All Been Crypto — Week 30 May 2025
A down week with BTC -4% to 106k and ETH -2% at 2600 despite the launch of the first ETH treasury company. Meme’s have been bleeding even harder with BONK and WIF -20% on the flipside we had TON +5% outperforming as the only major WoW after Telegram successfully raising 1.7bn in new 5 year convertible bonds at 9%. In the news we had many headlines from the Bitcoin conference in Vegas, Bybit announcing it secured a Mica licence in Austria, Circle now still filing for IPO and Polygon and GSR launching private mainnet of new DeFi focused L2 Katana. Enjoy reading!
Bat Tai Chi — btc21@mail.com
HEADLINES:
ETH got it’s Saylor — Sharplink Gaming raises 425mm to establish ETH treasury strategy
The world worst kept secret got announced this week. Consensys CEO Joseph Lubin is becoming the Michael Saylor of Ethereum and converting Sharplink Gaming into the MSTR for ETH. They came out of the gates with 425mm cap raising plan to you guessed in buy ETH. Stock jumped 400% and ETH was up slightly too. Joseph Lubins is of course probably the best suited for such a role and will take on a more active/aggressive role in promoting ETH. Meanwhile the Ethereum Foundation has taken out its first DeFi loan with a tiny 2mm in GHO of course via AAVE. This is nevertheless significant because the EF has historically shied away from borrowing and exclusivity done ETH sales to fund $ demand. We had the signs that things were moving though when Vitalik hinted at changes at the realm (see ABC 24 Jan 2025) and then of course when a month later they actually deployed into DeFi as a lender (see ABC 14 Feb 2025).
In other corporate treasury news XRP followed hot on heels with VivoPower International (VVPR) announcing a 121mm private placement to build out a treasury strategy around XRP. Sounds familary? They got former ex-SBI Ripple Asia executive Adam Traidman joining as chairman and I’m sure are looking to grow more. Sol Strategies filed for a 1bn offering across EQ, CB and Debt to buy more SOL. I bet you we’ll hear about an ADA one soon.
Updates from Bitcoin 2025 in Vegas
The largest Bitcoin conference globally and this year even bigger than last. Ironically at the gambling capital Vegas. If we remember last year we had it a bit later in August same format in Nashville and Trump announced his pivot to embrace Crypto and make the US the capital of the world and that all BTC should be mined here. (see ABC 2 Aug 2024). This year we are deep in a bull market and even more Trumps are at the conference his sons and his VP JD Vance. The fact that we have senior US administration now becoming a regular at BTC conferences is certainly showing how much ‘love’ there is for our industry. The VP made it clear that BTC is a strategic priority for team Trump and said it could be used as an advantage against China. He also called for a quick market structure bill and said Trump will fire any anti-crypto regulators. The other thing still on everyone’s lips is the touted ‘strategic bitcoin reserve’ that has been announced but we haven’t heard of budget neutral ways to build it. What we heard though is a lot of companies, organisations and states launching Bitcoin treasury strategies. Premier League football club PSG, Pakistan, Trump Media with 2.5bn cap raising and many more corporate treasuries at smaller scale. They seem to all ‘buy-in’ to the idea that it’s a solid asset to have on their balance sheet and can win them either access to cheaper capital, new users or popularity with existing ones. On the more traditional institutional side Cantor Fitzgerald announced to launch a gold backed BTC fund, and that they kicked off their BTC backed lending facility with FalconX and Maple.
Bybit secured MICA licence in Austria
Bybit one of the largest crypto exchanges globally has secured its European MiCa licence and settled for Austria as its European headquarter and looking to expand headcount by 100 in Vienna. This is a major milestone for Bybit who had shifted their global HQ from Singapore to Dubai in 2022. This marks a major regulatory win in the notoriously hard to crack European market despite the major security incident earlier this year (see ABC 28 Feb 2025) where >1.4bn in crypto assets were lot to a North Korean hacker group. But Bybit made users whole and avoided a bank run and the incident was pretty quickly forgotten in the bull market. Overall crypto adoption is still low in Europe but it’s obviously a large wealthy market and the MiCa passporting feature allows access to the entire European Union market. Bybit is also active on innovation with new spread products and trying to gain share from major rivals.
QUOTES:
This wallet, the national bitcoin wallet, is not for speculation or hype. We will be holding these Bitcoins and we will never, ever sell them
Bilal Bin Saqib — Pakistan Crypto Council CEO
We put Bitcoin in our books. We took our fiat reserves and we actually allocated Bitcoin. We still have it in our books. And as one of the largest clubs in the world, we’re the largest player in the sports ecosystem to do that. PSG is more than a football club, we’re a lifestyle brand. We’re about what’s next, just like Bitcoin.
Pär Helgosson — Head of PSG Labs
I hate using the word hate, but honestly, I would love to see some of the big banks go extinct. Honestly, they deserve it
Eric Trump
All Been Crypto — Week 30 May 2025 was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.