of Bodypal.com, a virtual garment services company. He holds a Ph.D. in Medical Physics from University College London.



Amanda Cassatt is the founder and CEO of Serotonin. Amanda previously served as Chief Marketing Officer of ConsenSys from 2016 through 2019. Joining one year after the launch of Ethereum, Amanda played a crucial role in defining, creating, and growing the narrative for ConsenSys, Ethereum, and blockchain overall.

Amanda stewarded the ConsenSys brand through its global expansion across enterprises, governments, developers, and consumers. She created and scaled the marketing team to over 50 people, serving both the ConsenSys brand and 50+ portfolio companies such as MetaMask, Infura, Truffle, and Gitcoin; managing teams in product marketing, growth, design, content, community, events, email, analytics and SEO. Amanda’s contributions to some of the most successful product launches, token sales and fundraises landed her on Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2016. Amanda is the author of the world's first web3 marketing book, Web3 Marketing: A Handbook for the Next Internet Revolution.

Amanda Keleher currently serves as Chief People Officer at Consensys, one of the largest and fastest-growing companies in the blockchain technology space. A well-rounded business leader with an over 25-year career in the technology space, Amanda is the driving force behind the human element of Consensys where she is responsible for overseeing all of the aspects of people, from building and maintaining the company culture to harnessing human capital as a key driver of business. 

Before joining ConsenSys, Amanda served as the Head of People at ThoughtWorks, a global technology consultancy company, for nearly ten years, where she led the global scale expansion by opening offices around the world and recruiting a diverse workforce at a time when the DevOps movement had just been born and a new skill set were yet to be developed. After her time at ThoughWorks, she served as the Executive Vice President, People &amp; Culture of Index Exchange, one of the world’s premier ad tech organizations; and as VP of People at Little Bits and Intent Media where she excelled in designing effective and creative strategies to attract and retain world-class talent in hyper competitive environments

Andrea Berry is a seasoned online video strategist with 15+ years of experience in transformative media partnerships. 

Her early successes include helping to launch Qello Concerts, the first direct-to-consumer live-music OTT service, later transforming it into Qello Media Services and Vimeo’s OTT channels offering across various industries as their first strategic sales director for their enterprise.

Currently, as the Head of Business Development at Theta Labs, Andrea leverages her expertise in online video and blockchain to drive strategic partnerships and growth opportunities for the company. She helps enterprises take advantage and lean into the opportunities Web3 presents. 

Andrew Redden is the CEO and CTO of Last Network, a blockchain platform focused on sustainable cash flow and reinvestment. Previously, he worked at Gitcoin and has contributed to numerous DeFi and Web3 projects. Redden's career reflects a commitment to developing technologies that prioritize long-term viability and community engagement​.

Andrew Thurman is a Data Editor based in Washington, DC. He previously wrote for CoinDesk and Cointelegraph, and worked in various roles for Chainlink and Nansen. His analysis has been quoted in The Financial Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Forbes, Fortune, Reuters, The BBC, CNBC, and elsewhere. Contact Andrew at andrew@blockworks.co.

Andrey Sergeenkov writes educational articles as a freelancer. His works have been published in Coindesk, Cointelegraph, Entrepreneur and CoinMarketCap. He believes that transforming society towards lifelong learning, combined with decentralization in government and business, will lead to exponential social development.

Andy Bromberg is CEO of Beam and Contributor to the Eco Protocol. Eco has raised more than $90 million from an array of leading investors, including a16z Crypto, L Catterton, Activant Capital, Founders Fund, Pantera Capital, and others. Prior to Eco, Andy was Co-founder and President of CoinList. Andy is also a founding board member at FreeWorld, a non-profit seeking to end institutionalized poverty in the United States by providing access to living-wage jobs for people with criminal histories. He studied Mathematics and Computer Science at Stanford University and co-founded the Stanford Bitcoin Group.

An established and versatile Financial Executive with over two decades of experience running multiple trading businesses across top-level banks such as HSBC, Barclays, and UBS. After running the top Agency and SSA business for both UBS and Barclays, he took over Emerging Markets macro trading for Barclays. In 2018, wanting to go deeper into Emerging Markets he took a role as Head of Latam local markets trading where he was responsible for trading activities across Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, and Chile. In 2021 DeMartino moved into Crypto when he became CEO and founder of Coinbase Risk Strategies focused on DeFi and Derivatives trading. More recently he started Trident Digital Group, a crypto-native solutions firm that is focused on lending and safe yield generation and stablecoin adoption.


Anthony Scaramucci is the founder and managing partner of SkyBridge, a global alternative investment firm, and founder and chairman of SALT, a global thought leadership forum and venture studio.

Prior to founding SkyBridge in 2005, Scaramucci co-founded investment partnership Oscar Capital Management, which was sold to Neuberger Berman in 2001. Earlier, he worked in Private Wealth Management at Goldman Sachs &amp; Co.

In 2022, Scaramucci was ranked #47 in Cointelegraph’s Top 100 Influencers in Crypto and Blockchain. In 2016, he was ranked #85 in Worth Magazine’s Power 100: The 100 Most Powerful People in Global Finance. In 2011, he received Ernst &amp; Young’s New York Financial Services “Entrepreneur of the Year” Award.  Anthony is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and a board member of the Federal Enforcement Homeland Security Foundation. He is the author of five books.

Scaramucci served on President Donald J. Trump’s 16-person Presidential Transition Team Executive Committee, and in 2017 briefly served as Chief Strategy Officer of the Export-Import (EXIM) Bank and White House Communications Director.

Scaramucci, a native of Long Island, New York, holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Economics from Tufts University and a Juris Doctor from Harvard Law School.

Antoni is a co-founder of Aleph Zero Foundation (Switzerland), an organization overseeing the development of the Aleph Zero blockchain, and a Managing Partner of Cardinal Cryptography (Poland), firm focused on core development of the Aleph Zero ecosystem.

Ari Juels is the Weill Family Foundation and Joan and Sanford I. Weill Professor in the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech and the Technion and a Computer Science faculty member at Cornell University. He is a Co-Director of the Initiative for CryptoCurrencies and Contracts (IC3). He is also Chief Scientist at Chainlink Labs. He is the author of crypto thriller novel The Oracle (Talos Press), which was released on 20 February 2024.

Austin Alexander is co-founder of LayerTwo Labs, a company focused on advancing the Bitcoin ecosystem through innovative solutions and specializing in the development of Drivechain, a specific type of blockchain sidechain designed to foster creativity and scalability within Bitcoin.

Austin Campbell is the founder and managing partner of Zero Knowledge Consulting and an adjunct professor at Columbia Business School. Previously, he has run portfolio management at Paxos for the stablecoins as well as being the chief risk officer of Paxos National Trust, has managed fixed income trading desks at JP Morgan and Citi, and has been a portfolio manager and structurer at Stone Ridge, the parent of NYDIG. He holds a BS in Mathematics from CSU Chico and a MBA from NYU Stern.

Ben Mills is the co-founder of Meso, a payments platform connecting banks and blockchains. Prior to Meso, Ben spent a decade building payments products as an early team member at Braintree (acquired by PayPal), as Head of Product at Venmo, and working on Solana Pay at Solana Labs.

Ben Rubin is the CEO and co-founder of Towns, a decentralized messaging platform dedicated to redefining online communication. Rubin has a rich background and a decade of experience in creating digital spaces that build trust and foster human connection. Prior to founding Here Not There Labs, the developer of Towns, Ben founded two venture-backed startups, Meerkat and Houseparty, both of which reimagined how people interact digitally. He scaled his communication products to hundreds of millions of users and raised over $70M in funding from Sequoia Capital and Greylock. After Houseparty was acquired by Epic Games in 2019, Ben went on to found Here Not There Labs, a venture-backed startup with over $30M in funding from a16z crypto and Benchmark Capital.

Ben Strack is a senior reporter covering macro and crypto-native funds, financial advisors, structured products, and the integration of digital assets and DeFi into traditional finance. Prior to joining Blockworks, he covered the asset management industry for Fund Intelligence and was a reporter and editor for various local newspapers on Long Island. He graduated from the University of Maryland with a degree in journalism.

Contact Ben via email at ben@blockworks.co

Bessie is a Brooklyn-based reporter covering DeFi and technology. Bessie worked as a tech journalist for The Org prior to joining Blockworks and was a management consultant for KPMG in another life. She is originally from Melbourne, Australia and holds an MA from New York University. She is also the mother of a bratty cat named Mochi. You can reach Bessie at bessie@blockworks.co

Bezalel Eithan Raviv, an ex-member of IDF Cyber Unit 8200, is a seasoned entrepreneur with deep expertise in technology and innovation. He now leads Lionsgate Network, a blockchain analysis firm specializing in professional money recovery services for digital asset investors in the +$2.5 trillion market. Prior to this role, Bezalel founded an investment banking firm supporting AI startups and developed Halleluiah, a pioneering web3 migration pattern for global music copyrights.

Billy Luedtke is the CEO and founder of Intuition, an information protocol powering a more trustful internet. Billy previously served as senior technology advisor at EY, a leading global professional services organization providing assurance, tax, audit, strategy and transactions. At EY, Billy created the company’s blockchain consulting practice, leading the technical development of blockchain-enabled distributed systems. Billy later became a senior token engineer at Consensys, a leading Ethereum developer (MetaMask, Infura, Linea). Billy continues to serve as an advisor at Consensys and MetaMask.

Billy Sebell is the Executive Director of the XDC Foundation and an early contributor to the XDC Network. Since early 2018, Billy has worked to develop the XDC community, focused on ecosystem and network growth and implementing use cases in trade finance. Billy previously spent more than 25 years in manufacturing and consumer products, dealing with the challenges businesses face in capital markets and international trade.

Bob Bodily is the Provo, Utah-based CEO and Co-Founder of Bioniq, a BTC Ordinals wallet and marketplace. He has a bachelor’s degree in neuroscience and a Ph.D. in educational/instructional technology from Brigham Young University, with 25 articles and 1K citations. He is a data engineer with 100K+ lines of production Python code, and he has two previous software startups, including an EdTech SaaS that sold in 2021.


Bogdan is the Co-Founder and CTO of Tenderly, the full-stack infrastructure solutions provider powering Web3 developer teams with the essential tools and services throughout their development journeys. 

Prior to co-founding Tenderly, Bogdan worked as a software engineer for major software platforms such as MVP Workshop and Go Daddy where he was responsible for constructing and managing the development of distributed cloud systems before realizing the lack of infrastructural support for Web3 developers. With his vast experience in constructing, expanding, and overseeing extensive distributed cloud systems, he is well-versed in the intricacies of blockchain technologies and their practical applications. 

Brandon Truong is lead product contributor for ZetaChain. He previously co-founded social platform Yada (which was acquired in 2020) and spent time building products for BuzzFeed and Udacity. 


 Brian Pak is CEO &amp; Co-Founder of ChainLight, an award-winning blockchain security firm that specializes in smart contract audits and on-chain monitoring. He is also a co-founder of Theori, an established US-based offensive cybersecurity company, since 2016, which he still leads today, having now amassed trusted partners including Microsoft, Google and Samsung. Brian’s early career started when he co-founded and developed Kaprica Security, inventing and patenting the Skorpion Charger, an Android mobile charger that can detect malicious software with no user action required. He has worked on research and development projects with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) of the US. Brian is also a founder of the team PPP (Plaid Parliament of Pwning) which won DEF CON CTF, one of the most prestigious hacker competitions held in Las Vegas, in 2013, 2014, 2016, 2017, 2019, 2022 and 2023. Brian graduated with a Masters Degree in Software Security Research from Carnegie Mellon University.

Three years ago, his act of burning a physical Banksy ignited global discourse on NFTs and Web3, exposing the industry's flaws. Now, through XION, founder Burnt Banksy leads a mission to democratize Web3 to the masses, making ownership accessible to all by removing unnecessary barriers and complications through chain abstraction. To date: XION has raised over $36M in funding with the goal of "making crypto disappear." Ultimately, Burnt Banksy wants to provide the benefits of crypto to people without requiring them to know anything about crypto.

Byron Donalds grew up in Brooklyn, New York, and he is also the proud son of a hardworking and loving single mother. His mother dedicated her time instilling in him that greatness requires sacrifice, which drives him as a devoted family man and United States Congressman.  

Byron is a graduate of Florida State University and received a Bachelor of Arts degree in finance and marketing. Byron's career led him to Southwest Florida, where he worked in the banking, finance, and insurance industries. Elected to the Florida House of Representatives in 2016, Byron represented Hendry County and east Collier County in the State Capitol. During his tenure in the Florida House, Byron served as the PreK-12 Quality Subcommittee Chair during the 2018-2019 Legislative Session and served as the Insurance &amp; Banking Subcommittee's Chairman 2019-2020 Legislative Session. While serving in the Florida House, primarily focused on elder affairs, criminal justice reform, and ensuring that each child has access to a world-class education. 

Byron is committed to serving and giving back to the community that gave him so much. He has served Southwest Florida in many ways, including previously serving on the Board of Trustees for Florida Southwestern State College after being appointed by then-Governor Rick Scott. Byron continues to volunteer in his church as a youth leader and a mentor. He also enjoys volunteering as a coach in youth football and basketball leagues.

Congressman Byron Donalds lives in Naples, Florida, with his wife, Erika, and their three sons: Damon, Darin, and Mason. Byron has spent his entire adult life serving others, whether it be through volunteering, business, or leadership. He is committed to representing Florida's 19th Congressional District's conservative values in Washington DC to ensure a stronger Florida and a stronger nation.

Cameron B. Pick is a partner and patent attorney at the Chicago-based intellectual property boutique law firm Marshall, Gerstein &amp; Borun. He prosecutes patents for emerging technologies, including blockchain and crypto, among other innovative areas. He may be reached at cpick@marshallip.com. 

Candace Kelly is the Chief Legal and Policy Officer for the Stellar Development Foundation (SDF), a non-profit organization that supports the development and growth of Stellar, an open-source network that connects the world's financial infrastructure. She leads the team responsible for SDF’s legal affairs and the policy team that is focused on bridging the gap between the public and private sectors. Previously, Candace worked for Uber Technologies, Inc., where she helped navigate the company’s response to regulatory investigations and advised on safety, security, privacy, consumer protection, and law enforcement response. Prior to that she served for 17 years at the United States Department of Justice.

Carlos Mercado is a data scientist at Flipside Crypto, specializing in the convergence of data science, cryptocurrency, economics, and open-source research. His expertise spans the Ethereum ecosystem and over 20 other blockchains, where he leverages SQL, R, Python, and Solidity to develop innovative data models and analytics tools. Carlos's notable contributions include the creation of the True Freeze DeFi primitive and leading the production of the 2023 Crypto Users Report, generating significant industry impact. Prior to Flipside, he applied his skills in AI strategy and product development at Guidehouse and offered data science consulting services.


​​Casey Wagner is a Senior Reporter based in New York. Casey covers crypto regulation, markets and central banks. Prior to joining Blockworks, she reported on macroeconomics at Bloomberg News. She graduated from the University of Virginia with a degree in Media Studies. Contact Casey via email at casey@blockworks.co

Charles Hoskinson is a Colorado-based technology entrepreneur and mathematician. He attended Metropolitan State University of Denver and University of Colorado Boulder to study analytic number theory before moving into cryptography through industry exposure.

His professional experience includes founding three cryptocurrency-related start-ups – Invictus Innovations, Ethereum and IOHK – and he has held a variety of posts in both the public and private sectors. He was the founding chairman of the Bitcoin Foundation’s education committee and established the Cryptocurrency Research Group in 2013.

His current projects focus on educating people about cryptocurrency, being an evangelist for decentralization and making cryptographic tools easier to use for the mainstream. This includes leading the research, design and development of Cardano, a third-generation cryptocurrency that launched in September 2017.

Chris Barrett serves as the Director of Communications at Chainlink Labs and has been involved with Chainlink since 2017. Chainlink is the only on-chain data and cross-chain platform that enables financial institutions to develop customized, flexible, compliant, and future-proof blockchain applications and tokenized assets. Before this role, he founded a leading PR agency for technology startups, where he worked with over 1,000 innovative companies. Chris is also an avid runner, having maintained a streak of running for over five consecutive years. 

Chris Brooks founded CryptoAssetRecovery.com in 2017 to help digital asset owners recover lost assets. Chris was a programmer at Fidelity Investments, VP of Technology at venture-backed Carescout (which sold to GenWorth, a spinoff of General Electric) and has founded and sold three bootstrapped internet companies. 

Chris Swenor is a seasoned entrepreneur and blockchain pioneer with a 20-year career that kicked off as a self-taught programmer at age 13. He swiftly moved from corporate roles into startups, leading several to successful acquisitions. Chris started venturing into blockchain and cryptocurrency in 2013, founding Reach in 2019, a platform that has since attracted over $13M in funding and onboarded more than 8,000 developers.

In recent years, Chris founded Humble, a decentralized exchange on Algorand, and Alloy, a blockchain gaming platform acquired in 2023. He is currently working on Voi Network, a layer 1 blockchain empowering its community with user-centric governance and economics. 

Christopher Perkins is President of CoinFund, a web3 focused Registered Investment Advisor.  He is also a member of the CFTC’s Global Markets Advisory Committee and its Digital Asset Markets Subcommittee.

Ciarán Murray is a seasoned veteran of the blockchain industry. Aside from advising on numerous blockchain projects over the years, and releasing a synthetics assets proof-of-concept last year, Ciarán previously worked in the media industry for British Sky Broadcasting. He is not only well placed to understand the issues facing the media industry but also how to apply blockchain and other distributed technologies to remedy them.

Da Hongfei is the founder of Neo, an open-source, community-driven blockchain platform designed to welcome developers into the Smart Economy. Hongfei operates as CEO of Neo Global Development (NGD), the executive arm of the Neo Foundation that is committed to developing the Neo protocol and its supporting ecosystem. He is seen as a luminary in the Web3 space and as a blockchain pioneer in Asia. Hongfei received his education at the South China University of Technology, receiving degrees in technology and English.

Damian Alvarez is a communications professional helping Web3 clients get their stories heard. He is currently the Head of Communications at Aori, an omni-chain logic layer that leverages off-chain data storage to enable high-frequency on-chain trading. He has worked at agencies such as Edelman and YAP Global to assist a variety of emerging and established clients to engage in industry-wide narratives surrounding technology. He may be contacted at damian@aori.io.

Dan Keeler is Editor-in-Chief at Blockworks. Prior to joining Blockworks, he was Frontier Markets Editor at the Wall Street Journal where he managed the Journal’s coverage of smaller emerging markets as well as created a number of high-profile events and a highly regarded newsletter. Before joining the WSJ, he was the Editor of Global Finance magazine. He is also the founder of New York’s FM Network, a group that hosts gatherings of finance professionals focused on smaller emerging markets.

Contact Dan via email at dan@blockworks.co

Dan Smith is a Senior Research Analyst based in the United States covering Curve, Convex, Aave, and Compound. Daniel previously worked in tax and valuation at EY and Bennett Thrasher. He is focused on using data visualization tools to better understand the health and profitability of various DeFi protocols. Contact Dan at daniel@blockworks.co

Daniel Batten is a ClimateTech investor, Bitcoin environmental impact analyst, CEO advisor and author. He is most widely known for his data-driven approach to Bitcoin mining research.


Daniel Cawrey has been involved full-time in the crypto space since 2013, including as an editor at CoinDesk. He is author of 2020’s “Mastering Blockchain” and 2023’s “Understanding Crypto” books, both available on Amazon.

Daranee Ganesh is a publishing and production manager based in Washington, DC. She holds an LLB with a focus on emerging technologies. Prior to Blockworks, Daranee worked on several legal and non-profit projects aimed at integrating decentralized solutions in the social justice framework, specifically within immigration and environmental law. Contact Daranee at daranee@blockworks.co.

Darren Kleine is an Alberta-based reporter covering podcast content at Blockworks. Previously reporting for Cointelegraph, he wrote feature content and a weekly series focused on the personal stories of influential figures in the Web3 space. He has been an active participant in the NFT art scene since 2020, creating works on curated platforms including SuperRare and KnownOrigin and hosting an NFT art-focused podcast called NFP with DKleine. Contact Darren Kleine at darren@blockworks.co.

David is an Editor based in the Netherlands focused on data-driven journalism. Previously, he wrote for TheNextWeb's crypto vertical before launching Protos in 2021. He's a reformed hardline Bitcoiner passionate about permissionless and decentralized networks. Contact David at david@blockworks.co

David Schwed serves as the Chief Operating Officer at Halborn, an elite blockchain security firm. Prior to Halborn, he was the Global Head of Digital Assets Technology at BNY Mellon, the world's biggest custodian bank, where he integrated the IT strategy for the company's digital asset services. David was also CISO for Galaxy Digital, where he led the development of information security and IT infrastructure, and served as a risk committee advisor, evaluating emerging threats in financial services. He also founded the Cybersecurity Master's Program at Yeshiva University’s Katz School of Science and Health, sharing his expertise as a practitioner-in-residence.


Delphine Forma is the policy lead for Europe &amp; UK at Solidus Labs, a leading market compliance and market integrity firm in digital assets. With a career spanning roles in major banks and blockchain ventures, she brings extensive experience in compliance and legal across sectors. She is the founder of the crypto compliance and legal TG group with 1,400 members. A Sciences Po Lyon alumna, Delphine also holds advanced degrees in European Criminal Business Law and anti-money laundering.

Denelle Dixon is the CEO and Executive Director of the Stellar Development Foundation (SDF), a non-profit organization focused on working with and supporting changemakers to create equitable access to the global financial system through blockchain technology. She leads the teams that help maintain Stellar's codebase, support the communities around Stellar, and advocate on behalf of the network with international stakeholders. Before joining Stellar, Dixon served as COO of Mozilla, one of the most successful mission-driven open-source organizations.. During her tenure at Mozilla, she led the organization’s business, revenue and policy teams including the ongoing fight for net neutrality and the global effort to ensure that people can control their personal data.

Dermot O’Riordan serves as a Director at the POKT Network Foundation where he helps steer product development and strategy. From Ireland to Silicon Valley, Dermot’s career ranged from advising tech companies and VC firms to leading marquee industry events. His interest in Web3 was sparked in 2016 with the rise of DAOs, leading him to dive deeper into the blockchain space, where he served as an advisor to projects like Radix and Dusk, and later, spearheading growth at Eden Block.

Donovan is a reporter based in Singapore. He previously worked in editorial at Bankless and is a huge fan of spaghetti Westerns and the Wu-Tang Clan. Contact Donovan at donovan@blockworks.co.

Elena leads product marketing at Hiro Systems, a developer tooling company bringing smart contracts to Bitcoin. She has spent the past six years working in blockchain and cryptocurrency startups. Elena co-founded Blockchain Latinx, an online community that explores what blockchain means for Latinos and for Latin America. She has an MBA from NYU Stern School of Business.

Eli Cohen is a corporate lawyer with 25+ years of experience in commercial transactions, financial services and regulatory matters and has worked in Asia, Europe and the United States. He is the General Counsel for Centrifuge, a real-world asset (RWA) tokenization and securitization platform and Chief Compliance Officer for Anemoy Capital SPC Limited a British Virgin Islands fund company issuer of the tokenized Anemoy Liquid Treasury Fund 1. He is a graduate of the Georgetown University Law Center, has a Masters in International Relations from the University of Pennsylvania and a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Eli Zeger writes about democracy and its relationship with technology. His work has been published in the Boston Review, Noema Magazine, Strange Matters, Zora Zine, among numerous other publications.

Elliot is the Head of Climate Strategy at Sustainable Bitcoin Protocol, where he is helping unlock Bitcoin's clean energy potential by bridging sustainable miners and climate-conscious investors. In his role at Sustainable Bitcoin Protocol, Elliot educates policymakers and NGOs on Bitcoin’s relationship with the energy system. He is a climatetech operator focused on alleviating energy poverty, bridging the digital divide, and promoting financial inclusion through technologies such as Bitcoin. Elliot was previously a Schwarzman Scholar and has served in the military, US Department of Energy, Clinton Foundation, and more. 

Evan Thomas is General Counsel for Alluvial, a software development company supporting the Liquid Collective liquid staking protocol. He was previously at Wealthsimple, Canada’s largest consumer fintech, where he was Head of Legal for Wealthsimple’s crypto trading platform. While at Wealthsimple, Evan helped launch Canada’s first regulated staking product. Before Wealthsimple, Evan was a litigator at Osler, Hoskin &amp; Harcourt LLP for nearly 15 years. Among other notable cases, Evan was hearing counsel to 3iQ Corp. in its appeal securing regulatory approval for Canada’s first publicly traded bitcoin fund in 2019.

Felix Jauvin is the host of the On the Margin podcast. Based in British Columbia, Canada, he lives and breathes where crypto and macroeconomics intersect.

Felix Xu, crypto geek, early adopter, and NFT collector. Felix graduated from NYU Stern and founded two crypto projects, ARPA and Bella Protocol, among the global top 500 by market cap. Felix previously worked at Fosun Investment, Sackler family office, and Vertical Research in New York and Beijing. Felix loves sailing, kitesurfing and was featured in the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times for his NFT collection.

Frank has a diverse career that spans creative writing, day trading, and a 12-year stint in financial planning. After experimenting with blockchain and being an early adapter to the Solana ecosystem, Mathis co-founded GenesysGo in 2021 to create a faster, more reliable and more secure decentralized data storage protocol. Their flagship product, shdwDrive is built on Solana and aims to bridge the gap between blockchain technology and traditional business infrastructure. GenesysGo is powered by a new type of decentralized data storage consensus mechanism, built from the ground up by the GenesysGo team.

Fraser is co-founder &amp; CTO of Cubist and an Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon University. She is an expert in software correctness: her research focuses on systems security, automated bug finding, and formal verification, from verifying (parts of) production systems like browser JITs, to finding exploitable bugs in real codebases. Her tools have found many zero-day bountied bugs and CVEs in the Chrome and Firefox browsers and multiple operating systems. Fraser received her BA in English and her MS and PhD in Computer Science from Stanford.


Garrett Harper is the producer for the Empire podcast. Garrett worked in private equity and product management before jumping into crypto full-time in 2021. His favorite thing about crypto? It conflates art, gaming, finance, software, and psychology into one hyper-growth industry.

Gijs op de Weegh is the CEO and Founder of StablR, where he leads the strategy, business operations, and investor relations. He founded StablR out of his passion for implementing blockchain technology in the financial industry and exploring its possibilities. Before founding StablR, Gijs co-founded Payvision, an e-commerce payment service provider, in 2002. Under his leadership, Payvision grew to over 300 employees and achieved a turnover exceeding €4 billion.

Gísli Kristjánsson is co-founder and CTO of Monerium, the first company to issue fiat onchain. He fell in love with programming at the age of 13. After working as a bonds broker, Gísli saw the inefficiencies of securities settlements firsthand and recognized the potential of Bitcoin. Prior to co-founding Monerium in 2015, Gísli founded and sold a platform to give users access to geo-blocked content. Fun fact: Gísli’s Ethereum address is among the 1% of the oldest addresses.

Haden Patrick is Director of Business Operations of Cordial Systems, a provider of institutional-grade self custody software using a Zero Trust security model.  Haden has executive experience in team leadership, engineering and education originating from his 24 year career as a Naval Officer. After co-founding SoloKeys, the first open-source security key company, he went on to manage projects connecting web3 to traditional finance at a cryptocurrency trading firm before joining Cordial Systems.

Hadley Stern, Advisor to MPCH, has extensive experience in leadership roles within TradFi and digital asset industries. As Global Head of Custody at the Bank of New York Mellon (BNYM) from 2021 to 2023, Hadley spearheaded the creation of the industry’s first bank-grade crypto-custody platform. Hadley also previously served as Chief Operating Officer at Bloq where he was responsible for the P&amp;L, product roadmap, and general operations. Hadley was Founding President of Fidelity Digital Asset Services where he led Fidelity's Blockchain Incubator and Digital Currency group and was pivotal in early product launches, including activating Bitcoin donations to Fidelity Charitable and building and running Fidelity first Bitcoin mining Operation.



Hannah Finnerty is Blockworks' editorial operations manager and is based in the US. Hannah previously worked in podcast production for The National in Abu Dhabi. She graduated from Bowling Green State University with a degree in multiplatform journalism and Middle Eastern politics. Contact Hannah at hannah@blockworks.co.

Hatu Sheikh is the co-founder and CMO of DAO Maker, the largest on-chain funding platform with 1.5M+ users. The platform's contracts have distributed over $600M, with a cumulative return of around 10x. Hatu has a strong background in marketing and strategy and has played a pivotal role in driving the success of various blockchain-based projects and tokens, crafting effective marketing strategies, and forging powerful synergies within the industry.

Harry Duckworth, a law graduate, embarked on a unique journey that led him to become the youngest trader at global commodities giant Trafigura. He then went on to set up desks for several hedge funds worldwide, accumulating over a decade of experience in trading, hedge funds, and emergent technologies. 

Through his work, he became fascinated by the revolutionary power of blockchain tech soon after the inception of Bitcoin. Years later he founded AgriDex International, to provide digital marketplaces and supply chain information for all participants in the global food chain. 

Hind Kurhan is a Co-Founder of Thesis Defense, a decentralized technology security auditing company whose mission is the facilitation of broad adoption of decentralized technology by improving security and audit consistency throughout the blockchain sphere.


Ian Rogers is the Chief Experience Officer at Ledger, leading the consumer-facing business delivering the world’s #1 way to buy and secure cryptocurrency.  Prior, Ian was the Chief Digital Officer at LVMH for five transformative years, working with a portfolio of nearly one hundred brands across luxury including Louis Vuitton, Dior, Sephora, and Hennessy.  Ian also sits on the boards of Dr Marten’s and Lyst.

Ian spent twenty years bringing digital music to the mainstream, first with Winamp then Yahoo!, Beats, and Apple.  Ian contributed to the 2015 launch of Apple Music including Beats 1, their digital streaming channel. Ian graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Computer Science (with honors, Phi Beta Kappa) from Indiana University in 1994.  Ian built some of the earliest music-related Web sites in the early 90s and has been working with Beastie Boys since 1993.

Igor Telyatnikov is the CEO and co-founder of the blockchain and financial services technology company AlphaPoint. Headquartered in New York, AlphaPoint supports over 10 million users, powering marketplaces and wallets in over 35 countries. With 15 years of experience in tech and innovation, Igor has empowered over 150 clients, including CME Group and Scotiabank. In 2022, he partnered with the Government of El Salvador to upgrade its Chivo Wallet into a national Bitcoin and dollar wallet, creating the first nationalized crypto ecosystem. Igor previously held roles at Cvetlo, LiftDNA, and Ingersoll Rand/Allegion, and has a Bachelor’s degree in Business Marketing from Penn State University. He is a frequent speaker at industry events.

Ishan is a University of Texas McCombs School of Business graduate with a BBA in Finance &amp; Marketing. He founded and managed a Private Equity Fund that reached an eight-figure Assets Under Management (AUM) and has also gained experience with many top 200 projects of crypto market cap. In 2022, he helped found SCRIB3, a Web3 Marketing and PR venture. He was notably among the first to raise an alert about potential deceptive and unethical business practices by FTX. Ishan contributes as a DeFi analyst, an active angel investor, and an advisor in projects like Polygon Technologies.

Jack Kubinec is a Solana ecosystem reporter based in Brooklyn, New York. Jack previously interned at Blockworks before joining full-time. He graduated summa cum laude from Cornell University with a degree in sociology. Contact Jack at jack.kubinec@blockworks.co.

Jag is the CEO and co-founder of re.al, an L2 build to facilitate deep onchain liquidity for tokenized RWAs. re.al seeks to redefine how RWAs are integrated into DeFi, using yield-generating real-world assets as novel building blocks in existing DeFi primitives.

James Cirrone is a breaking news reporter based in New York. Prior to joining Blockworks, James was a reporter and newsletter writer at Bloomberg News. He graduated from the University of Maryland with a degree in journalism. He also played trumpet in the university’s marching band. Contact James via email at james.cirrone@blockworks.co.

Jason Allegrante is the Chief Legal and Compliance Officer at Fireblocks. He is an experienced Counsel with a demonstrated history of working in the financial services industry with both large, traditional financial institutions as well as early stage fintech startups.



Jason Dehni is the co-founder and group CEO of Credbull, a leading DeFi platform offering structured high fixed yield solutions in SME private credit. Jason has over 25 years of senior management experience in asset management, private banking, SME lending, insurance, risk management, and crypto across North America, Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East. His background includes serving as group COO &amp; MENA CEO of a publicly traded crypto asset management company, co-founder &amp; CEO of an SME trade finance platform, and senior leadership roles in asset management, wealth management,  insurance, and management consulting. Jason holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and an Honours BA in Economics &amp; Political Science from the University of Toronto. 

Jean-Marie Mognetti is Chief Executive Officer of CoinShares, a publicly listed investment firm that manages over five billion in digital assets on behalf of a global investor base, and an experienced commodities trader with a background in quantitative strategies. A veteran of the Global Advisors group of companies since 2011, Jean-Marie has served in various leadership roles throughout his tenure, most recently as CEO of Global Advisors (Jersey) Limited and director of GABI, the world’s first regulated Bitcoin fund. In addition to his management responsibilities as CEO, Jean-Marie oversees the firm’s proprietary trading arm, capital markets portfolio, and risk management practices – areas in which he has developed unique expertise over his career. Prior to joining Global Advisors, Jean-Marie was a quantitative strategist with Hermes Commodities Fund Managers, and an Energy Trader Assistant at Lehman Brothers. He holds Master of Science degrees in Mathematical Trading and Finance from Sir John Cass Business School in London, and Bank-Finance-Insurance from Université Paris Dauphine in Paris, in addition to a Bachelor of Science degree in Economics and Finance from Université Paris Dauphine.

Jeff is an editor at Blockworks, based in the United States. He has been a part of the blockchain space for over a decade, most recently working as US news editor at Cointelegraph. His areas of focus include empowering artists and creators through technology, using proof-of-participation methods to reward self-improvement, reducing the effectiveness of Sybil attacks, seeking transparent equity for disadvantaged communities, and exploring fairer models of world governance. Contact Jeff at Jeffrey@blockworks.co.

Jesper Johansen is the founder and CEO of NORTHSTAKE, a regulated custodial staking company specialized in building regulatory compliant crypto staking products for institutional investors and financial institutions. The team holds backgrounds from financial institutions, pension funds, large investment companies to consulting, technology and audit firms, such as Accenture, Deloitte, PwC as well as blockchain and crypto projects e.g. DAI Foundation (MakerDao), Ethereum and L1/L2s. 

Prior to NORTHSTAKE, Jesper held leadership positions with Accenture Strategy and Deloitte Consulting advising clients in heavily regulated industries to implement new technologies and drive business transformation. He holds a MBA from Copenhagen Business School and a B.Sc. in International Business. 

Jess Sun is an independent writer and content strategist. She loves bringing good ideas to light, helping the people behind them shine, and bridging gaps in understanding. Follow her on Twitter or LinkedIn. Go to her website to learn about working with her.

Jesse Knutson is the head of operations at Bitfinex Securities, where he is responsible for expanding the platform’s issuance pipeline, overseeing distribution and building its user base while ensuring compliance with regulatory standards. Prior to this role, Knutson served as vice president of financial products at Blockstream, and held roles at prominent investment banks including Macquarie Group and Barclays.

Jim Myers is an engineer, early-stage investor, and the CTO &amp; Co-Founder of Flipside Crypto, a leading blockchain data analytics and business intelligence platform. Prior to co-founding Flipside, Jim developed the core technology that took products from 0 to 1 at companies such as Mylestone, Pluralsight, and Smarterer. Jim’s journey into the crypto industry began in 2015, eventually co-founding Flipside Crypto in 2017 to help empower crypto communities to create and share data-driven insights on the projects they care most about. Jim's passion for building extends to the broader startup community via his developer event series, Stack Dive, and as an angel investor to several local Boston-area startups, including AdHawk and LinkSquares. In a previous life, Jim developed advanced models to quantify risk and abnormal returns in the market for Financial Transmission Rights, a type of energy derivative.

JJ is an advisor, mentor and co-founder working across Bitcoin, mining and web3. He currently mentors for Outlier Ventures new Bitcoin Base Camp program and has co-founded a new protocol operating in stealth mode.

Joey is ranked by Chambers and Partners as one of the top 12 lawyers in the world, advising many of the largest platforms around the globe in the space. He co-chaired the Gibraltar Government’s working group on Blockchain for 3 years, which was established to develop the infrastructure to accommodate a DLT regulatory framework. Joey is also a specialist consultant to the United Nations and trains and assesses authorities primarily around South East Asia in virtual asset developments, DeFi and regulation. He is a member of several think tanks including the prestigious global ‘Wharton Reg@Tech’ initiative, the Blockchain Industry Parliamentary Roundtable on Blockchain Technologies at Parliament in the UK, and also contributed to the UK Law Society on the Blockchain Legal and Regulatory Guidance publication. He was the Xapo Representative on the Libra/Diem Association and has also contributed to various stablecoin and CBDC developments. 

Joeyz Yu is an entrepreneur with over 18 years of experience in product design and development. He co-founded Sending Labs to revolutionize communication protocols and social applications for Web3, leading the development of their flagship products SendingMe and SendingNetwork. Previously, Joeyz co-founded MoboTab, where he created the Dolphin Browser, used by over 200 million users and later acquired by ChangYou. Joeyz's passion for empowering users and building exceptional teams drives his mission to shape the future of the internet. 

John is the Editor of Evergreen Content at Blockworks. Before Blockworks, he was the producer and founder of an explainer studio called Best Explained. As Evergreen Editor, he manages the production of explainers, guides and all educational content for anything crypto related. He is passionate about making digital asset education more accessible for degens and fence-sitters alike. Contact John at john@blockworks.co

John Woods is the CTO of the Algorand Foundation, which supports Algorand’s rapidly growing ecosystem by providing a best-in-class developer environment, supporting key infrastructure and setting technical standards, offering comprehensive support to builders and entrepreneurs, and providing the framework for decentralized governance.

Prior to joining the leadership team at Algorand, John worked as Chief Architect of Cardano at IOHK. He has held roles leading software architecture and applied cryptography at a number of firms including Informatica, ConsenSys and Central Bank of Ireland.

Ben Strack

This is a segment from the Forward Guidance newsletter. To read full editions, <a href="https://blockworks.co/newsletter/forwardguidance" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">subscribe</a>.



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We already revisited the Dan Tapiero quote about an imminent <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/crypto-ipo-boom-etoro-kraken">“crypto IPO, M&amp;A, SPAC boom.”</a> And I wrote about the possible <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/crypto-ma-mergers-feeding-frenzy-kraken">“feeding frenzy”</a> coming on the M&amp;A side.&nbsp;



Then late yesterday, Circle, the issuer of stablecoin USDC, laid out <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/circle-files-s1-ahead-of-ipo">plans for an IPO</a>.&nbsp;



&#8220;The confluence of traditional financial infrastructure and blockchain innovation, as exemplified by companies like Circle, presents compelling opportunities for institutional investors,” Offchain Labs’ Ira Auerbach said in a statement.&nbsp;



It seems <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/forward-guidance-stablecoins-bullish-institutional-das">optimism around stablecoin growth</a> (and the potential for legislation) would signal high interest in Circle. Not to mention the potential for the <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/stablecoins-tokenization-blackrock-galaxy-das#">broader tokenization segment</a>.



But it’s worth noting that while Circle’s 2024 revenue was $1.7 billion, it paid $908 million in distribution costs to Coinbase.&nbsp;



Circle’s net income for last year was $156 million. Its competitor Tether, meanwhile, <a href="https://tether.io/news/tether-hits-13-billion-profits-for-2024-and-all-time-highs-in-u-s-treasury-holdings-usdt-circulation-and-reserve-buffer-in-q4-2024-attestation/">reported</a> a profit of $13 billion in 2024.&nbsp;



Looking at another publicly-traded crypto company: Coinbase’s 2024 net income was $2.6 billion (on $6.6 billion in revenue). Meaning Circle’s net profit margin was nearly five times less than Coinbase’s, Dom Kwok <a href="https://x.com/dom_kwok/status/1907416370746102008">pointed out</a> on X. Kwok, a former analyst at Blackstone and Goldman Sachs, added: “If the Fed lowers rates later this year (as expected), Circle&#8217;s metrics will only weaken further.”&nbsp;



After all, the S-1 notes that 99% of Circle’s revenues come from reserve interest income, which is sensitive to fluctuations in interest rates.



Circle explains in the filing that the emergence of yield-bearing digital assets “represents an additional source of competition, particularly in light of the current high interest rate environment.”



Hence, probably, why Circle acquired tokenized money market fund issuer Hashnote to help market participants more easily move <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/circle-hashnote-deal-tokenized-money">between cash and yield</a>. 



There will be plenty to monitor here as to when we could see Circle stock on the New York Stock Exchange, and <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/circles-valuation-could-top-5b-post-roadshow">at what valuation</a>. Stay tuned.



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<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li><a href="https://blockworks.co/newsletter/daily">Blockworks Daily</a>: The newsletter that helps thousands of investors understand crypto and the markets, by Byron Gilliam.</li>



<li><a href="https://blockworks.co/newsletter/empire">Empire</a>: Start your morning with the top news and analysis to inform your day in crypto.</li>



<li><a href="https://blockworks.co/newsletter/forwardguidance">Forward Guidance</a>: Reporting and analysis on the growing intersection of crypto and macroeconomics, policy and finance.</li>



<li><a href="https://blockworks.co/newsletter/0xresearch">0xResearch</a>: Alpha directly in your inbox. Market highlights, data, degen trade ideas, governance updates, token performance and more.</li>



<li><a href="https://blockworks.co/newsletter/lightspeed">Lightspeed</a>: Built for Solana investors, developers and community members. The latest from one of crypto&#8217;s hottest networks.</li>



<li><a href="https://blockworks.co/newsletter/thedrop">The Drop</a>: For crypto collectors and traders, covering apps, games, memes and more.</li>



<li><a href="https://blockworks.co/newsletter/supplyshock">Supply Shock</a>: Tracking Bitcoin’s rise from internet plaything worth less than a penny to global phenomenon disrupting money as we know it.</li>
</ul>

Circle plans an IPO, but faces a competitive landscape

Casey Wagner

This is a segment from the Forward Guidance newsletter. To read full editions, <a href="https://blockworks.co/newsletter/forwardguidance">subscribe</a>.



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President Trump is slated to reveal his long-promised reciprocal tariff policies at 4 pm ET from the White House Rose Garden.&nbsp;



Just hours from the event, we still know very little. Trump and his team were working on the plans late into Tuesday evening, according to people familiar.&nbsp;



We do know, though, that Trump in the past has floated imposing additional levies on copper, lumber and pharmaceuticals. I <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/liberation-day-tariffs-us-market-growth">wrote yesterday</a> about why I’m personally most interested in hearing about a copper tariff — the US currently imports about 50% of the amount we use, and the metal is in just about everything.&nbsp;



Trump has also said he plans to slap tariffs greater than or equal to all foreign levies placed on goods other countries import from the US.&nbsp;



White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said yesterday that whatever is announced on Wednesday afternoon will go into effect “immediately.”&nbsp;



In addition to the new policies, Trump’s 25% tariff on imported cars will start just after midnight tonight. Imported auto parts will be taxed at the same rate starting in May. S&amp;P Global estimates that roughly 46% of cars sold in the US in 2024 were imported.&nbsp;



Ahead of the auto tariffs, General Motors on Tuesday announced that its Q1 sales were more than 16% higher than last year, a signal Americans may be planning their car purchases before prices increase.&nbsp;



It’s worth noting that while the discourse around tariffs has unsurprisingly revolved around the potential impact on consumer prices, the policies could also have a significant effect on growth.&nbsp;



Goldman Sachs this week upped its odds of a recession in the next year from 20% to 35%. Analysts said tariffs are expected to lead to a slowdown in business expansion and investments.&nbsp;



To be fair, the Trump administration has admitted that tariff policies are going to cause some “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/18/business/economy/trump-recession-tariffs-inflation.html">short-term pain</a>.” But they still maintain that these levies are the way to bring back domestic manufacturing. Those against the plan <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/Business/trumps-tariffs-cause-recession-experts/story?id=120329597">argue</a> that it could take years for businesses to bring operations back onshore and the impact on consumer spending may have long-term effects on the economy.&nbsp;



Liberation Day comes after Republicans held on to two open Florida House seats in Tuesday’s special elections, although the party won with a much narrower margin than they had in November. This could present some challenges for the GOP come midterms.&nbsp;



As Americans (and the world) await what Trump will say, several lawmakers on Capitol Hill are already playing defense. Former Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell has joined Democrat Sen. Tim Kaine’s efforts to block Trump’s tariffs on Canada.&nbsp;



In a Truth Social post Wednesday, Trump called McConnell and other Republicans who have said they’ll back Kaine’s resolution “disloyal.” The president added that those supporting the effort to block his Canadian tariffs are “playing with the lives of the American people” as the levies are aimed at curbing fentanyl trafficking.&nbsp;



Alongside McConnell are fellow Republicans Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski and Rand Paul. We’ll be watching for any additional Congressional efforts to block tariffs after Trump’s announcement today.



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<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li><a href="https://blockworks.co/newsletter/daily">Blockworks Daily</a>: The newsletter that helps thousands of investors understand crypto and the markets, by Byron Gilliam.</li>



<li><a href="https://blockworks.co/newsletter/empire">Empire</a>: Start your morning with the top news and analysis to inform your day in crypto.</li>



<li><a href="https://blockworks.co/newsletter/forwardguidance">Forward Guidance</a>: Reporting and analysis on the growing intersection of crypto and macroeconomics, policy and finance.</li>



<li><a href="https://blockworks.co/newsletter/0xresearch">0xResearch</a>: Alpha directly in your inbox. Market highlights, data, degen trade ideas, governance updates, token performance and more.</li>



<li><a href="https://blockworks.co/newsletter/lightspeed">Lightspeed</a>: Built for Solana investors, developers and community members. The latest from one of crypto&#8217;s hottest networks.</li>



<li><a href="https://blockworks.co/newsletter/thedrop">The Drop</a>: For crypto collectors and traders, covering apps, games, memes and more.</li>



<li><a href="https://blockworks.co/newsletter/supplyshock">Supply Shock</a>: Tracking Bitcoin’s rise from internet plaything worth less than a penny to global phenomenon disrupting money as we know it.</li>
</ul>

Trump gears up to unveil ‘Liberation Day’ tariffs 

Macauley Peterson

This is a segment from the 0xResearch newsletter. To read full editions, <a href="https://blockworks.co/newsletter/0xresearch" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">subscribe</a>.



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Babylon Labs has released details of Genesis, the first-ever bitcoin-secured layer-1 blockchain. 



Based on Babylon’s own bitcoin staking technology, the chain marks a turning point in bitcoin’s utility. Genesis has the potential to turn BTC from a passive store-of-value asset (derided as a “pet rock”) into a cornerstone for proof-of-stake (PoS) security and liquidity.



Ancient Babylon’s Code of Hammurabi, one of the oldest recorded legal codes (circa 1754 BC), introduced the concept of codified, public and enforceable rules with clear penalties for violations. It marked a transition from informal justice (based on trust, status or brute force) to a formal system of accountability.



Babylon’s bitcoin staking introduces a modern crypto-native parallel, codifying slashing-based accountability into bitcoin staking.



Since Babylon’s August 2024 launch of <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/0xresearch-newsletter-babylon-btc-staking-deposits">Phase 1</a>, the protocol has attracted as much as 57.5k BTC staked in self-custodial contracts. It <a href="https://defillama.com/">ranks</a> third by staking market cap — behind <a href="https://blockworks.co/tag/lido">Lido</a> and <a href="https://blockworks.co/tag/eigenlayer">EigenLayer</a>, which currently have about $4.4 billion in assets. Despite this impressive figure, it represents just 0.27% of bitcoin’s total supply.



Instead of relying on custodial bridges or centralized intermediaries, the Babylon protocol enables native BTC holders to secure PoS networks without ever relinquishing control of their coins. That focus on self-custody and trust-minimized participation appeals to long-time Bitcoiners like Spencer Yang, co-founder of Fractal Bitcoin.



“Bitcoin OGs really care about custodying [their] own keys, having control over [their] own financial decisions,” Yang <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UM4V2PLCPFQ">said</a>.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">The “three facets”</h2>



Babylon Genesis functions as:



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>A bitcoin-secured L1 — built on CometBFT from <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/cosmos-ecosystem-changes-after-skip-acquisition">the Cosmos stack</a> with dual-quorum staking: 100 validators staking BABY (the L1’s native token) plus 60 BTC-staked finality providers. The network boasts hourly Bitcoin timestamping for fast unbonding and protection against <a href="https://github.com/slowmist/Cryptocurrency-Security-Audit-Guide/blob/main/Blockchain-Common-Vulnerability-List.md#long-range-attack">long-range attacks</a>.</li>



<li>A control plane — Genesis coordinates security and staking information across what it terms BSNs, or Bitcoin Secured Networks. BSNs use Genesis for timestamping, finality and protocol integration, sharing revenue back to Genesis participants.</li>



<li>A BTC liquidity hub — with DEXs, restaking, vaults and, in a subsequent phase, BTC LST minting. Genesis will compete as a prime venue for BTCFi, with other trust-minimized bridge destinations building on BitVM.</li>
</ul>



Babylon certainly has some narrative winds in its sails. “Babylon Genesis feels like something that could change the entire system,” <a href="https://x.com/jack_mfer/status/1907381085761134849">wrote</a> @jack_mfer on X. “Every network that connects to Genesis benefits from Bitcoin’s strength.”



Dozens of other protocols and teams have rallied around the Babylon ecosystem, such as:



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>Liquid staking: PumpBTC, Chakra, Solv, Acorn, Bedrock</li>



<li>Custodians/wallets: Binance, Anchorage, Cobo, OKX</li>



<li>Bitcoin-secured networks: Osmosis, Sei, Nomic, Manta, Corn, Cosmos Hub</li>



<li>Finality providers: Kiln, Chorus One, P2P, Figment, Blockdaemon</li>



<li>Infra: AltLayer, Ankr, Satlayer</li>
</ul>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Next up: A trust-minimized bridge</h2>



To fulfill its role as a liquidity hub, Babylon is building a trust-minimized bridge between Bitcoin and Genesis, with research grounded in <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/bitcoin-scaling-price-evolution">BitVM2</a>. The goal is to remove the need for trusted multisigs in BTC bridging and enable native staking for apps and other networks without needing upgrades to Bitcoin Core, explained Babylon co-founder David Tse.



“Rather than waiting for protocol changes, simply leverage Bitcoin&#8217;s existing capabilities in novel ways,” Tse <a href="https://x.com/dntse/status/1906695727201620299">said</a>, “replacing trusted committees with bitcoin-backed stakers who face automatic slashing for misbehavior.”



The ambitions of Babylon Genesis thus go beyond being a proof-of-concept bitcoin-secured chain, but extend to a Bitcoin-native coordination layer designed around trustless interoperability, liquidity and PoS security with crypto’s premier asset.



Bitcoin’s market cap is larger than all other crypto assets combined, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKUvoJsKfxY">noted</a> Dan Held, general partner at Asymmetric. “If we unlock any sort of DeFi activity on top of Bitcoin, that would soon be larger than all other DeFi combined.”



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<ul class="wp-block-list">
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<li><a href="https://blockworks.co/newsletter/empire">Empire</a>: Start your morning with the top news and analysis to inform your day in crypto.</li>



<li><a href="https://blockworks.co/newsletter/forwardguidance">Forward Guidance</a>: Reporting and analysis on the growing intersection of crypto and macroeconomics, policy and finance.</li>



<li><a href="https://blockworks.co/newsletter/0xresearch">0xResearch</a>: Alpha directly in your inbox. Market highlights, data, degen trade ideas, governance updates, token performance and more.</li>



<li><a href="https://blockworks.co/newsletter/lightspeed">Lightspeed</a>: Built for Solana investors, developers and community members. The latest from one of crypto&#8217;s hottest networks.</li>



<li><a href="https://blockworks.co/newsletter/thedrop">The Drop</a>: For crypto collectors and traders, covering apps, games, memes and more.</li>



<li><a href="https://blockworks.co/newsletter/supplyshock">Supply Shock</a>: Tracking Bitcoin’s rise from internet plaything worth less than a penny to global phenomenon disrupting money as we know it.</li>
</ul>

Babylon Genesis to launch as a Bitcoin-secured L1 and liquidity hub

Kate Irwin

This is a segment from The Drop newsletter. To read full editions, <a href="https://blockworks.co/newsletter/thedrop">subscribe</a>.



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When it comes to crypto gaming, is there any point in taking on the risk that comes with building a “AAA” game — or should studios just focus on simpler mobile games with dynamic economies instead?&nbsp;



Crypto founders at Ronin and Avalanche clashed over the issue on X this week.&nbsp;



In light of <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/gunzilla-token-letter-speculation-off-grid">Off The Grid</a>’s <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/gunzilla-games-gun-token-launch">GUN token launch</a> on Monday and perceived success as a blockchain game thus far, Ava Labs founder and CEO Emin Gün Sirer declared: “AVAX won gaming for sure. If you’re developing a AAA game, there’s only one proven platform to build on.”



“AAA” is a gaming industry buzzword with no official definition attached, but it typically refers to games that cost $25 million to $40 million or more to make and come from larger studios with substantial marketing budgets.&nbsp;



Off The Grid studio Gunzilla Games has its own dedicated, private Avalanche L1 chain called Gunz. The chain is nearing 500 million total transactions since its launch, according to Avascan <a href="https://testnet.avascan.info/blockchain/gunz/home">data</a> as of Wednesday morning.&nbsp;



GUN’s future price will be difficult to predict given the slated long-term unlocks and added supply to come, as some have <a href="https://x.com/RealJonahBlake/status/1906739642176766237">pointed out</a>. The token currently sits at a $32 million market cap, and its price is down 54% from its all-time high. But only 6% of the token’s total supply is currently in circulation.



Ronin, which made a name for itself as a gaming chain with its flagship Axie Infinity back in 2021, has <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/crypto-gaming-biggest-hurdles">taken a markedly different approach</a> to crypto gaming. They’ve chosen to focus on mobile gameplay and game economies instead of on graphics, allowing them to keep budgets small while making the best games possible given those restrictions.



“AAA Web3 gaming is a waste of money,” <a href="https://x.com/Psycheout86/status/1907329569725481154">wrote</a> Ronin cofounder and chair Aleksander Larsen in response to Sirer on Wednesday morning.



“Come to $RON and let’s figure out the hard economic problems of web3 gaming together. $AVAX is focusing on the wrong thing and the token holders will suffer as a consequence,” Larsen continued, adding: “Congrats on your victory” with a salute emoji.



Is Avalanche focusing on the wrong thing? For one, the chain has other types of games that aren’t “AAA,” like Spellborne, a pixelated magic game.&nbsp;



Then there’s the question of objectives for each game — as well as each one’s target audience. Every crypto game will likely have a substantial cohort of players who are there just to “farm” or extract as much value as possible because of a crypto game’s play-to-earn elements, like <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/pixels-founder-botters-death-threats">Pixels</a> founder Luke Barwikowski has found with his Ronin-based pixelated MMORPG.&nbsp;



But should higher-fidelity graphics be the goal for crypto games — which result in much higher costs and risk?



Two years ago, with the likes of Shrapnel, Off The Grid, and other ambitious projects splashing onto the blockchain gaming scene, pushing for a “AAA” game was trendy. But with VC firms <a href="https://thedrop.beehiiv.com/p/sega-on-sui">pulling back</a> on the inflated funding rounds of the 2021 post-pandemic boom, the number of crypto games with AAA plans has declined significantly since 2020.&nbsp;



Last year, AAA titles made up less than 1% of crypto games, while indies made up over 90% of the total, per Game7 research. That ratio largely matches the broader gaming industry: <a href="https://vginsights.com/insights/article/video-game-insights-2021-market-report">Roughly 98%</a> of Steam games are classified as indie.&nbsp;



Across both crypto gaming and the broader gaming industry, more releasing titles have been indie. This may be due to broader economic factors, including the <a href="https://publish.obsidian.md/vg-layoffs/Archive/2025">waves of mass layoffs</a> and studio shutdowns we’ve seen for years now across the gaming industry.



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXfTw1aU41wO3PfUzGJaP0Xz2Mui1eUIAjLrHQ63L5sU2ccxsQ2sKUzbZfMsxi8iVt59l7IbNZ4Al3C-suJiDo-7xmtuhYE7NH0BlXwio0DxqVi2YYJbKe-hTNJsz9SoYDz5PXNDtg?key=YbN8Gw90K_EhQaG6kZkwLpgB" alt=""/></figure>



Mobile games also make up a large portion of the broader gaming pie, as <a href="https://www.pocketgamer.biz/mobile-accounts-for-49-of-global-games-market-share-despite-2-revenue-dip/#:~:text=Mobile%20accounts%20for%2049%25%20of,%25%20revenue%20dip%20%7C%20PocketGamer.biz">49% of games</a> are mobile titles, according to data from analytics firm Adjust published last year.



I think there’s substantially less room for multiple “AAA-budget” games in the crypto space specifically because you’re competing with the likes of Call of Duty and Fortnite and require much higher levels of continued capital and revenue. Whether AAA crypto games want to admit it or not, they’re in the same bracket as multibillion-dollar giants like Microsoft and Epic Games when it comes to PC player choice. Call of Duty Black Ops Cold War, for example, released in 2020 and reportedly <a href="https://www.pcgamer.com/games/call-of-duty/call-of-dutys-development-budget-ballooned-by-usd250-million-between-2015-and-2020-to-an-eye-watering-usd700-million/">cost Activision $700 million</a> to make.&nbsp;



Many typical gamers still aren’t going to get behind NFTs in video games, as we saw back in 2021 with smaller titles like the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. franchise. And we’ve seen this many times since with players’ mainly negative response to Ubisoft’s and Square Enix’s respective blockchain gaming endeavors.&nbsp;



Smaller games like mobile titles, however, aren’t at a major advantage. While 83% of mobile games are <a href="https://www.gamesindustry.biz/report-83-of-mobile-games-fail-in-the-three-years-after-launch">expected to fail</a>, those lower-budget games come at a lower cost to studios.



The market has corrected to fit more realistic expectations — including expectations around funding. Can the crypto industry fund more than one AAA game at a time? I’m not sure.



Ronin is doing well in its niche, and Off The Grid is a rare breakout of a game for the blockchain gaming sector.



There’s definitely room for both to succeed — and I think they’ll continue to attract completely different types of gamers to their titles.



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Ronin founder accuses Ava Labs of focusing on the ‘wrong things’

David Canellis

Pete Rizzo

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This week marks the anniversary of two serendipitous Bitcoin posts from celebrities on opposite ends of the cultural spectrum: Neil deGrasse Tyson and Paris Hilton.



Apex influencer Hilton came first, on April Fool’s Day in 2021. In a brief CNBC <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1OJeexYXx4">interview</a>, Hilton was asked whether she was a bitcoin investor, considering her interest in NFTs.



“Yes! I’m very, very excited about that as well. It’s definitely the future,” she replied. It was near-peak bull market at the time, with the price of bitcoin breaking past $60,000 only two weeks earlier.



“Have you been in bitcoin for a while?”



“Yes.”



“Well, I guess it&#8217;s been a good trade,” joked the interviewer.



<figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-twitter wp-block-embed-twitter"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="550" data-dnt="true">oh no. oh no Bitcoin <a href="https://t.co/VaVSqpjtBQ">pic.twitter.com/VaVSqpjtBQ</a>&mdash; Joseph Young (@iamjosephyoung) <a href="https://twitter.com/iamjosephyoung/status/1377893183481384967?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 2, 2021</a></blockquote><script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
</div></figure>



One year later, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson was pictured giving two thumbs-up at a rooftop bar along with Bitcoiners Alex Gladstein, <a href="https://x.com/pete_rizzo_/status/1875905143603892262">Saifedean Ammous</a>, and Dan Held.&nbsp;&nbsp;



Tyson expressed curiosity about bitcoin’s resilience, even as its price tumbled alongside global markets shaken by rate hikes, inflation, and geopolitical unrest. Gladstein tweeted:



“Neil asked great questions. One of his first ones was, ‘What if aliens come to earth with much more computing power — couldn’t they mine all the bitcoin?’” Which led to a great Saifedean explanation of the difficulty algorithm.”



What’s clear, looking back, is that these were signposts marking the beginning of the end of Bitcoin’s celebrity era.



<figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-twitter wp-block-embed-twitter"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="550" data-dnt="true">Scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson learning about <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/Bitcoin?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#Bitcoin</a> from the best 🙌 <a href="https://t.co/EEasTKcStP">pic.twitter.com/EEasTKcStP</a>&mdash; Bitcoin Magazine (@BitcoinMagazine) <a href="https://twitter.com/BitcoinMagazine/status/1510267231032254470?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 2, 2022</a></blockquote><script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
</div></figure>



The roots of the celebrity era can be traced to the music industry in late 2013 — also peak bull market — when Snoop Lion (née Snoop Dogg) <a href="https://x.com/snoopdogg/status/407350025677586433">tweeted</a> that he wanted to accept bitcoin for his next album, to be &#8220;delivered by drone.&#8221; The sale never materialized, but the tweet sparked attention from Coinbase and BitPay, both eager to make it happen.



About a week later, Spice Girl Mel B began <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20140125122619/https://www.melaniebrown.com/2013/12/09/mel-b-to-accept-bitcoins-via-her-website/">accepting</a> bitcoin for her single “For Once in My Life,” even offering a discount to fans who paid in BTC “due to the extremely low transaction costs of using bitcoins.”



Still, the intent for both Mel B and Snoop Dogg — two of the first celebrities to publicly show interest in Bitcoin — was to experiment with bitcoin as money.



Six months later, 50 Cent raked in 700 BTC (~$400,000) for his 2014 album Animal Ambition, when bitcoin was still trading under $700.



He then forgot about it, only to be reminded by TMZ almost four years later, when a reporter <a href="https://www.tmz.com/2018/01/23/50-cent-made-millions-bitcoin-animal-ambition-album/">pointed</a> out it would’ve been worth between $7 million and $8.5 million. 50 Cent later <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/feb/27/50-cent-denies-reports-he-is-a-bitcoin-millionaire">confirmed</a> that the bitcoin was sold immediately upon receipt.



<figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-twitter wp-block-embed-twitter"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="550" data-dnt="true">50 Cent (0.000046 BTC) posted on instagram about making millions of dollars in Bitcoin and forgetting about doing it <a href="https://t.co/fycFbwMaUZ">https://t.co/fycFbwMaUZ</a> <a href="https://t.co/aD6VLj3zfS">pic.twitter.com/aD6VLj3zfS</a>&mdash; Neeraj K. Agrawal (@NeerajKA) <a href="https://twitter.com/NeerajKA/status/955913503080108032?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 23, 2018</a></blockquote><script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
</div></figure>



Around the same period, Lily Allen revealed that she had been offered “hundreds of thousands of bitcoins” to livestream a concert about 5 years earlier — but had turned it down with a dismissive “as if.” Some celebs clearly strayed too far from Bitcoin, resulting in <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/kim-kardashian-in-sec-crosshairs-for-ethereummax-promotion">awkward and costly</a> entanglements — the most <a href="https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11892491/Gisele-says-blindsided-FTX-failure-trusted-hype-SBF.html">severe</a> of which were ultimately <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/one-year-since-terra">triggered by events</a> that <a href="https://www.nansen.ai/research/blockchain-analysis-the-collapse-of-alameda-and-ftx">occurred</a> only one month after deGrasse Tyson’s thumbs-up picture from April 2022.



If that picture marked the beginning of the end for Bitcoin’s celebrity era, Trump’s recent alignment can be celebrated as the end of the end.&nbsp;



Bitcoin was suddenly no longer a financial quirk, but both bona fide money used by the US President to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4u-L9sS2r4">pay</a> for burgers in bars, and a credible safe-haven asset <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/bitcoin-sovereign-state-era">managed</a> by the Treasury and Commerce secretaries. Any individual celebrity adopting Bitcoin may never be as impressive.



So, what comes next, now that Bitcoin is in its post-celebrity era?&nbsp;



Think of it like music: the “post-” in genres like post-punk signals a turn back toward experimentation. No neater way to bring Bitcoin full circle in the culture than that.



— <a href="https://x.com/dcanellis/">David Canellis</a>



<hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity"/>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Rizzo’s take, the Bitcoin Historian</h2>



Some celebrities are better price indicators than others.&nbsp;



Patron Saint of Bitcoin Bottoms: Paris Hilton



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXfepv6FxDo2ZEuiZjviCCEfGqxnRIv8ZEKi6CxRMAeCSbf2ABTNNv4d7E1_GpOCCD07knPDtSJc8DUIbKkMx5fAu9e4nJNnITEy-kwGBN3YOw_rRtOmcl4AgDBFP34BWYDT9obk3A?key=PVNMjxZsbdy0xg6DokwMECCn" alt=""/><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Paris Hilton with the founders of the failed Ethereum project The DAO (<a href="https://www.facebook.com/jaesonma/photos/futuristic-discussion-with-the-block-chain-disruptors-founders-of-wwwethereumorg/10154189696695120/">2015</a>)</figcaption></figure>



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXeESQUB6iGEk_rNKaCkSaYZLqSoOWez1704MQKbIgsaFmc7nbJtl16dLW3ckpGyEjw1SU5KfeE4xGkgleV-Mo2-YRNLLM04D34klJymtlksuZrYMUoiPt3Sg2p76DDMXR5n-6fMsA?key=PVNMjxZsbdy0xg6DokwMECCn" alt=""/><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Paris Hilton bullish on NFTs (<a href="https://parishilton.com/nft/">2021</a>)</figcaption></figure>



Patron Saint of Bitcoin Tops: Katy Perry



<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1682" height="872" src="https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Screenshot-2025-04-02-at-1.16.41 PM.png?w=1024&amp;h=1024" alt="" class="wp-image-99975" srcset="https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Screenshot-2025-04-02-at-1.16.41 PM.png?w=1682 1682w, https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Screenshot-2025-04-02-at-1.16.41 PM.png?w=300 300w, https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Screenshot-2025-04-02-at-1.16.41 PM.png?w=1024 1024w, https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Screenshot-2025-04-02-at-1.16.41 PM.png?w=768 768w, https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Screenshot-2025-04-02-at-1.16.41 PM.png?w=1536 1536w, https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Screenshot-2025-04-02-at-1.16.41 PM.png?w=428 428w, https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Screenshot-2025-04-02-at-1.16.41 PM.png?w=470 470w, https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Screenshot-2025-04-02-at-1.16.41 PM.png?w=389 389w, https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Screenshot-2025-04-02-at-1.16.41 PM.png?w=80 80w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1682px) 100vw, 1682px" /><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Katy Perry posts her “crypto claws” (<a href="https://www.instagram.com/katyperry/p/BeXchJzFkhJ/?hl=en">February 2018</a>)</figcaption></figure>



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXd_UebgMROYX07_Kcq6AMMlFhwDYd48HPKpL1BEDV0VACYSH7QbM_6WtZayHBx9mS6nkl6frS4GK6R8YDSiPEzA_pVmum95OSJMLu5XWctKgwd0BuJs_59s5yE91hKEV1sLYVAUsA?key=PVNMjxZsbdy0xg6DokwMECCn" alt=""/><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Katy Perry Instagram post (<a href="https://www.instagram.com/katyperry/p/CZ5Qw2-vVoW/?img_index=1">February 2022</a>)</figcaption></figure>



When you see Paris Hilton, buy. When you see Katy Perry, sell. I don’t make the rules.



— Rizzo



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Paris Hilton vs. Katy Perry: Which celebs are bitcoin buy signals?

Katherine Ross

This is a segment from the Empire newsletter. To read full editions, <a href="https://blockworks.co/newsletter/empire" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">subscribe</a>.



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We finally have Circle’s <a href="https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1876042/000119312525070481/d737521ds1.htm#rom737521_1">S-1</a> and, honestly, it’s just as juicy as I had hoped.&nbsp;



It looks like Circle, which <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/circle-files-s1-ahead-of-ipo">plans to list on the New York Stock Exchange</a> under ticker CRCL, is aiming for a valuation of around $4 billion to $5 billion.&nbsp;



Some folks — including PitchBook’s Robert Le — have noted that it’s a rather low valuation. In Le’s case, he thinks it could be purposefully low.



Coinbase, when it went public in 2021, kicked off trading with a nearly $100 billion valuation. Obviously, the two companies, while very intertwined, have different business models, so don’t get too excited about Circle getting anywhere near those levels.&nbsp;



<figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-twitter wp-block-embed-twitter"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="550" data-dnt="true">Circle earned ~$1.7b revenue in 2024 and paid out $900M+ to <a href="https://twitter.com/coinbase?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@coinbase</a> as a distribution partner That ~$1B going to Coinbase likely comes with little to no cost/opex to serve. At 10x earnings = $10 B mkt cap and likely contributes ~25% of <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%24COIN&amp;src=ctag&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">$COIN</a> valuation For perspective -… <a href="https://t.co/2Et3yaSgas">pic.twitter.com/2Et3yaSgas</a>&mdash; James Ho (@jamesjho_) <a href="https://twitter.com/jamesjho_/status/1907187974594240647?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 1, 2025</a></blockquote><script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
</div></figure>



Especially if stablecoin legislation is passed.&nbsp;



But the roadshow will be the real test for the stablecoin issuer, Le told me.



“My guess is, if it all goes well, that valuation should push up much higher toward the end of their roadshow. And then that would be a positive signal,” especially if interest is higher than anticipated.&nbsp;



As Wyatt Lonergan of VanEck Ventures noted, the issuer will face questions around the market evolution and what could possibly be the beginning of “stablecoin wars,” which would see everyone, including big banks, look to issue their own stablecoins.&nbsp;



<figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-twitter wp-block-embed-twitter"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="550" data-dnt="true">Partner costs are probably the biggest line item to pay attention to, but also the most misunderstood line item, coming out of Circle’s IPO filing. Today, Coinbase takes the lion share of USDC revenue as the primary distribution partner. $900m ish of that $1 billion number.… <a href="https://t.co/z7sFKTJRKw">https://t.co/z7sFKTJRKw</a>&mdash; Wyatt Lonergan (@Wyatt_Lonergan) <a href="https://twitter.com/Wyatt_Lonergan/status/1907191801884102978?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 1, 2025</a></blockquote><script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
</div></figure>



It’ll “come down to how the market evolves and begins using stablecoins at scale. If that stable is USDC, then they’ll get a strong multiple even as their take rate declines, because the potential markets they can grow into are massive.”



But on the venture capital front, strong demand for the listing could open up a new exit path for crypto investments, and that would be a “shift that might encourage additional capital inflows into crypto startups.”



Circle could — and so far looks to be — just the start of a crypto IPO boom, with others like Kraken, Chainalysis and Fireblocks in the wings. Add in the pick up in M&amp;A activity and the liquidity routes are wide open for a lot of folks.



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Circle’s valuation could top $5B post-roadshow

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I’ve got a dose of optimistic news for you this morning: From a venture capital perspective, the first quarter wasn’t so bad!



Preliminary data from PitchBook suggests that the quarter saw roughly $4.5 billion in VC spending, with half of that coming from Binance’s deal with Abu Dhabi’s MGX. To put that figure into context, we saw a little over $2 billion per quarter last year.



If we continue at this pace — and I know it’s early to say this — we could see spending hit $18 billion. That number is still nowhere near the $33 billion raised back in 2021, but it shows that the sector’s bouncing back, and it’s not looking frothy.



Back in December, PitchBook’s Robert Le told us he wouldn’t be surprised if we saw “multiple” $5 billion quarters and, clearly, we’re not too far off.



He told me that part of the momentum is coming from the larger deals, $100 million or bigger, that we haven’t seen too much of so far this cycle.



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXeWujWcpvtylZESfIjiXWqcWUsoLWLhWUoxihTHwb0m513yhP9dyKbUfRLAo5C_d0XgsjvZd0Hsa0P5b2tNZynI9NsDb0kRbUCdURtKgQ5yeLMch3pDu4GPj3x27CYqqHEObfzOjg?key=NB0rP1ohR988jmRNVbyn1kF2" alt=""/><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Source: TIE Terminal</figcaption></figure>



Right now the average deal size in March sits at roughly $60 million, though — looking at the chart above — that’s clearly a jump from the deal sizes we saw last year.



“I think as the mega funds come back to market, we&#8217;re going to expect to see a lot of those larger deals get funded, and that&#8217;s going to really [show in the] amount of venture capital dollars being invested,” he said.



There’s preliminary evidence to support that, too. Le said he’s heard that Katie Haun’s not having a hard time raising $1 billion for two new funds, which was first reported by Fortune. The interest shows that limited partners are looking to invest in some of the so-called mega funds.



“Overall sentiment” is good for crypto VCs across the board, even emerging partners focused on seed or pre-seed funding.



Speaking of those smaller rounds, we might be seeing more of them at the moment, but Le thinks that larger deals will pick up as companies scale; it’s just a matter of where we are in the cycle. Per TIE data, the seed stage round is currently the most active round type.



It should come as absolutely no surprise that Le expects projects focused on institutions to garner the most interest right now.



One thing that’s “great for startups in this space is that these institutions are more likely to partner or buy rather than build internally.” Le expects this to drive a “large chunk of venture funding” going forward.



On the flipside, Le doesn’t think we’re going to see a flock to app-layer spending — anything that serves retail, he clarified.



“The general view is that retail hasn’t come back to the market,” though Le admitted that this mindset might be “short-term thinking.” The “holy grail” for crypto is to integrate retail users who are using crypto apps with real-world value. They’re not going to come in just for the tokens, and some may not even interact with tokens.



In fact, social media projects could potentially be the winners in the sector. Look at Farcaster, for example. Le said the project’s doing an “okay job,” but he wants to see them focus on a larger audience outside of the crypto native crowd.



Given that they raised $150 million last year, he thinks they have the capital to start winning over a broader audience.



Let’s start onboarding.



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Venture capital spending topped $4.5B in Q1: PitchBook

AI firm Sentient Labs, founded by Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal and backed by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, is preparing to launch Open Deep Search (ODS), a new framework designed to rival closed-source AI search products such as Perplexity.



ODS aims to boost Sentient Chat’s capabilities, with Sentient co-founder Himanshu Tyagi telling Blockworks that the “goal is to have all these different agents which are building on our models to be integrated there.”



<figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-twitter wp-block-embed-twitter"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="550" data-dnt="true">**Why we released ODS: the Open Deep Search framework that outperforms Perplexity** Deep research offerings are most useful of AI agents. These agents answer your queries by consulting multiple data sources and using multiple tools for reasoning over them. The response takes…&mdash; Himanshu Tyagi (@hstyagi) <a href="https://twitter.com/hstyagi/status/1907068387962089981?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 1, 2025</a></blockquote><script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
</div></figure>



It’s currently limited to select testers, though a full public release is expected in the next few months.



Sentient Chat is the platform in which users can “​​experience not only our models, but all the applications built on model collecting.”&nbsp;



“That&#8217;s why we have both these things going, but our value proposition is just models. So our claim is that even though great models … may come, we are in a sort of age of abundance for the next one to two years, especially because of this very interesting geopolitical play.”



The team designed ODS to be owned by the community, which means it can be modified and allows developers to “build domain-specific plug-ins, private search agents and alternative reward mechanisms,” the press release added.&nbsp;



Sentient is focused on building “loyal” AI models, such as its flagship model Dobby.



When scored against a benchmark called FRAMES, Sentient’s accuracy was higher than both Perplexity’s Sonar Reasoning Pro and GPT-4o Search Preview, according to a press release.&nbsp;



The team wants to make AI more accessible across the board through decentralization. Tyagi told Blockworks that he’s “absolutely” bullish on the intersection of AI and crypto.&nbsp;



“Open-sourcing a framework that outperforms industry leaders like Perplexity throws down the gauntlet to closed-source AI developers while giving developers access to a powerful primitive that frees them to create the applications they’ve always dreamed of,” Tyagi said.



Decentralization is key, he added, because it’s hard to know what centralized entities are missing in terms of data.&nbsp;



“I am very bullish on decentralizing data sources itself” because it solves the problem, he explained.&nbsp;



While some have compared Sentient to Perplexity, Tyagi dismissed this, saying Sentient doesn’t have a direct competitor. Rather, he says the team is more focused on building models.



Currently, there’s a waitlist of nearly two million for Sentient Chat, and roughly 700,000 users of its loyal AI model Dobby.



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Peter Thiel-backed Sentient to launch Open Deep Search 

Jack Kubinec

This is a segment from the Lightspeed newsletter. To read full editions, <a href="https://blockworks.co/newsletter/lightspeed" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">subscribe</a>.



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Miller Whitehouse-Levine, former CEO of the DeFi Education Fund, yesterday announced his latest venture as founder and CEO of the Solana Policy Institute.&nbsp;



Then, this afternoon, Blockchain Association CEO Kristin Smith said she would become the fledgling non-profit’s first president in May.



The non-profit’s launch and big-name hires in the crypto policy space will grow Solana’s small-ish footprint in Washington DC. The new Institute joins Solana infrastructure venue Jito and venture capital firm Multicoin as the most public Solana organizations doing business in Washington.  



Smith started as CEO of the Blockchain Association — perhaps DC’s most well-known crypto policy organization — in 2018, according to her LinkedIn page. Whitehouse-Levine got his start in crypto policy working under Smith at the Blockchain Association.



“This isn’t goodbye to the industry I love – just a shift in perspective,” Smith said in an X post announcing her departure and new role.



After working at the Blockchain Association, Whitehouse-Levine served as CEO of the DeFi Education Fund from 2021, until a couple weeks ago, when he stepped down to launch the Solana Policy Institute. Whitehouse-Levine only began working on the Institute in mid-January, he told me in an interview.



Whitehouse-Levine said market structure legislation — which the Republican-led House of Representatives is currently <a href="https://www.cryptoinamerica.com/p/house-to-hold-hearing-on-crypto-market?selection=8a48c439-2a4d-4e76-8fde-cffd7a29327a&amp;triedRedirect=true#:~:text=Miller%20Whitehouse-Levine%2C%20the%20founder%20of%20the%20DeFi%20Education%20Fund%20%E2%80%93%20D">working</a> on proposing — is “critically important” for the crypto industry. He balked at listing Solana-specific policies for 2025.&nbsp;



“Our objective is not to establish some regulatory capture or tech-specific policies,” Whitehouse-Levine said.



Still, not everyone looked favorably upon the Solana ecosystem’s foray into the decidedly-not-cypherpunk realm of US federal policy.



“L1s trying to influence politics is the exact opposite kind of energy that brought me and so many others into crypto,” David Hoffman, co-host of the popular Ethereum-leaning podcast Bankless, wrote on X.&nbsp;



But for better or worse, having boots on the ground in DC may be table stakes for blockchains in these heady days for the US crypto industry. Congress has its Bitcoin bulls. Ripple built up its DC infrastructure through years of regulatory battles. 



After a year of dramatic <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/how-solana-became-the-peoples-chain">usage and developer growth</a>, Solana is entering the political fray.



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‘Solana Policy Institute’ nets CEOs of Blockchain Association, DeFi Education Fund

This is a segment from the Forward Guidance newsletter. To read full editions, <a href="https://blockworks.co/newsletter/forwardguidance" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">subscribe</a>.



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US equities slipped early in today’s session on February’s disappointing Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (<a href="https://www.bls.gov/jlt/">JOLTS</a>) report. 



The release shows that job openings continued to drop, while quits also declined. Hiring and firing rates were mostly unchanged. Layoffs, however, were on the rise. 



The S&amp;P 500 and Nasdaq Composite indexes fell as much as 0.7% and 0.8%, respectively, after the report was published.&nbsp;



Job openings came in at 7.56 million — a four-year low — compared with a projected 7.63 million. Additional DOGE-related layoffs and slowdowns in federal hiring are likely not included in February’s figures.&nbsp;



Odds of a May interest rate cut from the Federal Reserve ticked up slightly on the report. Those odds now sit at 15.2%, per data from CME Group.&nbsp;



Friday’s March employment report will give markets, and central bankers, a better look at current labor market conditions. If inflation continues to inch higher and the employment situation deteriorates further, the current pause may not last much longer.



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US equities slip after job openings disappointment

This is a segment from the Forward Guidance newsletter. To read full editions, <a href="https://blockworks.co/newsletter/forwardguidance" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">subscribe</a>.



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The countdown to President Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” is on, and the White House remains tight-lipped about what will be in his tariff announcement tomorrow.&nbsp;



Bulls are optimistic Trump will put an end to the back-and-forth trade policies that have <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/tariff-trade-overshadows-earnings-season">unnerved markets</a> since he took office. The logic goes: No matter what the levies actually are, at least the policies will be set in stone.



I’m less certain tomorrow will bring, well, certainty. Trump yesterday hinted that he would be open to negotiations with foreign nations, so the pattern — in which harsh and sweeping policies are announced, then either <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/us-revokes-colombia-tariff-threat">quickly walked back</a> or delayed — may continue after all.&nbsp;



Most of the conversation around tariffs has been about how higher levies will impact consumer prices (i.e. inflation and Fed policy). But the bigger impact of tariffs is arguably that doing business with the US is going to get more expensive, which in turn is bad for growth.&nbsp;



Trump and his team maintain that short-term pain is to be expected, and they say it’s a small price to pay for bringing manufacturing back to the US.&nbsp;



Tomorrow’s announcement will likely focus on global reciprocal tariffs, which we’ll be watching. But personally, I’m most interested in seeing if the administration targets copper imports.&nbsp;



The US currently produces about half the amount of copper it consumes annually, meaning roughly 1 million metric tons are imported. Copper is virtually in everything: wiring, plumbing, motors, medical devices, personal electronics — you get the picture.&nbsp;



“Dr. Copper” may be a dated economic indicator, but expect to see the metal dominating headlines should tariffs come down the line.



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What ‘Liberation Day’ could mean for US equities, growth

Stablecoin issuer Circle has taken a step toward going public.



Circle plans to list its stock on the New York Stock Exchange pending SEC approval, a Tuesday filing shows. It would trade under the ticker CRCL.&nbsp;&nbsp;



“We think that we can create a new defining internet platform company that is built on the internet financial system,” Circle wrote in its S-1 — a form used to register securities offerings with the SEC. “And we believe that we are still in the very early stages in the development of this new financial system.”&nbsp;



Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire said that the stablecoin firm’s journey is complex, having to navigate an “evolving ecosystem where innovative technology and highly regulated, legacy financial services are intersecting in ways that will give rise to challenges and uncertainties.”&nbsp;



Allaire added: “Building a new internet financial system, creating major new infrastructure for money and economic activity, shaping and responding to policy, and operating this infrastructure in a complex global macro environment — well, it’s hard.”



The filing represents the first time Circle’s finances are available for public review.



Circle reports minting roughly $504 billion of USDC and redeeming about $464 billion of USDC from Jan. 1, 2021 to Dec. 31, 2024 — “redemptions that have always been one-for-one with the US dollar,” the company wrote.&nbsp;



Adjusted earnings before income tax, depreciation or amortization (EBITDA) for 2024 came out to $284 million, per the filing.&nbsp;&nbsp;



In the risk factors section of the filing, Circle warned that it operates in a “rapidly changing and highly competitive industry, and our results of operations and future prospects depend in part on the continued growth of the Circle stablecoin network, our ability to monetize the Circle stablecoin network, and our ability to innovate and create successful new products and services and improve existing products and services.”



Risk factor sections are normal in these types of SEC filings.&nbsp; Circle’s filing comes about a week after trading platform eToro filed for an IPO.



10T Holdings CEO Dan Tapiero said at last month’s Digital Asset Summit that he’s expecting “a crypto IPO, M&amp;A, SPAC boom” <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/crypto-ipo-boom-etoro-kraken">in the coming months</a>.&nbsp;



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Circle files S-1 ahead of long-awaited IPO

This is a segment from the Forward Guidance newsletter. To read full editions, <a href="https://blockworks.co/newsletter/forwardguidance" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">subscribe</a>.



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You’ve heard again and again about the crypto industry “maturing.” More M&amp;A deals are likely to be an ongoing byproduct.



The quarterly number of M&amp;As in crypto is building, reaching a record level during the first three months of 2025. While momentum could snowball from here, the economy’s stability remains a wild card.&nbsp;



There were 62 crypto M&amp;A transactions in Q1, according to advisory firm Architect Partners — up from 59 deals in the final quarter of 2024.&nbsp;



Each of those totals is nearly double that of Q3 2024 (33 deals). The end of 2024, of course, had lots of crypto optimism: Donald Trump’s election <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/donald-trump-declared-president-2024-election">win</a>, <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/new-sec-crypto-task-force">regulatory</a> progress/promises, <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/sec-actions-timeline">a softening SEC</a>, and rising crypto prices.



“I see larger financial players stepping in to add crypto platforms, markets and custodians to their already-diversified financial services offerings, now that the risk of negative outcomes is greatly reduced,” Baker Botts partner Samuel Dibble told me.



During Blockworks’ Digital Asset Summit last month, 10T Holdings CEO Dan Tapiero alluded to an M&amp;A boom coming alongside <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/crypto-ipo-boom-etoro-kraken">an expected pick-up</a> in crypto IPOs.&nbsp;



The Q1 crypto M&amp;A activity was unprecedented in more ways than one, noted Architect Partners founder Eric Risley. Aside from the record deal count, there were seven transactions over $100 million and the largest in crypto history: Kraken&#8217;s $1.5 billion acquisition of NinjaTrader.&nbsp;&nbsp;



So-called “bridge transactions” — made between crypto and non-crypto companies — will remain a theme going forward, Risley said. The Kraken buy was a bit atypical, given it was a crypto exchange that acquired a traditional foreign exchange and futures business.&nbsp;&nbsp;



The Kraken-NinjaTrader deal also touches on another trend likely to continue — companies seeking out regulatory compliance and licensing.&nbsp;&nbsp;



“NinjaTrader is registered with the CFTC and has a lot of regulatory ‘stamps of approval’ that acquirers see as a fast track to expanding — or simply bolting on — crypto capabilities to their existing businesses,” Dibble noted.



Related to that, Dibble said he expects more non-US companies swooping in to acquire US-licensed operators to quicken business plans in what is now a more attractive market.&nbsp;



“We will see what ultimately unfolds, but I think it has all the signs of being a feeding frenzy,” Dibble noted.



Galaxy Digital CEO Mike Novogratz said on the company’s earnings call last week that a lot of private crypto firms probably want to sell.



“They see [TradFi] companies coming in with big balance sheets,” he noted. “And most crypto businesses, fortunately or unfortunately, are tied to the overall index of crypto prices.”



Indeed, economic uncertainty is the counter to a pro-crypto Trump administration, Risley argued. Crypto price performance has proven to be highly correlated with traditional assets, which have taken a hit given tariff unknowns and even the possibility of a recession.&nbsp;“The state of the global economy matters, and crypto will be buffeted by economic weakness if it develops,” Risley said. “Economically stressed market participants simply withdraw or take less risk.”



He added: “Skew toward optimism. But perhaps not as strongly, as the economic and foreign policy uncertainties have emerged.”



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‘Feeding frenzy’ possible as crypto M&A picks up

This is a segment from The Drop newsletter. To read full editions, <a href="https://blockworks.co/newsletter/thedrop" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">subscribe</a>.



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The shooter game Off The Grid has faced some disapproval — and some praise — over a purported confidential letter.



The letter in question was reportedly emailed to Gunzilla Games’ private investors in regard to its GUN token that became tradeable on Binance this week. GUN launched on Monday and <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/gunzilla-games-gun-token-launch">hit a $68 million</a> market cap within hours of launch, but that number has since fallen to $40 million.&nbsp;



The <a href="https://x.com/pixiekate13/status/1906777971005829541">letter</a> references a SAFT, or a Simple Agreement for Future Tokens, that means investors gave the company money upfront for tokens at a later, future date.&nbsp;



The copy-pasted text of the letter was posted on X yesterday by a crypto trader and got over 115,000 views in less than a day. The larger post also included the trader’s scathing criticism of the decision. We don’t know more about the specifics of the SAFT yet, though.&nbsp;



The supposed text of that email also references a change to GUN’s vesting tokenomics — and offers investors a chance for a refund if they don’t want to agree to the new terms.



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXeRnExDMneGra87-nxiF_LMsC_Rqwi-NJsDLFab0L7gsGEMhBxWcl4X8UOhP55BLz7hCXmV2XUrt7RsViNNND1emY-lX02ZBLAH-Yfmy8zvJZcxTLBVe7y470pA8LDZwY9Up6OyUw?key=eiHP8XU0o4ADlGCoXjX4cQe7" alt=""/></figure>



What exactly might these changes be? The trader who leaked the purported letter, Grail.eth, <a href="https://x.com/graildoteth/status/1906737689191473480">claims</a> seed round investors were supposed to get 5% of their GUN tokens unlocked on launch day, while strategic round investors were supposed to see 2% of their tokens unlock on launch.&nbsp;



According to the public GUN whitepaper, the strategic round is seeing 0% of tokens unlocked on launch. The Private A and B rounds have been granted the same. This means these groups’ tokens won’t be unlocked for at least a year because their tokens have a 12-month cliff, with 18 months of vesting.



Some traders on Twitter speculate that the changes may be in order to fund the token’s listing on Binance, though this has not been confirmed by Gunzilla or Binance.&nbsp;



&#8220;We do not charge listing fees to projects listing on Binance,” a Binance spokesperson tells Blockworks. “Regardless, deposits from project teams are refundable and designed to help protect users by ensuring that projects are serious about building their projects, keeping them alive and continuing to build after listing on Binance. The deposit also serves to help protect users in situations where projects harm them by failing to deliver on their commitments.”



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXfy0oO4-u2jb-Gae6lELR0Rmlgzr6ycjF5jtd-DhwFlZ0tnU50XGDHoi7LWhAA_AuNfm7aku0Da3TTDeYBxB0h4P_qwa-JXtnkxtrN8qAWS710KnGqEZ1-BdX_Og3SHF0rB4KYmlw?key=eiHP8XU0o4ADlGCoXjX4cQe7" alt=""/></figure>



Others have <a href="https://x.com/0xAkina_/status/1906731320849641653">criticized</a> GUN’s tokenomics for allotting a significant amount to investors in the first place.&nbsp;



But not everyone’s seeing these tokenomics in a negative light.&nbsp;



I’m personally a fan of any project that makes investors wait longer to unlock their tokens. The “dump on retail” price action isn’t fun for anyone, and it can kill excitement around a new project fast if it happens shortly after a token launches.&nbsp;



“A rare instance where the project chooses its users over VCs,” <a href="https://x.com/avery_bartlett/status/1906738335428587882">wrote</a> Ava Labs Marketing Lead Avery Bartlett in response to the post with the letter, while also admitting he understood the criticism around it (Gunzilla is using its own Avalanche L1).



In a DM, Bartlett told Blockworks: “The people I know didn’t get [a letter]. I got nodes on secondary and didn’t get it,” suggesting validator investors did not see a change to their tokenomics.



Theodore Agranat, Gunzilla’s Director of Web3, told Blockworks he was “not sure” when asked about the letter’s legitimacy.



“I do know that whatever letter was sent out had [a] confidentiality clause attached to it. So not sure,” he said, adding that he would speak with his team.



Agranat’s response indicates a letter was sent confidentially — we just don’t know with 100% certainty if this copy-pasted text matches it.



When Blockworks reached out a day later to follow up regarding the letter, Agranat did not respond by time of publication.&nbsp;



Blockworks has reached out to Gunzilla for additional comment.



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Off The Grid confidential letter sparks speculation around tokenomics

Donovan Choy

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If you ask the average person in crypto what problems the industry faces today, “too many chains, not enough apps” quickly comes up as a common gripe.



This complaint has a striking parallel to the days of the early internet.



During the dot-com boom of the late 90s and early 2000s, skeptics similarly criticized the perceived overinvestment in excessive infrastructure, particularly fiber optics.



Telecom companies (Global Crossing, WorldCom, AT&amp;T) spent billions laying undersea cables and long-haul fiber networks based on the belief that internet traffic would grow exponentially.



Even internet pioneer Bob Metcalfe criticized this perceived overinvestment, arguing that there simply wouldn’t be enough demand.



With the luxury of hindsight, we now know that Metcalfe was wrong (Metcalfe <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1d1xg1/til_robert_metcalfe_predicted_in_1995_that_the/">literally ate</a> his words in 2006 after he conceded his error).



The explosive surplus of bandwidth is what makes amazing products like YouTube, cloud computing, and Netflix possible today.



Netflix, for instance, was a mail-based DVD rental business for years until it slowly began its transition to streaming in 2007 — thanks to the foundations of bandwidth infrastructure that had been laid prior.



In short, the bet that “if we build it, demand will come” eventually proved true for the internet, though it took a decade and the bankruptcy of internet infrastructure companies like Global Crossing.



Ethereum is (kind of) placing its chips on a similar bet today.



Per its <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/ethereum-scaling-interop-sequencing">rollup-centric roadmap</a>, the Ethereum L1 today in effect gives up execution fees to L2s.



But Ethereum plans to eventually reap the profits in data availability (DA) fees through its upcoming upgrades to scale the supply of DA. The idea is that Ethereum DA will eventually be so abundantly plentiful that it would induce eventual user demand.



Just like the early internet builders, Ethereum researcher Justin Drake <a href="https://youtu.be/yvP39-EOADU">believes</a> that “if we build it, demand will come.”



Drake’s moonshot math looks like this: At 10 million TPS, with each transaction paying $0.001 in DA fees to Ethereum, that comes up to ~$1 billion per day of revenue for Ethereum.



(This assumes L2s use the Ethereum L1 for DA, as opposed to an alternative DA layer like Celestia or EigenLayer. But Drake believes the benefits of synchronous composability will make it so.)



It’s a bold thesis, considering DA consumption today; Ethereum’s blob gas fees came up to about a mere $272k in March.



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXcwR4OD-izr37fe2tJxfQPEgMPmGLChD4Lq9RPqgXfte5MCKTMg5C8Ad-_O40CKd9H1PDqa2tmA4ZWZITRVDEW9CsUuqtwI4UaxsFcgSRSecsLbRkl63O1TG98sLgEXNpZnZqt_YA?key=kRoqvm_ZUgyHO1lsNH38B_Eu" alt=""/></figure>



Maybe Ethereum bulls believe Web3 will play out similarly to the history of Web2, but Ethereum doesn’t exist in a silo, and it faces stiff competition from other chains.



We also still have so few guesses as to the kinds of onchain applications that will dominate blockchain usage. Will the world need that much data availability?



But I digress. The claim that there are “too many chains” may eventually be true. But it’s too early to tell, as it was in the early days of the internet.



If true, markets are serving to curb further wasteful spending. Case in point: The L1 premium has been rapidly compressing.



The days of $300-$500 million dollar raises for an L1 are over. L1/L2 blockchain raises in 2024 ranged from as low as $14 million (<a href="https://x.com/initia/status/1838929323954200974">Initia</a>) to as high as $100 million (<a href="https://blockworks.co/news/evm-compatible-layer-1-blockchain-vc-interest">Berachain</a>) and $225 million (<a href="https://blockworks.co/news/evm-compatible-layer-1-blockchain-vc-interest">Monad</a>).



The high costs of running an L1 and a lack of value capture sends a feedback signal to markets to stop funding these things.



In comparison, L2s are much cheaper to launch, about $5-$15 million, per <a href="https://x.com/JasonYanowitz/status/1846936073382809626">estimates</a> by Blockworks’ Jason Yanowitz.



That may explain the Celo L1’s recent transition into an L2, or what Kydo, EigenLayer’s head of special projects, <a href="https://x.com/0xkydo/status/1906050837186584983">calls</a> Ethereum’s “inevitable gravity toward efficiency.”



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Can Ethereum win big with data availability?

This is a segment from the Supply Shock newsletter. To read full editions, <a href="https://blockworks.co/newsletter/supplyshock" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">subscribe</a>.



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Few things are built to stand the test of time. Bitcoin is.



Engineers design bridges to last only around 100 years. Modern-day dams might be built that only make it to half that. 



Perhaps regular maintenance could stretch those numbers by a few decades. They would still crumble much sooner than Bitcoin was ever intended to.



Today is the 11th anniversary of a testament to exactly that: BIP-42, the clutch proposal that averted a potential supply crisis 240 years from now.



Bitcoin Core contributor <a href="https://x.com/pete_rizzo_/status/1880616287363059980">Pieter Wuille</a> submitted BIP-42 on April Fool’s Day, 2014, years after Satoshi Nakamoto’s last post. BIP-42 was based on a solution proposed by <a href="https://x.com/pete_rizzo_/status/1878079505052413965">Gregory Maxwell</a>. Fittingly, it was both very serious and deeply unserious at the same time.



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXcxexSwe6D6Dhm0k2ObNvIs8ip8LXwulYlpFsHj7RnslBpy5T5ITyr6oDzmLEi3sbexIIAONmCO811Ta6XOTdTHKQs3rrpRmcZefPRMGtkb3l6KGj_7NtHThZ5Bcf8c6oqRP_j-Mg?key=OWOEEWME-Gq6nfqaq74dza6b" alt=""/><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">BIP-42 doubled as a roast of Satoshi Nakamoto (<a href="https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0042.mediawiki">source</a>).</figcaption></figure>



As it turns out, Satoshi had made a grave but obscure error when coding the logic for bitcoin halvings.&nbsp;



The block reward had been correctly set to halve every 210,000 blocks, all the way down to an unspendable fraction of a sat by the year 2140 or so. This is what makes the BTC supply predictably and provably finite.



But the code was written in such a way that it determines the mining reward using the current block height. And when the block height gets too high — much higher than it is today — Satoshi would’ve had to write special rules informing the software how to process such a calculation safely.



The exact impact of the bug isn’t really knowable, but the largest of unintended consequences would have been that the block reward reverted to its original state of 50 BTC. BTC’s supply issuance curve would be rebooted to 2009.



Left unchecked, the bug would return again and again every two and a half centuries, making for potentially infinite bitcoins over the millennia.



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXdjMI40BjNZZ0vsmV8py9UXnvBjp6ClH_kHUnIPe0yIFLdhoOvkQZAYWKbJSYMnUuzBWoQ5kxzAVX8e3-lUPN-agTUHcKfVj9BLdg38Y-zX1f0AgKB8PJlh3SUh8rzlbmSEk_-Riw?key=OWOEEWME-Gq6nfqaq74dza6b" alt=""/><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Bitcoin’s circulating supply would hit 126 million in the year 3417, without fixing the supply bug.</figcaption></figure>



“Although it is widely believed that Satoshi was an inflation-hating goldbug, he never said this, and in fact programmed Bitcoin&#8217;s money supply to grow indefinitely, forever,” Wuille wrote.



What’s humbling is that BIP-42 aborted a cataclysmic event that would’ve occurred 10 generations from now — in the approximate year 2265, when the block height should reach 13.44 million (today, it’s under 890,000). That’s over a century after the last slice of spendable bitcoin is expected to be mined, in 2140.&nbsp;



So, I suppose our great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandchildren will have Wuille and Maxwell to thank for making sure that’s so.



— David



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Rizzo’s view, as the Bitcoin Historian</h2>



It’s nice that David can have a laugh over BIP-42. It is one of the more objectively quirky events in Bitcoin development history. That said, a more sober assessment raises thorny questions about the management of the Bitcoin software.&nbsp; One that I always linger on is the natural tension over what defines a “bug” in Bitcoin. Should we consider BIP-42 through the lens of jurisprudence, it helped enshrine two interesting views.&nbsp;



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>First is the assertion that the code which BIP-42 patches is indeed a “bug” because it contradicts what Satoshi wrote, namely, that Bitcoin would have a fixed supply. </li>



<li>Second is the view that the code is a “bug” because it contradicts what he told users to expect (creating a kind of social contract). </li>
</ul>



There’s a truth to both assertions, but it seems to get more problematic when compared to how other code debates were handled. Take the infamous “block size,” for instance. In this case, Satoshi said it would be raised over time, and it’s also what most (if not all early users) expected.



Ergo, the unchanged block size checks similar boxes as BIP-42. Yet no action was ever taken to change it. How to square this circle? Perhaps there’s the issue of safety. It’s true that eliminating the block size could lead to DDOS attacks, block withholding attacks, and potentially contribute to Bitcoin’s ultimate centralization. Equally, it could be said that rebooting the Bitcoin supply would constitute economic attacks. So, perhaps this was what swayed the decision.



I talked to Luke Jr. about this, and here’s what he had to say: “It was the behaviour everyone expected. And also there was no guarantee future CPUs would have the previous behavior for the existing code either.” Unfortunately, due to the tone of the patch, however, we might never know what all the participants had to say.



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