All Been Crypto — Week 8 Aug 2025
Hitting send a bit early as I’m going to be on the road for the next 2 weeks. Might take a bit of a summer break as with markets hoping nothing major. We saw a down week again mostly lead by macro with BTC back to 115k -3% and ETH at 3800 ETH -2% with only major outperformer LTC +7% helped by the first treasury company launched. Of course we had more treasury companies also in BTC, ETH as well as further down the cap table TON. In the news we have Barry Silbert coming back as Grayscale chairman preparing for their IPO, Metamask planning their own stablecoin, SEC saying restaking tokens are not by default securities, Trump signing order allowing crypto in 401(k)s and an unfortunately ruling for Roman Storm in the Tornado cash saga. Enjoy reading and the summer!
Bat Tai Chi — btc21@mail.com
HEADLINES:
Tornado Cash’s Roman Storm found guilty
In a sad turn of events Tornado Cash developer Roman Storm was found guilty on money transmitter charges. While he did not get convinced for money laundering and other sanction violation related charges this is still a sad day for our industry. I’ve written extensively about the case (see (ABC 12 Aug 2022; ABC 19 Aug 2022; ABC 28 Aug 2022; ABC 17 Sep 2022; ABC 18 Aug 2023; ABC 8 Sep 2023; ABC 26 Jan 2024, ABC 28 Mar 2025, ABC 25 July 2025) and hoping that this is not the end. Writing code should not be a crime and privacy neither. This trial had already a wide chilling effect on our industry and while some had hoped that Trump will ease some of that the jury here clearly served different. During closing arguments this week, prosecutors said Storm knew what he was doing and made millions of dollars. They also said he knew about the hackers in North Korea. Storm’s lawyer said the co-founder did not want hackers to use Tornado Cash and that when he found out North Koreans used the crypto mixer, they were not celebratory and “dropped F-bombs”. Last week we had the two co-founders Keonne Rodriguez and William Lonergan Hill of Samourai Wallet pleaded guilty I have also talked about them before (see ABC 26 April 2024).
Hong Kong Stablecoin law comes into effect
The initial bill passed earlier this year (See ABC 23 May 2025) but only came into effect this from 1st Aug. HKMA had warned that only a few licences will be granted and there will be stringent AML rules. They were concerned that euphoria was kicking in too quickly and stock prices had def ran its course all of course fulled by Circles tremendous success. Now that the bill is in place there’s however quite loud critique from industry participants that KYC is way too strict asking for every holder to identified, this is obviously not how USDT and USDC are currently working and is not compatible with any permissionless DeFi applications. Whether regulator will actually adjust and adopt remains to be seen since Hong Kong has a long tradition of being very conservative with regulation and usually only follows US after innovation. As we have seen with the spot ETF approvals last year.
Base sequencer outrage
Base suffered from a 30min outrage this week as there were problems with a sequencer. They wrote a detailed post-mortem and quickly resolved the issue however it seves as a good reminder that first of all errors can occur since the L2 is still relatively young and not battle tested and second it can be manually halted. Now it’s called Base from Coinbase so there is little double about it’s decentralization but there is still the claim that at some point L2s might want to become sufficiently decentralized to offer some censorship resistance otherwise why don’t we just do this on the coinbase internal leger? Base has seen quite some success with the launch of Base APP and the integration of social media leading to more token issuance than on solana. Meanwhile COIN the stock is down 20% wow on weak earnings of 2Q but didn’t react much to the outrage which I’m actually not surprised since sequencer related fees are only a tiny fraction of rev.
QUOTES:
Under President Trump’s strong leadership and vision, the CFTC is full speed ahead on enabling immediate trading of digital assets at the Federal level in coordination with the SEC’s Project Crypto
Caroline Pham — CFTC Acting Chairman
The SEC’s latest crypto giveaway is to bless the same type of rehypothecation that cratered Lehman Brothers — only in crypto it’s worse because you can do it without any SEC or Fed oversight.
Amanda Fischer — ex-Chief of Staff to SEC Chair Gary Gensler
On crypto and stablecoins, as on too many other things, the hard truth is this: We’re being completely left behind. It’s time to catch up
George Osborne — Former UK Chancellor
All Been Crypto — Week 8 Aug 2025 was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.