As of the end of Q1, the Uniswap Foundation held $41.41 million in fiat and stablecoins and 730,000 UNI tokens.

The Foundation committed $4.34 million in new grants, disbursed $2.79 million previously, and designated UNI tokens for employee awards.

The Uniswap Foundation – the nonprofit behind Uniswap – recently shared a look at its financials days before the community moves to vote to enable and distribute fees autonomously.

According to a balance sheet shared by the Foundation, at the end of the first quarter it held $41.41 million in fiat and stablecoins, along with 730,000 UNI tokens. The fiat and stablecoins are designated for grant commitments and operational activities, while the UNI tokens are reserved for employee awards.

Later this week, UNI token holders will vote for a new fee mechanism that would shift some rewards away from the decentralized exchange's liquidity providers to its token holders instead.

If approved – and prior snapshot polls show it likely will be – the proposal will transfer control of the mainnet UniswapV3Factory to a new V3FactoryOwner contract. The new fee distribution plan will be activated in a second vote that hasn't yet been scheduled.

SEC threats loom large

This comes as the Uniswap Foundation prepares to fight the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Recently, the SEC issued the Foundation a Wells notice, signaling that it intends to recommend enforcement action against it in the future.

The Wells Notice targets Uniswap's UNI and LP tokens, arguing they are investment contracts and alleging that they violating securities laws. Uniswap Labs disputes this, and says the SEC lacks jurisdiction, arguing LP tokens are merely bookkeeping devices.

Uniswap also argues that it doesn't meet the SEC's own definition of an exchange.

Floki developers launched a Telegram-based trading bot for FLOKI holders on the BNB Chain network.

The bot is expected to increase demand for FLOKI tokens and contribute to buying pressure with a 1% fee on transactions, half of which will be used to buy FLOKI on the open market.

Floki developers today introduced a trading bot tool that allows FLOKI holders to trade any token on the BNB Chain network, the developers told CoinDesk in a Telegram interview.

The Telegram-based bot will initially be available to a small number of users during a beta testing period to find and resolve any technical bugs. Developer B said public availability is expected in “mid-June.”

B said the service will later be expanded to the Ethereum and Base blockchains. Developers expect the service to increase demand for FLOKI tokens, because users will need to hold the coin to use the bot.

The bot charges a 1% fee on every transaction and 50% of the collected fees will be used to buy FLOKI on the open market, contributing to buying pressure.

The product is the latest release in a line of utility tools and a metaverse that make part of the Floki ecosystem. The token was initially launched in 2021 as a meme coin themed after the Shiba Inu dog breed. It has since rebranded as a utility token that fuels Floki-based protocols and products.

Telegram-based trading bots started to gain popularity in early 2023 with the launch of Unibot. These bots allow users to punt on tokens as easily as they can chat to each other on the messaging app.

The appeal of such products is likely due to the ease of usage compared to a decentralized exchange, such as Uniswap, where users have to continually log in to their wallet, cross-check if all token information is correct, and encounter high fees to ensure their trades go through.

Meme coin projects such as Solana-based Bonk (BONK) have previously launched their own trading bots, which have proven popular among their community. Bonk’s BonkBot, for instance, was responsible for up to 70% of all on-chain trades on Solana at one point, B said, contributing to over $1 million in buying pressure to BONK monthly.

FLOKI prices are up 17% in the past 24 hours, data shows. The broad-based CoinDesk 20 (CD20) has gained 0.27%.

American celebrity Caitlyn Jenner apparently launched a token, JENNER, on the Solana blockchain, but its legitimacy was questioned due to past celebrity X account compromises.

Despite skepticism among market participants and claims of being a hack, Jenner's account continued to promote the token, even releasing a video that appeared to confirm its authenticity.

A token launched on the Solana blockchain, apparently by U.S. celebrity Caitlyn Jenner, has left crypto market observers scratching their heads.

Late Sunday, a post on Jenner’s X account said she had issued the JENNER token using the Solana token deployer Pump Fun. Market participants quickly dismissed it as a likely hack because celebrity accounts on the social media platform have previously been compromised to falsely promote tokens or crypto protocols.

make america great again!!! 🇺🇸  and we love crypto!  https://t.co/SiYwteBGkv @pumpdotfun 🫡 pic.twitter.com/3IDlAoaQJq

— Caitlyn Jenner (@Caitlyn_Jenner) May 26, 2024

Usually, such account compromises are caught early and shut down immediately by X's security teams. But Jenner’s account continued to advertise the token hours after the initial launch.

“Nothing has been hacked,” a post read. “We will be solely focused on $Jenner and expect to hit $50m market cap in the first 24 hours,” another said.

Market observers likely viewed the token with skepticism, as several American celebrities have previously been charged by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for even promoting tokens.

About six hours after the issuance, Jenner’s account released a video that appeared to show the celebrity talking about the token. The post specifically mentioned it was not a “deep fake,” and said the token had recorded more than $113 million in trading volumes in just four hours.

“This is real. Get involved,” Jenner said in the purported video. “My new crypto coin.”

$Jenner no deep fakes. All real crypto. $113.5M volume in just over 4 hours. Trade here: https://t.co/SiYwteBGkv pic.twitter.com/gyobXOddzI

— Caitlyn Jenner (@Caitlyn_Jenner) May 27, 2024

A separate video post appeared to show Jenner’s manager Sophia Hutchins affirming that the token was real and that she was “managing the crypto project.” Some X users dismissed that video as a deep fake.

The Block reported that posts promoting the token were also made on Jenner’s Instagram account. CoinDesk did not see these posts on Jenner’s account as of 10:48 UTC, indicative of their being taken down.

Meanwhile, only 4% of punters voted for “Yes” on the “Was Caitlyn Jenner hacked?” market on the predictions platform Polymarket. The market had attracted over $1.2 million in bets as of early in the European afternoon.

A request for comment posted through Jenner's website was not immediately answered on a U.S. national holiday.

Two Ethereum ecosystem tokens, PEPE and MOG, climbed to new highs on the back of U.S. ether ETF filings approvals, with traders treating them as beta bets.

Open interest in futures for the tokens increased, suggesting new money entering the market, though the long-to-short ratio for PEPE indicates traders are betting against further price rises.

Two Ethereum ecosystem tokens surged to record highs on Monday, fueled by last week's approval of key ether {{ETH}} exchange-traded fund (ETF) filings in the U.S. that persuaded some traders to consider meme tokens as beta bets.

Frog-themed pepe {{PEPE}} and cat-themed mog (MOG) jumped 11% and 45%, respectively, in the past 24 hours as a beta bet narrative showed no signs of slowing. A beta bet is a way of gaining exposure to a main asset by investing in related networks or protocols. Trading volumes for PEPE across spot and futures hit over $1.8 billion, compared with a more usual range of $400 million-$600 million.

The gains came as ether rose nearly 5% over the same period, leading the advance among major tokens as bitcoin {{BTC}} shed 1%. The broad-based CoinDesk 20 {{CD20}}, an index of the biggest tokens, minus stablecoins, lost 0.3%.

Futures data shows open interest on pepe and mog-tracked instruments spiked up in the past 24 hours. PEPE open interest rose to $720 million from last week’s $550 million, while for MOG the figure rose to $8.3 million from $5 million. Rising open interest is considered a sign of new money entering the market, which may foreshadow further price volatility.

However, a long-to-short ratio for PEPE is skewed in favor of bears at 54%, data from Coinalyze shows, showing traders are going short, or betting against, further price rises.

As CoinDesk reported last week, traders have been considering PEPE and MOG as a levered way to gain exposure to ether. A rally in the two tokens started when analysts raised the odds of ether ETFs being approved for trading in the U.S.

PEPE even zoomed into the 20 largest tokens by a market capitalization of over $6 billion, netting some early investors millions of dollars on an initial purchase of just $460.

Since 2023, meme tokens – usually considered to have no intrinsic value, but which nevertheless enjoy tremendous followings – have recently risen in prominence as a beta bet on whichever ecosystem they are based on.

Several Solana-based meme coin tokens surged from December to March as the network’s SOL tokens took off – contributing to ecosystem growth and garnering attention. Also in December, the Avalanche Foundation, a non-profit organization that maintains the Avalanche blockchain, said it would invest in meme tokens built on the network in recognition of the online culture and memetic value that such tokens can drive among investors.

Hyped Base meme coin normie (NORMIE) plunged 99% on Sunday after being hit by an exploit that saw attackers manipulate the token’s total supply, completely draining its liquidity pools.

Blockchain sleuths said attackers exploited a so-called tax function in the token’s contract to issue more tokens than the intended 1 billion supply. The extra tokens were then traded for ether.

In an on-chain message late on Sunday, the attacker offered Normie developers a way to receive 90% of the stolen funds back if they agreed to relaunch the project.

“I offer to return 90% of the exploited ETH, keeping 10% as a bug bounty (with no reprisals,” the on-chain message reads. “One condition: it, and the 600 ETH in the dev wallet, are used to fairly launch a new token that is used to reimburse NORMIE holders.”

Six hundred ether is worth nearly $2.3 million at current prices. The move marked one of the first instances of an attacker keeping a project relaunch as a condition to return funds. Normie developers accepted the bounty offer as of early Monday, messages on the project's official Telegram group viewed by CoinDesk showed.

In another on-chain message in Asian morning hours on Monday, the attacker called Normie’s contract code a “copy-paste” job which was likely not thoroughly reviewed by its developers prior to being pushed live.

“This exact code is present in a number of other token contracts, a few of which significantly pre-date Normie. Most meme tokens are simply copy-paste jobs from the same small set of contracts, all with over-complicated tax logic in the transfer function,” the attacker said.

“I suspect this simply a case of them re-using code they didn't thoroughly review,” they added. Before the dump, NORMIE was among the top meme coins on Base with a market capitalization of over $40 million and nearly 90,000 on-chain token holders, as per DEXTools metrics. Normie is slang for a “normal person,” and the Base version was modeled after a blue coloured frog that resembled the popular Pepe the Frog character.

It sits at a market capitalization of just $700 as of early Monday following the exploit.

Meanwhile, at least one NORMIE investor faced a massive loss due to the attack, with their $1.6 million in investment turning to just $150 in seconds.

“Since $NORMIE was exploited, the 11.23M $NORMIE that this trader spent $1.16M to buy is now worth less than $150,” analysis firm Lookonchain posted on X. “He spent $1.16M to buy 11.23M $NORMIE at $0.1035 from Mar 25 to Apr 9 and has held it until now without selling it.”

Since $NORMIE was exploited, the 11.23M $NORMIE that this trader spent $1.16M to buy is now worth less than $150.He spent $1.16M to buy 11.23M $NORMIE at $0.1035 from Mar 25 to Apr 9 and has held it until now without selling it.https://t.co/za6YaldkoZ pic.twitter.com/6lJRJsU2mq

— Lookonchain (@lookonchain) May 26, 2024

Normie’s X has been suspended as of early Asian hours on Monday.

Donald J. Trump has pledged to commute Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht’s life sentence to time served if he’s re-elected president.

“If you vote for me, on Day 1, I will commute the sentence of Ross Ulbricht to a sentence of time served,” Trump said during his Saturday night remarks at the Libertarian National Convention in Washington, D.C. “He’s already served 11 years, we’re gonna get him home.”

Hours before those remarks, Trump took to social media to praise the crypto industry, writing on Truth Social:

“I am very positive and open minded to cryptocurrency companies, and all things related to this new and burgeoning industry. Our country must be the leader in the field. There is no second place,” Trump wrote, adding that President Joe Biden “wants [the cryptocurrency industry] to die a slow and painful death. That will never happen with me!”

In his evening address, Trump’s pledge to free Ulbricht was met with raucous cheers from the assembled audience, many of whom were holding up signs reading “Free Ross.”

In 2015, Ulbricht was sentenced to two consecutive life sentences plus 40 years – effectively, life in prison without the possibility of parole – for creating and operating Silk Road. The now-defunct darknet marketplace was used to anonymously buy and sell goods, but was largely used for drugs. Silk Road operated from 2011 to 2013 and is widely considered the first real-world use case for Bitcoin.

Ulbricht has become something of a martyr for many in the crypto community, as well as to many Libertarians, who see Ulbricht’s draconian sentence as a governmental overstep and a violation of his constitutional rights. In 2018, the Libertarian Party called on then-President Trump to pardon Ulbricht.

Before Trump’s presidency ended in January 2021, he granted clemency to 143 individuals – pardoning 73, including Ripple board member Ken Kurson, and commuting the sentences of 70 others. He did not offer clemency to Ulbricht, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange or Edward Snowden, who released details about a U.S. surveillance program to American journalist Glenn Greenwald.

Trump also made more general comments about cryptocurrency at the convention, telling attendees that he would “stop Joe Biden’s crusade to crush crypto – we’re gonna stop it.”

“I will ensure that the future of crypto and the future of bitcoin will be made in the USA, not driven overseas. I will support the right to self custody,” Trump said, to cheers. “To the nation’s fifty million crypto holders, I say this: I will keep Elizabeth Warren and her goons away from your bitcoin, and I will never allow the creation of a central bank digital currency.”

Trump has warmed up considerably to crypto in recent months, making several pro-crypto comments publicly and becoming the first major party presidential candidate to accept crypto donations.

Read more: The Biden Administration Is Easing Up on Crypto (a Vibes Analysis)

Donald J. Trump tightened his recent embrace of crypto today, posting on social media "I am very positive and open minded to cryptocurrency companies and all things related to this new and burgeoning industry" as both sides in the upcoming presidential election appear to be seeking to win over pro-crypto voters.

"Our country must be the leader in the field, there is no second place," Trump posted on Truth Social prior to his address at the Libertarian National Convention in Washington, D.C., later today.

Trump then took a shot at his rival: "Crooked Joe Biden, on the other hand, the worst president in the history of our country, wants it to die a slow and painful death."

The sentiment toward crypto has noticeably warmed in Washington since Trump has deliberately sought to woo pro-crypto voters. First, the former president made pro-crypto comments earlier this month at a Mar-a-Lago dinner. Then this past Tuesday, Trump's presidential campaign began accepting crypto donations, making good on the presumptive Republican nominee's pledge to become the first major party candidate to embrace bitcoin, ether and other digital currencies.

Trump's pro-crypto rhetoric and actions seem to have thawed the Biden administrations opposition to crypto. Last Wednesday, the White House issued a statement expressing its opposition to the House of Representatives passing a crypto market structure bill, but didn't threaten a veto. The House proceeded to approve the measure, which now heads to the Senate. Then on Thursday, the ether exchange traded funds (ETF) took a major step toward becoming available in the U.S. after the Securities and Exchange Commission approved key regulatory filings. Such an approval was seen as extremely unlikely just a month ago.

Read more: The Biden Administration Is Easing Up on Crypto (a Vibes Analysis)

Mike Winkelmann sank into the sofa as three cameras recorded his meltdown. The dueling identities that had once structured his life were coming into conflict as his fortunes increased by the second. Unseen crypto billionaires were bidding for his soul, or at least it felt that way. His entire artistic career was being auctioned as a compilation of five thousand digital artworks, packaged by the Christie’s auctioneers as a single non-fungible token (NFT). The winner would receive this NFT as an online certificate of ownership, a deed to 14 years inside Winkelmann’s mind. It was surreal watching his own coronation from the couch. The new crypto king was slack jawed as his net worth continued to rise by the millions on the computer screen, reckoning with the transformation of his art into an ultimate use-case for blockchain technology, bringing the metaverse into the mainstream. Two documentary crews captured his euphoric stupor, memorializing the tight choreography of this historic moment.

Zachary Small, a New York Times reporter writing about the art world's relationship to money, politics and technology, is the author of "Token Supremacy: THE ART OF FINANCE, THE FINANCE OF ART, AND THE GREAT CRYPTO CRASH OF 2022," published by Penguin Random House.

The artist had become a multimillionaire at that moment. It was too much to bear, and suddenly he was bolting for the out door patio, away from the living room, where his family had gathered to celebrate his success. Winkelmann needed some air.

Once upon a time, the promise of a divided life held some appeal. Mike owned a lucrative business turning digital graphics and animations into branded visuals for clients like Louis Vuitton, Apple and Justin Bieber. The money he earned from those productions allowed him to live in the McMansion suburbs outside of Charleston, South Carolina. He fit comfortably there into the patterns of home, work, and hobby. He was popular with the neighbors, a plucky midwestern transplant with a wide smile, a sailor’s mouth, and a heart of gold. He would sometimes rant about politics, but otherwise focused on family, sitting pretty in a large home overlooking the palmetto trees. Mike understood the value of compartmentalization, because his parents taught him midwestern manners and the importance of staying reserved in the middle-class Wisconsin village where he was born. So he kept his more libidinal thoughts inside a computer running so hot that it needed to be stored in the bathroom on a wood platform over the tub, near a jury-rigged industrial A/C unit that vented its heat into the attic.

The computer expended its vast amounts of energy trying to contain Beeple, the internet crap monster responsible for Winkelmann’s cult online following. He adopted the name in 2003, after a 1980s toy that looked like the abandoned love child of Sasquatch and Chewbacca, with light sensors that triggered its blinking nose and squeaky voice whenever its eyes were covered by a hand. Winkelmann had just graduated with a computer-science degree from Purdue University in Indiana, but he found programming “boring as sh*t.” The 22-year-old was more interested in shooting narrative short films through a webcam than working for a software company. The Beeple toy came to symbolize his fascination with the interplay of light and sound.

In 2007, Beeple started a project that would eventually make him famous. The "Everydays" series began as a daily drawing habit of crude little doodles that seemed to betray his more corporate, Bill Gates appearance. The drawings were the crass products of a mind feeding on internet bile (racist caricatures, nude women, penis jokes, political satire) and tutored by magical realism (family portraits, animal studies, Jesus smoking cigarettes, Hillary Clinton wearing gold teeth). A year later, Beeple switched to Cinema4D, an animation software that allowed him to manipulate three-dimensional space. For the kid who spent hours at Toys “R” Us playing a demo of Super Mario 64 on the new Nintendo console, it was a dream come true to create realistic worlds on a computer. But it wasn’t until around 2011 that he started fully utilizing the program to experiment with bright colors and blurry shapes with names like Synthetic Bubblegum Tittufux. Around the same time, Beeple started releasing music videos made with Cinema4D as free source material for creative professionals; the artist understood how popular his creations had become only when, on a family vacation to Hong Kong, he saw one of his works projected outside a Hard Rock Cafe.

A recognizable style finally emerged in 2017, when Beeple fully articulated his fascination with tech dystopias. Importing digital assets from other websites allowed him to createmore detailed scenes in only a couple hours. His imagination exploded with skyscrapers stacked atop cargo containers, Santa Claus clones brawling to the death, and cultists worshipping an original Macintosh computer. Celebrity sightings abound in these nihilistic tales of the future: Donald Trump’s head opens to reveal a burger brain; Mickey Mouse holds a machine gun; and Buzz Lightyear lactates in the park.

See also: Beeple Sold Out. So What?

All that chaos was contained in Winkelmann’s computer, sitting on a desk with its cables running into the bathroom hotbox. His home office was largely undecorated, with beige carpeting, Walmart bookshelves, and two 65-inch screen televisions that played CNN and Fox News on mute throughout the day. He was neither the first artist to adopt lowbrow culture (Marcel Duchamp beat him there by nearly a century when he exhibited a signed urinal in 1917) nor the first to immerse himself in mass media (Andy Warhol and his silkscreens of Marilyn Monroe might like a word). What made Beeple special was his evangelism for digital art, his embodiment of the internet’s tendency toward dark absurdism, and his eagerness to build an economy around it. He had already cultivated a network of nearly two million followers on Instagram, and artist friends were repeatedly bugging him to start releasing NFTs. Why not try something new?

Beeple had everything to gain and nothing to lose. In late October 2020, days before the presidential election, he released three artworks on the NFT marketplace Nifty Gateway. One piece was called "Politics Is Bullshit," featuring a diarrheic bull tattooed with an American flag with a Twitter bird perched upon its neck. The initial offer for this edition of 100 images was just $1.00 each.

“If you need extra convincing from some BS artist’s notes wether you want to spend a dollar on this i will punch you in the god damn face,” Beeple wrote about the offering in the lowercase, typo-ridden idiom of internetspeak. “Smash the buy button ya jabroni.”

Poof. All gone. Sold. The two other NFTs offered, including one from a video series called Crossroads, went for $66,666.66 each. Even with such a devilish price – decided upon with the whimsy of a speculative market willing to spend whatever – Winkelmann could identify his salvation in the metaverse. The most he had ever made from his artworks was $100 for a small print. Now the artist saw a potential avenue for financializing his digital art, one that built upon the lucrative market for online collectibles that companies like Dapper Labs and Larva Labs had started in 2017 with the release of CryptoKitty and CryptoPunk NFTs. Executives behind those products had predicted that digital art would find online buyers, and within the two-month period from November to January 2018, CryptoKitties made $52 million. Mack Flavelle, a founder of the CryptoKitties project, pointed out why: “There’s not that much that people can do with cryptocurrency,” he told the New York Times reporter Scott Reyburn at the time. “We gave them something fun and useful to do with their Ethereum.”

Winkelmann’s success seemed to fulfill the prophecy that individual artists would benefit from the cryptoeconomy. But the business developers behind crypto companies were looking for the kind of legitimization that no amount of advertising could attain, and collectibles by themselves felt like little more than a bubble. They wanted the approval of legacy companies.

They wanted permanence. They wanted cultural capital.

In 2017, Christie’s made a Renaissance painting the marquee lot in their November sale of postwar and contemporary art. The anachronism was supposed to convey the immediacy of the artwork’s appeal, even if art historians were more skeptical about its authenticity; nevertheless, the auction house described Salvator Mundi as a genuine Leonardo da Vinci painting, and it sold for a record $450.3 million to Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman. The price overtook the previous benchmark, set by a Picasso painting in 2015, by almost triple. Gasps from the salesroom confirmed the event as peak spectacle, made even more ridiculous in the coming years, as Salvator Mundi remained locked inside the crown prince’s yacht; he refused to exhibit the painting publicly, allegedly because he feared that museums might downgrade the work as belonging to a Leonardo assistant instead of the master himself.

Restructuring continued in 2020, as Christie’s announced that it would merge its impressionist and modern and contemporary art departments into one office. “Our clients don’t think in categories anymore,” Guillaume Cerutti, chief executive at the auction house, told reporters at the time.

The decision came at a time when impressionist and modern sales were performing far below their postwar and contemporary competitors. Combining the departments would dump collectors into one pool, changing the dynamics of the market and pushing tastes toward the present. It suddenly seemed that the most expensive artworks had paint dripping off the canvas; the artists were oftentimes women and people of color, and they were in their 30s and 40s – shocking for an industry that had exclusively prized dead white men for the majority of its existence. Sales of art sold within three years of its creation date grew 1,000% over the past decade to almost $260 million.

Ironically, the arrival of the ultra-contemporary market occurred around the same time that Christie’s announced that its top lot for the "20th Century Evening Sale" in October 2020 would be the remains of a Tyrannosaurus rex, nicknamed Stan, which ended up selling for $31.8 million, the most ever paid for a fossil at the time.

Many employees were bitter about the changes; they rolled their eyes at the little anachronisms that had become headliners. It was a successful marketing gimmick by the bigwigs to grab attention in a moment when the pandemic economy seemed on the verge of daily collapse. Those who joined the auction house to nerd out on art history hated this new approach, but others, with a sense for business, thrived in the controlled chaos.

See also: Robert Alice Made NFT History, Now He's Writing About It

“I have always felt like I am living in the theater of the absurd,” Davis later confided in me. He relished the ridiculous nature of his industry. The auction world was a system of meaningless sales records, an illusion of competition that often boiled down to a handful of rich men who all knew one another competing over the bragging rights of ownership. Connoisseurship was dead. Provenance was a mirage. Dinosaur bones were being sold next to Rothko and Picasso paintings.

“All I know is that I know nothing,” Davis said, adding that the motto was actually a paraphrase of something Socrates once said and a lyric from a song called “Knowledge” by the California punk band Operation Ivy.

So, when the salesman considered all the strange circumstances surrounding him, auctioning an NFT sounded perfectly reasonable. “It will be fun and a little weird,” he predicted. The auction was less than two months away, and everyone supporting the NFT sale had something to prove. Meghan Doyle, a researcher, and Ryoma Ito, the chief marketing officer, started working around the clock, feeling pressure to create the perfect auction. But the most important detail was still missing: what was Beeple going to make? The artist had originally suggested one of his "Everydays" to commemorate 14 years of working on the project.

“Cool, but maybe not as epic as it should be,” Doyle said, declining the proposal.

Winkelmann returned with a new idea. “I had hit this perfect milestone in this massive project,” he remembered. “And I had just happened to hit 5,000 days of making art.” Instead of offering a single work, he decided to combine everything he had created over the last fourteen years into a single composite, sold as an NFT.

“He came back to us with a magnum opus,” Doyle said. “With that image in hand, we were able to rally the support that we needed to develop content around the piece and get advertisements in the newspaper. We had a complete story, a complete picture.”

However, Ito found the level of involvement from Christie’s marketing department lacking. Understanding the stakes of this auction for his company, he started trying to make his own luck through outreach with private collectors – “whales,” as they are called in the crypto community. Vignesh Sundaresan was one of the first names on his list.

In January, Sundaresan could be found on the virtual disco floor with a champagne glass floating about the head of his digital avatar. He was partying hard in the metaverse to celebrate his $2.2-million purchase of twenty Beeple NFTs and the opening of a gallery that he had commissioned Web architects to build in the online world of Origin City. Back then, he was operating under a mysterious persona named MetaKovan, which translates from his native Tamil language into “King of Meta.”

Sundaresan was a serial entrepreneur in the crypto industry; he had gained his affinity for decentralized finance after a childhood in the Indian city of Chennai, where he dreamed of becoming the next Steve Jobs. He was born there in 1988, and came of age alongside the World Wide Web, which had been released the following year. Then there were a series of false starts, including the creation of “Bitcoin ATMs,” which enabled users to deposit physical cash and receive crypto, and a trading platform called Lendroid, which blew through its $48 million in funding within two years.

In 2019, Sundaresan started investing heavily in digital properties, buying a digital representation of a diamond-studded Formula One car for an online racing game, NFT artworks and hundreds of acres in the digital real-estate market. A year later, he started using the name MetaKovan, which he describes as his “exosuit” created for “building the metaverse.”

At the virtual party in January, Sundaresan, now 33, unveiled a fund called Metapurse for investing in NFTs. The 20 Beeple artworks that he had purchased were bundled into a single asset called B.20, which was then fractionalized into ten million tokens. Buyers of the tokens were told that this would denote ownership over the metaverse’s first large-scale public art project.

“We were inspired by the idea of not only being able to own historic artwork, like the Mona Lisa, but also being able to own the museum it was displayed in, and then sharing that ownership and experience with the public,” the company said in its newsletter. “Making money with art is fairly simple and not very imaginative. What we want to do is to decentralize and democratize art.”

Ito had been watching Sundaresan for a while; he understood how the crypto millionaire operated and that he had an affinity for the guttural sci-fi fantasies that Beeple was selling. More important, MetaKovan wanted to leverage NFTs as a financial instrument. He was exactly the kind of person who might want to send a message about the power of digital art by spending millions on an image.

Gradually, Sundaresan was coaxed into the process. He had some initial worries about going through the Christie’s “know your customer” process, an anti-money-laundering rule that ensures that companies keep records on the essential facts of their buyers and sellers. He expressed his reservations to Ito, fearing that he would be unmasked as MetaKovan because of the digital identity trail. But, eventually, he came to accept that this was a risk involved in doing business with an established auction house, even if the majority of bidders remain anonymous to the public unless they choose to reveal themselves. He was joined by his cofounder at Metapurse – another Indian crypto investor, Anand Venkateswaran – who played more of a backseat advisory role in the acquisition process.

The marketing juggernaut at Christie’s, which had initially been slow to support the sale, finally kicked into action. Winkelmann’s NFT idea had been rebranded into an event with its own subtitle, like an Avengers movie – "Everydays: The First 5000 Days." Doyle was receiving increasing numbers of emails from crypto collectors expressing their interest in placing a bid. The artwork had been published without a price range; instead, the auction house chose to write “estimate unknown,” a cheeky nod to the usual “inquire for estimate” phrase implying that anyone needing to ask was too poor to buy.

“Estimate unknown.” That was the truth. Winkelmann had prepared himself for the NFT to sell for somewhere near $1 million. Ito had the same gut feeling. It wasn’t until a few days before the sale, as reporters started asking if they were prepared to sell for tens of millions, that the team realized something profound was about to happen.

“Noah looked at me and said, ‘We are about to throw a grenade on the art world,’ ” Winkelmann recalled.

Compliance officers and executives at Christie’s were still debating the financial terms of the deal. The original plan was for the house to accept cryptocurrency for the hammer price but require that its own premium fee be paid in dollars; however, sale organizers worried that such an arrangement would discourage crypto whales from participating in the auction.

Success needed to be measured with the company’s longterm goals for growth. Accepting cryptocurrency would invite scrutiny from the press, traditional collectors and government regulators; it could also be a financial risk, depending on the volatile prices of bitcoin {{BTC}} and ether {{ETH}}. What ultimately became clear to decision makers was that nothing about this sale could be half-assed. Big money often requires big leaps of faith.

“A decision was made at the highest levels to take the whole thing in cryptocurrency,” Doyle said. “The amount of cogs in the wheel for that to happen was truly mind-blowing.”

The gamble worked, and the tidal waves of inquiries about the Beeple sale never stopped. Sundaresan had already confirmed his participation in the auction, but what nobody expected was another competitor willing to participate in one of the most furious online bidding wars that the auction house had ever seen.

On February 25, 2021, the auction began with a $100 opening bid. Within eight minutes, the price had reached $1 million.

“I was shocked that our website could handle it,” Doyle said. “I had never seen that happen.”

The auction had already reached the threshold for bidders at which the prospective buyers needed to be cleared financially, often with letters of references from the crypto exchanges supporting their transactions. There were nearly two dozen hopeful buyers at that point, 18 of whom were entirely new to Christie’s. Most were millennials.

See also: What's Next for Beeple After Dizzying $69M NFT Sale?

“It was a psychotic amount of bidding,” Davis thought as his phone started blowing up with messages. His boss, Alex Rotter, head of 20th-and-21st-century art, even took to social media to brag about the sale. He posted a Beeple artwork to his Instagram featuring a superpowered Homer Simpson lobotomizing his son, Bart Simpson, with laser vision.

“Beeple leads the way,” Rotter captioned the image. “It’s all happening.”

This excerpt has been lightly edited.

Cryptocurrency custodian BitGo will get a fresh chance to sue financial services firm Galaxy Digital over the two companies’ failed $1.2 billion merger agreement after Delaware’s Supreme Court reversed an earlier ruling to dismiss BitGo’s lawsuit.

“We believe justice prevailed on appeal, and we are delighted to move forward with this case in the Chancery Court,” said R. Brian Timmons, partner at Los Angeles-based law firm Quinn Emanuel, which is representing BitGo in this case.

BitGo filed suit against Galaxy in August 2022, seeking $100 million in damages and alleging that Galaxy “intentionally” breached its May 2021 merger agreement when it could no longer afford the $1.2 billion price tag after experiencing massive financial losses during the crypto bear market. Galaxy blamed the breakup on BitGo’s failure to provide certain audited financial statements on time and said BitGo’s claims were “without merit.”

Last June, Delaware Chancery Court Vice Chancellor J. Travis Laster ruled that Galaxy had a “valid basis” to pull out of the agreement, because BitGo gave the firm “non-compliant” financial documents.

After BitGo appealed the ruling, the state’s Supreme Court found that the merger agreement’s definition of “financial statements” was ambiguous, and that both parties “have proffered reasonable interpretations” of acceptable documentation, and reversed the ruling.

Galaxy Digital did not respond to CoinDesk’s request for comment by press time.

There is no doubt that the bipartisan passage of the Financial Innovation and Technology for the 21st Century Act (FIT21) by the House is a monumental development for the U.S. crypto industry, bringing much-needed regulatory clarity within sight. However, despite its good intentions, FIT21 is fundamentally flawed from a market structure perspective and introduces issues that could have far-reaching unintended consequences if not addressed in future Senate negotiations.

Joshua Riezman is deputy general counsel at GSR.

Note: The views expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of CoinDesk, Inc. or its owners and affiliates.

One of the most problematic aspects of the bill is its creation of a bifurcated market for crypto tokens. By distinguishing between "restricted digital assets” and “digital commodities” in parallel trading markets, the bill sets the stage for a fragmented landscape that is ill-suited for the inherently global and fungible nature of crypto tokens and creates first-of-its-kind compliance complications.

This legislative initiative stems from the long-running debates over U.S. federal securities laws application to crypto tokens and the difference between bitcoin, considered a non-security, and nearly every other token. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission's (SEC) guidance on whether a crypto token is a security has generally been based on whether the associated blockchain project is "sufficiently decentralized" and thus not an investment contract "security" as defined by the Howey test.

FIT21 attempts to codify this impractical test by dividing regulatory oversight over spot crypto markets between the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and SEC, based on, among other things, the degree of decentralization.

While the bill helpfully appears to clarify that crypto tokens transferred or sold pursuant to an investment contract do not inherently become securities themselves, it unfortunately contradicts itself by nonetheless giving the SEC plenary authority over such investment contract assets where sold to investors (or issued to developers) for the time period before a project reaches decentralized Valhalla. Only tokens airdropped or earned by end-users are initially “digital commodities” subject to CFTC jurisdiction.

Most confoundingly, FIT21 allows for concurrent trading in restricted digital assets and digital commodities for the same token in separate and distinct markets during this period (as shown in the graphic below). It is likely that many projects would never meet the prescriptive definition of decentralization in the bill and therefore trade in disjointed markets in the U.S. indefinitely.

The bill's proposed bifurcated market for restricted and unrestricted digital assets ignores fungibility as a fundamental characteristic of crypto tokens. By creating categories of restricted and unrestricted assets, the bill disrupts this principle, leading to confusion and market fragmentation. This could impair liquidity, complicate transactions and risk management mechanisms such as derivatives, reduce the overall utility of the crypto tokens and ultimately stifle innovation in a nascent industry.

See also: The Financial Innovation and Technology for the 21st Century Act Is a Watershed Moment | Opinion

Implementing such distinctions would likely necessitate technological modifications to crypto tokens to enable buyers to know which type of crypto asset they are receiving such that they may comply with market-specific requirements. Imposing such technological marking on restricted digital assets, even if possible, would create an "American-only" crypto market separate from global digital asset markets, reducing the utility and value of every relevant project.

To protect customers and ensure well-functioning U.S. digital asset markets lawmakers must refine the bill to unify spot markets.

As shown in the above graphic, tokens may transition back and forth between the SEC and CFTC markets should decentralized projects re-centralize. The complexity and compliance costs created by such a scheme applied to the many thousands of future crypto tokens is dramatically underestimated and would undermine the credibility and predictability of U.S. financial markets. There are precious few examples of financial products transitioning between SEC and CFTC jurisdiction and it's nearly always a tire fire (e.g., the 2020 transition of KOSPI 200 futures contracts from CFTC jurisdiction to joint CFTC/SEC jurisdiction).

The bill further underestimates the international nature of crypto token markets. Crypto tokens are global assets that trade as the same instrument globally. Attempting to restrict certain assets within the U.S. would likely lead to regulatory arbitrage, where the flowback from international markets would undermine the bill's intent while eroding the competitiveness of the U.S. crypto industry.

Developers and investors outside the U.S. are unlikely to self-impose similar restrictions on restricted digital assets. Therefore, new projects and investors will be incentivized to move development and investment outside of the U.S. to avoid these requirements. This would make it extremely difficult to prevent the U.S. digital commodities market from being flooded with non-U.S. tokens that would have been restricted digital assets had they been "issued" in the U.S.

Lastly and ironically, the bill designed to protect U.S. consumers could end up harming them due to poor market structure. The initial CFTC-regulated markets for end users will be full of sellers that generally received tokens for free. This unbalanced market dynamic will most likely lead to depressed prices and increased volatility compared to both the restricted and international markets, with professional arbitrageurs benefiting at the expense of U.S. retail.

See also: Is the House’s FIT21 Bill Really the Legislation That Crypto Needs? | Opinion

This system will further be gamed by insiders and professional investors as arbitrageurs capitalize on disjointed pricing and price jump discontinuities caused by the transition between centralized and decentralized designations. At best U.S. retail markets will be a noisy signal of fundamental value and end-users will be the last to receive institutional liquidity.

While FIT21 is a crucial step towards addressing the regulatory challenges posed by crypto tokens, its current proposed market structure could have unintended consequences. To protect customers and ensure well-functioning U.S. digital asset markets lawmakers must refine the bill to unify spot markets for fungible crypto tokens that are not otherwise securities in a coherent regulatory framework.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) confirmed yesterday it has approved critical rule changes to allow for exchange-traded funds holding Ethereum’s native token, ETH. A lot of people were caught off guard, considering that just last week nearly everyone – from Bloomberg analysts to prediction markets – thought it was a lost cause.

Note: The views expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of CoinDesk, Inc. or its owners and affiliates.

It never really made sense to me why SEC Chairman Gary Gensler would hold out on approving these spot ETH products, considering how the agency was embarrassed during its proactive fight over listing bitcoin ETFs.

Recall that a three-person panel of judges in an appeals court called the SEC’s reasoning for denying (and denying and denying) spot bitcoin funds was “arbitrary and capricious” as it had already approved bitcoin futures products that did substantially the same thing. The same situation has been true for ETH as well, and it’s likely that some firm would have been happy to litigate the matter in the same way Digital Currency Group went to bat for bitcoin ETFs.

This time around, the SEC’s decision seems just as arbitrary, just in the opposite direction. In an interview with CoinDesk’s Jesse Hamilton hours before the approval became public, Gensler said he’d follow “how the courts interpret the law” and that the “DC Circuit took a different view, and we took that into consideration and pivoted.”

See also: Ether ETFs Clear Major Hurdle, Though SEC Hasn't Cleared Them for Trading Yet

So why now? What does it mean for Ethereum going forward? And does this bode well for other cryptos?

Was the decision politically motivated?

As many have already noted, it appears there has been a seachange regarding crypto’s regulatory situation. On Thursday, the House took a historic vote to approve the most substantive piece of crypto-specific legislation to date. This came on the heels of both the upper and lower houses of Congress voting to repeal a controversial SEC crypto custody accounting rule.

With significant participation from Democrats in both bills, it appears that the U.S. government’s long war on crypto is nearing an end. Notably, President Biden announced that he wouldn’t veto the crypto market structure bill, FIT21, which the White House officially opposes – a pretty major concession.

It’s possible that all these events on the Hill acted like a temperature check, and helped convince Gensler that his approach to crypto was becoming a political hazard. Afterall, former President Donald Trump did just announce his support for crypto in a big way – and denying ETH ETFs on the basis, purportedly, that the SEC wasn’t having “productive” meetings with applicants would be great ammunition.

To be sure, the SEC didn’t approve ETH ETFs to actually list anytime soon – just the Cboe, NYSE Arca and Nasdaq’s 19b-4 proposals, which would allow them to list the funds once firms like Ark Invest, Bitwise, BlackRock, Fidelity and Grayscale, among others, get their S-1 filings approved. That could take months.

What does it mean for Ethereum?

Well first off, the launch of spot ETH funds means that there may soon be a lot more institutional interest in the second largest cryptocurrency. Not only did the move act as a sort of stamp of approval, it will also create a familiar on-ramp for buying the asset for anyone from mom and pop investors looking to diversify their 401(k)s to hedge funds, much in the same way ETFs did for bitcoin.

“A lot of people have been caught offside by the Ethereum ETF announcement. Even though the Bitcoin ETF created a crypto ETF roadmap for wirehouses and large registered investment advisors, I still expect that many institutional stakeholders are now scrambling to prime their sales teams on the state of Ethereum and put together the proper infrastructure,” Framework Ventures co-founder Michael Anderson said in an emailed statement.

And while ETFs are really just a vehicle for gaining exposure to an underlying asset, it is also possible that these funds will actually drive more users onto Ethereum itself. One scenario: because the SEC likely won’t allow fund managers to stake the underlying ETH, it’s possible new ether investors determine that they want to do it themselves to earn that extra ~3.5% yield.

Relatedly, as Variant Chief Legal Officer Jake Chervinsky noted on X, the approval likely answers one lingering question: whether or not ETH is a security. Chervinsky said, if these funds are allowed to trade, it would likely mean that unstaked ETH, in particular, isn’t viewed as a security at the agency. That in itself may spur more institutions into the market, considering that many are currently holding off simply due to regulatory uncertainty.

On a more technical level, there are many open questions about what it would mean for Ethereum in a world where these funds buy up vast quantities of ETH (assuming they’re as popular) as the bitcoin ETFs. To some degree, the buying pressure would be great for the network and surrounding layer 2s.

Ethereum instituted a burn mechanism that destroys tokens with every transaction, which for a long time made the asset class deflationary. But, with the growing popularity of L2s and alternative chains like Solana, Ethereum transaction volumes have dropped to such a degree that the supply of ETH is growing again, which raises long term implications for the asset’s price and demand. The ETFs could help support the economics of ETH.

See also: Ethereum ETF Approval Could Spur 60% ETH Rally as

Finally, it will be interesting to see how the funds affect the staking economy. Some people have been ringing alarm bells about the amount of staked ETH, now that applications like Lido make it very easy for people to lock up even tiny quantities of the crypto. With the possibility ETFs pull even more ETH out of circulation, these concerns may be compounded.

What does this mean for chains like Solana?

As mentioned, the approval of ETH ETFs is something of an endorsement for Ethereum, and likely an opportunity for the chain to lock in its already dominant brand position.

“Assuming the Ethereum ETF sees even a fraction of the institutional flows that the Bitcoin ETF saw, I think it's entirely possible that Ethereum will be solidified as the uncontested leader in decentralized app platforms for the next several years, at least in terms of market share and valuation,” Anderson said.

But the move may also open the door for alternative chains like Cardano, Solana and Ripple to also enter further into the world of high finance. Of course, bitcoin and ETH had an easier time (all in perspective) because financial incumbents like CME had already embraced them. Ether futures have been live on CME for three years already, while it’s not even clear whether other crypto assets are being considered.

It’s also worth noting that, while the SEC has hinted it thinks ETH is a security, the agency has proactively come out and said that assets like SOL, ADA and ALGO fit the definition outlined by the Howey Test used to determine whether something is an investment contract. This may be a speed-bump in the road towards a spot SOL ETF.

Bitcoin {{BTC}} mining company Marathon Digital (MARA) struck a deal Friday with the Ministry of Energy and Petroleum of Kenya to develop the African country's energy infrastructure with over $80 million in investments.

The aim of the partnership is "monetizing underutilized energy across Kenya and jointly developing technology projects," Marathon chief executive officer Fred Thiel said.

In a social media post, the company said that the investment will be in green data centers. Marathon also noted in a press release that the capital will include foreign investments without specifying sources of funds. "With projected foreign investments expected to exceed $80 million, this venture is poised to deliver economic benefits to the Kenyan economy and generate revenue for the local energy sector ecosystem," according to the statement.

The partnership comes as Marathon held talks earlier this month with the nation to help manage its renewable energy operation and advise on its digital asset regulatory regime.

Read more: Bitcoin Miner Marathon In Talks With Kenya to Help With Its Green Energy Ambitions

Renewable energy is Kenya's main power source, responsible for 80% of all electricity generation in 2022, with plans to increase its share to 100% by the end of the decade. However, renewable energy sources like solar and wind are intermittent, meaning that they don't produce energy when most of the consumption happens. Infrastructure building for renewable energy is capital-intensive and requires a power management system to store and distribute energy properly.

Under the agreement, Marathon and Kenyan policymakers will cooperate to "better understand how to optimize renewable energy projects that produce surplus energy due to intermittency and seasonal variations," the press release said.

Marathon shares traded 6% higher at around $21 on Friday from yesterday's close, outperforming BTC's 1% advance over the past 24 hours.

Prominent crypto lawyer Gabriel Shapiro's MetaLeX raised $2.75 million at a $27.5 million valuation.

The project is building new governance standards for crypto groups to use when decentralizing.

Crypto proponents used to posit that "code is law." Courts and legal pundits ultimately forced the phrase into retirement. But there's still plenty of money in figuring out how the two intertwine.

One such effort is crypto lawyer Gabriel Shapiro's MetaLeX, a hybrid law firm/tech company focused on the mess that crypto projects make when trying to "decentralize." MetaLeX recently raised $2.75 million in seed funding led by Cyber Fund. It is now valued at $27.5 million, Shapiro said.

Unlike their "centralized" counterparts in the traditional business world, many crypto projects seek to "decentralize" by giving their tokenholders control of budgets and other core operations. It's a costly, cumbersome, failure-prone journey that has bedeviled major DeFi players like SushiSwap and often leaves the organization open to make arbitrary decisions that break their own ethos.

Into this fray steps Shapiro's incredibly niche MetaLeX. In an interview with CoinDesk, he described it as a "business-to-business, crypto software as a services" company that's designing standardized, smart contract-based processes for so-called decentralized autonomous organizations, or DAOs, to properly run themselves on-chain.

In MetaLeX lingo, the name for this newfangled construct is a Cybernetic Organization, or BORG. Think of it as a cyborg equivalent for legal entities. They'll be governed by hard-coded, smart contract-enforced rules infused into their charters, according to the project whitepaper.

"What makes them kind of unique is the way they mandate smart contract functionality" in their operations," Shapiro said. "That makes them 'cybernetic.'"

MetaLeX's first product will be an operating system for DAOs to BORGify their governance decision processes with constructs to run grantmaking, emergency shutdowns and venture investments made on behalf of the entity, he said.

Crypto projects are reaching out "every day" to join the waitlist for MetaLeX OS, Shapiro said, including two "blue chip" projects, though he declined to identify them beyond saying they were a layer-2 blockchain and a "traditional DeFi DAO."

'Fully BORGify'

"They both want to fully BORGify their operations," he said.

Not every crypto project can be easily BORGified. Those that have already launched tokens and DAO governance processes are more difficult to work with than pre-token projects, Shapiro said.

MetaLeX is not itself a BORG or a DAO or anything that crypto-native. It's an umbrella brand for a Delaware corporation (the tech company) and a Texas limited liability partnership (the law firm led by Shapiro and Alex Golubitsky). Clients could use one or both, Shapiro said.

MetaLeX could one day have its own token if it evolves to become a legal protocol that requires governance by its customers, Shapiro said.

"It will probably take a while before we would get to that point. But ultimately I think it will get there," he said.

Coinbase is trying to get a higher court to take a look at a question at the heart of its legal dispute with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The courts must accept the request for appeal before it can move forward, but the SEC has said the exchange hasn't made its case.

Coinbase Inc. (COIN) took another step in its back-and-forth argument with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on whether the cryptocurrency exchange should be allowed to raise a single, core legal point for consideration by a higher court.

After the company's effort to dismiss the SEC's enforcement case against it was rejected in federal court, Coinbase lawyers on Friday filed for a so-called interlocutory appeal that seeks to get one question considered at the next level up: Is a digital asset transaction that poses no obligation to the original issuer of the asset an investment contract regulated by the SEC?

Coinbase's filing described the query as "a novel legal question in a regulatory action against a market leader that could shape or distort a multi-trillion-dollar industry."

The exchange said "no appellate court has addressed whether a digital asset transaction carrying no post-sale obligations can be an 'investment contract'" under the Howey Test that's the legal standard for determining what assets are securities. Coinbase also argued that the SEC is acting inconsistently, because it pursued a similar appeal in its case against Ripple.

Coinbase had requested this appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit last month, and the SEC argued on May 10 that the court already "noted the lack of any legal authority for Coinbase’s various arguments," contending that "there can be no doubt" that the latest request to be allowed to appeal also fails to establish such legal grounds and should be halted.

The request would have to be accepted by the courts, including Judge Katherine Polk Failla, of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, who rejected Coinbase's request to dismiss the SEC's original case, which accused the exchange of operating illegally. Resolving this central legal question could help steer a number of other SEC enforcement clashes with the industry.

Also this week, Coinbase lost a U.S. Supreme Court argument over a narrow question on arbitration disputes.

Read More: Coinbase Seeks to Take Core Question in U.S. SEC Case to Higher Court

Police in the U.K. seized over 1.7 billion pounds ($2.2 billion) worth of bitcoin related to the alleged fraud in a 2018 operation.

Wen accused of laundering the proceeds of the fraud, converting the bitcoin into cash and purchasing property, jewelery and other luxury items.

Wen admitted to being control of a bitcoin wallet on behalf of her boss but claimed that she was unaware where the contents had come from.

A British-Chinese woman guilty of laundering bitcoin in a $6 billion fraud in China has been sentenced to six year and eight months in prison, the Financial Times (FT) reported on Friday.

Jian Wen, 42, who was alleged to have carrying out the laundering on behalf of her former boss, was found guilty in March.

Police in the U.K. seized over 1.7 billion pounds ($2.2 billion) worth of bitcoin related to the alleged fraud in a 2018 operation. Wen was accused of laundering BTC on behalf of Yadi Zhang, whose real name is Zhimin Qian.

Zhimian is alleged to have defrauded around 130,000 investors in China in an investment scam that brought in $5 billion. Her lawyer has said she is "wholly innocent," according to the FT's report.

Wen was not accused of any involvement in the fraud, but of laundering the proceeds, converting the bitcoin into cash and purchasing property, jewellery and other luxury items.

She denied the charges against her, with her lawyer, Mark Harries, KC, claiming she had been "duped and used."

Wen admitted to being control of a bitcoin wallet on behalf of her boss but claimed that she was unaware where the contents had come from.

“I am in no doubt that . . . you knew, rather than merely suspected, that you were dealing in the proceeds of crime,” Judge Sally-Ann Hales, KC, said in Southwark Crown Court on Friday. “This was an offence which was sophisticated and involved significant planning."

Read More: Binance Money Laundering Trial in Nigeria Pushed to June 20 Due to Executive’s Illness

Popular canine-themed meme coins dogecoin {{DOGE}} and shiba inu {{SHIB}} spiked Friday after Elon Musk tweeted about the passing of Kabosu, the dog that inspired the tokens.

OG Doge has ascended to heaven to be with his friend Harambe(@Not_the_Bee)

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 24, 2024

DOGE surged as much as 5% to a session high of 17.3 cents within minutes after the post, while SHIB jumped nearly 3% during the same period. However, the advances proved to be short-lived as both cryptos pared gains. Still, DOGE was up 6% and SHIB gained 1% over the past 24 hours, outperforming the mostly flat broad-market CoinDesk 20 Index.

The action underscores the market-moving sway Musk possesses over memecoins, with many crypto enthusiasts speculating on the possibility of him being behind one of the largest dogecoin holders and potentially integrating the token into an X payment system.

Kabosu, the face of dogecoin and several other meme tokens, died early Friday, her owner wrote in a blog post. She was over 17 years old.

Almost $1 billion worth of ether (ETH) has been deposited to Ether.fi over the past ten days.

The protocol's native token has been up 41% in the past week.

Ether.fi's CEO said that a spot ETF approval will help shift narratives around Ethereum and smart contracts.

Restaking protocol Ether.fi has soared to record highs in terms of deposits and total value locked (TVL) as investors anticipate the approval of a spot ether {{ETH}} exchange-traded fund (ETF) in the U.S.

More than 270,000 ether ($995 million) has been deposited to Ether.fi over the past ten days. The inflows, coupled with ether's recent rise in price, have spurred the protocol's with TVL to increase from $4 billion to $5.4 billion, an all-time high according to DefiLlama.

Restaking is a strategy used by traders to earn an extra yield on ether that is already staked on the Ethereum blockchain. Ether.fi currently offers an annual yield of 3.48%, with an additional 15.1% being available through the product's liquid vault.

The increase in activity could suggest that investors are looking to gain exposure to the Ethereum ecosystem while betting on whether staking could be incorporated into ETF products in the future.

Ether.fi's CEO Mike Silagadze, told CoinDesk that it will be a "matter of time" before ether ETFs begin to implement staking and restaking to generate a yield for shareholders.

"I think there is question whether staking, particularly liquid staking, turns ETH into a security," Silagadze said. "I think how it is going to start is you will have ETH ETFs that are either contracted out or run their own infrastructure, those nodes will be compliant and censored and all of that stuff, but it'll have a nice baked-in yield. Restaking is much more complex, so I think it'll get there; it'll just be a matter of time."

Silagadze added that the SEC's approval will help shift the narrative as more people become aware of Ethereum and smart contracts.

"It's just more awareness," Silagadze said. "A lot of people that are sophisticated know what restaking is; they just have no way to access it or allocate to this asset. So I think it helps with the narrative shift because more people become aware of what Ethereum is."

Ether.fi's native token {{ETHFI}} has also experienced a boost this week on the back of recent inflows, rising by 41% to outperform CoinDesk's CD20 Index which has risen by just 5.2% in the same period.

To a startup founder working with a PR agency for the first time, the immediate impacts of a resonant campaign or an extended engagement might not seem clear. This seems especially true when notable influencers and entrepreneurs such as Balaji Srinivasan tell founders rather bluntly to “hire creators, not public relators”.

This op-ed is part of CoinDesk's Web3 Marketing Week.

Motti Peer is chairman and co-CEO of ReBlonde, a Web3 marketing and PR firm. Note: The views expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of CoinDesk, Inc. or its owners and affiliates.

Srinivasan’s rationale here builds on Tesla’s strategy of dissolving its PR department in 2020 – an unusual move that the company has recently walked back on – further punctuating the frequently unpredictable or erratic behavior of its CEO Elon Musk.

While it might make sense for company leaders to make their communications more direct, that doesn’t necessarily mean they should sideline PR as an antiquated tool. As a PR veteran with decades of experience helping companies navigate every kind of success and setback – I’ve witnessed how the expectations around public relations have shifted radically throughout the years.

This is especially true in the blockchain arena, where leaders are still getting their feet wet in the communications space and may end up unwittingly jeopardizing the future of their project by ignoring the virtues and value of a communications plan.

Direct communication pitfalls

Srinivasan echoes many talking points that have been leveled at public relations as an industry for years: It’s a relic of the past, cedes too much narrative control to journalists and doesn’t directly contribute to conversion like direct marketing can. His proposed alternative is to take a company-aligned, content-creator-focused approach that forgoes media – or implementing AI to do it – and advises only hiring PR professionals who have rebranded to “creators” with built-in audiences themselves.

Let’s be clear: PR and SEO or marketing are not the same thing. Although they fall under the wider “communications” umbrella, it’s wrong to assume that their strategies, KPIs or added value are interchangeable. It also completely misconstrues what PR professionals do by ascribing their only value to sending out press releases.

Yes, content is king in any kind of modern communication. But while PR professionals also function as content creators, not all content creators can enter the PR arena.

It’s also true that although the media and individual reporters may be friendly – they are not your friends nor part of a company’s marketing and social media team. A project trying to garner consistent media coverage will never do so by posting TikToks or X threads.

PR operates in earned media – leveraging company announcements, iron-clad relations with media outlets and reporters, thought leaderships and other content-focused strategies to garner results without needing to pay for it. The idea that PR professionals are “giving precious content away for free” to journalists greatly mischaracterizes what PR content is for.

There’s also a fine line between alerting the media about an exciting announcement or development and spamming your audience with news that is not really news. PR professionals can advise on what information to share and add value to an announcement that rewards your efforts in coverage that truly resonates with key audiences and stakeholders.

Stronger together

Just because blockchain and crypto are ingrained in internet culture and social media communication doesn’t make traditional PR obsolete. It just requires a bit of a twist that only a team of experienced communications professionals can provide.

Pay-to-play placements or paid social content creation will never stack up or achieve the same results as earned media. And any agency, communications team, or freelance publicist purporting that it can be equated is misguided.

Simply put: Users have an allergy to paid media. It’s why most people install ad-blocking extensions on their web browser or pay extra for ad-free streaming on Spotify or Netflix. We live in a world bombarded with ads and sponsored content vying for clicks across social media and virtually any other platform. So, unless an ad or influencer campaign is particularly memorable, we naturally develop a blindness to it.

That very concretely translates to media consumption. You likely don’t remember the last ten advertisements or sponsored posts you saw on TikTok, but you do remember a thought-provoking article about an interesting company or a podcast with an incisive founder on your daily commute.

See also: How Web3 Marketing Changes the Game | Opinion

Social media is a fickle thing, and just because a creator or company leader might have an audience doesn’t necessarily mean your project will sustainably gain the same resonance.

Likewise, focusing solely on content creators to lead “public relations” efforts won’t help too much in a crisis or controversy, two things that blockchain companies and founders, unfortunately, find themselves prone to. No investor wants to learn about a disappointing quarter from an X post, and no employee wants to hear about impending layoffs from a TikTok.

By all means, projects should have an SEO and marketing plan to boost conversion and lead generation, but it cannot substitute the hard work of earned PR or downplay its results.

All of these fields come with singular approaches with unique drawbacks, advantages, and expectations. There might be some overlap, but ultimately, the ROI in PR comes from establishing and maintaining a timeless and respected brand – not affiliate link clicks or snarky, ephemeral creator posts.

Founders and leaders of startups pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in tech should be wary of these differences, and of any organization that claims to either guarantee coverage or manufacture results that don’t reflect the reality of a company’s standing.

Otherwise, flattening a communications strategy to solely focus on social media or quick wins and generally meaningless metrics risks upending the hard work and dedication of a team trying to make innovation a reality.

Standard Chartered says Solana and Ripple’s XRP could be next in line to become spot ETFs.

This won’t likely happen until 2025, analyst Geoffrey Kendric wrote in a note.

With the approval of an important filing in the race to launch a spot ether {{ETH}} exchange-traded fund (ETF), industry leaders are already wondering which cryptocurrency could be next.

Standard Chartered (STAN) said it believes Solana {{SOL}} or Ripple’s XRP could be the next contenders, but not until 2025.

“For other coins (eg. SOL, XRP), markets will look ahead to their eventual ETF status as well, albeit this is likely a 2025 story, not a 2024 one,” analyst Geoffrey Kendric said. “For now, bitcoin and ether dominance will rise, with selective “next in line” winners as well.”

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Thursday approved forms 19b-4 filed by would-be issuers. While this is an important step in the race to launch a spot ether ETF, it is only one of two forms that needs approval from the regulator.

It could take the SEC weeks if not months—even potentially indefinitely—to approve the S-1 document, which has so far only been filed by a few potential issuers.

Several industry experts have suggested that SOL would be a logical choice for a third ETF, given its similarities to Ethereum.

Brokerage firm Bernstein said in a note on Thursday that given Ethereum’s classification as a commodity, the token could follow a similar path. Solana is the third biggest cryptocurrency after bitcoin and ether by market cap. This is excluding stablecoin Tether (USDT) and Binance Coin {{BNB}}.

CoinDesk Indices (CDI) presents its bi-weekly market update, highlighting the performance of leaders and laggards in the benchmark CoinDesk 20 Index (CD20) and the broad CoinDesk Market Index (CMI).

Ether {{ETH}} gained more than 20% this week, buoyed by first the rumor and then the news that the SEC was moving to approve the listing of a spot ETH ETF.

Uniswap {{UNI}} added 21% alongside its response this week to a Wells Notice it received from U.S. regulators.

Among underperforming large-cap assets were Ripple {{XRP}}, Cardano {{ADA}} and ChainLink {{LINK}}, not to mention bitcoin {{BTC}} which gave up early gains to finish the week just marginally higher.

CoinDesk 20 tracks top digital assets and is investible on multiple platforms. The broader CMI comprises approximately 180 tokens and seven crypto sectors: currency, smart contract platforms, DeFi, culture & entertainment, computing, and digitization.