Starknet

David Canellis

Pete Rizzo

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Overanalyzing every crumb in Satoshi Nakamoto’s long-cold trail isn’t exactly useful these days. Not to mention that Satoshi left for a reason and deserves his privacy. 



But there’s hardly a better excuse to lean into the Nakamoto mystery than a cryptic fake birth date.



It’s generally assumed that Satoshi listed April 5, 1975 as his birthday as a reference to President Roosevelt’s Executive Order 6102, which on that day in 1933 made it <a href="https://www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/roosevelts-gold-program">illegal</a> for US citizens to hold physical gold — forcing them to give it to the government in return for cash.



President Ford reversed the order in 1975, so at best we figure Satoshi mashed up those dates as a nod to bitcoin’s potential as self-sovereign digital gold outside of government control. Neat!



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">On This Day – Satoshi was &#8220;born&#8221;</h2>



Let’s be clear — today is probably not Satoshi’s 50th birthday.



The facts: Satoshi set his birthday as April 5, 1975 in his P2P Foundation forum profile, which also stated that he resided in Japan (another unlikely factoid based on his known <a href="https://medium.com/@insearchofsatoshi/the-time-zones-of-satoshi-nakamoto-aa40f035178f">activity</a> patterns).



Satoshi’s only <a href="https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/posts/p2pfoundation/threads/1/">posts</a> on this forum were to share the first version of Bitcoin, Bitcoin v0.1, in February 2009. He’d mined the genesis block about five weeks earlier and had already <a href="https://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2009-January/014994.html">released</a> the software via the Metzdowd cryptography mailing list.



If today were really Satoshi’s birthday, he would’ve been 32 when he <a href="https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/posts/bitcointalk/17/">started</a> coding Bitcoin in 2007.



Perhaps Satoshi entering his founder era in his early thirties sounds about right.&nbsp;



Although you might already know about some idiosyncrasies that hint he could’ve been older.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Double spaces</h2>



Satoshi widely used double-spaces after sentences — in the whitepaper, on forums, and in emails. 



Double-spaces are a relic of the typewriter era, which more-or-less ended with the arrival of PCs in the 1990s. On typewriters, a single space was often not enough for the reader to easily differentiate between sentences, so people were taught to use two spaces after every end punctuation.



Setting aside the possibility that double-spaces were part of some sophisticated ploy to obscure Satoshi’s true identity, it points to him learning to type earlier than the ‘90s. Perhaps in the ‘80s or even the ‘70s — the latter likely making him a boomer born sometime in the ‘60s.&nbsp;



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXePIPtL98KTf3DSXIOAnGWl0iKBzk796fOSrJHir2W18MM8xD2KZOHF4wsrMQkC8SfK0PeW7rr1npxohB4GFMk7F_F8mtXc7ueI71v9td5jbbdvhc-kkFwAP3bclYDd6spUTPm0?key=buPlaCJiNsJCSp2mfjZvf8BI" alt=""/><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Here you can see Satoshi use double-spaces between sentences in the Bitcoin whitepaper.</figcaption></figure>



This would put Satoshi in his mid-forties when he started coding Bitcoin, and up to around 65 years old today.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Coding style</h2>



Satoshi wrote Bitcoin in the programming language C++, released in 1983, which in and of itself is not peculiar. It’s the way he wrote it.



Developers have pointed to Satoshi’s use of a variable naming <a href="https://www.baeldung.com/cs/hungarian-notation">system</a> called Hungarian notation, popularized by Microsoft in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, which had fallen out of favor as development environments improved.



Satoshi also defined classes using a capital C. Doing so was standard when working with the Microsoft Foundation Class Library (MFC), a coding suite that was at peak popularity in the mid-to-late 90s — a whole decade before Bitcoin was written — and eventually surpassed by .NET.



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXfO8_Z_bczmswZMwlXKB5GMBLPIwK_fIoblHt6pL6BTVUgEo6Ue8nghN1ilnROcy8OwZgi6C2vwAIzsa_X5YDaxjO6Tax_XVwTIT4koxEwFFj0f5pCT0yBYs-uXbmlARmJPCIlXtg?key=buPlaCJiNsJCSp2mfjZvf8BI" alt=""/><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Satoshi named classes with a capital C, as shown <a href="https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/src/primitives/block.h">here in the code</a> that instructs the properties of Bitcoin block headers.</figcaption></figure>



Following that arc suggests Satoshi may have had more than 20 years worth of C++ experience by the time he came to write Bitcoin. In that case, he would’ve probably been in his early-to-mid forties in 2007 and close to 60 today, a similar age to other cypherpunks like Julian Assange and Adam Back.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Cultural clues </h2>



On the Bitcointalk forum, an early adopter in July 2010 had <a href="https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/fa/posts/bitcointalk/174/">wondered</a> what might happen to the network if someone were to maliciously buy up all the bitcoin. 



Satoshi pointed to an old <a href="https://www.investopedia.com/articles/optioninvestor/09/silver-thursday-hunt-brothers.asp">tale</a> of the silver market from the late 1970s, when the billionaire Hunt brothers sought to corner the supply and borrowed heavily to do it. They’d reportedly acquired more than half of the world’s deliverable silver, more than tripling its price in five months.



The trio was eventually bankrupted following the Silver Tuesday market crash in March 1980, which saw them face a $100-million margin call and losses of over $1.7 billion as prices tanked.&nbsp;



Satoshi clearly wasn’t too worried about someone cornering the bitcoin supply (for what it’s worth, here’s a <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/ansellindner/2024/11/20/microstrategys-bitcoin-blueprint-isnt-a-hunt-brothers-silver-scheme/">decent exploration</a> of the differences between the Hunt brothers’ scheme and Michael Saylor’s current bitcoin strategy).



Early Bitcoin developer Mike Hearn has <a href="https://time.com/7064841/satoshi-nakamoto-hbo-money-electric/">previously</a> said that Satoshi referenced Silver Tuesday “as if he remembered it,” and that his coding style suggested that “he came of age as a developer in the ‘90s and then stopped. He did not keep up with the evolution of the industry.”



But hey, whether Satoshi would be 50 years old today, as his P2P Foundation profile states, or really in his mid-sixties born in an entirely different month, he will have a birthday this year. We just don’t know when.



So, cheers to Satoshi!



What do you give someone who already has 1 million BTC? Well, Depeche Mode is touring right now — great if Satoshi were born in 1975 — and the Rolling Stones are playing in Boca Raton later this month, a solid bet for someone in their mid-60s, I’d say.



— David



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



I’ll leave David to the deductions. As for myself, I prefer to look at Satoshi’s birthday as a lens of how the architect behind the world’s greatest digital history preferred to be known.&nbsp;



What I mean by this is that Satoshi, while pseudonymous, did selectively reveal himself to the world. I say himself, because he chose to identify as a man, just as he chose to identify as Japanese, just as he chose April 5, 1975 as his birthday. But let us absolve ourselves of specificity for a moment to focus on a greater point. Satoshi Nakamoto was a person of intent. Given the fact that we know so little about them, in an age when our entire lives are digital, not to mention that we can track the lives lived of millions to the hour, it remains remarkable how little is known at all about Satoshi Nakamoto. If one is to consider the internet the greatest ever assault on human privacy, Satoshi, then, is an anomaly. He’s The Boy Who Lived, the ghost that passed through the machine, who sent physical cash to the one domain registrar that promised to destroy his records, who used Tor to hide his footprints, and then vanished, some two years later, leaving not so much as a trace.



Why, then, does it matter that Satoshi chose April 5, 1975 as his birthday? Well, it is one of the few footprints he left behind. It may not represent his age, so much as a product of his choice. Why did Satoshi choose this date? My only answer is that the choice itself is worthy of consideration.



And as Dumbledore said, “It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.”&nbsp;



— Rizzo



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Satoshi Nakamoto turns “50” — how old is he really?

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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XNET, a Solana-based project building a decentralized network of Wi-Fi hotspots, has partnered with US telecom giant AT&amp;T. The collaboration will enable AT&amp;T to offload mobile data traffic onto XNET’s network, the team told Lightspeed exclusively.



XNET sells Wi-Fi hotspots that businesses and public spaces can deploy in exchange for XNET token rewards. Together, the patchwork of hotspots makes up a distributed wireless network. XNET partners with cell carriers to offload mobile data onto its hotspots where available, easing network congestion and improving coverage — while the cell carriers pay XNET for the data.



Under the agreement with AT&amp;T, which has been live since September 2024, AT&amp;T wireless customers connect to XNET’s Wi-Fi network where available. AT&amp;T pays XNET in dollars for the data usage, and XNET passes tokens along to its node operators.



According to a Dune <a href="https://dune.com/xnet/xnetmobile">dashboard</a>, XNET currently has 688 active nodes, and around 9 million users have connected through its Wi-Fi offloading network. The handoff between AT&amp;T’s coverage and XNET’s Wi-Fi is seamless, and most users have no idea it’s happening, XNET co-founder Richard DeVaul told me. He added that bootstrapping a business like XNET would have been difficult without a token.



“XNET is the poster child for DePIN. We financed millions of dollars of equipment on our network using our token, without conventional equity or debt financing,” DeVaul said in a text.



XNET has a similar feel to Helium Mobile, a popular DePIN company building a nationwide cellular network through token-incentivized hotspots. But while Helium lets individuals install hotspots at home, marketing lead Chris Banks said that XNET focuses exclusively on B2B services and restricts deployments to “high-value locations to the carriers.”



“We see Helium as a potential customer, not a competitor. But [Helium Mobile CEO Amir Haleem] may have different ideas,” DeVaul said, adding a tongue-wagging emoji.



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Exclusive: Wi-Fi DePIN XNET announces AT&T partnership

Kate Irwin

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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Venture capital spending may be bouncing back — with an estimated $4.5 billion spent last quarter.



But it doesn’t look like gaming’s getting a piece of that pie.&nbsp;



Earlier this week, Empire noted that <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/venture-capital-spending-crypto-pitchbook">VC interest may be going more toward projects</a> with real-world value. This is a symptom of a broader change across the landscape, thanks to institutional interest in the space.&nbsp;



Unfortunately, even with the potential for more raises across the board — from mega deals ($100 million and upwards) to emerging deals (meaning seed or pre-seed) — it doesn’t look like gaming is getting the love. Not yet, anyway. 



I asked PitchBook’s Eric Bellomo — senior analyst on emerging technology — about gaming raises, but he wasn’t too optimistic.&nbsp;



“While deal value increased substantially YoY, outsized deals like the Disney/Epic Games round inflated top-line figures. Deal volume continued to slide, falling 9.5% to 649 deals, in-line with 2018-2019 figures. Further, the number of investors actively investing in content developers continued its step <a href="https://files.pitchbook.com/website/files/pdf/2025_Consumer_Technology_Outlook.pdf#page=1">deceleration since 2021</a>.&nbsp;



“Capital is still available, but we view the current environment as a new steady state, rather than a resurgence,” he told me.&nbsp;



Part of this is fairly obvious, right? A lot of money went into this gaming subsector — but not a whole lot of successes came out.



“Enthusiasm has waned in the market broadly, as many well-funded startups have yet to produce breakout hits or venture-scale outcomes. A game&#8217;s underlying technology is far removed from the most important factor: Is the game fun and retentive?” Bellomo said.&nbsp;



“Online shoppers don&#8217;t care if a merchant uses Shopify or a <a href="https://machalliance.org/">MACH</a>-based service; they care about value and speed. They don&#8217;t care if a game was built in Unity or Unreal. The same holds in video games: Players only care if a game is fun and if their friends play. A discussion of tech stacks and architecture misses this point.”



He added that he doesn’t think we’ll see a resurgence in VC activity for “quite some time.” Mostly because, last cycle, gaming clearly benefited from a number of tailwinds from the attention that Web3 overall received with the focus on NFTs.&nbsp;



But, hey, while games centered on gambling aren’t going to be the focus of big VC spending at this point, at least they’ve found some footing in terms of adoption.



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Why Web3 gaming won’t see an uptick in VC activity 

Casey Wagner

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Phew, it&#8217;s been a week.&nbsp;



Most people expected things to get worse before they got better, and they have. But we’re not calling this the bottom yet.&nbsp;



Here’s a high-level recap, in case you’ve been offline the past few days, or simply avoided checking your brokerage account (probably for the best):



President Trump this week announced sweeping global tariffs of 10% on all imports, and higher levies on 60 or so countries the administration says are the “worst offenders” when it comes to taxing goods the US exports.&nbsp;



These higher tariffs range from 11% to 50%. Countries facing the highest tariffs include Cambodia (49%), Vietnam (46%), China (34%) and India (27%). You can find the full list <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Annex-I.pdf">here</a>.&nbsp;



His team calculated reciprocal tariffs based on what they are calling the “total sum of all unfair trade practices” by country. Here’s the White House’s formula: a country’s trade deficit divided by its exports to the US multiplied by 0.5.&nbsp;



The math has proven to be controversial. Critics say that this method, in focusing solely on a country’s trade deficit with the US, does not consider (1) the actual tariff rate on any product, and&nbsp; (2) non-tariff trade barriers. The White House conceded that there’s no perfect formula, but it’s the <a href="https://ustr.gov/issue-areas/reciprocal-tariff-calculations">best they could do</a>.&nbsp;



The Trump administration also maintains that the reciprocal tariffs are still less than what other countries charge on US imports, and that these policies are the first step in bringing manufacturing back onshore.&nbsp;



Now for the impact:&nbsp;



Stocks tanked, crypto fell, planned M&amp;A deals and IPOs collapsed, and other countries are striking back.&nbsp;



The Dow Jones Industrial Average on Thursday, the first day of trading post-announcement, lost 1,679.39 points. The S&amp;P 500 yesterday closed almost 5% lower, now down more than 12% year-to-date. US equities as a whole lost more than $3 billion in market value, the worst single-day since 2020.&nbsp;



Fed Chair Jerome Powell on Friday gave no indication that interest rate cuts will come anytime soon, adding to the turmoil in markets. “The economy is still in a good place,” he said, speaking from an event in Virginia. He added, though, that central bankers will be keeping an eye on tariffs.&nbsp;



I wrote yesterday that the IPO window would be closing. Today, Bloomberg <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-04-04/trump-s-trade-war-hits-billions-of-dollars-of-deals-in-24-hours">reported</a> that StubHub, Klarna Bank, and MNTN have all paused their IPO plans. Private equity firm KKR &amp; Co. is no longer considering purchasing German packaging producer Gerresheimer.&nbsp;



Today, stocks extended their selloff and the VIX hit a staggering level just shy of 44, well above the 20-day moving average of 21. The continued decline comes as China announced a 34% reciprocal tariff on US goods starting on April 10.&nbsp;



Trump hasn’t backed down, although his team hasn’t definitively said they are closed to negotiations. I think the biggest concern for markets, though, is that other countries haven’t immediately come forward with offers (that we know of, at least!).



For what it’s worth, Trump and company did say things would get worse before they got better.



Enjoy your weekend. The chaos will still be here Monday.



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US equities slide as trade war escalates, Powell signals no rate cut

Donovan Choy

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About 11 months after its initial <a href="https://x.com/StaniKulechov/status/1790458663926219212">announcement</a>, the mainnet of Lens Chain goes live today with its V3 deployment.



Lens Protocol launched in February 2022 on the Polygon sidechain.&nbsp;



In May 2024, Lens announced that it was migrating off Polygon to its own L2 chain built within the zkSync Elastic Network. For the deal, Lens was <a href="https://www.dlnews.com/articles/defi/lens-promised-possibly-tens-of-millions-to-go-to-zksync/">reportedly</a> paid 0.5% of the total ZK token supply (worth about $6.5M today).



The shift to its own L2, however, was motivated primarily by costs and scalability.&nbsp;



Building Lens on the Polygon sidechain made sense in 2021, but once L2s were available, they provided a better cost basis for transactions, Lens founder Stani Kulechov told me last September at Token2049 Singapore.



“The costs on Polygon don&#8217;t scale to mainstream usage for social transactions. Compared to a rollup, the cost savings looks 30 to 50 times lower,” Kulechov said.



Rather than posting data to the Ethereum L1, Lens Chain is using <a href="https://blockworks.co/podcast/0xresearch/e91db748-d67d-11ee-8d92-8b61dd33eafb">Avail</a> as its data availability (DA) layer. That makes Lens Chain technically a <a href="https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/scaling/validium/">validium</a> rollup that also enjoys the security of Ethereum’s settlement.



Lens’ migration to its own chain is purportedly one of the largest. According to an official blog, the entire social graph to be migrated comes out to about 125GB of historical data and 12M+ content posts.



Users on Lens Chain will enjoy near-zero gas fees and can pay in Aave’s GHO stablecoin.



All content will also be stored onchain. This is thanks to <a href="https://lens.xyz/news/introducing-grove-onchain-controlled-storage">Grove</a>, Lens’ new storage infrastructure. Grove allows developers on Lens to have customizable access and control over user data. Platform data can be either permanent or deleted.



This makes all Lens’ social data fully onchain and decentralized, in contrast to competing Web3 social platforms like Farcaster, where only user profiles are onchain.



This, at its core, is what forms the foundation of Lens V3, what the team has termed a modular social protocol.



In addition, Grove also promises to deliver the “speed and cost-efficiency of leading Web2 solutions like AWS S3 and Cloudflare R2,” its blog says.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">The state of Lens</h2>



Today, Lens boasts about 650,000 user profiles and 28 million social connections.



That is still a far cry from being a serious challenge to traditional social media platforms, but consider how far the promise of “social media on the blockchain” has come.



As far back as 2016, companies like Steem, a social project that was bought by the Tron Foundation in 2020 and subsequently hardforked by its original community into what is known today as the HIVE blockchain.



What does Lens do differently?



Recall that Lens is not a social media platform per se, but a protocol where apps can be built on top of it.



Lens&#8217; protocol is decidedly taking a builder-centric growth strategy. Lens wants to target app builders, in particular Web2 developers who have historically been deterred by the clunky UX and complexity of Web3.



“Our strategy focuses on social plus finance apps: projects where people connect, create and earn. Just like YouTube unlocked a new class of creators, Lens is unlocking a new class of SocialFi apps,” the Lens team told Blockworks.



In other words, the freedom to monetize on a permissionless infrastructure without gatekeepers.



Signature Lens apps since day one are migrating to Lens chains. These include the Twitter-like apps such as Orb and Hey, the AI launchpad Bonsai, Tape, a Tiktok-like short-form app, and more.



It’s hard to imagine Web3 socials ever toppling the incumbent Big Tech platforms today. But take heart in the fact that the mainstream media and experts of the 2000s felt just the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2007/feb/08/business.comment">same</a> about competitors to MySpace.



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Lens launches mainnet today, bringing a potential new era to SocialFi

Neon Machine’s Shrapnel is in the red: Sources

Katherine Ross

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For ether, things aren’t looking good. The chart below very clearly shows just how painful of a spot ETH is in right now.



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXdQ1r4epIImC0f3h2YNs1-0ciHr0YuR4VKh5jt0E6YUqwznplh13f9PiMoYX5TcW5KXo7mHepmK4qsLLEUsfjJORwuyIYkEoqetkrLGuDziI81PDOvJC5QSt1OXcD6QgpVttlAd?key=99wLbKEgZH_raEcVyFrdWu4L" alt=""/></figure>



Blockworks Research’s Marc-Thomas Arjoon <a href="https://app.blockworksresearch.com/flashnotes/ethereum-march-2025-update">noted</a> that ETH had its lowest quarterly return since Q2 2022. Yikes.&nbsp;



Like I said above, some of the pressure is macro, as folks drop their risk assets like hot potatoes to protect themselves. But let’s be clear: Ethereum also has no one to blame but itself.&nbsp;



“Ethereum&#8217;s fundamentals also weakened, with Real Economic Value (REV) dropping 48% month-over-month to $37M, its lowest since July 2020. Despite these setbacks, Ethereum maintained its dominance in the stablecoin market, with a record $124B in market cap and continued growth in on-chain activity,” Arjoon wrote.



The network, Arjoon continued, sits at a “pivotal juncture.”



“As the effects of Pectra unfold and market conditions stabilize, Ethereum has the potential to reclaim momentum and strengthen its role as a cornerstone of the decentralized ecosystem,” he added.&nbsp;



The one big bonus for Ethereum has been stablecoin and institutional interest. As those continue to dominate the narrative, they also help give the network a much-needed boost. But is that going to be enough?



I guess only time — and Pectra — will tell.



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ETH just had lowest quarterly return since Q2 2022: Blockworks Research

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Even before the tariffs, it was clear that risk assets — like bitcoin and crypto — were going out of style for a lot of investors.



And now, with the tariffs on the table, it wouldn’t be surprising if we continued to see folks move away from these riskier assets. Which leaves us with one big question: Does this mean we’re out of luck for an altcoin season?



A Kaiko Research and BRN <a href="https://research.kaiko.com/reports/are-altcoins-poised-for-a-widespread-rally?utm_campaign=Weekly%20Newsletter&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;_hsenc=p2ANqtz-8gcmRMqX5vZBVABvEhtW8-5-84Wg9W7dZT2hrMFwNMGPh3CpfUllEHYrfRG0Y5M8EMtFQzVEnGp_DFLOD5rkCCw4OPkw&amp;_hsmi=107014245&amp;utm_content=107009719&amp;utm_source=hs_email">report</a> noted that altcoins just haven’t been able to break — or, in some cases, even come close to — their 2021-2022 peaks.&nbsp;



On the bright side, though, we are seeing altcoin dominance levels rise relative to bitcoin, but the distribution there has been uneven.



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXe9WkGwUwK_rhh01R-hPy5KzT4pgsNYa2uq1HRpg4sd4nHrX7riiVghMcwHWcRWMshNObjtdDEWc3K2La_NNtEGMEJUYMoX6RAKbRNTuLPgfCZaxIOV4zABJf03eXl6M9srkvN9mQ?key=99wLbKEgZH_raEcVyFrdWu4L" alt=""/><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Source: Kaiko Research and BRN Report</figcaption></figure>



“Altcoin trade volume has returned to pre-FTX levels, but it is more concentrated than ever. The top 10 altcoins account for 64% of the total volume, indicating that investors are focusing capital on a select group. Market depth mirrors this trend, with the top 10 comprising over 60% of the 1% depth,” the analysts wrote.



In a nutshell —&nbsp;after the US elections, there was a jump back into altcoins, but only into a select few. Altcoins across the board didn’t get the boost, which is different from what we’ve seen the last few cycles, when the rising tide lifted all the boats.&nbsp;



“This shrinking pool of market leaders reflects a shift from retail-driven speculation to institutional capital favoring a concentrated set of high-liquidity assets,” according to the report.



The smaller pool, the analysts noted, can be tied back to the institutional shift. But interest rates play into the narrative as well. Tighter monetary policy is forcing traders to take on a more cautious approach.&nbsp;



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXdAOBqU6Sp-C4CYAoMwBRj-3PGWliTLZYDxI4apSjKOocT4SrTgMq4ne9xW9McfeiPEUio9kckTZa0ea4erGng7-fxeclY_T4ZE9Lo2jaQJo0lMO5klAeL6qQY-KrRL8MfXXNhnqw?key=99wLbKEgZH_raEcVyFrdWu4L" alt=""/><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Source: Kaiko Indices</figcaption></figure>



There was a lot of hope initially that regulatory certainty would be a much-needed boost for altcoins — especially since the previous SEC clearly targeted some of the top ones in their regulation via enforcement approach. But without the reengagement of retail, altcoins are left in the lurch.&nbsp;



Perhaps altcoin ETFs could change that and offer a bit more certainty for the institutional crowd, which is clearly ready to engage with parts of crypto. But, honestly, I’m not so sure. Mostly because — outside of a potential SOL ETF — it’s not clear what other altcoins would be ready for an ETF at this stage.



But don’t let my cautiousness dim your hope for altcoin szn. There are still a couple of factors to keep an eye on, per the report. We know RWAs and stablecoins are real winners, which could also translate into altcoins. Projects that are tied to a “real-world utility” like DePIN, for example, could also grab interest.&nbsp;



Liquidity trends could change in regards to the aforementioned alt ETFs, and that also ties into the regulatory environment. Though if President Trump has his way, the focus is really going to be on US projects rather than anything overseas.



Basically, this time around, folks aren’t just going to jump into an alt for the trade. It looks like there’ll be more attention paid to projects focused on revenue generation. Unfortunately, this also means that the likelihood of a face-ripping altcoin szn is getting slimmer and slimmer.&nbsp;



A sign of maturity, if you ask me.



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Altcoin volumes are ‘more concentrated’ than ever

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It’s been three weeks since Solana’s validators <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/what-simd-0228-failing-means-for-solana/">failed to pass</a> SIMD-0228, a governance proposal that aimed to shift Solana’s issuance to a market-based mechanism and reduce inflation in the process. But while validators — who earn their keep partly from Solana inflation — voted the measure down, issuance still doesn’t feel like a settled question.&nbsp;



With the <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/solana-monetary-decisions">implementation of SIMD-0096</a>, which got rid of Solana’s priority fee “burn,” the network also lost a disinflationary mechanism, and many ecosystem participants feel that the network is “overpaying” for economic security by way of inflation. While there’s no looming fix for this in the short term, the Solana Foundation’s former head of strategy has made a counterproposal.



Austin Federa’s “left curve 228” <a href="https://github.com/solana-foundation/solana-improvement-documents/discussions/261">pitch</a> says Solana should accelerate the network’s disinflation curve and “see if anything breaks.”&nbsp;



Solana’s inflation curve sets a current issuance <a href="https://solanacompass.com/tokenomics">rate</a> of around 4.6%, which will shrink to 1.5% in 15% increments every 180 epochs, or roughly one year. Federa, who is now co-founder of the buzzy internet infrastructure for crypto startup DoubleZero, would increase the disinflation rate to 30% every 180 epochs.&nbsp;



Rounding 180 epochs to a year, Federa’s proposal would drop Solana’s inflation rate to around 1.5% in roughly three years. The benefit of such a scheme, Federa points out, is that it would keep Solana from overpaying for security without creating uncertainty on inflation rates — which some in Solana criticized SIMD-0228 for doing.



The proposal has taken some heat, most notably from Kevin Ricoy, founder of <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/former-solana-foundation-employee-media-venture">crypto media startup Allmight</a>. Ricoy chafed against “well-meaning autists playing central banker [and] constantly fiddling with the monetary policy” while arguing that bitcoin’s value comes from its changeless inflation mechanics. He followed up with a more measured rebuttal later on.



When I DMed Federa to ask whether he had any comment to add on “left curve 228,” he said: “Heh. Not really,” before writing: “I think at its core, 228 felt complicated at a time when people crave simplicity. As people feel the change from AI, from a change in government in many countries around the world, it just seemed messy.&nbsp;



“Left curve 228 was an attempt to not let the great be the enemy of the good, and to move Solana in the right general direction. Left curve 228 is objectively wrong — but I do think it is less wrong…And less wrong is great. Solana burns 50% of base fees, which is not optimal — but it’s pretty close to optimal, and it’s very easy to understand.”



He then added, “[Oh] no, did I just do a <a href="https://x.com/Timccopeland/status/1891857037190898052">Cobie</a>?”



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Following Solana inflation reduction defeat, could ‘left curve 228’ be next?

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In terms of companies insulated from tariff announcements, one sector of the crypto industry that is decidedly not safe is bitcoin mining. 



With much of the bitcoin mining supply chain based in Asia, US-based operations are going to face higher prices to get equipment onshore. 



Beijing-based Bitmain Technologies is the largest mining machine manufacturer, with a 90% market share, and it moved a large part of its production line to Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand years ago, according to a Bloomberg <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-08-26/trump-s-made-in-usa-bitcoin-relies-on-chinese-rig-maker-bitmain">report</a>.



Imports from these countries to the US now come with levies of 24% to 37%, per Trump’s Wednesday Liberation Day announcement. Bitmain <a href="https://x.com/BITMAINtech/status/1866124016819339335">announced</a> late last year it would open a “US production line,” presumably to get ahead of tariffs.



The tariffs also come on the heels of widespread supply chain delays in the bitcoin mining space. Mining equipment has just started to move out of US ports after being stuck for months at points of entry into the US.&nbsp;



Bitcoin mining stocks on Thursday took a hit. Marathon Digital Holdings was down more than 8% midway through today’s session. Riot Platforms and Core Scientific lost around 7% and 10%, respectively.&nbsp;



President Trump, <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/revisiting-trumps-crypto-promises-after-his-election-win">on the campaign trail</a>, touted making the US a hub for bitcoin mining.&nbsp;



“Made in America bitcoin,” though, now may be a tall order.



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Bitcoin mining stocks slip as investors weigh tariff exposure

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As global markets react to President Trump’s <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/market-reactions-to-trump-tariff-plans">sweeping reciprocal tariffs</a>, the post-election optimism that the new administration would bust open the US IPO window is wavering.&nbsp;



An international trade war isn’t exactly the most ideal backdrop for entering the public market, and Trump just upped the ante.&nbsp;



Of course, any company can go public whenever it wants — it’s not like there’s an actual regulatory window — but it’s best to avoid entering the market during a major downturn.&nbsp;



A wave of first-quarter IPO and M&amp;A announcements were penned at the end of 2024, when the prospect of tax cuts and deregulation had bankers and VCs riding high. Now, tariffs, rising fears <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/february-cpi-print-tariffs">of a recession</a> and slower growth have them taking a step back.&nbsp;



We could also see funding slow. After all, venture firms invest in startups because they see a light at the end of the tunnel: a successful exit via acquisition or public market debut. A poor IPO market limits exit strategy options. The longer the trade war rages on, the worse things could get for US startup funding.&nbsp;



Even so, the environment didn’t stop stablecoin issuer Circle from moving forward with <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/circle-ipo-stablecoin-competition-investors">its IPO plans</a> this week. I’d say a company that generates most of its revenue from interest earned on US Treasurys, and which sells an intangible product, is fairly insulated from Trump’s trade policies, at least directly. It’s not like USDC is shipped from China.&nbsp;



Still, though, we’re in a risk-off era, which doesn’t usually bode well for crypto equities.



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Tariff announcements push IPO window closed

Felix Jauvin

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As I write this piece, I’m in shock.&nbsp;



The tariffs that President Trump announced yesterday were significantly larger than even the most aggressive of estimates.



The basics have already been discussed to death, but let’s summarize them anyway just to set things straight: Trump issued a blanket tariff of 10%. For 60 or so countries, there’s a tariff of roughly half of the “total sum of all unfair trade practices,” as calculated by the Trump administration.



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXd7-nhfwzkk_557MtbrKSnjrWpFKsiv2TNVlIzKJFOcAUvtS3gR-z0M5hav46jYz-yY2-eABZdGzw4SvdLDGKqVMdA9YnhnzdzPdtS9vorQHskaHoU93mJKRPFkqdJ_idp16K2gLg?key=W6yNtBPQeTMkhGR4SzN_Du94" alt=""/></figure>



As seen in this chart from the Budget Lab (a Yale think tank), the total weighting of all these tariffs leads to an effective tariff rate at 22.5%, which would be the highest it’s been in a century. 



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXdBTlmfThwOuC2kY65PlGv0PwMC7ulDURdIx0UrvSXxPWYt_jM_r49cGzbDHVo9EiG4a9h6VmGs6KOYaqpQSFwXGUweLtHYULBTonAofn-oP_Jc0ixI5EqyKLSLWHyDS3Nz6-__xQ?key=W6yNtBPQeTMkhGR4SzN_Du94" alt=""/><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Source: The Budget Lab</figcaption></figure>



Other estimates are as high as 26.5% to 30%.



Now, how exactly did the Trump team quantify these estimates of tariffs imposed on the US? It turns out that it was a crass estimation of the country’s trade deficit divided by its exports.



In chart form, you get this extremely simplistic linear extrapolation:



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXdN-CbMLU13V0WYGLVmd_oZgnXY3nYzdTb3gN3By04DKfncyvNQpOQ8_6Y2nPGSoKAYFCm15zdsmh7XC0qFa8GFfSi9tbyi5073WaTTtbDd-zi5Co7u5gjnyzsAXmSwGlxTsJ-_3g?key=W6yNtBPQeTMkhGR4SzN_Du94" alt=""/></figure>



I walked through the mechanics of how the Trump team calculated these estimates, because it&#8217;s important to grasp how little thought was put into coming up with the numbers. They quite literally made this simplistic estimation, then decided the reciprocal tariff would be half of that made up number to seem forgiving. It’s not forgiving.&nbsp;



Now let’s move into discerning the economic impact of these announcements, assuming they hold (and given what we’ve seen from the administration so far, who the hell knows if they will).&nbsp;



The Budget Lab analyzed the impacts of the tariffs and came up with the following:&nbsp;



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>Short-term: US real GDP growth in 2025 is expected to be 0.9% to 1.0% lower due to the tariffs.</li>



<li>Long-term: The US economy is projected to be permanently 0.3% to 0.6% smaller — equivalent to an annual loss of $90 billion to $180 billion in 2024 dollars. Global GDP also shrinks in the long run, though China’s GDP remains largely unaffected, per the estimates.&nbsp;</li>



<li>Prices: The short-term price level on all goods rises by 2.1% to 2.6%, translating to a per-household consumer loss of $3,400 to $4,200 in 2024 dollars. Food prices specifically are projected to increase by 3.7%, nearly double the recent grocery inflation rate.</li>
</ul>



In chart form, the GDP hit looks something like this, and remember that this doesn’t even consider retaliation from other countries: 



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXcKHAZPxWH-G9mhkzE1piXmzoGFImjJYA624-sczafH8dnVQYgm-2PGx7SALqKvbxXsVo8lEOK2vzW0FzDqTtQ-YJp9SrEBdMtgN86oSoat1cMUixUXumq1JVF7Kht9pB-Hjw_9?key=W6yNtBPQeTMkhGR4SzN_Du94" alt=""/></figure>



I liked the way Brad Setser, one of my favorite economists on trade, put it: 



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXddKQdzeVqSsluKgtqJHnKYYMXmY1hv3H8VFIQlO9qhbbcEIRLzJZOTdJAJpHJ3p8DGVyhwwm1cQTV3QDKO8ysBdKAi8FZZa3olz0SLzj-heSzPZX2WZZTevrKgigtNIQ9zgLMf?key=W6yNtBPQeTMkhGR4SzN_Du94" alt=""/></figure>



If you’re not familiar with the impact of oil shocks on the economy, the experience of seeing what follows (hint: a recession) is a sobering one.&nbsp;



How likely is said recession? Well, Neil Dutta of Renaissance Macro has moved up his implied probability of recession to 89%. I listen when Neil warns about recession because he was one of the only economists who said a recession being imminent between 2022-2024 was nonsense whilst everyone else had their odds at 100%.&nbsp;



Breathe in, breathe out.&nbsp;



This is all under the assumption that these tariffs hold. I, as well as the market as a whole, seem to be in denial and think cooler heads will prevail. Let’s hope so.&nbsp;



Buckle up — the uncertainty and volatility are only just getting started.



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US economy braces for the largest tariffs in over a century

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FDUSD, the sixth-largest stablecoin (market cap $2.5 billion), saw a significant depeg yesterday morning to $0.91. The peg has since recovered, though FDUSD suffered a market cap loss of about $200m.



The cause? The tweets of Tron founder Justin Sun.



Sun blasted First Digital, the issuer of FUSD, in a tweet alleging that the Hong Kong-based firm was “effectively insolvent and unable to fulfill client fund redemptions” for its stablecoin.



<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">First Digital Trust (FDT) is effectively insolvent and unable to fulfill client fund redemptions. I strongly recommend that users take immediate action to secure their assets. There are significant loopholes in both the trust licensing process in Hong Kong and the internal risk…&mdash; H.E. Justin Sun 🍌 (@justinsuntron) <a href="https://twitter.com/justinsuntron/status/1907453216524243373?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 2, 2025</a></blockquote><script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
</div></figure>



Sun’s tweet included a link to a CoinDesk article detailing Techteryx’s lawsuit against First Digital’s CEO Vincent Chok for alleged mismanagement of the former’s reserves. Sun had previously been <a href="https://fortune.com/crypto/2024/12/18/justin-sun-coindesk-matt-murray-banana-resign-article/">accused</a> of influencing CoinDesk’s editorial decisions, which resulted in the removal of key editorial staff.



Techteryx is the issuer of the TrueUSD (TUSD) stablecoin, and had previously established First Digital as a fiduciary to manage its reserves.



The lawsuit alleges First Digital had misappropriated $456 million of Techteryx’s monies into “unauthorized trade finance loans.”



First Digital immediately denounced Sun’s allegations as a “smear campaign,” claiming that FDUSD was &#8220;completely solvent&#8221; and that the company would &#8220;pursue legal action to protect its rights and reputation.”&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">The recent allegations by Justin Sun against First Digital Trust are completely false. This dispute is with TUSD and not with <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%24FDUSD&amp;src=ctag&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">$FDUSD</a>. First Digital is completely solvent. Every dollar backing <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%24FDUSD&amp;src=ctag&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">$FDUSD</a> is completely, secure, safe and accounted for with US backed T-Bills. The…&mdash; First Digital (@FirstDigitalHQ) <a href="https://twitter.com/FirstDigitalHQ/status/1907469378876215803?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 2, 2025</a></blockquote><script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
</div></figure>



Sun doubled down in a second <a href="https://x.com/justinsuntron/status/1907481239143199016">tweet</a> an hour later, asserting that his claim regarding FDT’s insolvency was “a factual statement.”



According to First Digital’s latest February 2025 <a href="https://firstdigitallabs.com/transparency">monthly reserve report</a>, the company’s reserves at the time totaled $2,051,348,188 — backing a total issued supply of $2,041,924,819 FDUSD.



Like most centralized stablecoins, First Digital’s collateral backing consisted of primarily US Treasury bills, overnight fixed deposits, and US dollars.



While attestation reports are helpful, there is still an element level of trust and counterparty risk inherent to stablecoins, Cork Protocol co-founder <a href="https://x.com/robdogeth?lang=en">Rob Schmitt</a> told Blockworks.



“If stablecoins are to underpin the global financial system, there will be a clear demand to hedge against these risks, without which there could be a lot of contagion potentially.”



“It’s not so different from what happened with USDC’s depeg during the Silicon Valley Bank chaos. There wasn&#8217;t fraud as claimed, but there was spillover of collateral damage from counterparty risk, which is inherent to any stablecoin design.”



FDUSD is largely known for being a stablecoin used on the Binance exchange, acting as a replacement for Binance’s BUSD stablecoin.



BUSD’s issuer, Paxos, was ordered by the New York Department of Financial Services to <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/binance-fdusd-busd">shut down</a> the stablecoin in February 2023.



<a href="https://intel.arkm.com/explorer/token/first-digital-usd">Arkham</a> data shows that Binance holds the large majority (95%) of the FDUSD supply.



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXdZnCkfuFMdTBTFzC9SPIsdi6Jg6NWZccSwHS56qP4R7g4GyFY4EmKcFm1DBmu7wuULbRauWcCByQz_N8WqPxslEgy_KCE2QXnkh0w9juYFd5grvH6ZF2J-334Qiq9D2-GgrCUTbA?key=G9xeC3Fqx62zQphdlmNqvEM5" alt=""/></figure>



In response to the debacle, Aave has frozen FDUSD depositing and borrowing on its BNB Chain deployment.



<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">I don&#39;t think there&#39;s any issue with fdUSD, but as an abundance of caution and to protect Aave users,<a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%24FDUSD&amp;src=ctag&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">$FDUSD</a> deposits &amp; borrows have been frozen on Aave BNB instance. If you&#39;re a current user no change or risk, freezing a reserve just means no new position can be created.&mdash; Marc “Billy” Zeller 👻 🦇🔊 (@lemiscate) <a href="https://twitter.com/lemiscate/status/1907472403795791903?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 2, 2025</a></blockquote><script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
</div></figure>



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Justin Sun’s allegations of FDUSD insolvency cause 9% depeg

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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Can BitCoin be “trusted”? Will anyone accept bitcoins as payment? Could bitcoin eventually replace national currencies and “break the monopoly power of the Federal Reserve”?



These were questions fielded by then-lead developer Gavin Andresen, 14 years ago this week.&nbsp; Andresen was speaking on the <a href="https://www.econtalk.org/andresen-on-bitcoin-and-virtual-currency/">first podcast episode dedicated</a> to “BitCoin.” (The price was a cool $0.73.)



This hour-long EconTalk chat was recorded in March 2011, back in the very early months of GPU mining. It&#8217;s still worth listening to this episode, for nothing more than to transport yourself back to your first few times hearing about Bitcoin.&nbsp;



You can relive the curiosity in real time, as Andresen walks host Russ Roberts — the one who sounds eerily like <a href="https://x.com/pete_rizzo_/status/1886391766460330376">Michael Saylor</a> — through the basics (as they were when you mined coins on your laptop and they traded for 90 cents apiece).



Those days are obviously long gone. Almost 95% of the bitcoin supply has been mined, and solo mining is no longer guaranteed to net any bitcoin at all. It’s that enshrined scarcity that’s now drawing institutions and sovereigns to buy bitcoin that already exists. They don’t even need to run the software.



But just because mining is not necessarily profitable now doesn’t mean it’s not possible — you can mine Bitcoin today with solo rigs like the <a href="https://bitaxe.org/">BitAxe</a>, <a href="https://d-central.tech/the-piaxe-one-asic-one-vote/">PiAxe</a>, and other <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/mine-bitcoin-from-your-pocket">customized Raspberry Pi builds</a>. And solo miners regularly solve blocks — at least more than a <a href="https://mempool.space/mining/pool/solock">dozen over the past year</a> — with their luck usually boosted by <a href="https://theminermag.com/news/2025-01-30/bitcoin-foundation-solo-mining/">donated</a> or otherwise shared hash rate.



However, it’s still so rare now that when solo miners do solve blocks, we <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/solo-bitcoin-miner-solves-block">collectively celebrate</a>: Successful solo mining is the exception and not the rule, even if it wasn’t always meant to be that way.



We know that Satoshi had <a href="https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/posts/bitcointalk/20/">pushed</a> to “postpone the GPU arms race as long as we can for the good of the network,” and in the first two years <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/36vnmr/heres_what_satoshi_wrote_to_the_man_responsible/">encouraged</a> Laszlo Hanyecz to slow down work on GPU mining, <a href="https://cointelegraph.com/news/satoshi-invented-gpu-mining-to-defend-the-network-says-early-dev">saying</a> that “the big attraction is that anybody can download Bitcoin and start mining with their laptop.”



It was those laptop miners who bootstrapped bitcoin with their CPUs. Satoshi, by opting not to sell his coins, left the responsibility of distributing and decentralizing the supply with new users.&nbsp;



Whether those initial miners were aware of their critical role in bitcoin’s future is moot — they were interacting with the Bitcoin network in a tangible way that supported Satoshi’s vision of what it could be.



This all means that solo mining is anything but performative. Far from it. Consider solo mining on par with spiritually fighting alongside Satoshi in the trenches of the GPU arms race.



Because Bitcoin is more than a technology — it’s a supratechnology, encompassing computer science, math, sociology, politics, philosophy, psychology and economics.



Listening back to Andresen speak in 2011, what stuck most of all is that the reason Bitcoin is so attractive to institutions and sovereign nations in 2025 is very different from what made it so interesting to early adopters in the nascent 2010s. And that’s okay.



In the podcast, Andresen reasons that when Bitcoin mining reaches the point it has today, i.e. when it takes “dedicated fleets of computers with high-speed network interfaces […] big iron to actually do all that transaction processing,” that those who’d been generating bitcoins on their own computers, “and who like the fact that they can be a self-contained unit,” might not be so happy about “trusting someone running these bigger data computers.”



Obviously, there are many reasons to solo-mine bitcoin, even with the few extra steps required now compared to 2011.&nbsp;



But most importantly, among them is the very off chance that you’ll (at least for the time it takes for Bitcoin to add the next block) be the one to dictate the state of the network — not multibillion-dollar companies or other hypercapitalized operations, however well-intentioned.



— David Canellis



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



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



“Benevolent dictator.” “De-facto lead.” While there’s a lot of nice descriptions about Bitcoin’s inner-workings in this 2011 podcast (I personally think mainstream coverage of the subject was actually better “back then”), it’s hard not to focus squarely on its real historical significance. This podcast provides an almost eerie backdrop to the events that would force Gavin Andresen from his “leadership position” in the open-source project he inherited from Satoshi not some months before the recording.



Fast-forward to the 23:00 mark, and you’ll find Andresen opening up about some of the thornier parts of the software development process that are still a mystery (even to people who have spent a decade watching the Bitcoin charts like me).&nbsp;



At around this mark, Andresen begins diving into the rights and privileges he believed he had as project maintainer, which, while common to open-source projects, were eventually torn away by the project users, who didn’t want to run <a href="https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bitcoin_XT">his more experimental forks</a>. As Bitcoin begins to consider coming soft fork upgrades, (see my most recent conversation with <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GdgQ3IflBJ0">Jeremy Rubin</a>), it’s a reminder that the core of the system remains fragile human consensus, along with software, a written medium that, due to the nature of evolving hardware, must change. That Andresen himself was <a href="https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2017/05/19/where-is-gavin-andresen-the-quiet-exile-of-bitcoins-former-face">eventually evicted over his attempts</a> to exert authority over this process makes listening to this podcast, with this context, bittersweet. 



— Rizzo



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Bitcoin is up 11,000,000% since this 2011 podcast episode

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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WisdomTree’s giving institutions access to their <a href="https://www.wisdomtree.com/investments/digital-funds">tokenized funds</a> across Arbitrum, Base, Avalanche, Ethereum and Optimism with its WisdomTree Connect, the team exclusively told Blockworks.&nbsp;



“Historically, WisdomTree Connect was only on Ethereum, and we think it&#8217;s really important for availability” to allow users to get access to other EVM chains, especially given that WisdomTree prides itself in being “chain agnostic.” Its more retail-focused Prime app, for example, is built on Stellar, WisdomTree’s Maredith Hannon told me.



It also means that its clientele can use the various chains without ever leaving their own ecosystem.



The team had a “lot of interest” from institutional clients for tokenized funds, which led to it launching 13 tokenized funds on its institutional RWA platform.



“We, on purpose, built a suite that really allows any investor to build a diversified portfolio onchain. A lot of the input that we&#8217;ve received from the market is, ‘There&#8217;s plenty of money market funds. What else do you have?’”



The suite includes equity index funds, fixed income funds, asset allocation funds and, of course, WisdomTree’s signature money market fund, WTGXX.&nbsp;



Hannon added that their institutional clients have been looking for alternatives as yields come down. Specifically, investors have been aiming for higher-yield option alternatives to fixed-income products.&nbsp;



“This just gives them more optionality and more availability, where they can build out a diversified portfolio that they would do in the traditional world for asset management, in a way that&#8217;s still onchain and still also being able to be held native in their own wallets,” Hannon explained.&nbsp;



The Connect platform itself is what Hannon called “tech first,” allowing the clients to own the wallet infrastructure. Instead of a whitelist, they use soulbound NFTs that “essentially tag the wallets as WisdomTree wallets,” allowing peer-to-peer transfers between flagged Connect wallets.&nbsp;



“This is really the starting point for us to be able to say clients [can] […] create a network of networks. So let&#8217;s say that [a] […] financial institution developed its own type of identity solution. We could start to create a network of networks of identity to bring more and more investors onchain organically,” Hannon said.



Outside of the newest rollout, the team has been busy applying its Government Money Market Digital Fund as a <a href="https://gov.frax.finance/t/fip-427-wtgxx-as-reserve-asset-for-frax-usd/3649">reserve asset for Frax USD</a>. They also <a href="https://forum.arbitrum.foundation/t/wisdomtree-wtgxx-step-application/28756/1">applied</a> for an investment from Arbitrum’s RWA ecosystem.



The market cap of WisdomTree’s WTGXX sits at $108 million, according to rwa.xyz. That puts it below the offerings from both Franklin and BlackRock.



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Exclusive: WisdomTree Connect expands to Base, Arbitrum, Avalanche and Optimism

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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There was talk at last week’s <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/crypto-exchange-etf-event-vegas">Exchange ETF conference</a> around more crypto products coming as different types of investors enter the market.&nbsp;&nbsp;



Grayscale Investments is among those expanding its product lineup, introducing a Bitcoin Covered Call ETF (BTCC) and a Bitcoin Premium Income ETF (BPI).



The strategies “may be considered as an alternative income stream that’s less correlated to traditional income-oriented investments,” the firm notes. They aim to distribute income monthly.



BTCC buys and sells call and put option contracts that utilize a bitcoin ETP (i.e. its GBTC and BTC trusts) as the reference asset. Its sale of call options may limit the fund’s gains when those bitcoin ETPs see share price increases.



As for BPI, the ETF writes calls targeting so-called out-of-the-money strike prices (those higher than bitcoin’s spot price). It’s meant to balance upside participation and income generation.



It was clear that <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/bitcoin-etf-options-trading-begins">options on bitcoin ETFs</a> — letting institutional investors better manage BTC exposures in different market conditions — <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/bitcoin-etf-options-trading-begins">marked a new chapter</a> for the asset class. Issuers have debuted funds utilizing options to <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/calamos-btc-etf-downside-protection">offer downside protection</a>, for example.&nbsp;



Another new chapter? Crypto index funds.&nbsp;



A Grayscale registration statement <a href="https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1729997/000095017025047994/gdlc_s-3_032525.htm">filed</a> Monday is another step toward the firm trying to uplist its Grayscale Digital Large Cap Fund to an ETF (after NYSE Arca’s <a href="https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2024/11/04/2974196/0/en/Grayscale-Digital-Large-Cap-Fund-Ticker-GDLC-Application-to-Uplist-as-Exchange-Traded-Product-Now-Published-in-Federal-Register.html">19b-4</a> last year). That fund, currently trading on OTC Markets, holds bitcoin, ether, solana, XRP and cardano. 



Hashdex, Bitwise and others are also looking to offer index ETFs that go beyond <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/trump-media-etf-cryptodotcom">BTC and ETH exposure</a>. We’ll find out in the coming months what the SEC has to say about that.



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