Bitcoin Magazine

Bitcoin Treasury Companies Are Bubbles Half a year has passed since the publishing of my initial report on the company then-named MicroStrategy, now simply Strategy. Other than a name change, the company has since then broadened the arsenal of its financial products, accumulated more bitcoin, and fueled a wide array of companies copying Michael Saylor’s playbook. There seem to be bitcoin treasury companies everywhere. Due for an update, we will now investigate whether or not these bitcoin treasury companies’ operations are in line with the predictions made in the initial report, and yet again attempt to conclude where all this is eventually going. A Cause for Alarm In December last year, the company seemed near invincible: With its bitcoin yield KPI accumulating at a mind-boggling annual rate of above 60%, optimism reigned. It was no wonder then that most of the arguments carefully laid out in the report released at that time were either ridiculed, ignored, or met with snarling challenges to sell the shares short. The share price, denominated either in dollar or bitcoin, is at time of writing flat compared to those days and so far offers little in terms of vindication. Tragically few understood or even reached the most important conclusion of my December report, which concerns the source of the bitcoin yield. We will therefore iterate what’s wrong with the company’s metric, and why this should be a cause of alarm for any serious investor. The bitcoin yield — the increase in bitcoin per share — reaching old shareholders comes from the pockets of new shareholders. The new shareholders, many of them buying shares in the hope of getting a high bitcoin yield themselves, provide the bitcoin yield either directly by buying Strategy common shares created in the company’s world-record sized ATM (“at the market”) offerings or indirectly by buying the shares borrowed (and then sold) by delta neutral hedge funds that simultaneously hold the company’s convertible bonds. This is the Ponzi part of company operations — publicly boasting a bitcoin yield far higher than any conventional yield, while obfuscating the fact that the yield stems, not from the sale of company goods or services, but from the new investors themselves. They are the yield, and the harvesting of their hard-earned money will continue as long as they willingly provide it. The size of the harvest is in proportion to the size of the confusion, here measured as the premium of common shares over company net assets. This premium is nurtured by complicated but inviting company narratives, promises, and financial products. Because the word “Ponzi” has been thrown Bitcoiners’ way for over a decade, they have become accustomed — and rightly so — to simply disregard such critiques altogether. But just because a company within the Bitcoin sector intentionally or inadvertently has constructed a Ponzi scheme, that does not obviously mean that bitcoin itself is a Ponzi. The two assets are separate. During metallic monetary standards of the past, Ponzi schemes existed, but that does not mean the precious metals themselves ever were, or are, such schemes. When I make this claim of Strategy in its current form, I mean it from the point of definition, not from tiresome hyperbole. The Accumulation Continues Before drawing any further conclusions, it is first time to pick up where we left off in the initial report, and map relevant company decisions made over the last six months. Strategy announced on December 9 that approximately 21,550 bitcoin had been acquired for about $2.1 billion (average price: approximately $98,783 per bitcoin). This purchase was conducted with proceeds from the ATM outlined in the famous 21/21 Plan initiated earlier the same year. Just a few days later, over 15,000 more bitcoin were purchased, also through the ATM offering, and a few days after that announcement, about 5,000 more were purchased. The end of 2024 saw the company requesting from its shareholders an amendment to increase the number of authorized shares of class A common stock from 330,000,000 shares to 10,330,000,000 shares — in other words, a 30x. The number of authorized shares of preferred stock was to be increased from 5,000,000 shares to 1,005,000,000 shares — a 200x. All this, though not the same as stating the full amount to actually be issued, was done to give the company more liberty in future financial operations as the 21/21 Plan quickly ran its course. By also focusing on preferred stock, another variant of funding could now be pursued. The full year ended with about 446,000 bitcoin owned by Strategy, and with a company bitcoin yield of 74.3%. Perpetual Strike Preferred Stock The new year started with an 8-K filing stating that Strategy was now ready to seek the new funding through preferred stock. The new instrument, as the name implies, was to be senior to the company’s common shares, meaning the owners of the preferred shares had a stronger claim on any future cash flows. Initially, a $2 billion raise was the stated goal. While the new instrument was being prepared, 450,000 bitcoin had been accumulated by January 12. At the end of the month, all 2027 convertible bonds were called on to be redeemed for newly issued shares, as the conversion price was now below the market price of the shares. Any Strategy convertible bond far “in the money” becomes unappealing to the largest buyers of such instruments — the gamma-trading, delta neutral hedge funds — who prefer early conversion followed by new convertible bond issuance over holding the old bonds until maturity. On January 25, 2025, the company finally filed its prospectus for Strike perpetual preferred stock ($STRK), and about a week later, 7.3 million Strike shares were issued with 8% cumulative dividends on the liquidation preference of $100 per share. In practice, this meant a $2 per share quarterly dividend in perpetuity, or until the shares are converted to Strategy shares in case the price of the latter reaches $1,000. Conversion was defined at the ratio 10:1, meaning 10 Strike shares must be converted for every new Strategy share. In other words, the instrument is akin to a dividend-paying perpetual call option on Strategy common shares. If deemed necessary, Strategy can pay the dividends in the form of its own common shares. On February 10, about 7,600 bitcoin were purchased with the proceeds from the Strike issuance as well as from conventional ATM offering of common shares. On February 21, Strategy issued $2 billion worth of convertible bonds maturing March 1, 2030, with a conversion price of about $433 per share, representing a conversion premium of about 35%. About 20,000 bitcoin could quickly be purchased with the proceeds. Shortly thereafter, a new prospectus was published, enabling the company to issue up to $21 billion worth of Strike perpetual preferred stock, meaning the already ambitious 21/21 Plan of last year now seemed to morph into something even more massive. Perpetual Strife and Stride Preferred Stock As soon as the company had publicly announced its ambitious expansion of its funding plan, yet another instrument was announced; Strife ($STRF), a perpetual preferred stock similar to Strike, was to go live with 5 million shares. It was to offer 10% annual dividends in cash — paid quarterly — instead of 8% in cash or common shares. Strife, unlike Strike, had no equity conversion feature, but was senior to both common shares and Strike. Any dividend delay was to be compensated by higher future dividends, with a maximum of 18% total annual dividend rate. At time of issuance, the initial plan of issuing 5 million shares seems to have been increased to 8.5 million shares, raising over $700 million. With ATM activity for the common shares as well as for Strike, Strategy could finally announce in March that the company held over 500,000 bitcoin. April saw mostly regular common share ATM activities, until that type of funding was all but depleted. Strike ATM activity continued as well, but due to what was likely low liquidity, the dollar amount raised was negligible. With the proceeds, Strategy’s total bitcoin position climbed above 550,000 bitcoin. On May 1, Strategy announced the intention of launching another $21 billion common share ATM offering. This announcement came very shortly after the ATM arm of the initial 21/21 Plan had been exhausted, and fully vindicated the logic outlined in the previous report as well as on X. As any premium to net assets creates an arbitrage for the company, management is bound to continue to print new shares overvalued relative to underlying bitcoin assets in order to capture it. Issuance started almost immediately, and more bitcoin could be accumulated. As the fixed income arm of the initial 21/21 Plan already had been extended with the new preferred stock in mind, investors now faced a massive 42/42 Plan, meaning a maximum of $42 billion in common share issuance and $42 billion in fixed income security issuance. May also saw the SEC filing of a new $2.1 billion ATM offering for the Strife perpetual preferred stock instrument. At the end of the month, all three ATM offerings were printing shares for the acquisition of new bitcoin. In the beginning of June, yet another instrument was announced: Stride ($STRD), a perpetual preferred stock asset similar to Strike and Strife, was soon to launch. It was to offer 10% optional, noncumulative dividends in cash, had no equity conversion feature, and was junior to every other instrument except the common shares. A little less than 12 million shares worth about $1 billion were initially issued, paving the way for about 10,000 more bitcoin for the company coffers. A Dazzling Mosaic of Bitcoin Treasury Companies With the STRK, STRD, and STRF products launched, and Strategy’s 21/21 Plan in full swing, the full picture of what has been going on in the last six months should be clearer. I pointed out in the initial report that the main rationale behind the convertible bonds was not, despite the claims of the company, to offer bitcoin exposure to a section of the market in need and want of such. The buyers of the bonds were almost all of them delta neutral hedge funds, and, being simultaneously short Strategy shares, they never had any actual bitcoin exposure. It was all a ruse. The true reason that Strategy offered these securities to lenders was that it gave retail investors an impression of financial innovation targeting a multitrillion-dollar industry, as well as facilitating further bitcoin accumulation without equity dilution. And as the investors bid on the common shares, so did the price discrepancy to net assets and the opportunity of risk-free bitcoin yield grow in proportion. The greater the economic confusion, coupled with Michael Saylor’s way with words and vivid analogies, the larger the company’s arbitrage opportunity. By issuing three different perpetual preferred stock securities over the last six months, in addition to the various convertible bonds already in place, these complicated financial products could now create an appearance of financial innovation, thus spurring further bidding on the common shares. At the time of writing, the common shares trade near double that of net assets, which is a great feat by company management, given the large size and activity of the common share ATM offerings. It means Strategy can continue to buy about two bitcoin for the price of one in a risk-free fashion. In 2024, the company could enjoy tailwinds originating from the popular “reflexivity flywheel” theory, where it was argued that the more bitcoin the company purchased, the more its shares would increase in value, resulting in the opportunity to buy even more bitcoin. In 2025, this self-referential stupidity morphed slightly to a “torque” narrative, manifesting itself as official company depictions of fixed income cogwheels rotating the core that is the common shares, with bitcoin yield produced from the machinery as a result. Exactly from where, or how, the yield was created, few investors seemed to be asking themselves, and instead the made-up dynamic was mindlessly celebrated.

Preferred shares are financial assets, and not subject to the laws of physics. Being an engineer, it is not surprising that Saylor should come up with all these fallacious analogies so that bitcoin yield would appear to stem from what can only be viewed as financial alchemy. But since there are no actual company revenues to speak of, no actual banking (the company borrows, but does not lend), the bitcoin yield must in the end stem from the earlier outlined Ponzi element of the company’s business model; retail investors are dazzled by carefully curated narratives, causing them to bid up the price of common shares enough for the bitcoin yield opportunity to materialize. Whatever bitcoin yield originating from the various debt instruments cannot yet be considered settled as debt must eventually be paid off. Only the bitcoin yield stemming from common share ATM offerings is immediate and final — a true profit. A Bubble of Bitcoin Treasury Companies Oblivious or not to the fact that narratives can’t influence reality forever, the massively successful bitcoin yield concept of Strategy has spread like a wildfire among management teams of smaller companies all over the world. CEOs have seen how Strategy insiders, by continuously dumping shares on the retail investors currently chasing the shares, have become immensely rich, and so have started copying the playbook. The constant Strategy insider selling can be verified by looking at the numerous Form 144 filings. Many of these companies have successfully pulled this off, already enriching management and old shareholders at the expense of new ones. But it must all end at one point, and many of these companies, grasping in desperation at the bold, new strategy of becoming bitcoin treasury companies (due to the conventional main business struggling or even failing) will be the first that are compelled to sell their bitcoin assets to pay creditors when things take a turn for the worse. Michael Saylor himself once admitted that he was desperate before stumbling over bitcoin.

• Metaplanet was once known as Red Planet Japan and struggled mightily to be profitable in Japan’s budget hotel sector.
• Before Méliuz SA desperately adopted a bitcoin acquisition strategy, it had undergone a 100:1 reverse split.
• Vanadi Coffee SA drifted ever closer to bankruptcy, managing five cafes and a bakery in Spain’s Alicante region, but its pivot to a bitcoin strategy now seems to have performed miracles for its share price.
• The notorious meme stock company Trump Media & Technology, with no revenue to speak of, is now pursuing billions of dollars in funding for the purpose of creating a bitcoin treasury company in order to rescue a share price trading at all-time lows.
• Bluebird Mining Ventures Ltd, also in desperation, I would imagine — at least if the share price is any indicator — just recently decided to sell any gold it managed to mine in order to fund bitcoin purchases for its treasury; the shares are at time of writing up almost 500% in a month.
• H100 Group, a small and until recently struggling Swedish biotech company, has, at the time of writing returned, to its investors about 1,500% in a month on news that Adam Back, CEO of Blockstream, is funding the company through some type of convertible bonds, for the pursuit of a bitcoin treasury strategy.

The list could go on and on, but I think the point is made; it is not Microsoft, Apple, or Nvidia that are becoming bitcoin treasury companies, but failing companies with nothing to lose. Jesse Myers, a Strategy supporter and a direct influence on Michael Saylor’s bitcoin valuation modeling, admitted that,  “[…] with MicroStrategy, Metaplanet and Gamestop, they are all zombie companies. They all had […] a reason to take a serious look in the mirror and say, we can’t keep doing the strategy that we’ve… the path we’ve been on. We have to radically reinvent our approach to delivering shareholder value.”  All these desperate companies have looked at Michael Saylor and Strategy and believe they have found a clear path to riches. By copying the financial alchemy themselves, they are now all involved in a great transfer of wealth as the bitcoin treasury company bubble runs its course. When the Mosaic Breaks Though part of the impressive company mosaic, Strike, Strife, and Stride are all senior to equity. The same is true for the convertible bonds, not all of them are currently “in the money.” Future free cash flow will always have to reach holders of these instruments before whatever is left can go to owners of the common shares. In good times, this is obviously not a problem due to the rather low debt ratio of the company; in bad times, the value of all company assets decline considerably while debt obligations remain — like tall, looming threats to any new creditor. Due to a phenomenon sometimes referred to as debt overhang, any new creditor will be hesitant to lend for the purpose of paying off other debt obligations. What started as an enchanting collection of narratives and exaggerations morphs into something turning on its creator. This is all exacerbated by the fact that a prolonged bitcoin bear market will cause further sell pressure on the asset by the many bitcoin treasury companies then in distress. The more popular Strategy’s playbook becomes, in other words, the deeper the future bitcoin crash, likely wiping out much of the equity of most companies having pursued such a strategy to the bitter end. In summary: Michael Saylor likes bitcoin. He, like all of us, prefers more bitcoin to less bitcoin. It is then extremely naive to think that he will let company management pass on what is by definition an arbitrage. When common shares trade at a premium to net assets, the company can create risk-free profits for its old shareholders by transferring wealth from the buyers of newly issued shares. This will continue in the form of ever-larger common share ATM offerings alongside new, obfuscating ”innovative products”, despite protests and mutterings about equity dilution. Evidence of this claim is my prediction made in March, coming true in the form of a new $21 billion ATM offering barely one and a half months later. If Strategy does not act on this arbitrage, all the copy-cats will capture it instead as they attempt to increase their bitcoin treasury in an equally risk-free manner. In the frantic scramble to create and expand all these arbitrage opportunities, companies will take on debt in various forms, and danger abounds. During the next bitcoin bear market, the Strategy share price will reach — and then break below — net assets per share, inflicting large bitcoin-denominated losses on anyone buying at today’s premium. The best action a Strategy investor can take today is doing exactly what the company and its insiders are all doing: Sell the shares!  Bitcoin is no longer the main strategy of this company, nor of any of the now multiplying bitcoin treasury companies; you are. This is an edited version of the article posted on the author’s Medium page. A fuller assessment is featured in the next Bitcoin Magazine Print issue — be sure to get your subscription now. BM Big Reads are weekly, in-depth articles on some current topic relevant to Bitcoin and Bitcoiners. If you have a submission you think fits the model, feel free to reach out at editor[at]bitcoinmagazine.com. This post Bitcoin Treasury Companies Are Bubbles first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Emil Sandstedt.

Prices are down, X was down (and for a little moment I had hope of being free), and people in crypto are realizing that they might have to re-think their priorities. Story OneETH Denver disappoints Despite everyone hating the location (you'll dehydrate and get the plague), ETH Denver, a conference, has been one of the few consistencies in the ever-changing crypto industry. In recent years, it's become commonplace to complain about how the main venue is stuffed with random non-Ethereum projects.This year the vibes were even more off, which explains how my timeline turned into a potpourri of hot takes about how ETH Denver '25 was sad, and not even the AI agent hype could camouflage that. The disillusionment poked out like a pimple, which you only make more apparent with concealer. Why were the vibes off? Chances are that the heavy commercial focus of the conference, a lack of genuine representation of real people and dApps for them, and the slow death of memecoins contributed to it. XPeople are tired of the same-old panels delivered by the same speakers without us making any apparent advances. After all, if we did, we could finally stop talking about Web3 UX. Takeaway: Community conferences, so obviously selling out is the problem. If you want genuine community interactions, you're unlikely to get that in an environment where market forces dictate. Don't believe me? Then read Sandel's book on what Money can't buy. Story TwoMemecoins success dwindlesFrom people finally realizing how out of touch their conference cycle is, to another area where I, with big Schadenfreude, watch the demise: Memecoins. Yes, I am a hater but not for the obvious reasons. I don't mind people getting rich quick. What I do mind is the fact that most of these memes were just a guise of community, to make already well-off people even richer. Fortunately, presidents getting involved in memes might have been the final nail in their coffin and memecoin launches on pump.fun are down 80%. Still thousands launch a day, but barely any of them ever make it even to the Twitter feed. The only recent exception was PWEASE, a meme inspired by JD Vance's performance during the disastrous White House visit of Zelenskyy.XYet, even that meme didn't prove lasting; its quick market cap increase to $33 million quickly followed by the price catapulting it slowly back to obscurity. Takeaway: Maybe this is a case where it (the greed) had to get really bad first, to expose what's wrong and we can now move on to bigger and better things. Story ThreeThe Crypto strategic reserves we deserve?Remember that thing I said about nature healing? It might be in parts, but it's more like small patches of greenery in a woodfire. Overall, you'd think that the US digital asset working group discussing the implementation of a strategic reserve is a good thing. But leave it to the current administration to also turn that into a bad idea. While people can get on board with governments holding Bitcoin, like how they keep gold around, Ripple and Cardano should not be included in that same category. Finally, we found something nearly all of crypto Twitter agrees on: chains that are best known for lawsuits, or in the case of Cardano, an annoying founder, should not be part of a nation's holdings. While Trump supposedly wants to elevate the industry after years of corrupt attacks, his choices only signal a lack of understanding, and once again highlight the Faustian bargain we entered when we started making crypto about politics. At least Faust got a girl, all we get is tariffs and market crashes. warpcastCognitive dissonance is about to be added to the list of mental health issues of crypto people. Takeaway: Instead of cheering for nation states to pump our bags, it might be time to channel our contrarian roots and work on undermining the current system again. Fact of the week: If you feel like you need a deep clean after reading the news these days, and take up your soap, you might stop to ask, how did we ever invent this? It was a happy accident, a byproduct of cooking out meat where fat droplets fell into the ashes to form a substance that worked great for cleaning. You can find a great write-up of the history of soap here. Naomi for CoinJar

It's official now. Sparkling water isn't just part of assimilating to German culture anymore but has become an integral part of the alpha male morning routine, alongside dipping your face in a bowl of ice water and wiping it with a banana peel. That's still better skincare than 80% of crypto bros. It's also better PR than whatever the f*ck the Solana Foundation assumed to be a good ad. Story OneSolana PR gone wrong Some time last week, it feels long ago,  the official Solana account posted a clip depicting a guy, supposedly an impersonation of America, going to therapy and ranting to his therapist about how genders keep him from inventing stuff. XIn short, it was one of the most tone-deaf, transphobic ads you could publish on your official timeline, while conveniently forgetting that Rust, the programming language Solana uses, was developed by trans devs. CT quickly united in condemning this ad, pointing out that Solana had only recently issued marketing materials claiming it was for everyone. XAs the backlash grew, the team decided to delete the ad. But it goes on to live forever onchain as someone had the foresight to download it and upload the video on Zora. Later, Solana founder Anatolu tweeted an apology, but the damage was done. Takeaway: It's not exactly surprising that Solana went full Maga marketing. A little common sense would have gone a long way here. Story TwoA win for privacy Moving on to better news, the US Treasury Department has lifted sanctions on Tornado Cash. Tornado Cash is a mixing service that obfuscates the trail of transfers you usually leave behind when sending crypto across wallets. As such, it provides privacy to anyone who doesn't want the whole world to know where they send their funds. The service became a target of the OFAC because it was said to have facilitated the laundering of $7 billion in funds, among them 0.5 billion by the North Korean Hacker group Lazarus. On a side note, it's nice to know you're never truly alone as a crypto holder; Lazarus is always there trying to get into your wallet. With sanctions put on it, anyone using it was essentially engaging in illicit activities. The news also benefited the native Tornado Cash token, which rose steeply in value upon the announcement. CoinmarketCap Torn chartTakeaway: Privacy is a human right. And hackers have evolved; last time I checked, Lazarus was launching memecoins to clean the trail of their funds. Story ThreePenguin ETF? A common phrase on X these days is "you can just do things." XMaybe that's what compelled Canary Capital to apply for a Penguin ETF. Of course, not any penguins, but Pudgy Penguins, a cute NFT collection that amassed a massive following on Web2 socials and sells plush toys in Walmart. In other words, the NFT project has the most exposure to normal people. Canary thinks that's a good enough reason to apply for an ETF. PinterestProbably how Canary feels after sending in that application.The ETF would mostly hold the Pengu token, a token launched to Pudgy Penguin holders, and a handful of Pudgy NFTs. Neither has been performing great in the past few months, and it doesn't help that there's no real utility for Pengu coin except for selling. Note that one can apply for any kind of ETF—sparkling water, for example—but approval is anything but secure. And if that wasn't enough reason to question Canary's judgment, they also applied for a Litecoin ETF. Takeaway: You can just do things, which implies you can also just not. In this case, I don't think an ETF will do much for Pudgy Penguin. Fact of the week: Sparkling water was first artificially created (there are some naturally occurring ones) in the 1750s, when the scientist Gabriel Francois Venel added hydrochloric acid and soda to pure water. We have the privilege of buying it. If you're considering adding it to your morning routine, the lobby claims it's also good for productivity. However, from personal experience, I can't quite confirm this. PinterestIf someone were to ask me if I wrote this in one sitting.Naomi for CoinJar

Finally we have something to bond over with normal people: we're all in the same boat sailing the red seas that are our portfolios. Story OneThere's things still going up like RWAsAnd your anxiety. While tariffs have negatively impacted crypto prices, one niche has escaped the downturn trajectory: Real-World-Assets. A lame term to describe all the financial assets that are administered the old-school way, through human bureaucracy and Excel sheets. PinterestHow I feel about those hot takes.Ever since Blackrock got into the onchain asset game, the market cap of tokenized treasuries has been growing steadily, and their BUIDL fund hit $1.9 billion just recently. In this economy, people aren't interested in vaporwave yield earnings provided by the next dumb trader. Instead, suddenly, a mere 3% yield offered by a government seems like a sweet deal.What else is hot in times of uncertainty? When in doubt, can't go wrong with gold. Even when your whole mission was to get away from TradFi - that explains why tokenized gold has been flying off the metaphorical shelves, pushing onchain commodities to a nearly 1.3 billion market cap. In this economy! Takeaway: For the purist, this might be a bit annoying. You set out to replace the system, now you create some Chimera where, without the TradFi apparatus, you can't provide stable yields. Consumers won't care. Stable yield and digital (real) gold win in times of anxiety. Story TwoLens mainnet goes live If watching your life savings evaporate isn't enough stress for you, you might be scrolling on X. Ever since Elon took over, the rage has accelerated, and all the ads I receive are hopelessly mistargeted. The problem is: where to go from there?Lens tries to provide an answer with its decentralized social protocol, where everyone's posts and interactions are stored onchain. While the team initially launched on Polygon, the chain turned out to be too expensive for Lens' aspiration. To fix that, they simply built their own chain: Lens Chain - because why be a tenant if you can be an owner (a question I won't ever have to ask myself being born in the wrong generation for home ownership)? XLens' migration was impressive—it moved 125 GB from one chain to the other and 12 million posts. Still, mainstream adoption is far off, with 650,000 users. Takeaway: The idea of having open social graphs is great, the challenge is switching costs. All my frenemies are on X. Once I quit, I can't see what they're up to anymore. Unless someone figures out how to fix that, I don't foresee DeSo taking off. Story ThreeSoneium thinks Anime will make people care about it Sure, Soneium is backed by Sony, a well-known brand, but let's not forget that Sony's glory days are decades behind, and their mission statement for their chain is as opaque as it gets. It's giving IBM vibes if you know what I mean. Soneium HomepageTheir latest idea to get people invested in their L2 is anime. Soneium wants to change that by launching an Anime ID in collaboration with Animoca, "targeting global anime and manga fans." The idea is that having one Anime ID to engage with apps on Soneium is an attractive proposition. To further the appeal they're launching it alongside the "Anime Art Festival" campaign, probably their interpretation of Base's onchain summer - but instead of Coca Cola NFTs, people will get to mint Solo Leveling NFTs. Takeaway: I don't see how having an embedded ID for one specific chain is such an amazing feature. Being a fan is more than just having a wallet in my view. Not impressed. And I'm an Anime fan and Manga reader. I am the target audience. Fact of the week: According to the internet, the real Red Sea is a much more pleasurable spot than the one in my portfolio. It's one of Earth's saltiest bodies of water, making it a great place to float around. Naomi for CoinJar

That's, in essence, what a certain part of crypto identified as the next trend that'll finally bring mass adoption. Or at least a mass influx of wealth in select wallets (not ours). Story OnePosting content isn't enough You will also have to mint coins associated with it on Zora whenever you tweet, to maximize the value of the attention generated by your hot takes. The good news is that you probably still have 4 weeks to be early on this content coin meta on LinkedIn.XWhile crypto has always felt the need to tokenize everything and their mum, Jesse from Base identified it as the latest way to get more attention on the Base L2. The first "content coin" to go live was "Base is for everyone," which was amplified through Base's social media accounts, propelling it to a $20 million market cap within minutes before crashing 95%, leading to allegations of a rug pull. While the coin recovered somewhat, Base addressed this by simply tweeting that this wasn't an official Base coin and that they're just trying to work on bringing more culture onchain. XTakeaway: Coining everything, including pictures of your baby ghiblified won't bring about crypto adoption. It's just lame hyperfinancialization copied from what Solana did last year while pretending it's good for creators. Story TwoYet another coin If you thought the times of new token launches were over, you'd be wrong. The next project to launch a native token is Zora. Zora started as a platform aiming to empower creators by making it easy to create and distribute NFTs, but has now evolved into a content coin farm. Critical people will say that it is undoubtedly very convenient that just ahead of them announcing their TGE - token generation event - on April 20th, Base suddenly encouraged everyone to mint coins on Zora. Thanks to that, token minting activity is nearly on par now with pump.fun, its evil twin.XThe Zora token will launch on Base (not on Zora's own chain), which appears to give further grounds to the allegations of Base pumping the numbers. After all, they seem to be early investors. However, even setting aside the hype pre-TGE strategy, the tokenomics themselves leave much room for critique. 65% of the supply is allocated to team members, and the only utility is "fun". XTakeaway: You'll get nothing and you'll be happy could have been the more honest slogan for the new Zora token. You know it's bad when even ZachXBT tweets about a token before it's launched. Story ThreeValues aren't coins Not all is coins yet, although it can't be long until some crypto bro will suggest that we should create markets to decide on our moral codex instead of common sense. While in other realms of the ecosystem people are busy turning everything into a coin, a small crowd of resistance fighters persists, trying to get people to care about values that aren't prices again.You might know them under the label of cypherpunks, the original movement that led to the creation of crypto in the first place and stewarded the ideas of decentralization, sovereignty and permissionlessness. The torrent of coins and greed has left many of the original cypherpunks feeling tired and burned out. XClearly, just talking about the values that once mattered won't fix things. The first step is one we should all enjoy: dunk on the chains that aren't living up to them at all.XThe next step is a little harder: building dApps that have the values built in by respecting privacy, empowering users, and promoting openness. Takeaway: All is not lost to coins just yet. Most of the current coin games are short-term, cypherpunk dApps might just have to compete on a different timeframe to win. I, for one, am ready for a doc editor that doesn't use my writing to train its AI (GD*cs) or a banking solution that doesn't block me. Fact of the week: You're gonna love this if you like coins and the Roman Empire. Tossing coins to make decisions started during the reign of Julius Caesar. Since the emperor's word was law, whenever the coin landed heads up, you had to respect that side's decisions and act accordingly. Naomi for CoinJar

Story OneMovement is down only from here Remember how Facebook (now Meta) once had an idea for building their own cryptocurrency, and to do that, they even invented a whole virtual machine? While Meta was occupied with lawsuits, two college dropouts picked it up and fostered it into a full-blown alt L1, with $100 million in VC backing. So far, so ordinary, until December last year, when one of their market makers sold 66 million MOVE tokens, netting a solid $38 million in profit. After Binance detected suspicious activity on the market makers' account, they reported it to Movement Labs and the Movement Foundation. This kicked off an investigation, culminating on May 2nd with the suspension of Movement Co-founder Rishi Manche for getting the company into the "worst possible agreement ever." In essence, this agreement put an insane amount of MOVE tokens (5% of supply) into the hands of the Market Maker and incentivized them to pump the token price before dumping.Takeaway: While market makers are helpful in facilitating selling and buying, it's not rare for them to abuse their power. That said, I won't shed a tear over Movement's downfall. Story TwoGood boy gone bad Gabagool made his name as an anon founder, and rose the ranks of crypto street cred by exposing other insiders, and seemingly fighting the good fight. He even featured in a Vice documentary on crypto scams.  But this wasn't enough for him, and he launched a DeFi protocol called Velodrome right during the Luna collapse in 2022. After losing funds, he decided to replenish by draining his project's treasury of $350,000 and disappearing; not without casting the blame for the failed launch on the only doxxed team member: Alexander. He nearly got away with it, had he not reappeared under the name proxystudio, and become part of the Clanker team (a bot for launching coins). During a recent meetup, Alexander ran into and confronted him; the rest is history.XGabagool/Proxy was quickly let go from Clanker, and the entire Base ecosystem has effectively banned him. XTakeaway: The social layer is working fine for once, and we're banning a bad guy. At the same time, this saga just highlights the inherent challenges with how easy it is to be anon and disappear, then run it all up again under a different name. Story ThreeAztec launches testnet I know what you're thinking: Don't we already have enough chains? Of course, you're right that we technically have at least one chain for every daily active crypto user. Also, placing the announcement of a privacy chain right below concerns around anonymous founders might appear off. But I believe privacy is a human right, and full transparency is as dystopian as Psycho Pass makes it look. PinterestOf course, one value prop of blockchains has been that you can see everything people do, but we've slowly realized this might not be great in a world of cancel culture and mob mentality. Not saying that Aztec network fixes this, but at least this L2 says they are the first programmable privacy layer that combines private data with blockchain, allowing users to decide what they want to share and what not. With 8 years of development, you'd assume the tech is solid and ready to make privacy a default rather than a luxury afforded to the few anon founders who find doxxed members to blame when things go wrong. Takeaway: Aztec looks sufficiently different from other copy-pasta L2s, and in a world of surveillance capitalism, what's not to love about a privacy blockchain? Fact of the week: We all see them all the time. But did you know that pigeons can distinguish between good and bad kid paintings? Maybe it's time to adopt one, so you don't have to be the one crushing your kid's dreams of becoming a painter. Not parental advice.Naomi for CoinJar

Returning to life has been a theme for crypto recently in many ways. Story OneNew exit strategy just dropped Imagine you're the founder of an AI crypto project that paves your way to wealth, but not for others. People start harassing you, some going as far as blackmailing you. What do you do? Jeffy Yu has found a unique answer to that. The Zerebro founder went on a pump.fun livestream (video since deleted so this is anecdotal) where he seemingly unalived himself. A little later, a blog post of his went live, supposedly triggered by his passing, introducing the idea of legacy coins, a memecoin that would stand in as his legacy. As his obituary spread across CT, the value of the legacycoin skyrocketed. Yet, all wasn't as it seemed. While CT discussed whether crypto livestreams and coining everything had gone too far, Jeffy sat happily in his parents' basement, watching the charts of his coin go up. Eventually, greed set in, and he started putting in buy orders from the dev wallet. His coming back to life (or more correctly, his fake s*icide) were further proven by a San Francisco newspaper journalist running into him. XAs people realized it was all just a lie, they started selling, and the first legacy coin's chart looks like all the other pump and dumps. Congrats on the legacy! DEX ScreenerTakeaway: Bullying on CT might be bad, but so is faking one's own death and then trying to cash in on the memecoin pump thus generated. Story TwoGood boy gone bad? Coinbase's marketing image of a good boy always following best practices is endangered. But unlike the Panda, notoriously threatened by extinction, they don't have a cute face to rescue them in the court of public opinion. On May 15th, the official Coinbase account tweeted that they had experienced a data breach, blaming cyber criminals and rogue support agents who leaked 1% of their customers' sensitive information, including their home addresses. XInstead of giving in to the criminals' demand for $20 million, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong did a Uno reverse on them and offered anyone helping to catch the criminals $20 million instead. In addition, they fired a team of support agents based in India. As a result of this breach, the company is facing at least six lawsuits alleging a failure to adhere to security protocols, and countless humorous to offensive comments on X. The privacy maxis are giving off new sparks of life.XTakeaway: KYC is a problem waiting to be fixed by Zero-Knowledge-Proofs. If widely implemented, we could KYC once, and present the proof thereof to any subsequent new service we sign up for. Story ThreeEth coming back to life Congrats to everyone who held ETH in the past years, wishing they'd bought Bitcoin instead, myself included. The time of our hardship might finally be over, as ETH has given up its stablecoin existence and price has finally moved. I'm still convinced that it was the dance that saved Ethereum. XThat said, there have been signs of life in the Ethereum ecosystem recently with the latest Pectra upgrade going live and the Ethereum Foundation making moves again. I admit I spent very little time studying their newly published board structure. I didn't get into crypto to look at org charts, yet the gist is that Ethereum must remain cypherpunk and not succumb to business acumen. On top of that, they launched a trillion-dollar initiative to elevate Ethereum security to a point where it surpasses traditional financial institutions. And if all of that doesn't get your blood flowing, maybe ETH-chan will.XTakeaway: We shouldn't write off Ethereum just yet; it still got moves (pun intended). But I won't rely on that alone, brb, practicing my TikTok dance skills. Fact of the week: This whole Jeffy saga reminded me of the book we were forced to read in High School: Sorrows of Young Werther, written by Goethe, who wanted to criticize the Romantics of his time. It backfired, as anecdotal evidence suggests an increase in suicides emulating the protagonist's death. This was later dubbed the Werther effect. Good thing no one reads anymore.Naomi for CoinJar

Story OneA hack with a twistOn May 22nd, the leading DEX on the SUI blockchain tweeted that it had detected an incident leading to the loss of $223 million in user funds. So far, just another successful exploit by a hacker. Shortly after draining the liquidity pools, the hacker began bridging their funds to Ethereum in an attempt to launder them. As a result of this massive exploit, memecoins dumped — including the supposedly stable coin USDC, which suddenly was stable at 0.PinterestAfter $60 million had been moved off SUI, the validators collectively decided to simply freeze the funds, leaving the hackers unable to access the money they had stolen. Can they do that? Yes, they could. As it turns out, SUI is structured to give validators the right to exempt transactions from specific wallets in extreme circumstances as long as a broad consensus is reached.tenorCT is split in the reaction to this. Some point to the positive effect of saving $160 million worth of user funds from being drained, while others worry that the power to freeze might not always be used for such noble causes.Cetus has suspended operations and initiated a governance vote to decide the fate of the frozen funds. So far, 90% are in favor of distributing them back to the victims.Takeaway: The lesson here is that the social layer can trump the technical. If people decide to act against the decentralization maxime, not much you can do.Story TwoMoney as a social constructRemember when you first learned about fractional reserve banking? I was about 24 and just got started in crypto. What blew my mind back then was that banks just create money out of nothing. Well, it’s not nothing, in the end it’s trust.Ironically, in crypto the main propaganda is to get away from trust, to create trust-less money, rejecting the idea that money is just a social construct. Bitcoin started as an attempt, but it accumulated mainly in the hands of Michael Saylor and corporations seeking PR coverage (see Metaplanet).PinterestMost memecoins follow a similar pattern of accumulation. But what if there was money that didn’t follow this path? That’s what Circles promises: a project by Gnosis that just launched its V2. In essence, everyone on there mints one token per hour. Through agreements with others to use these tokens, they gain value. This enables the creation of circles of trust, allowing trust to scale beyond the bonds of people you know.Takeaway: Finally, an interesting social monetary experiment. Will it work? Who knows, but at least it’s an attempt to do something different than all these PVP coins.Story ThreeEIP 7702 adoption is going greatIt’s especially going great if your hobby is draining people’s wallets. While Ethereum’s recent Pectra upgrade focused on improving UX, it also made it easier for criminals to drain people with even less clicks.The proposal in question is EIP7702, which introduced account abstraction, a buzzword of last year. Once implemented, this allows wallets to behave like smart contracts, giving them the ability to, for example, batch transactions (avoiding getting stuck in approve & confirm loops), sponsor gas fees, and use passkeys.Wintermute ResearchUnfortunately, over 60% of delegations authorize contracts to act on behalf of wallet users that aren’t in the interest of the user, as Wintermute, a crypto trading firm, has found. They dubbed these contracts Crime Enjoyer as they’re all versions of the same copy-pasta code that sweeps wallets if keys are leaked and sends the funds to the deployer.One user lost $150,000 this way to a supposed batch transaction. Wintermute commented they found this trend "funny, bleak and fascinating". Takeaway: Wallets should step up to make it clearer what users are signing when they hand over control. What’s more, we should all think about the fact that all technological improvements will also end up in the hands of our adversaries. Fact of the week: Speaking of constructs, did you know that the lifetime of reinforced concrete is about 50 - 100 years? That's because after a while, the steel inside starts rusting, breaking up the concrete from the inside. Fun prospect if you're living in a city built from concrete 50 years ago. To learn more go here. You might never look at concrete bridges the same again.Naomi for CoinJar

I ask myself as I follow the crypto news. It seems we’re not really chasing the idea of providing an alternative to current systems, but rather embracing them, such as a certain CEX deciding to sponsor a military parade. But that’s not all.Story OneEveryone wants a MicrostrategyWhere would Bitcoin be if there wasn’t a Michel Saylor consistently buying and HODLing his Bitcoin bags? His business model has inspired many founders who dream of an entity like MicroStrategy that simply buys and holds. Diamond hands are a token project’s best friend, after all.Justin Sun, the billionaire founder of TRON — the blockchain holding up USDT adoption in the Global South — is no different.With the Trump administration signaling looser rules for crypto, the SEC case against the Tron founder has been paused, clearing the way for bigger and better things.Earlier this week, Tron reached a deal with SRM Entertainment, a NASDAQ company, which entails SRM Entertainment buying Tron tokens and being renamed Tron Inc.Takeaway: Tron controls the entire infrastructure that upholds 30% of stablecoin transactions, capturing all the transaction fees. That’s probably a sexy proposition to TradFi, very close to their own business models of maximum extractable value.Story TwoCircle goes publicTron isn’t the only one going public these days. Circle, the company behind USD Coin and lesser-known stablecoins such as EURC, went live on the NASDAQ on June 5th, making it the first major public listing by a stablecoin issuer in the US. With shares priced at $31, Circles raised an additional $1.05 billion in an IPO that had been talked about for so long that some had lost hope altogether.XUnlike the coins that the entity puts onchain, the shares weren’t stable at all, but traded like a memecoin after a celebrity tweeted about them (if you discount the usual dump that proceeds). Roughly two weeks later, Circles’ shares are trading at nearly five times their initial offering price. I wish someone had told me that I could have 5x’d my money instead of holding on to my principles (staying in ETH).What aids this price movement is the final vote in the US Senate to introduce stablecoin regulation, creating a clearer playing field for stablecoin businesses in the US. Another edge Circle has over most crypto companies is that it’s profitable.Takeaway: Stablecoin summer is heating up, we’ve given up on creating our own money, and love the dollar now. If you think about it, it’d be way more logical for someone like Circle to sponsor the military next… as a defender of fiat. 🤷‍♀️Story ThreeCT now with a dose of bettingThis is me whenever I log into Crypto Twitter and witness yet another crypto drama or public loss of virtue.PinterestYou’d think it couldn’t possibly get more dramatic than that, until last week when Elon Musk announced that Polymarket was going to be the official partner for X. This comes unfortunately too late for us to bet on the biggest breakup of Pride month and Elon’s subsequent public crash out.So far, people who wanted to bet on major world events, from whether MetaMask would ever release a token, or who’d start World War 3, had to go to Polymarket directly. Soon, though, the prediction markets widgets could be directly integrated with X, appearing inside posts and live streams so that you won’t need to leave to place bets.In 2024, Polymarket facilitated over $8 billion in predictions, making it one of the biggest categories in crypto, although people were unsure whether the betting would continue after the elections. The answer is yes.Takeaway: In a culture where even kids are trained on gambling mechanics early on with loot boxes in Roblox, it’s only logical that gambling is now the preferred mechanism to decide whether things are fake news or not for the adults.PinterestFact of the week: It’s Strawberry season in Germany, so here’s a fun fact about us: every German eats on average 3,3 kilos of strawberries per year. Australia is also not far off still making the top ten with 2.8 kilos per person. Naomi for CoinJar

If Shakespeare was alive today, he'd be the perfect person to write a comedy about crypto. Story OneOne digital identity isn't enough Perhaps the question we should ask isn't "Who am I?" but "How many?"In Japan, there's a belief that we all wear masks, some of which we never shed. That's probably why masks feature heavily in traditional Japanese theatre, and continue to be prominent in anime to this day.Pinterest No-Face is also a face In a similar vein, when we interact online, we don't always do so as the person we portray to be in reality. If you have an anon account you're pretending to be a cat on, I applaud you. We need more of that silliness, and less of the world domination attempts by digital identity projects like: World (they aren't trying hard to hide what they want to govern). As Vitalik points out in his most recent blog post, while a single-system digital identity looks pretty convenient at first glance, it risks becoming a totalitarian regime where one is robbed of their pseudonymity and forced to live one's life entirely in public. It also makes it very easy to deplatform people for good. That's why he advocates for pluralistic identity systems, combining different approaches such as social graphs, government-issued documents, and internet personas. Only then can we maintain privacy, inclusivity, and resist abuse. Now you won't have to read the entire blog. You're welcome. Takeaway: In my view, it's always been evident that having a diverse rather than one centralized system should be the goal for decentralization maxis. But then again, common sense isn't that common, and many just want to replace the current empires with their own. Story TwoRWA Summer Not the summer we wanted, but the summer we deserve. Pinterest Me, a europooor without AC Now that certain big players happily sponsor the military while pretending to be cypherpunks, is it any surprise that the hottest theme has become tokenization? The idea of bringing financial assets on-chain isn't new, but it's gaining momentum with a clearer regulatory framework and TradFi realizing that... It's yet another avenue for exit liquidity. First, we got the Circles IPO, and the latest asset put onchain now are stocks. The primary perpetrator in this case is Backed Finance, a company dedicated to democratizing access to finance. Unlike previous tokenized stocks, this one guarantees that the onchain stocks purchased are backed 1:1 by real stocks held by them. Similar to how stablecoins work, except with more accounting transparency than Tether will ever have. Takeaway: Stablecoins, stocks, equities, all of these things are quite boring to the memecoin degenerate, but they do point at the larger picture: we're not becoming an alternative to, we're becoming part of Big Finance. Story ThreeYou win some, you lose some We won some adoption with the TradFi bros, but we also lost some money to exploits. The numbers are in for the first half of 2025, and they don't look great. We'll probably surpass previous heights. Admittedly, the most significant portion of the exploits is attributed to the $1.5 billion ByBit hack, which ultimately resulted in a total loss of $2.1 billion. TRM LabsOnce again, the winning team in these Olympics are the North Korean hackers, who gained a steep $1.6 billion, which their benevolent leader can spend on toys. The rest is spread across different DeFi protocols and other infrastructure attacks. In recent days, the most popular vector has become the Front-end. Just a few weeks ago, CoinMarketCap suddenly featured a wallet drainer. Next up, Cointelegraph, the media outlet, was hit with a similar attack where attackers advertised a fake airdrop on their official websites. While it's unclear how much funds were lost this way, what's clear is that we'll hardly be taken for serious people if our biggest tracking sites and media outlets can't secure their own frontends. Takeaway: The year is 2025, and we still haven't figured out how to offer verifiable, secure frontends to users. It says a lot about our priorities. Fact of the week: Since I spent a lot of time longing for a fan these days, did you know that the world's biggest ceiling fan has a wingspan of 24 feet. Fittingly its producer is called Big Ass Fans.Naomi for CoinJar