Wilder World

Macauley Peterson

Yesterday’s <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/roman-storm-guilty-one-count">partial verdict</a> in U.S. v. Roman Storm is about more than the fate of one Tornado Cash developer. It dampens hopes of giving DeFi protocols greater access to the US market by sending chills through the entire open‑source community.



Storm was found guilty under <a href="https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1960">18 U.S.C. § 1960(b)(1)(C)</a>, which treats noncustodial code as &#8220;money transmitting&#8221; and thus a criminal offense, if it&#8217;s used by anyone for illicit purposes. In the <a href="https://x.com/preston_vanloon/status/1953137607853871516">words</a> of Ethereum core developer Preston van Loon: “This is a dark day for crypto and [Roman Storm].”



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Sketchy legal foundations</h2>



At issue in rendering a verdict was how § 1960 defines “money transmission.” The law requires transmitting funds on behalf of the public and has traditionally meant moving others’ money as a custodial intermediary — not publishing permissionless code. Yet SDNY prosecutors convinced the jury that deploying <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/tornado-cash-sanctions-expose-potential-defi-achilles-heel">immutable smart contracts</a> meets that definition.



Coin Center executive director Peter Van Valkenburgh spoke to the flawed logic in <a href="https://twitter.com/i/spaces/1vAxRDQZeDDGl">a must-listen X space</a> on Wednesday: “I can’t transfer your funds if I don’t have them in my possession and in my control.” And yet that’s exactly how Storm’s Tornado Cash functioned: no custody, only code.



The government also shut out FinCEN’s own 2019 <a href="https://www.fincen.gov/sites/default/files/2019-05/FinCEN%20Guidance%20CVC%20FINAL%20508.pdf">guidance</a> on the matter, which explicitly carves out non‑custodial software providers from Money Service Business (MSB) liability, as Fund DeFi’s Amanda Tuminelli explained: “The DOJ said they don’t have to listen to that guidance…They can come up with their own interpretation.”



That <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/doj-trial-tornado-cash-roman-storm">disregard for regulatory alignment</a> undermines legal clarity and due process.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">A warning for every DeFi dev</h2>



What happens when writing neutral, useful software tools becomes laden with risk? This verdict signals that simply publishing code could mean criminal liability — regardless of intent or control. Yes, it’s just one case, but this guilty verdict still will embolden prosecutors and intimidate developers.



Even more alarming: It exemplifies how jurisdiction is elastic. Peter Van Valkenburgh aptly calls SDNY “the sovereign District of New York,” capable of reeling in any dev, anywhere, if even a single user in Manhattan runs your code. This worry is no longer theoretical. Between Storm’s conviction and the Samourai Wallet developers’ recent plea deal, it’s a blueprint for future prosecutions unless the law is changed, or the interpretation repudiated.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">DOJ’s approach: Unfair, hypocritical and dangerous</h2>



Let’s call it what it is: Prosecuting a developer who doesn’t touch users’ funds while letting large financial actors facing multi‑billion‑dollar laundering scandals skate by is hypocrisy.



Compared to world-scale financial scandals involving multinational banks, the criminal case against Storm is outrageous. In cases like <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/topics/cm8m6leejrkt">the 1MDB scandal</a>, where over $4.5 billion was siphoned from Malaysia’s sovereign wealth fund with the help of major global financial institutions, few individuals faced meaningful criminal consequences.



Goldman Sachs, which helped underwrite billions in 1MDB bond sales, ultimately reached a deferred prosecution agreement with the DOJ in 2020. The bank <a href="https://www.reuters.com/markets/asia/goldman-sachs-its-role-multi-billion-dollar-1mdb-scandal-2023-10-12/">paid $2.9 billion in fines</a> but avoided criminal conviction, and no senior executives were charged. Only one former banker for Goldman’s Asia group, Roger Ng, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/mar/09/roger-ng-goldman-sachs-banker-malaysia-1mdb-fraud#:~:text=Roger%20Ng%2C%20the%20former%20Goldman,frauds%20of%20the%20past%20decade.">received</a> a prison sentence, and the DOJ closed the matter in 2024 without further indictments.



By contrast, Roman Storm&#8217;s role was limited to writing and deploying open-source smart contracts that others used, yet even on the lesser money-transmitter count, he faces up to a maximum of five years prison time. (Storm himself <a href="https://x.com/EleanorTerrett/status/1953146088602427664">sounded an optimistic note</a> following the verdict.)



Legal experts argue that this represents <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/appeals-court-dismiss-tornado-cash-suit">a double standard</a> in enforcement. “If you don&#8217;t handle other people’s money,” said Van Valkenburgh, “you shouldn&#8217;t be held to the same regulatory expectations as a bank like Credit Suisse or Goldman Sachs.”



The DOJ’s approach not only criminalizes innovation but diverts enforcement resources away from large-scale financial misconduct that poses far greater systemic risk. While traditional financial institutions routinely secure settlement deals for billion-dollar offenses, developers facing felony charges will think twice before publishing open-source tools that promote privacy and financial autonomy.&nbsp;



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Political remedies needed</h2>



The Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act (BRCA), now tacked onto the <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/us-house-passes-clarity-act">CLARITY market‑structure legislation</a>, would codify that non‑custodial developers are not money transmitters, aligned with the <a href="https://blockworks.co/tag/fincen">FinCEN</a> guidance. Van Valkenburgh describes it as a “really good simple statutory drafting exercise to clamp the brakes on this abuse of prosecutions.”



But even if that makes it through Congress — still a big if — CLARITY isn’t retroactive, so it won’t help Storm. Yet it can spare future developers.



“There’ll be a moment in a couple of months where it might be important to call your senator,” Van Valkenburgh said.



On the other side of the regulatory spectrum stands SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce. In <a href="https://www.sec.gov/newsroom/speeches-statements/peirce-remarks-blockchain-conference-080425">a speech this week</a>, she emphasized financial privacy as a constitutional right and warned against treating privacy‑protecting code as criminal. She reminded us: “Denying people financial privacy — whether through sweeping surveillance programs or restrictions on privacy‑protecting technologies — undermines the fabric and freedoms of our families, communities, and nation.”&nbsp;



Peirce also preached disintermediation — the idea that technology should obviate the need for intermediaries, and not add new mandates. She warned against deputizing private actors to surveil each other, saying it’s “antithetical to a free society.”&nbsp;



These principles directly clash with SDNY’s approach: criminalizing neutral tools that enhance one’s financial privacy. Peirce’s vision is of protecting, not policing, innovation.



Storm’s legal team is expected to challenge the conviction in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, focusing on the misinterpretation of federal law. Key legal questions were foreclosed during <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/tornado-cash-motion-to-dismiss-denied">pretrial motions</a>, not left for the jury, Tuminelli said. “The jury was fenced in on the 1960 charge because they weren’t given the opportunity to really make the decision on the part that’s most relevant… the definition of money transmission,” she said.



The outcome of the appeal could have major implications for the crypto ecosystem. Coin Center is also supporting <a href="https://www.coincenter.org/app/uploads/2025/01/Lewellen-v.-Garland.pdf">a related civil lawsuit</a> in Texas.



The CLARITY Act, while offering no retroactive relief, could lessen the impact of Storm’s guilty verdict, clarifying that publishing noncustodial code alone can’t be treated as a criminal act. Without reform, every DeFi dev runs a risk.



Crypto can feel directionless at times. However, this is a clear fork in the road: What’s decided in the months ahead will shape the future of crypto development both in the United States and outside of it.



Let Tuminelli’s warning mobilize us, Peirce’s plea for privacy guide us, and Van Valkenburgh’s strategy direct us.&nbsp;



The legal battle isn’t over, and the political one is still in the early innings.



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open source development

Opinion: Tornado Cash developer conviction raises alarm for open-source devs

Katherine Ross

This is a segment from the Empire newsletter. To read full editions, <a href="https://blockworks.co/newsletter/empire" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">subscribe</a>.



<hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity"/>



Scenius Capital is making some moves.&nbsp;&nbsp;



Ben Jacobs, co-founder and managing partner, told Blockworks exclusively that the firm just closed a “slightly oversubscribed” $20 million fundraise for a fund of emerging crypto VC funds.&nbsp;



“We think we&#8217;ve carved out a unique niche and a very important one in the asset class, where we&#8217;re backing emerging managers exclusively. So [by] investing in small funds…early in their firm history, managers that we think have established a clear edge in a domain, a geography, and ecosystem, and we&#8217;re excited to back them at the earliest stages,” Jacobs told me.



“We think that’s where the best returns will come from,” he added.&nbsp;



As Jacobs noted, it’s been quite a rough year for fundraising. We’ve seen both <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/venture-capital-funding-up-in-june">multi-billion dollar months</a>, but then some months — <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/venture-capital-funding-may-2025">like May for example</a> — fell short of expectations.&nbsp;



“It hasn’t been necessarily the easiest fundraising environment through ‘24 and ‘25, and we do believe that our ability to launch and close even a slightly oversubscribed $20 million dollar vehicle is a huge testament to the value that we’re bringing to the market, and recognition from the market that we are doing things in a high-integrity, high-quality way,” co-founder Greg d’Incelli added.&nbsp;



“Closing the VC fund was a huge accomplishment for us,” he continued. “We think both Scenius and the overall asset class are at an important moment — a pivotal moment — that we&#8217;ve seen sort of with evolving regulation in a positive sense, both in the US through the Trump administration and globally.”&nbsp;



But the $20 million raise isn’t the only thing that Scenius is announcing. Jacobs and d’Incelli also told Blockworks that ParaFi is taking a strategic stake in Scenius.&nbsp;



“Having [ParaFi’s] support, we think, really gives us a partner that has grown into an institutional, broadly trusted firm, and we hope to follow in their footsteps. And we think the launch of this new fund is one of those footsteps, and the development of this token capital markets arm is a second step. So, yeah, it&#8217;s very exciting, and we&#8217;re thrilled for where things go from here,” Jacobs said.



D’Incelli added that Scenius “always wanted to be aligned with people that are long-term thinkers, that keep a long-term horizon, that are strategic.”&nbsp;



“We are thrilled to have acquired a strategic GP stake in Scenius Capital and to be partnering with Ben, Greg and the broader team. Scenius has established itself as a leader in the crypto fund of funds space with deep industry expertise and a reputation for integrity,” ParaFi’s Ben Forman told Blockworks.



“We are excited to provide Scenius with growth capital to enable them to scale their existing business lines and expand into new areas, such as their token capital markets advisory practice. ParaFi believes Scenius is exceptionally well-positioned and we look forward to supporting the firm&#8217;s future success.&#8221;



Jacobs, in an <a href="https://www.hedgeweek.com/providing-curated-access-best-in-class-crypto-blockchain-investment-opportunities/">interview</a> tied to winning a Hedgweek award earlier this year, said that the fund views “bitcoin as a core and important position in the portfolio, and we are allocated to managers who own BTC beta, trade around BTC with various instruments, or denominate their funds in BTC.”



The two told Blockworks that Scenius is also backed by a number of crypto native LPs, though they declined to give specifics.&nbsp;



“A lot of people are declaring crypto venture is dead, or the returns are going to compress, but a lot of people still see a lot of value and opportunity, and they think our expression — by focusing on these smaller, first time or second time managers — is the best route to continue to allocate to crypto venture,” Jacobs said.&nbsp;



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<li><a href="https://blockworks.co/newsletter/empire">Empire</a>: Crypto news and analysis to start your day.</li>



<li><a href="https://blockworks.co/newsletter/forward-guidance">Forward Guidance</a>: The intersection of crypto, macro and policy.</li>



<li><a href="https://blockworks.co/newsletter/thedrop">The Drop</a>: Apps, games, memes and more.</li>



<li><a href="https://blockworks.co/newsletter/lightspeed">Lightspeed</a>: All things Solana.</li>



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Empire Newsletter

Scenius Capital raises $20M for new fund of emerging crypto VC funds

Byron Gilliam

This is a segment from The Breakdown newsletter. To read more editions, <a href="https://blockworks.co/brand/the-breakdown">subscribe</a>.



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<blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow">
“Ideas are easy. Execution is everything.”



― John Doerr
</blockquote>



Nobody does big ideas better than crypto: internet-native money, self-sovereignty, democratized finance…



Execution, however, has never been its strong suit.



Internet-native money is crypto’s foundational idea, but 15 years on, few use it to pay for anything on the internet.&nbsp;



The democratization of finance has largely become people getting fleeced in the memecoin casino.



Self-sovereignty remains a core principle, but most people have stored their crypto on centralized exchanges, and now, increasingly, with the evil empire itself (i.e., the stock market).



Still, these remain worthy aspirations.



But crypto’s high-minded ideals have been obscured by a morass of manipulated memecoins, presidential grifting, North Korean hacking and institutional co-opting.



This sometimes makes it hard to remember what crypto was supposed to be about.



Could even some OG Bitcoiners be losing faith? I can’t help but wonder if the recent sales of Satoshi-era coins are a quiet reaction to bitcoin’s growing corporate ownership.



To win over a new generation of converts, then, it might take more than lofty principles delivered in rousing sound bites.



It might require something simpler: a reason to actually use it.



Crypto’s mission statements would be more convincing if its proof of concept were something other than just the price of bitcoin — if people were using it onchain and not just buying it on the stock market.



So how’s that going? Let’s check the charts.



People are using the chains!



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXdjzuxmRpRbjkvNCCwF9y-yvz3JDNs6U4M5oFpwWUm1O6MtZZd6WxbDrA-Q0KIZ4473MHAMaEisjNm3g_SodUcC7pMgaThLBbFyJhphdY88SHIfyylXG8ITmsxjQ2ccPc64MCBGMg?key=3VK3LqPmlcReHlCuG582Ig" alt=""/></figure>



Ethereum processed an all-time high of 46.7 million transactions in July, thanks largely to the smart contract chain’s new, higher gas limit. A higher gas limit increases the computational capacity of each block, which lowers the competition for blockspace. As a result, the median fee on Ethereum has hovered around $0.20 recently, down from as high as $13 a little over a year ago.



(Note: Nearly all of today’s charts are freely available on the <a href="https://blockworks.co/analytics">Blockworks website</a>.)



Doing more for less:



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXdxHkAWFac-ffuHrqNqTmvQHHhPTinj6oes_W5Dlji1bwFbOL7vAtIHmYAW7k8UFYkNLrUE3utKk_i7MCEljBHXQADZwo2Tr0ZH6cRLfsn4hq8e3bFXnOy9CSLJm-_DYVuv1ulQ?key=3VK3LqPmlcReHlCuG582Ig" alt=""/></figure>



Ethereum transactions are at record highs, but Ethereum REV — a measure of how much people pay to use the chain — is near record lows. In July, Solana, Hyperliquid and Tron all earned more in fees than Ethereum did. This is great news for Ethereum’s users, who can do more with less. But it may not be such great news for Ethereum’s investors.&nbsp;



If blockchains had earnings:



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXdYeFrIe27AdZuwohFd4xQKcaUm5TSxE3b6hDLTK3bm_2eHu5_MJbnjeeaKM9NUJ-TqPlbcDOOnCgKEJciHymcqtzCTqf62OmFizaDqA2LwNu3p2H2loCqn5arjlfhBVQ1ZQ7UerA?key=3VK3LqPmlcReHlCuG582Ig" alt=""/></figure>



Subtract payments to operators from REV and you get what can be thought of as the “net income” of a blockchain. On that basis, if we annualize the $31 million of net income that Ethereum recorded in July, we can say that ETH trades on a price-to-earnings ratio of 1,200x. Yikes.



Still, there have been more buyers than sellers lately:



<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="624" height="376" src="https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXezbnPkiKkSfy-I8owlo3tcH4RIcex8z5rPkademqqi3edtXg_Hsh0jZ2Z4P531FJGkl5R91FKySqTvlgX-19kCAxzt0XiCqBKCpy7Xja5hiXz-bqLEmvHl1kilVK7I45hD-4BDkg?key=3VK3LqPmlcReHlCuG582Ig">



ETH is  up 45% over the past month, presumably because digital asset treasury companies have provided a new source of demand. DATs now hold $6.9 billion of ETH, up from near zero just a month ago. ETH ETFs bought an additional <a href="https://app.blockworksresearch.com/analytics/crypto-etfs">$5.4 billion worth</a> in July as well. 



Trending down:



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXeHkiQJ0ZXxACyyFxU9ISZyOCgLicGe-FPH6docBTykrHbHkPd1zn-pw6my5u-JB2kEAWOM2V9JRvIicXG8DZSUdC6jJ01FyFgX9ol_jT3VXuR_L1rIJP7PmkxlZUc8wWmrK3VLXg?key=3VK3LqPmlcReHlCuG582Ig" alt=""/></figure>



Because most treasury companies have to sell shares to buy crypto, trading volume is considered a leading indicator of their purchases. Falling volumes suggest that DATs will be buying less crypto.



The stock market premium:



<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="624" height="376" src="https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXf5fnaZHM9j6JAlOC4NRbPvHWS-IT6Ik-ABob4J6C8AeMF8WTIqwl-VB-bzBwpbeO1XlG_CrihKFJsyo-7aznbE1PsLnBVSq8OvXTMyMQ8aTzS4OigFN34A1R1NooTZU9NC6MXEig?key=3VK3LqPmlcReHlCuG582Ig">



Collectively, digital asset treasury companies are now worth $88.5 billion more than the crypto they hold. The good news is that the stock market loves crypto. The bad news is that 100% of that premium can be attributed to financial engineering, which tends to go “poof” at some point.



The hype is real:



<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="624" height="376" src="https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXdm18WEWxATndXnctukCLOIsCIG0eNSypGLoJk0anHjUu1urRBAf33YfcKROvCPkWsMLujQAi8zi64hUFjZwxvv0zWk7gLqUl068-s5ASGnwh63km8uyK8RntEicopBsODCIbwJ?key=3VK3LqPmlcReHlCuG582Ig">



Hyperliquid just posted its best-ever month, recording $88 million of revenue in July. That is $1 million more than Solana did, which must mean…something. Hyperliquid now has a 75% share of the market for perpetual futures. I can’t think what its moat is, but it seems to have found one.



My favorite crypto chart:



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXd9fQk3vuOu2MXNfguu_Kn-mby3KuxryOCwu7g5_-veIqUhbIEsLbrXAZ7L0Zc_Cj0QxgylC1Duy1smhXeqX7hmEhN2bvnNIxOXenU3j6jKyQEFbu8QtvUYKApdQ0IL38NcsfnVJg?key=3VK3LqPmlcReHlCuG582Ig" alt=""/></figure>



This is the collective P&amp;L for traders on Hyperliquid, which has been trending relentlessly lower. The big spike up in March was <a href="https://x.com/EvanLuthra/status/1900525968089108694">market manipulation</a>, not a trader being right. The rest of the chart demonstrates that traders are rarely right. Like casinos, perps platforms grind their users to dust. But also like casinos, the users keep coming back. (Note: I’m not sure how super accurate this data is but I assume it’s directionally correct.)



Not as hype as it was:



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXdsBBwhYWd1tFF2aDPANrNL64adK6x8ImCQ5rpvUq4fA2rRXBIKIz1RrhqMbGGsgBirUuawf6-y4UEqUN8w1pxgkCmWVHgfN2jxe1UKnsr_Vdzgbonjd3LaXusbLlRzF-MWYTYxOQ?key=3VK3LqPmlcReHlCuG582Ig" alt=""/></figure>



Solana’s “token holder net income” has been more or less flatlining around $6 million a week. Annualized, that puts the SOL token on 390x P/E. Better than Ethereum, for sure, but still pretty yikes.&nbsp;



Memes vs. projects:



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXek3JwBTqmDBqgAJAo6FF6haTo529z8IEZ3L3n6h7oyl5ay6TR-lPKY8xEmab7SRPJUwhLYE_UO0E1a1DUM5r96GNSlZeGUqQRJuFRX-yqyxwjVrnuJDup5zqTQIvK2tkcFCtHW?key=3VK3LqPmlcReHlCuG582Ig" alt=""/></figure>



DeFi apps are great and constantly getting better. But “most of the assets are shady,” as Alex Thorn <a href="https://pca.st/x922xl8m?t=31m3s">puts it</a>. On Solana DEXs, for example, memecoins still trade 7x more volume than “project tokens.”



Colonel Mustard in the billiard room with a candle stick…



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXeqSWpC4yNx8j7di-OC7OQY8ZnWqF1syUjfflMYCOjFmds-avQr1vL8fBb6a4kE7SpXe-tbPuxDsD7S6Q-Jx2IxNMumndO4P0fEPx7ymwudm4_ojwuWuwsdXPaRhog-d8c7i3U2Jg?key=3VK3LqPmlcReHlCuG582Ig" alt=""/></figure>



Like a game of Clue, this Sankey diagram demonstrates that DEX volumes have recently been dominated by memecoins on BNB Chain using PancakeSwap. I’m reliably told by the 0xResearch chat room that most of this is wash trading, however.



Less degen-ing:



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXexiGh4eITgkoN24qBiRqnwWKI6aNEW0f9vbDSN7gkbdB18B5ML5gOZNYy_RDzpHyzpdI0M_R46ORY7oDtGu_S3lkEb2DCPfjPN2ciF0gcatxNEpw0LmmGGngDbTtOQfoZyty8Iqg?key=3VK3LqPmlcReHlCuG582Ig" alt=""/></figure>



The leading trading bot, Axiom, has seen falling trade volumes, which suggests the most active, most degen of retail crypto traders are finding fewer reasons to trade.&nbsp;



Tokenized equities haven’t inspired them, either:



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXej1E9-i6rVEZGWkOpcb-qw5uPi6tH1YRS1cLifPa7lTs82v5IsJZVz_sdugH1GWM927F6gHutd0-vMHQ4cMflRDJjHcTwodXpnCwUYA2W6KJuTWaG0RkzMMeuZEZzExEtyhyOrUw?key=3VK3LqPmlcReHlCuG582Ig" alt=""/></figure>



Putting equities onchain has been a popular topic lately, but crypto traders seem disinterested so far. “Equities” trading volume has averaged less than $4 million a day on Solana.



Bitcoin’s mempool:



<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="624" height="295" src="https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXe1MqQChVUkp7TWdSaXd4xOuBEozJYWVzO9m2L3XGsxmhg88Vke1rKUYUWgLJgD0PafLNwqFxQ01ZzEPXxZvZxPZYZsMjTf-Ac84FYIz3LpIwjj1SG5_3EFxAdB1tRTPbxY405YNQ?key=3VK3LqPmlcReHlCuG582Ig">



Bitcoin’s mempool, the queue of transactions waiting to be added to a block, has been a little busier of late, but activity remains near long-term lows. (I still think “MEMEpool” every time I read “mempool” and I’m not sure I’m wrong.) You can watch the mempool in a neat visualization <a href="https://mempool.space/mempool-block/0">here</a>.  It’s kind of mesmerizing, like watching fish in a fishbowl. And in the case of Bitcoin, it’s not much faster. The Ethereum mempool is busier and helpfully visualized <a href="https://txcity.io/v/eth-btc">here</a> as a bus stop.



The original idea still stands:



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXceSIln_Fi8O8woNL98drZyeVM4wunNVRo_h-9PBjZpub23xR0-lhdf8NxaMSs_gjToyrMOVntXey2Z3JjpJkzoDX2ohv5nolN1Dr_b1VN49-pTJEs6w4pxDmklu-WxKd_8b2bCjw?key=3VK3LqPmlcReHlCuG582Ig" alt=""/></figure>



However active crypto is at the moment (or <a href="https://x.com/laurashin/status/1943013611250540559">inactive</a>, Rob Hadick describes it), the foundational rationale is stronger than ever: Exploding government debt makes an alternative financial system worth exploring.



But it probably won’t help much if it happens on the stock market.



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The Breakdown Newsletter

Big ideas, small use cases: Crypto’s execution gap

Jack Kubinec

This is a segment from the Lightspeed newsletter. To read full editions, <a href="https://blockworks.co/newsletter/lightspeed" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">subscribe</a>.



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Shortly after the Solana Saga debuted <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/solana-launches-saga-phone">in 2023</a>, the popular tech YouTuber Marques Brownlee, otherwise known as MKBHD, released a video titled “This is a Crypto Phone. Don’t Buy It.” Brownlee complained to his 20 million YouTube subscribers about the Saga’s mediocre specs, high price and overly niche crypto features.&nbsp;



Brownlee followed that video with another, naming the Solana Saga the biggest smartphone bust of 2023, which caused Solana Labs to <a href="https://decrypt.co/210739/solana-cancels-saga-orders-after-selling-phones-didnt-have">joke</a> that it had released an award-winning phone.



In creating the Solana Seeker, Solana Mobile seems to have taken its critics seriously, either reversing course or making significant upgrades on the Saga’s weak points. Overall, Solana Mobile seems to have exorcised its Saga demons to deliver a very solid new phone in the Seeker.



My first impression of the Seeker was how light the phone is. At 192g, it’s more than 20% lighter than the Saga. This was the first piece of evidence that Solana took its critics seriously, after the Saga was widely panned for being too heavy.



The portability may also be useful because many of the Seeker’s 150,000 putative buyers may use it as a second phone, but that’s by no means an indictment on the Seeker’s quality.



In general, the Seeker performs about as well as you could hope for a $500 phone in 2025. The battery life and display are quite solid. The camera is good but not spectacular. The Mediatek Dimensity 7300 chip isn’t top-of-the-line, and the phone did feel a bit hot in my hands after a bout of heavy usage, but the Seeker generally does everything I want it to do without lag or bugs.



<figure class="wp-block-image is-resized"><img decoding="async" src="https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXdruXvkIb4DexM5dxbQLZ1uuwUKdisM4StHnm4gjojAxQL5hB-Ly4qiPTsvoW5RYLMatftqXqjzY7HplF741wZkz7X2xNyT7wVQMEk-u8RbC9_XEP6zlmDcT7YVgy9erpqwwVuAKA?key=EPt2vB7VsF_eZmA7-m7DXg" alt="" style="width:387px;height:auto"/><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Photo taken with the Seeker. Source: Jack Kubinec</figcaption></figure>



Like its predecessor, the Seeker comes with a built-in “seed vault,” which is basically a very secure way to store crypto wallet keys. The phone comes with a native wallet that’s integrated with the seed vault and can be fingerprint-protected, so a thief wouldn’t be able to access it (unless, of course, they stole your finger as well). The wallet has a stocks tab where non-US users can purchase xStocks, a new <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/backed-tokenized-equities-xstocks-kraken/">tokenized stock product</a> on Solana.&nbsp;



The Seeker has the Google Play store and features the return of the Solana-native dApp Store. The dApp store has expanded notably from 2023, when it featured <a href="https://unchainedcrypto.com/solana-saga-review/?utm_source=chatgpt.com">fewer</a> than two dozen apps. Now the store has well over 100 apps, some of which are only available on the dApp store. Not all dApp Store apps are created equal — the <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/sec-announces-mango-markets-settlement">now-defunct</a> Mango Markets has a (seemingly non-functional) app listed, for instance — but Solana Mobile granted some of the best ones primary real estate as featured apps.



Caitlin Cook, who works in growth at one of these featured apps in Moonwalk, stressed that becoming a Seeker launch partner was not a paid partnership, and Solana wanted to organically spotlight the new consumer crypto app.&nbsp;



“In terms of the process, getting listed on the Solana dApp store was a light lift for us. Since we already had a live Android app, it only took a few quick tweaks. From what I’ve seen more broadly, the Solana Mobile team has done a great job encouraging teams to move beyond browser-based UX and embrace mobile-native experiences in prep for the Seeker launch, and making the process for doing so smooth and painless,” Cook said.



One segment of Seeker buyers may receive the phone with disappointment, however, because after 24 hours of using the phone, crypto token airdrops have still yet to magically appear in my wallet. Airdrops — particularly of BONK tokens — were <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/solana-phones-sold-out">a major driver</a> of what commercial success the Solana Saga did see, but a core contributor at BONK confirmed to me that the memecoin project does not currently have any Saga-like airdrops planned for Seeker users.



The speculative saving grace for the Seeker may be the forthcoming SKR token, which Solana Mobile vaguely said will flow “directly to builders and users,” per a slide deck shared with Blockworks.



It’s unclear to me whether Solana Mobile will keep releasing phones after the Seeker, or if it will pivot its focus to onboarding more devices to its newly unveiled TEEPIN mobile architecture. But either way, Solana Mobile deserves credit for delivering a serious, grown-up smartphone. Put another way, I don’t see any unwelcome awards in the Seeker’s future.



Updated 8/7/2025 at 12:30 pm to reflect the weight of the Seeker.



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Lightspeed Newsletter

Seeker review: Solana Mobile heard the critics

Casey Wagner

This is a segment from the Forward Guidance newsletter. To read full editions, <a href="https://blockworks.co/newsletter/forward-guidance" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">subscribe</a>.



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We’re 42 days away from the Fed’s next policy-setting meeting, and markets are growing more certain that committee members will make the first interest rate cut of the year.&nbsp;



There’s currently a 91% chance the FOMC will lower rates by 25 basis points in September, per <a href="https://www.cmegroup.com/markets/interest-rates/cme-fedwatch-tool.html?redirect=/trading/interest-rates/countdown-to-fomc.html">data</a> from CME Group.&nbsp;



The Fed, once acting in lockstep with the Bank of England and the European Central Bank, has diverged in policy recently.&nbsp;



So far in 2025, the ECB has cut rates twice; first in March and then again in June, putting benchmark borrowing costs more than 2% lower than the US. The June cut marked the European central bank’s eighth consecutive. In July, the ECB held rates, citing concern over uncertain trade policy.



The ECB lowered its inflation forecasts in June, now expecting prices to increase by 1.6% in 2026. Its headline forecast for 2025 is 2%, in line with its target and giving it room to hold off on additional rate cuts. Growth projections, on the other hand, have decreased slightly in response to higher tariff rates on exports to the US.&nbsp;



The BOE issued a cut in May and held rates in June, citing conflict between Israel and Iran that sent <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/stocks-lower-oil-iran-israel">oil prices higher</a>. BOE officials reiterated that interest rates are on a “gradual downward path,” in the words of Gov. Andrew Bailey.&nbsp;



“The world is highly unpredictable,” Bailey added.&nbsp;



Fed Chair Powell agrees. Throughout 2025 he has emphasized the importance of monitoring economic data <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/powell-interest-fed-continue-monitor-june">before adjusting policy</a>.&nbsp;



When asked by a reporter at the ECB’s annual forum in July whether the Fed would have cut rates by now if it weren’t for tariffs, Powell responded with this:&nbsp;



“So I do think that’s right. In effect, we went on hold when we saw the size of the tariffs, and essentially all inflation forecasts for the United States went up materially as a consequence of the tariffs. We didn’t overreact. In fact, we didn’t react at all; we’re simply taking some time.”



Last month, Powell told reporters that committee members “have made no decision about September,” which was expected, but he added that the central bank is weighing potential risks of waiting too long, including “downside risks to the <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/stocks-higher-after-july-jobs-report-dip">labor market</a>.”&nbsp;



Not everyone is convinced that the Fed’s first rate cut will come this fall, though. Bank of America analysts in a recent note suggested that the labor market situation is not as bleak as it may appear: Yes, demand for labor is decreasing, but so is labor supply, leaving the unemployment rate relatively flat. We also know Powell’s primary concern is the unemployment rate.&nbsp;



BoA analysts also said that internal data show consumer spending is not meaningfully declining — in fact, it’s increasing.&nbsp;



A lot can change in 42 days. 



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Economy

Will the Fed keep diverging from other central bank policies?

The jury in cryptocurrency mixer <a href="https://blockworks.co/tag/tornado-cash">Tornado Cash</a> developer Roman Storm’s criminal trial handed down a partial verdict Wednesday afternoon after four days of deliberation.&nbsp;



Storm was found guilty of conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money transmitter business. The jury was unable to reach a unanimous decision on the two other counts: conspiracy to commit money laundering and conspiracy to violate the IEEPA.&nbsp;



The jury deliberated for four days before coming to a decision on one of the counts. The government could opt to retry Storm on counts one and three.&nbsp;



The prosecution asked that Storm be remanded into custody, citing Storm’s “means” and ties to Russia, where he was born. The judge sided with the defense, determining Storm was not a flight risk and may remain out on bond.&nbsp;



The criminal trial, which spanned about three weeks, concluded last week with <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/roman-storm-closing-statements">lengthy summation arguments</a> from both the prosecution and defense. Storm did not testify during the trial.&nbsp;



Storm and co-developer Roman Semenov were <a href="https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/tornado-cash-founders-charged-money-laundering-and-sanctions-violations">charged in 2023</a> with three federal counts. Semenov has not faced trial and is currently <a href="https://www.fbi.gov/wanted/wcc/roman-semenov">wanted</a> by the Federal Bureau of Investigations.&nbsp;



Throughout the trial, the government maintained that Storm, motivated by greed, intentionally helped illicit actors conceal funds through Tornado Cash.&nbsp;



“Tornado Cash made dirty money clean money, and made it impossible to tell the difference,” government attorney Benjamin Gianforti told the jury during his <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/roman-storm-closing-statements">closing statement</a> last week.&nbsp;



Storm’s team never denied that criminals used Tornado Cash, but they insisted that Storm had no criminal intent. Tornado Cash was created as a privacy tool for users who didn’t want their financial transactions made public, defense attorney Keri Axel said during opening statements.&nbsp;



Storm’s team did not immediately respond to Blockworks’ request for comment.&nbsp;



This is a developing story.



Correction note: Updated 8/6/2025 at 1:10 p.m. ET to reflect the jury decision on count 3. A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that Roman Storm was acquitted on count 3, conspiracy to violate the IEEPA. The jury was unable to reach a unanimous decision on this count.



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Roman Storm

Tornado Cash developer found guilty on 1 count in partial verdict

In onchain finance, every yield stream is becoming a building block. Today Pendle introduced Boros, a new primitive that takes the floating funding-rate on perpetual futures — one of crypto’s most volatile, yet essential flows — and turns it into a tokenized instrument that can be traded, hedged, or, perhaps, even posted as collateral.



Initially available for <a href="https://blockworks.co/tag/binance">Binance</a> <a href="https://blockworks.co/price/eth">ETH</a> and <a href="https://blockworks.co/price/eth">BTC</a> perps, Boros enables a market for fixed-vs-floating funding rate swaps, unlocking a new way to price and hedge directional leverage. Essentially, it’s the creation of a funding-rate <a href="https://blockworks.co/tag/derivatives">derivatives</a> layer that can plug in throughout DeFi.



As the Boros team <a href="https://medium.com/boros-fi/boros-introducing-funding-futures-d1f69111a8a7">explains</a>: “Traders exposed to funding rates can hedge their funding exposure on Boros by fixing the amount of funding rate they pay.”&nbsp;



For instance, a trader long ETH perps but wary of rising funding can buy Yield Units (YU) on Boros, paying a fixed rate in order to receive the floating leg — thus locking in a maximum cost of carry. Conversely, a stablecoin protocol like <a href="https://blockworks.co/podcast/empire/e4eb7ca2-68ce-11f0-b29f-b3ca9b0f92c3">Ethena</a>, which is structurally short perps so as to harvest funding, can sell YU to receive fixed payments upfront.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Complementary to Ethena</h2>



Once Boros expands to other exchanges where Ethena hedges its spot longs, Boros should provide ample benefits:



<ol class="wp-block-list">
<li>Swap floating for fixed —&nbsp;Ethena can open a short YU position to convert volatile funding flows into a stable coupon. This enables better reserve planning, reduces tail risk from funding crashes, and even allows Ethena to pre-announce yields with confidence — which its marketing team will love.</li>



<li>Post YU as collateral — While Yield Units (YUs) do not have fixed cash flows or settle to the underlying like Pendle PTs, they represent tokenized funding-rate swap positions with a clearly defined maturity and oracle-tracked valuation. This structure makes them a candidate for future use as collateral in money-markets. In that scenario, traders or protocols could post YU as collateral to borrow stablecoins, enabling them to retain funding exposure without unwinding directional hedges.</li>



<li>Price certainty for protocol treasuries —&nbsp;Treasuries can now “lock-in” the <a href="https://blockworks.co/tag/yield">yield</a> side of their delta-neutral trades, turning variable PnL into predictable income. Over time, this could bring in more conservative capital, especially if protocols pass through fixed yields to end users.</li>
</ol>



Pendle founder TN Lee expects Boros will eventually harmonize funding rate markets, which are quite variable today:


<div class="wp-block-image">
<figure class="aligncenter"><img decoding="async" src="https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXd9NbpZZ223fEyy4bPfUhVNsWAAitHOC4m_pCxNpLCnMVXBlaZyieHni9b6IeiS7WVGQ3mzlKJLa-mn9__xDm3D-oFZ1Wxst2jX4zM-hec0z1FsADLl_gO2UbacaFI-CheK-p9pqg?key=EFEJYHNdQ_9IPOj97pW-AQ" alt=""/><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Source: <a href="https://velo.xyz/futures/ETH">velo.xyz</a></figcaption></figure></div>


“Boros allows [arbitrage] of funding rates across exchanges, thereby resulting in the converging of rates,” Lee told Blockworks.



The <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/blockworks-research-crypto-investing">utility</a> goes further, however. As the Boros team writes: &#8220;Beyond the obvious utility to cash and carry traders, the mechanics we are bringing to life open up a new vertical for all assets with yield, regardless if they are on-chain or off.&#8221; The model can extend to staking, real-world credit, or even CeFi borrow/lend rates — basically anything for which there is an oracle-verifiable yield source.



To support this new interest-rate layer, Boros will open up dedicated vaults that earn fees and boosted incentives by providing liquidity to fixed/floating funding rate swaps. These vaults mirror Pendle’s V2 pools, allowing LPs to take the other side of directional hedging demand and earn a share of the new market’s fee flow.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Tokenize everything</h2>



Boros isn’t the only project racing to turn yield-bearing positions into “spendable” collateral. Notional’s forthcoming <a href="https://blog.notional.finance/notional-exponent-how-it-works/">Exponent</a> upgrade takes a strikingly similar tack: it “tokenizes new yield strategies specifically designed for leveraged yield users” and then lets those tokens be pledged on deep-liquidity lending rails such as <a href="https://blockworks.co/analytics/morpho">Morpho</a>.



Exponent’s headline innovation, Smart Redemption, lets a vault holder redeem a staked asset (e.g., <a href="https://blockworks.co/price/susde">sUSDe</a> for <a href="https://blockworks.co/price/usde">USDe</a>) without first withdrawing collateral from the lending market, enabling costless exits and, crucially, making yield tokens with lock-ups or thin secondary liquidity acceptable to risk engines.&nbsp;



Functionally, the two designs rhyme: both Boros and Notional Exponent wrap a variable cash-flow into a token whose value can be reliably marked by onchain oracles and tracked to maturity, giving risk engines a clear path to whitelist it as collateral. Even though a YU’s market value simply decays toward zero at expiry, the predictable oracle feed and known payoff window still let lending markets haircut it with confidence.



The upshot is the same capital-efficiency fly-wheel: Users can lever against the very stream of income that services their debt, while money-markets gain a diversified pool of “income-backed” collateral that is less correlated to spot swings. Together, Boros and Exponent point to a DeFi future where yield primitives are the core building blocks of credit, shrinking idle capital and smoothing the path to leveraged, yet risk-managed, strategies across the stack.



Importantly, Boros does not launch a new token. Instead, 80% of its fees will accrue to vePENDLE holders, continuing Pendle’s model of rewarding long-term stakers. At the same time, PENDLE emissions will be used to bootstrap Boros vaults. That’s also a potential source of sell pressure, but one that is likely to recycle back into vePENDLE locks as yields increase. The token’s fundamentals benefit from the added fee stream without unnecessary dilution — a design choice that deserves credit, especially in a time when many founders opt to spin off products with one or more new tokens.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Starting over</h2>



Still, the launch is not without complexity. Boros is “starting from 0 again,” the team admits, with its own risk engine and vault logic, built on <a href="https://blockworks.co/tag/arbitrum">Arbitrum</a>.



&#8220;As a new platform being built to stand alongside Pendle V2,&#8221; the team notes, &#8220;risk management will be our main focus at the initial stages — especially at the start when new mechanics and market dynamics are being experimented with.&#8221;



Among those dynamics: a new type of price-volatility feedback loop. Today, a sudden 1,000 bips spike in funding can force traders to unwind spot-perp basis trades just to stop the bleeding— creating a cascade of liquidations and market stress. But with Boros, those players can hedge the funding leg without closing directional exposure. If liquidity is deep, YU markets could act like interest-rate swaps in TradFi: dampening volatility and compressing extreme funding prints.



That “if” is crucial. Hedging only works if the YU orderbook is liquid enough not to introduce slippage or risk of blowouts. To mitigate early reflexivity, Boros is limiting open interest to 1.2x the perp OI — tight by design. If liquidity grows, the ability to hedge funding cheaply should mute the sharpest funding swings and, indirectly, some price volatility.



Boros doesn’t just tokenize a new yield source, but has the potential for this new funding-rate derivatives layer to be integrated into many other DeFi applications: money-markets, structured products, delta-neutral strategies, and, ultimately, real-world credit.



But the larger change is architectural: As these products show, any stream of yield can now become both a trading instrument and first-class collateral, pushing DeFi a step closer to a full-stack fixed-income market onchain.



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Ethereum

Boros tokenizes funding rates as onchain yield instruments

This is a segment from the Empire newsletter. To read full editions, <a href="https://blockworks.co/newsletter/empire" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">subscribe</a>.



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At the end of last year, Pantera <a href="https://panteracapital.com/blockchain-compensation-survey-2024/">collected</a> a decent batch of data, taking a look at just how folks in crypto are being paid.&nbsp;



Roughly 3% of people in the industry were paid in crypto in 2023, but that number shot up to 9.6% by the end of 2024. Interestingly enough, there was also a trend in folks opting to take their salaries in stablecoins.&nbsp;



Mind you, this was prior to stablecoins taking off (as we’ve seen and discussed) throughout 2025. So it seems that it’s not just institutions that’re buying into the stablecoin narrative. 



Specifically, people opted to take their paychecks in USDC and USDT, the report noted.&nbsp;



“USDC (63%) and USDT (28.6%) collectively account for over 90% of crypto salaries, cementing their status as the go-to choices for payroll stability and liquidity,” the report said.



As you can see in the chart below, a far smaller number of folks opted to be paid in SOL and ETH.&nbsp;



<figure class="wp-block-image is-resized"><img decoding="async" src="https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXcL4OxOPzQjspFJJMulkcxS3TgPs03_clDVZe9Z-AREuo6xd1-rm2anc0vrEIqaBl5iKbEhtkvLCKD0ghWX6xdjYpTjF2poInsDx___n6Za7yCIA0DYxabnMql_O_J8T1OqUDfViw?key=WD576P408GcPlFBIyJaQbQ" alt="" style="width:720px;height:auto"/><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Source: Pantera’s Compensation Survey</figcaption></figure>



Admittedly, this is data from 2024 (meaning it happened well before lawmakers were finalizing the stablecoin legislation in the US), but I’m slightly surprised that USDC outranks USDT by a decent margin.&nbsp;



Especially since the respondents were largely international, as you can see in the chart below.



<figure class="wp-block-image size-large is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1368" height="1082" src="https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/image.png?w=1024&amp;h=1024" alt="" class="wp-image-105872" style="width:624px;height:auto" srcset="https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/image.png?w=1368 1368w, https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/image.png?w=300 300w, https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/image.png?w=1024 1024w, https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/image.png?w=768 768w, https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/image.png?w=325 325w, https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/image.png?w=330 330w, https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/image.png?w=277 277w, https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/image.png?w=80 80w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1368px) 100vw, 1368px" /><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Source: Pantera Compensation Survey</figcaption></figure>



But there’s a reason for that, Pantera found.&nbsp;



“We initially thought this was due to our survey skewing more western. After digging in further, we found it very interesting that none of the major payroll providers in the space (Deel, Remote, Rippling) offer USDT for payroll,” the survey said.&nbsp;



The team at Pantera told me that the data was collected from a variety of projects around crypto.&nbsp;



“Our survey includes data pulled from dozens of geographically-distributed startups and information we gathered from hundreds of participants in the crypto community spanning a wide range of professions,” they noted.&nbsp;



And this came from around 1,600 folks in different sectors, including DeFi, CeFi, gaming, etc. Of that total sum, 47% of respondents were in senior positions, while 29% were in the middle of their careers. The smallest number of respondents, 24%, were junior employees.&nbsp;



<figure class="wp-block-image is-resized"><img decoding="async" src="https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXeE2Hnj-_H0Mq6YFvA-BzQtQnj44bYXVmtQQqmNkdWLpRZUL5Z2GYIeDep4d4w_UwaAhd3nvZFAswv0Fz_Kda_affW1myT_wL9pj8kj-FLQCXYb9HI7h_CHzGw_3-yVCSD8caBUGg?key=WD576P408GcPlFBIyJaQbQ" alt="" style="width:459px;height:auto"/><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Source: Pantera Compensation Survey</figcaption></figure>



“There’s still no reliable, comprehensive database for compensation in the blockchain ecosystem — so we set out to change that,” Nick Zurick, head of portfolio talent at Pantera, told me. “This survey is a first step toward bringing transparency to crypto compensation. Whether you&#8217;re a founder, candidate, or operator, we hope the data is valuable as you build and grow in the space.“



I point this data out because it shows the larger trend towards stablecoins. And now, as we head into the final months of 2025, I’ll be curious to see if we see an even higher tick up. But, alas, only time will tell.&nbsp;



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Stablecoins accounted for 90% of salaries paid in crypto in 2024: Pantera survey

This is a segment from The Breakdown newsletter. To read more editions, <a href="https://blockworks.co/brand/the-breakdown">subscribe</a>.



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PUMP token holders now find themselves in the odd position of hoping the money they just sent to Pump.fun will soon be returned to them.



That’s the mood on Crypto Twitter, at least, where influential accounts keep pointing to Pump.fun’s estimated $2 billion cash pile as the bull case for PUMP (see <a href="https://x.com/suganarium/status/1948765211881865443">here</a>, <a href="https://x.com/Yaki_fomoArt/status/1950475784348717418">here</a>, <a href="https://x.com/chooserich/status/1948412910331371670">here</a> and <a href="https://x.com/DukeD_Defi/status/1950496129831084180">here</a>).



The problem, of course, is that token holders have no claim on that cash — even though they supplied most of it.



In IPOs, stock market investors send their money to a company in return for an owner’s claim on assets that’s roughly equivalent to the money they just sent.



In the PUMP ICO, however, crypto investors sent their money to Pump.fun in return for a token with no claim on anything whatsoever.



They knew that. But they also expected to be treated as if they had a claim on the revenue of Pump.fun.



So far, they have been.&nbsp;



Over the past week or so, Pump.fun has used roughly <a href="https://fees.pump.fun">100% of its revenue</a> to buy back the PUMP token.



If you assume it does that forever, the token seems reasonably priced: Annualizing last week’s revenue, PUMP is trading on only about 16x (by market capitalization).



But that’s assuming they also burn all those tokens — and what’s the point of issuing tokens if you’re immediately going to start burning them?



It seems more logical, as people have also been <a href="https://x.com/Dumpster_DAO/status/1949127244112081071">speculating</a>, to do the opposite: either airdropping tokens to users or paying them out as incentives.&nbsp;



Luca Netz, for example, <a href="https://x.com/frontrunnersx/status/1948733725900243248">thinks</a> Pump.fun should airdrop 10% of the token’s supply to the community.



This would “nuke the token,” as he puts it, but that’s part of the appeal: “The token nuking is fine, especially because he has so much cash.”



By “he,” Netz means Pump.fun’s three co-founders, which is instructive: They own the $2 billion of cash that token holders are hoping to have an informal claim on.



If the co-founders are intending to use that cash to buy the token, as people hope, it would make sense to get the token price down first.



“It’s in his interest to buy as much of the token as possible at the lowest price possible,” Netz explained.



In other words, the incentives between the owners of the protocol and the owners of the token are grievously misaligned.



Charlie Munger would say that’s exactly what PUMP token holders should be thinking about.



Equity investors don’t have to worry much about incentives because management is aligned with shareholders by both law and precedent.



The cult of shareholder value that was popularized by the fictional Gordon Gekko in the 1980s is now so ingrained in equity markets that investors are almost always treated like owners.&nbsp;



In crypto, by contrast, token holders have neither law nor precedent to rely on, so they do have to think hard about incentives.



Take Grass, for example — a buzzy AI project (“multimodal search”) that’s already earning “millions of dollars a month,” <a href="https://youtu.be/osFIJBjVXtQ?si=nBnjGOtL8ZXxdivW">according</a> to its founder.



But that’s the full extent of Grass’s disclosure: That revenue is neither onchain nor otherwise made public.&nbsp;



So when <a href="https://x.com/_dshap">Dan Shapiro</a> tried to value the DePIN project for Blockworks Research, he could only take a guess at what “millions a month” might really mean.



“Although Grass keeps network revenue data private,” he wrote, “one can make some educated assumptions from publicly available data licensing deals to estimate the value of the network.”



In other words, he had to look at data licensing agreements made by the likes of OpenAI and Reddit to hazard a guess at what kinds of agreements Grass might also be making.



To value the Grass token, he also had to do things like “assume data sales have similar margins to ad sales” — things that an equities analyst would determine by calling the company and asking them.



If all of the assumptions Shapiro was forced to make turned out to be roughly correct, he thought there could be an interesting investment case for GRASS: “In its current state, Grass’ free floating market cap of $585m is justified based on the value of its multimodal data alone.”



But now Grass “appears to have pivoted to data labeling” (i.e, away from multimodal), <a href="https://x.com/Daveeemor/status/1950499366239638009">according</a> to one disillusioned token holder, who adds that “little information has been shared with token holders.”



I couldn’t find any information at all. Which is weird.



Imagine if shareholders had to find out from a random X account that Apple had pivoted from making smartphones to making sneakers.



Grass is earning some amount of revenue, but we don’t know how much; however much it is earning, token holders haven’t seen any of it and don’t know if they ever will; and the business may or may not have gone off in a new direction.&nbsp;



Such is the state of affairs in crypto “investing.”



It doesn’t have to be that way.



Holders of the MAPLE token, for example, don’t have to guess what portion of the revenue earned by Maple Finance will be returned to them. Instead, they decide that themselves by <a href="https://x.com/maplefinance/status/1950302668028559714">voting on it</a>.&nbsp;



As a result, MAPLE investors probably don’t have to think about incentives much more than equity investors typically do.&nbsp;



“No fees are allocated to the Labs entity,” <a href="https://x.com/shaundadevens">Shaunda Devens</a> wrote for Blockworks Research, “and the Labs entity is funded exclusively through grants, not through revenue-generating activities.”



That makes MAPLE holders a lot like owners, I think.&nbsp;



Shareholders have disclosure rules, legal claims, SEC enforcement actions, decades of precedent and the movie Wall Street to substantiate their ownership claims.



Token holders have only smart contracts.&nbsp;



Have crypto investors properly accounted for this lack of both rights and transparency?



Anecdotally, there doesn’t seem to be any risk premium built into opaque, rights-light tokens. Most of them still seem inexplicably expensive to me.



Nor is there much differentiation between projects with ownership-like tokenomics and those with tokenomics you can only guess at.



I imagine it’s only a matter of time until there is, however. And the sooner the better.



The best thing for crypto investors may be if Pump.fun follows Netz’s advice and “nukes the token.”



That might finally get crypto thinking harder about the power of incentives.



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Investing in crypto is investing in incentives

Donovan Choy

This is a segment from the Lightspeed newsletter. To read full editions, <a href="https://blockworks.co/newsletter/lightspeed">subscribe</a>.



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Switchboard’s new “Surge” oracle network goes live on mainnet today.



As Solana continues to reckon with competition from high-speed upstarts like Hyperliquid, one of the network&#8217;s biggest price oracles is getting much faster. The oracle will be free to integrate, and is claimed by the Switchboard team to be the fastest on Solana yet.&nbsp;



How fast? Surge promises to deliver price feeds at a sub-100ms latency — a performance gain of about 8x faster and at roughly 1/100th the cost of existing oracle providers, according to the team’s press release.



That <a href="https://thepriceisright.xyz/">latency</a> falls even lower to 8-25 ms should protocols choose to colocate with a Surge node on their backend, rivaling the oracle speeds of even CEXs.



The performance gain is achieved by key architectural changes under the hood.



Conventional “pull” oracles collect data, post it onchain and wait for network consensus before apps can read it — a pipeline that typically adds 2-10 seconds of delay.



Surge <a href="https://docs.switchboard.xyz/switchboard-surge/surge-overview">replaces</a> that model with a direct WebSocket stream from the data source to applications, thereby bypassing the consensus step.



Prices are pushed by oracle nodes only when market prices change within a set range. This eliminates the wasteful slot-by-slot polling and gas spend that is standard fare on conventional “on-demand” oracles.



It’s an oracle targeted at high volume use cases in DeFi, in particular “latency-sensitive protocols/products like DeFi derivatives and oracle AMMs,” Switchboard co-founder Chris Hermida told Blockworks.



Surge is built on Switchboard’s open-source SAIL (switch forward attestation inference layer) framework, which uses trusted execution environment (TEE) hardware attestation to verify that each oracle node is running authorized Switchboard software code before it is allowed to onboard the network and serve data.&nbsp;



A snapshot of Solana’s oracle market today shows a fairly competitive market.



In terms of total value secured (TVS), Pyth leads the segment with $2.3b, followed by Edge ($2b) and Switchboard ($1.2b), <a href="https://defillama.com/oracles/chain/Solana">DefiLlama</a> data shows.



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXe5jxk8tIOKTGsccp1F56z3xfItDRJyWw0SsxV1WUtJFvjyK3YKDd3rkHJd5oJT79PRR_iXjQltjZA7oUqLtHE44caEqnXj97BJ8P4fX4QtoDU1PruPZQwxBPyhCPJ0gc4MQXrb?key=NoBvhBfKDd5ihUChnXLLtg" alt=""/></figure>



Note, though, that TVS measures the value of collateral that an oracle touches, not how often an oracle feed is consumed.



Blockworks Research’s Ryan Connor has <a href="https://blockworks-research.beehiiv.com/p/3-blockchain-metrics-that-suck?_bhlid=e7ec9d125f96db219eb346b82d394dbd8574633a&amp;utm_campaign=3-blockchain-metrics-that-suck&amp;utm_medium=newsletter&amp;utm_source=blockworks-research.beehiiv.com">argued</a> that a better gauge for oracle market share is total transaction value (TTV) — the notional volume actually priced by the feed — because a high-frequency perps DEX can ping an oracle thousands of times more often than a passive money market securing the same dollar amount can.



If Surge gains adoption with high latency use cases, Switchboard’s share of activity could expand faster than its share of TVS.



For now, low-latency data on Solana is becoming a public utility — and Switchboard is first out of the gate.



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Switchboard launches Surge, Solana’s fastest oracle yet

This is a segment from the Forward Guidance newsletter. To read full editions, <a href="https://blockworks.co/newsletter/forward-guidance">subscribe</a>.



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Yesterday I wrote about how stocks were on the recovery path after last week’s disappointing data. I also said I wasn’t sure how long the rally would last. Go figure, US equities and cryptos are back in the red today. 



In the first few hours of trading, the S&amp;P 500 was trading 0.5% lower while the Nasdaq Composite had lost 0.6%. BTC was 2% lower over the last 24 hours at that time.&nbsp;



Some of the biggest names on Wall Street say stocks have further to fall. In a Monday note,&nbsp; Morgan Stanley strategist Mike Wilson projected the S&amp;P 500 is due for a decline of up to 10%. Also on Monday, Evercore senior managing director estimated the index will lose up to 15%.&nbsp;



Why might we be due for a correction?&nbsp;



First of all, US equities have been on a tear this summer, and not just Big Tech. Let’s rewind: Megacap tech stocks were among the biggest losers in the Liberation Day aftermath — Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon and Broadcom, to name a few.&nbsp;



Positive economic data and optimism that the reciprocal tariff rates would decline significantly from the initially announced figures helped fuel a rally across the board. By late June, around 80% of companies in the S&amp;P 500 were closing above their 50-day moving average, which is about where the percentage stood in fall 2024.&nbsp;



You know what they say, what goes up must come down. If there’s one thing we know about stocks, it’s that a decline always follows a rally eventually, and vice versa.&nbsp;



Second, economic data is painting a less positive picture these days. Inflation is inching higher, job growth and consumer spending are slowing.&nbsp;



The tariff situation is also not yet resolved — the Aug. 1 deadline most countries faced was <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/07/further-modifying-the-reciprocal-tariff-rates/">extended to Aug. 7 last week</a>. Rates on imports from Mexico are still in flux as negotiations continue and China faces a separate deadline of Aug. 12 to pen a deal. Since April, the rate levels, due dates and impacted industries have changed more times than I can count, so who knows when markets will get clarity.&nbsp;



Maybe investors would be able to shrug off the trade war limbo if the economic data was more positive. That’s what they’ve been doing most of the summer, at least.&nbsp;



Third, it’s August! Yes, this just may be reason enough to send stocks lower. August and October (but we’ll focus on the former for the time being) are historically volatile months for equities.&nbsp;



Over the past 35 years, the S&amp;P 500 has averaged a return of -0.6% in August, according to data from StoneX.&nbsp;



We just may have the perfect storm for a decline, but I’ll also note that anything can happen, and I’m not in the business of giving out investment advice.



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Forward Guidance newsletter

Why Wall Street is bracing for a correction in stocks

Early Tuesday morning, Coinbase’s Base network experienced a rare outage, halting block production for about 33 minutes. The root cause, classified on Base’s <a href="https://status.base.org/">status page</a> as an “unsafe head delay,” was quickly identified and resolved by the Base team.



The cause was “an unexpected issue during an automated system switch,” a Base spokesperson told Blockworks, adding, “we’re close to a long-term fix.”



At around 2:15 am ET, BaseScan detected the final block stuck at height 33,792,704. With no new blocks for over 19 minutes, developers and users alike raised concerns across social channels. But the tone wasn’t all negative.&nbsp;



As Save and Suilend protocol founder Rooter <a href="https://x.com/0xrooter/status/1952632681843523702">quipped</a>: “People only make a fuss about downtime for chains with actual users. Bullish downtime.”



They may have a point, and the incident naturally <a href="https://x.com/0xMert_/status/1952648061701820825">spawned</a> comparisons to <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/solana-price-dips-after-another-network-outage">Solana’s growing pains</a>.



Base’s recent momentum is one of the reasons people take notice of a snafu. The July <a href="https://blog.base.org/a-new-day-one">rollout</a> of new Base App — Coinbase’s ambitious attempt to create a crypto super app — has turned Base into one of the most active layer-2s of late. By combining wallet, social, payments, and mini-app functionality, Base App draws parallels to a crypto-native spin on WeChat.



<a href="https://blockworks.co/analytics/base">Blockworks data</a> confirms the surge in onchain activity. Daily <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/zora-latest-content-coin-fad">token launches on Zora</a> spiked to nearly 40,000, with 15–50% of that volume attributed to Base App users — up sharply from around 4,000 daily average prior to launch.&nbsp;



Breaking out creator rewards on Zora shows daily payouts exceeding $33k as of Aug. 4, with a surge in token activity and engagement following the Base App launch.



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXcPl7NQYltvvRGlm2jPBlgxou-o6x-U39BarBTI8O0DBp7Qrii6ioDWSMNNrgLo7fKHr1Jy9wv9pj0X1suzcUX2EvdRubP0DWSj7njSSy7oYXjxJSvUn7SmHg38FhChMCOZAELs?key=xb2l4K_b4YIi45V4nJtVWg" alt=""/><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Blockworks charts also show sustained creator monetization through content coin trading, validating broader adoption.</figcaption></figure>



The app leverages <a href="https://blockworks.co/tag/farcaster">Farcaster</a>, Zora, and Noice, a <a href="https://docs.base.org/base-app/build-with-minikit/quickstart">mini-app</a>, to blend content creation, tipping, and tokenization. Meanwhile, Base Pay — a USDC-powered tap-to-pay system — brings a strong offering to the competitive crypto payments space. A planned 1% cashback incentive for USDC payments on <a href="https://blockworks.co/tag/shopify">Shopify</a> aims to sweeten the deal.



Critically, Base App relies on account abstraction to onboard users without private keys or manual signatures. Wallets can be spun up with just an email, <a href="https://x.com/privy_io/status/1951312169133326731">via Privy</a>, and gas fees are abstracted away or sponsored.



Tuesday’s downtime doesn’t negate Base’s progress. Unlike other chains that stall with barely a whisper, Base’s outage sparked immediate attention precisely because users rely on it.



At the same time, the outage caused minimal disruption to DeFi protocols. Lending platforms like Aave, Morph, and Moonwell were temporarily frozen due to <a href="https://docs.chain.link/data-feeds/l2-sequencer-feeds">Chainlink’s Sequencer Uptime Feed</a> disabling price updates, which successfully prevented mispriced liquidations. Once block production resumed, liquidation bots processed queued positions with no bad debt reported.&nbsp;



Overall, the incident demonstrated effective circuit breakers and risk management across Base DeFi.



Updated August 5, 2025 at 11:03 am ET: Added data for clarity. 



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Base

Base outage highlights growing pains of a chain with real users

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We’ve talked about a lot of sectors in crypto and how the past year has shaped them or redefined their approaches to the industry, but we haven’t really discussed one aspect, which is crypto comms.&nbsp;



As crypto hits the mainstream and momentum picks up, firms like the <a href="https://x.com/aubreystrobel/status/1950217035629076948">newly announced Halcyon</a> act as the liaison between projects and the mainstream media.&nbsp;



Halcyon co-founder Aubrey Strobel hopped on the phone with me to chat about comms in 2025 and the changes she’s seeing as someone who’s been in the space for a while.



“It feels like there&#8217;s still a huge gap for the mainstream media, and we want to fill that in…things aren&#8217;t just the same as press releases and op-eds. There&#8217;s a lot of visual content for the attention economy,” she said.&nbsp;



Nowadays, tech companies have changed the way they make their own announcements. Instead of issuing a press release, some — like <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vich2C-Tl7Q">Astronomer’s video response to the infamous cheating scandal</a> — have found a more direct-to-audience approach to have a greater impact than hoping for press coverage.&nbsp;



“Going direct is one of the biggest ways to really break through, and I think a lot of companies have realized that. I don&#8217;t think founders and entrepreneurs always know how to get their message across. There&#8217;s a lot of really good tech being built, and crypto has the numbers to back up its success,” Strobel told me.&nbsp;



For Halcyon, that also means offering content and video production services for firms who are interested in going that route, versus the more traditional press release.&nbsp;



“So, it&#8217;s helping them write those stories and go direct if they need to, because sometimes going direct is better. There are times when you don&#8217;t want to tell them to go to the media. I would say, ‘No, this isn&#8217;t a press release, but it could be a really interesting story.’ And even so, if a crisis moment breaks out, sometimes, you can give a quote to the media, or you can really own the narrative.”



She also acknowledged a problem in crypto that will continue to persist even as we see more mainstream adoption: The industry excludes people by using terms or language that’s not easily understandable.&nbsp;



“There&#8217;s some terms that you can&#8217;t totally change the meaning of because they are inherently tech…[so] there&#8217;s a lot of terms that we make up on our own that are not totally accurate, and I think that we need to do a better job of choosing the words that we write, and being strategic and creating those words for ourselves,” she noted.&nbsp;



One of her goals with Halcyon is simple: Make it so that the public can digest crypto and can feel like it’s meant for them.&nbsp;



When my work focused on traditional finance, I found that it had a very similar problem with jargon and exclusionary language (and systems) designed to keep the financially illiterate out. Crypto, if it’s really for the masses, can’t have the same problem.



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Crypto needs more innovative stories for mainstream adoption: Halcyon co-founder

This is a segment from The Breakdown newsletter. To read more editions, <a href="https://blockworks.co/brand/the-breakdown">subscribe</a>.



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<blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow">
&#8220;There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.&#8221;



— Mark Twain
</blockquote>



The 2004 edition of the Economic Report of the president included a creative proposal it hoped the statistical agencies would consider: reclassifying fast-food cooks as manufacturing workers.



&#8221;When a fast-food restaurant sells a hamburger,” the <a href="https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/sites/default/files/books/presidential-documents-archive-guidebook/the-economic-report-of-the-president-truman-1947-obama-2017/2004.pdf">report</a> asked, “is it providing a &#8216;service&#8217; or is it combining inputs to &#8216;manufacture&#8217; a product?&#8221;&nbsp;



I hear you snickering, but it did make some fair points.



The report noted, for example, that “mixing water and concentrate to produce soft drinks is classified as manufacturing” — so why shouldn’t assembling a hamburger count, too?



The answer lies in the Census Bureau’s definition of manufacturing, which the job counters at the BLS follow: “the mechanical, physical, or chemical transformation of materials, substances, or components into new products.”



Heating a frozen hamburger patty does indeed create a “chemical transformation” — heat causes a burger’s proteins to unfold and reconfigure in ways that irreversibly change it.



(You can freeze and melt a soda as many times as you like and still drink it, but try that with a burger and you’ll regret it.)



It would be a stretch, however, to argue that heating a burger transforms it into a “new product,” so it’s no surprise that the BLS continued to categorize burger flippers as service workers.&nbsp;



If the BLS rejected the White House’s suggestion on its merits, everyone else rejected it on its politics — a transparent attempt by the White House to make the manufacturing sector look healthier than it was.



It wasn’t the first time the seemingly mundane process of counting jobs became a political flashpoint.&nbsp;



In 1971, the Nixon White House shut down BLS press briefings after the agency unenthusiastically described a 0.2% drop in unemployment as only “marginally significant” (the Secretary of Labor described the same data as “of great significance”).



A month later, a statistical error caused the BLS to overstate a further drop in unemployment, this time raising fears that the White House was manipulating the data to make the economy seem better than it was.



Investigations found no evidence of political influence on the jobs data, but the OMB nevertheless responded by issuing a directive that tightly restricted early access to the data for political appointees.



More surprisingly, there have also been accusations that the White House manipulated jobs data to make the economy look worse than it was.



In 1961, Reader’s Digest published an article accusing the Kennedy White House of using data techniques to “magnify the unemployment problem” as a pretext for more government spending and regulation.



Again, an investigation found no basis for the claim.



A similar investigation in 1944 dismissed similar claims that the BLS had &#8220;obsequiously acquiesced&#8221; to White House demands to understate inflation, with the goal of keeping wages down too (while the government had war-time powers to set wages).



All of these unfortunate episodes are <a href="https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2018/article/the-current-population-survey-tracking-unemployment.htm?utm_source=chatgpt.com">recounted</a> on the BLS website, which highlights just how much precedent there is behind President Trump’s new accusations of political bias at the non-partisan agency.



In fact, his shock decision to fire Erika McEntarfer wasn’t even the first time a BLS commissioner lost their job for political reasons.



In 1932, Ethelbert Stewart was “involuntarily retired” as head of the BLS for publicly disagreeing with the Hoover administration’s rosy portrayal of the Depression-era labor market.



In response, The San Francisco News <a href="https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/title/first-hundred-years-bureau-labor-statistics-5181/fulltext#:~:text=%E2%80%9D%20The%20San%20Francisco%20News%20was%20more,his%20honest%20work%20on%20employment%20is%20particularly">opined</a> that &#8220;in the city named for George Washington, it seems they fire people for telling the truth.&#8221;



Now, by contrast, McEntarfer has been fired for the gravest form of not telling the truth: statistics.



On Friday, President Trump accused the BLS commissioner of “miscalculations” that he is sure were politically motivated.&nbsp;



But every jobs report is a miscalculation — by design.



When the BLS reported on Friday that the US economy had added 73,000 jobs in July, McEntafer and everyone involved with the number knew it was wrong.



Like every month, July’s report was based on incomplete data: The BLS doesn’t wait for all 121,000 surveyed employers to respond. 



Instead, it goes with what it’s got at the end of the month — typically just 60% or so of what it’d like to have — and then updates its models as additional responses trickle in afterwards.



But even with all the data in, it’s still just an estimate based on a lot of assumptions.



Without adjusting for seasonality, for example, the BLS would have reported that the US economy lost <a href="https://www.bls.gov/regions/mid-atlantic/data/xg-tables/ro3fx9585.htm#ro3fx9585.f.p">1,066,000 jobs</a> in July.



The difference between 1,066,000 and the 73,000 that everyone thinks of as “the” number of jobs created in July is just one measure of how “wrong&#8221; the BLS’ model is.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;



“All models are wrong,” as statistician George Box famously said, “but some are useful.&#8221;



The BLS model that comes up with a monthly jobs number is one of the useful ones — an early warning system that allows businesses, investors and the Federal Reserve to adjust to the direction of the job market.&nbsp;



The true size of the job market won’t be known until everyone reports their taxes in a year or so, as I’m sure the president is aware.&nbsp;



But the president also seems acutely aware of the power of numbers to affect our perception of reality.



A hamburger, for example, is far more than its calorie count: It’s protein, a night out with friends and a piece of culture, too.&nbsp;



But the moment you read &#8220;1,600 calories&#8221; on the menu, a bacon cheeseburger becomes something else entirely: judgment. Liability. Guilt.



Numbers often wield more power than the reality they attempt to represent, so we should of course try to get them correct.



That’s especially true with economic data, where feedback loops can cause the perception of a slowing economy to become the reality of a recession.



But with high-frequency data like non-farm payrolls, correct is the enemy of useful.



And always has been.



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The ‘jobs’ number is always wrong

This is a segment from the Lightspeed newsletter. To read full editions, <a href="https://blockworks.co/newsletter/lightspeed" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">subscribe</a>.



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Phantom has acquired the Solana trading and analytics platform Solsniper, Blockworks has learned exclusively. Phantom declined to disclose the deal terms.



Solsniper is one of a raft of platforms that provide advanced features and tracking tools for memecoin traders. Solsniper’s web app will continue to operate as a standalone platform, and Solsniper’s team, led by co-founder and CEO Max Zhuang, will join Phantom.



While Phantom cut its teeth as a crypto wallet, the acquisition perhaps signals the <a href="https://www.theblock.co/post/335305/phantom-wallet-raises-150-million-at-3-billion-valuation">well-funded</a> platform’s plans to deepen its trading capabilities, especially after Phantom began offering perpetual futures trading <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/phantom-hyperliquid-integration-winners">by way of Hyperliquid</a>.



Solana’s memecoin craze has been lucrative for token creation platforms like pump.fun and Letsbonk, but it has also been quite profitable for the picks and shovels that facilitate the discovery, tracking and trading of those memecoins.



DEX Screener, which offers popular trending token lists, made $2.9 million in the past month just by charging memecoin projects to update their token information, Solana onchain analyst adam_tehc <a href="https://x.com/Adam_Tehc/status/1952281150283808969">noted</a> recently.



Over time, popular trading venues have begun integrating these picks and shovels-like services. Jupiter and pump.fun both offer in-house trading terminals. With the Solsniper acquisition, Phantom may be poised to do the same, although it has not yet made announcements on that front.



“We see a wide variety of experience levels in crypto today, from new folks to professional traders. This acquisition helps Phantom provide more advanced tools that grow with the user’s expertise. Solsniper has done a great job of building a platform, and we’re excited to bring Phantom’s distribution and infrastructure into the product,” Phantom head of corporate development Joe Wadcan said.



Sweetening the deal further, Solsniper also offers a Telegram trading bot, which is a popular product among some memecoin traders.



Picks and shovels may be valuable to trading platforms because value often flows to the venues and platforms where users actually are. This is why memecoin industry watchers tend to be <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/why-owning-the-end-user-is-profitable-lessons-from-axiom-and-google">bullish on Axiom</a>, which is attempting to win end users while staying agnostic to specific networks or platforms.



By acquiring Solsniper, Phantom could take a segment of its users who currently leave the wallet app to go track, trade, or discover memecoins somewhere else and bring them back in-platform.&nbsp;



Phantom’s acquisition plans likely will not end with Solsniper.



“As we build the next evolution of Phantom, we expect to aggressively pursue acquisitions to expand our product surface area and build the leading consumer finance platform,” Phantom co-founder and CEO Brandon Millman said in a blog post.



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Phantom acquires Solana trading terminal Solsniper

This is a segment from the Forward Guidance newsletter. To read full editions, <a href="https://blockworks.co/newsletter/forward-guidance" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">subscribe</a>.



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It’s bounce-back day on Wall Street after Friday’s jobs report-fueled dip.



After the first three hours of trading Monday morning, the S&amp;P 500 and Nasdaq Composite indexes were up 1.3% and 1.8%, respectively. I’m not shocked to see things back in the green, but I’m curious as to how long the rally may last.&nbsp;



Investors are going to be watching for any additional fallout from the July jobs report. As a reminder, Friday’s release showed the economy added just 73,000 new positions last month (compared with expectations for 104,000).&nbsp;



May and June also received significant downward revisions (a combined -258,000 positions), marking the biggest revision since 2020. The unemployment rate was unchanged at 4.2%.&nbsp;



The numbers were not good for stocks, although the report did help boost expectations of a September interest rate cut from the Fed.&nbsp;



Chair Powell has stressed in the past that he’s primarily concerned with the unemployment rate as opposed to the number of positions added. Last week’s Fed decision (in which it opted to once again hold interest rates steady) came with an addendum we haven’t seen in decades: a double dissent.&nbsp;



JPMorgan chief US economist Michael Feroli called the <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/powell-resolute-amid-rate-dissents">two dissenting opinions</a> in last week’s Fed decision (from Governors Waller and Bowman) a “job application,” and I’d have to agree. With Powell’s term set to <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/fomc-june-powell-term-end">expire next May</a> (and Trump’s <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/trump-criticizes-fed-chair-powell">vocal distaste</a> for Powell), the position is up for grabs.&nbsp;



Here’s an excerpt from Waller’s opinion:&nbsp;



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow">
“While the labor market looks fine on the surface, once we account for expected data revisions, private-sector payroll growth is near stall speed, and other data suggest that the downside risks to the labor market have increased. With underlying inflation near target and the upside risks to inflation limited, we should not wait until the labor market deteriorates before we cut the policy rate.”
</blockquote>



From Waller’s mouth to the president’s ears? We’ll have to wait and see.&nbsp;



Aside from Powell, there’s another (former) government official on Trump’s bad side: Bureau of Labor Statistics Commissioner Erika McEntarfer. He fired her on Friday following the release of July’s employment report, accusing her of manipulating the data to show a bias against his administration.&nbsp;



“A lengthy history of inaccuracies and incompetence by Erika McEntarfer, the former Biden-appointed Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, has completely eroded public trust in the government agency charged with disseminating key data used by policymakers and businesses to make consequential decisions,” the White House wrote in a Friday statement.&nbsp;



The BLS earlier this year said it would have to reduce its data collection on consumer prices, which impacts its CPI report. Last week the agency clarified that the changes were implemented “to align survey workload with resource levels.”&nbsp;



The situation adds a layer of political complexity to Friday’s disappointing report, and takes a hit to investor confidence in data. Noelle Acheson, from Crypto is Macro Now, put it best in her note today:&nbsp;



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow">
“So, will the next BLS commissioner be able to avoid large revisions going forward? Obviously, they’ll have to if they want to keep their job, which elevates the temptation to publish late or to suppress new information as it comes in. Neither will be an improvement on the current situation.”
</blockquote>



We’ll be on “labor report fallout watch” all week, so keep an eye on your inbox.



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<li><a href="https://blockworks.co/newsletter/empire">Empire</a>: Crypto news and analysis to start your day.</li>



<li><a href="https://blockworks.co/newsletter/forward-guidance">Forward Guidance</a>: The intersection of crypto, macro and policy.</li>



<li><a href="https://blockworks.co/newsletter/thedrop">The Drop</a>: Apps, games, memes and more.</li>



<li><a href="https://blockworks.co/newsletter/lightspeed">Lightspeed</a>: All things Solana.</li>



<li><a href="https://blockworks.co/newsletter/supply-shock">Supply Shock</a>: Bitcoin, bitcoin, bitcoin.</li>
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