All Been Crypto — Week 11 April 2025
A volatile week with BTC shortly breaking below 75k and now hovering around 80k slightly down Wow -3% ETH -15% at 1500 all on macro uncertainty around Trumps tariffs and exemptions. While this all may feel like a lot of hot air to you (pun intended) this weeks clear outperformer is FARTCOIN +100% entering the top 100 and showing us that animal spirits still in vogue. In the news we had large announced M&A in the crypto space, Galaxy got the SEC nod for US listing, Circle delaying their IPO, Hong Kong allowing staking for crypto ETFs. CZ joining Pakistan Crypto Council and Virgil Griffith — the Ethereum Developer that gave a blockchain presentation in North Korea in 2018 — now got released from prison on parol. On policy side the US disbanded the National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team and SEC gave guidance about stablecoins. Hope you holding on tight during these volatile times — Enjoy reading!
Bat Tai Chi — btc21@mail.com
HEADLINES:
Lense launched mainnet
The SocialFi protocol Lense founded by the team behind AAVE has successfully transitioned away from Polygon to their own L2. The chain will use Avail for DA, utilizing zksynch integration for roll ups and GHO for transaction fees. Lens aims to become the decentralized social media infra and so it’s interesting to see that they are building their own chain. A matter of time till AAVE with its 16bn TVL is considering too? The direction of travel certainly is going to more appchains and less general purpose L2s. Decentralized social media has been a core idea of many cypherpunks however none have really taken off much including farcaster, nostr or phaver. The ticky part is always critical mass and without mainstream adoption it’s hard to gain that. Theres a reason why Kaito connects to Twitter/X. If you havn’t read about them, it’s a novel from ranking social capital as part of Kaito’s InfoFi a way to market data and information. Certainly an interesting space to watch but hard to see how we overcome the same challenges we had faced before with adoption, I almost feel we need a pull AND push factor i.e. some major f*** up by incumbents to cause a large scale migration.
Crypto M&A: Ripple buying Hidden Road Partners — Magic Eden buys Slingshot
The largest M&A in our space (yet) Ripple is buying crypto prime broker Hidden Road for 1.25bn. Ripple is obviously cash rich after it had put aside a lot of resources for these legal battles that are all now coming to a close so it’s unsprising they are putting that to work now. The target is a bit strange though with settlement layer and XRP not having straight overlaps on Prime Brokerage services but their recent stablecoin RLUSD is one that can be pushed through the new pipes helping drive adoption. RLUSD will be accepted as collateral and the XRP leger can be used to increase settlement efficiencies. To fully grow Hidden Road into an institutional crypto prime broker balances are key and as part of the deal Ripple will inject ‘billions’ of capital to scale the business. They were also trying to the the market for raising that capital before so seems like an opportunistic deal for Ripple Labs. In other M&A Magic Eden bought Slingshot Finance a mobile crypto trading app. Terms were not disclosed but Slingshot has ~1mm users and raised at a 33mm valuation in 2021 This now aggregates trading capabilities for tokens to the NFT market place. While Magic Eden is still fully committed to NFTs and their growth despite recent downturn they are clearly also thinking about business expansion and diversification. Expanding business lines horizontally is a very common theme we see across the industry now.
Stablecoin Updates — SEC statement and new issuers emerging
We don’t just see market cap continuing to climb for stables to new record highs we also had the SEC declare that ‘covered’ stablecoins i.e. USDC USDT are not securities and persons involved in minting and redemption are not required to register the transactions to the commission. Same time we have two bills progressing with lawmakers. There seems to be bipartisan support for stablecoin regulation but of course nothings a given until the bill is passed and likely there’ll be a lot of back and forth still. What’s clear is once regulation is set there will be a slay of new issuers, and unsurprisingly Tether is also gearing up to issue a US stablecoin. It would be targeted at US investors who are currently not target audience for USDT. But not just in the US enthusiasm for stablecoin issuance is very high, over in Japanese banks like SMBC are also looking to issue their own stable. They interestingly announced that they are looking to work with Ava Labs and leverage Avalanche’s subchains for the issuance of their Stablecoin, looks like a major win for the AVAX team if they get Japans second largest bank build their stable rails on their chain. In the not so good news Circle apparently mulling to pause their IPO not unlike many other companies that were to tap the markets given recent turmoil.
QUOTES:
The new legislation gives us the opportunity to explore the creation of a U.S.-based, institutional-grade stablecoin.
Tether CEO — Paolo Ardoino
Then I might have to say something you won’t want to hear: it’s fine to chase shitcoins, but that shouldn’t be everything the crypto space is about. The noise around this round of Memecoins is just too loud — and in some ways, it’s actually unhealthy for the industry.
Binance Founder — CZ
It’s a complete scramble. From the ASIC trading front and brokerage, miners have not been very proactive here. They have not necessarily frontrun orders and gotten them into the U.S. Top firms are [now] chartering flights at 2–4x the usual rate, anywhere from $2–3.5 million per flight
Luxor COO — Ethan Vera
All Been Crypto — Week 11 April 2025 was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.