WINR Protocol

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">
“For new technologies to play a role in protecting Americans’ privacy, government must guard jealously the ability of Americans to use them.”



— Hester Peirce
</blockquote>



Centralized stablecoins, permissioned blockchains, corporate treasury companies…the hottest topics in crypto are not very cypherpunk these days.



Weirdly though, the SEC is.



In a <a href="https://www.sec.gov/newsroom/speeches-statements/peirce-remarks-blockchain-conference-080425#_ftn47">speech</a> last week, SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce delivered a defense of privacy that wouldn’t be out of place on the original <a href="https://mailing-list-archive.cryptoanarchy.wiki">cypherpunk mailing list</a>.



She even cited Eric Hughes, founder of the mailing list and author of <a href="https://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/manifesto.html">A Cypherpunk Manifesto</a>, as an inspiration for her surprisingly radical line of thinking.



Hughes probably never imagined he’d be approvingly quoted by a government official, as you can tell from the line Peirce chose to quote: “We cannot expect governments, corporations or other large, faceless organizations to grant us privacy out of their beneficence.”



And yet, here is one of the US’s most influential regulators not just name-dropping Hughes, but amplifying his radical views on privacy-preserving technology.



She hardly sounds like someone who works for the government, though: “Where, by design or deficiency, the law will not protect us, technology might.”&nbsp;



That’s a pretty good summation of Hughes’ core message that, because we trust governments to grant it, “privacy in an open society requires cryptography.”



Writing in 1993, Hughes spoke aspirationally about the need for “systems which allow anonymous transactions to take place.”



Writing in 2025, Peirce cites crypto mixers, privacy-preserving blockchains and even decentralized physical networks (DePIN!!!) as systems that can provide such anonymity.



She makes the case for these technologies succinctly: “New and improved technology can diminish the need for us to rely on third parties and thus to hand our information over to them.”&nbsp;



Peirce even makes explicit what Hughes diplomatically left unsaid in the Manifesto: Privacy preserving technology must be allowed “even though doing so enables people to use them for bad purposes.”



What could be more cypherpunk than that?



It’s an extraordinary turn of events to see an SEC commissioner being so closely aligned with the author of the original cypherpunk’s call to arms on privacy.



Their views are not entirely aligned, however — but in the opposite way you might expect.



Much of Peirce’s speech targets the “third-party doctrine” — the legal theory that lets law enforcement access your banking data without a warrant — which she accuses the US government (her employer!) of wielding like a “sledgehammer.”



“The third-party doctrine is a key pillar of financial surveillance in this country,” she writes, before making clear that she’d like to knock it down.



In short, she argues that your banking records deserve the same Fourth Amendment protection as whatever goes on in your home behind closed doors.



Weirdly, I think Hughes might disagree.



“If two parties have some sort of dealings,” he wrote in the Manifesto, “then each has a memory of their interaction. Each party can speak about their own memory of this; how could anyone prevent it?”



That is a tidy restatement of the government’s insistence that once you give your information to a third party, such as a bank, it’s no longer your private information.



Hughes even adds that “we seek not to restrict any speech at all” — which must therefore include banks speaking about their customers.



(Wouldn’t it be funny if the prosecution cited Hughes in the next Roman Storm trial.)



But this is why both Peirce and Hughes put their faith in technology: Even if the current government chooses to respect your privacy, the next one probably won’t.



“We must come together and create systems which allow anonymous transactions to take place,” Hughes wrote.



But not just that.



“For privacy to be widespread it must be part of a social contract,” he added. “Privacy only extends so far as the cooperation of one&#8217;s fellows in society.”



This will be a hard sell, I think.



Most people say they are in favor of privacy. But most people also say they’re against money laundering and terrorist financing.



Few are as radical as Peirce and Hughes in believing that privacy is so fundamental that its benefits outweigh any harm it might enable (or fail to prevent).



If Peirce’s speech finds its way to Hughes (wherever he is), I’m sure he’d recognize and appreciate it as an effort to win the not-yet-radicalized over to the cause.



“We the Cypherpunks seek your questions and your concerns and hope we may engage you,” he wrote in 1993.



Hester Peirce can count herself among the “we.”



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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>
</ul>

The Breakdown Newsletter

A regulator’s radical defense of privacy

Jeff Albus

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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Lightspeed has exclusively learned that Maple — one of Solana&#8217;s largest onchain asset managers — is bringing its yield-bearing syrupUSDC stablecoin into perpetual futures markets operated by Drift, Solana&#8217;s flagship perps DEX.



Drift, known for its deep onchain liquidity and capital-efficient margins, will accept syrupUSDC as margin collateral, allowing traders to earn a 7-8% APY on their margin while trading.



This will be the first time the exchange has allowed a collateral asset to serve dual purposes, earning yield while backing positions — sweetened by $100,000 in incentives and an initial $50 million cap.



One of Solana&#8217;s biggest wins is that its DeFi ecosystem can move at the speed of centralized markets. It doesn&#8217;t matter how advanced your strategies are or how complex your positions get.



The network&#8217;s speed means traders can rebalance instantly, while staying entirely onchain. That&#8217;s more than competing ecosystems like Ethereum can often promise without high fees or serious latency.



Often, though, the very need for collateral means capital ends up sitting idle as margin, earning nothing while waiting for trades to play out. That leads to higher opportunity costs, less capital efficiency and slower compounding for active traders.



But because users can now post syrupUSDC as margin on Drift, those same dollars can both secure your trades and earn passive income. Traders will be able to offset funding costs, free up cash flow and keep capital productive without changing their trading style.



More capital will flow into Solana&#8217;s onchain perps market, which also means Drift&#8217;s open interest should climb, and we&#8217;re more likely to see syrupUSDC adoption spread across more protocols.



SyrupUSDC is backed by Maple&#8217;s institutional lending pools and earns a steady yield from over-collateralized loans. Drift&#8217;s cross-collateral system treats it like USDC for margin purposes, but allows the yield stream to keep running while positions are open.



Altogether, their goal is to allow money to multitask, cutting out the dead time it would otherwise spend doing nothing.



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<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>
</ul>

Lightspeed Newsletter

Yield-bearing margin arrives on Drift

Ben Strack

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 watched what happened when Circle listed on the NYSE two months ago. Today, the industry looked on as crypto exchange Bullish did the same.



BLSH jumped to more than triple its IPO price minutes after going public before losing momentum later in the session.&nbsp;



The company yesterday revealed IPO pricing of 30 million shares at $37 per share — up from the $32-33 estimate it shared in a Monday <a href="https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1872195/000110465925075896/tm2421409-23_f1a.htm">filing</a>.



Shares opened at $90 around 1 p.m. ET — roughly 143% higher than the IPO price. The company’s stock quickly <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/bullish-stock-surges-ipo-110/">surged to $118</a>, but had dropped below the opening price when the market closed.



<figure class="wp-block-image is-resized"><img decoding="async" src="https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXcdjt8d5uKtuNatOpxA_h_zUgWoGg422vRMyjCVViVkBuHvRVDUcwlIfd2-EjDKmncnQTkTWnXnhMKsK_yT8pxC4WLf76EydDFaT51a6ThvvxTSSfyAtjE2jXxBA9yMxa-BBz5TgA?key=ugntXJX7FAzGhfsEJue-hA" alt="" style="width:602px;height:auto"/><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Source: Yahoo finance</figcaption></figure>



<a href="https://blockworks.co/news/circle-shares-nyse-day-one">Circle stock debuted</a> at $69 per share on June 5 (more than double its IPO price of $31). Though the USDC issuer’s stock price peaked near $300 on June 23, CRCL shares were trading for around $156 midday Wednesday.&nbsp;



All’s to say: Where Bullish’s stock price goes from here is anyone’s guess.&nbsp;



Led by former NYSE president Tom Farley, Bullish launched in 2021 with backing from Block.one, Thiel Capital, Galaxy Digital, Nomura and others. It offers a spot and derivatives exchange, as well as liquidity services; Bullish also owns crypto media company CoinDesk.



As of March 31, Bullish held $1.7 billion worth of bitcoin, $144 million of US dollar stablecoins, $28 million in cash and $55 million of ether and other digital assets.



The company’s roughly $1.8 billion in cash and crypto makes it one of the most well-financed companies in the space, noted Architect Partners VP Ryan McCulloch.



“By buying this stock, you are heavily invested in their future potential to invest this cash,” he told Blockworks.



McCulloch labeled Amber Group and OSL Group as the most similar public companies to Bullish, given that they are Asia-focused exchanges offering a similar suite of services.&nbsp;



But Amber Group and OSL Group are trading at enterprise values around $600 million and $1.4 billion, respectively — significantly lower than the roughly $13 billion valuation Bullish went public with,&nbsp; he explained.



“They get significantly more public exposure via the media business, which likely serves as free lead generation for the trading business and vice versa,” McCulloch said. “This is far different than any others and seems to provide a unique market positioning.”



Matthew Sigel, who manages the VanEck Onchain Economy ETF (NODE), also noted Bullish’s sizable bitcoin treasury — enabling tighter spreads and “competitive positioning” in both spot and derivatives markets.&nbsp;



“These capabilities can compound across trading, data and index businesses,” Sigel added. “In a bull scenario based on our internal modeling, there is a path to $600 million in revenue and $200 million in EBITDA.”



More crypto company IPOs are expected in the coming months, as Gemini, <a href="http://grayscale">Grayscale</a>, BitGo and Figure Technology have confidentially filed draft registration statements with the SEC.



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Bullish

Bullish closes 89% above IPO price after up-and-down NYSE debut

Macauley Peterson

Five years ago today, Curve Finance — now one of DeFi’s longest-running protocols — saw the launch of its governance token CRV in what remains one of the most unusual moments in crypto history.



On August 13, 2020, an anonymous Twitter account, @0xc4ad, announced that they had gone ahead and deployed the CRV token and DAO contracts before the Curve team themselves had done so.



“Yo, @CurveFinance! Saw your DAO is ready to rock and I gots to MAXIMIZE MY ALPHA! So I went ahead and deployed it for you,” the account posted.



<figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-twitter wp-block-embed-twitter"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="550" data-dnt="true">Yo, <a href="https://twitter.com/CurveFinance?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@CurveFinance</a> ! Saw your DAO is ready to rock and I gots to MAXIMIZE MY ALPHA ! So I went ahead and deployed it for you. Get at me in DM to verify and lets get this party started!! <a href="https://t.co/D0KqEg4Ldr">pic.twitter.com/D0KqEg4Ldr</a>&mdash; 0xc4ad (@0xc4ad) <a href="https://twitter.com/0xc4ad/status/1293977012550467584?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">August 13, 2020</a></blockquote><script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
</div></figure>



They linked to the deployment address, token contract, and even the freshly created Aragon DAO, assuring followers the contracts matched Curve’s specifications.



“You guys ready to harvest some CRV with me or what?!?” they <a href="https://x.com/0xc4ad/status/1293978460411568131">wrote</a>, tagging a who’s-who of early DeFi influencers.



The Curve team, ostensibly blindsided, responded carefully. “Interesting. We are proceeding with caution here, so far looks like contracts are the correct ones,” the official account <a href="https://x.com/CurveFinance/status/1294007705263386631">tweeted</a>, noting they would verify before endorsing the launch.



Once confirmed, the deployment effectively became the official CRV token launch, initiated — the story goes — not by the team, but by an opportunistic outsider. The @0xc4ad account soon vanished from Twitter, leaving behind one of DeFi’s most enduring origin stories.



Asked if the mystery will ever be solved, founder Michael Egorov told Blockworks, “Good question! I still don&#8217;t really know today. Looks as hard to know as Satoshi&#8217;s identity.”



Since that chaotic start, <a href="https://blockworks.co/tag/curve-finance">Curve Finance</a> has grown from a <a href="https://blockworks.co/tag/stablecoins">stablecoin</a>-focused AMM <a href="https://blockworks.co/tag/dex">DEX</a> into a core layer of DeFi’s liquidity stack, influencing protocol design across the industry. Reflecting on its rise, Egorov said: “What went as calculated is market sizing of stablecoin swaps,” though he added Curve’s centrality in DeFi infrastructure “was a bit surprising, but not totally unexpected.”



Today’s anniversary coincides with a <a href="https://blockworks.co/price/crv">CRV</a> inflation drop, reducing the token’s emission rate. Egorov sees ongoing misunderstandings around Curve’s governance design: “Many projects think that token burn is better (<a href="https://blockworks.co/tag/changpeng-zhao">CZ</a> thinks that!),” he said, but noting that, to him, “it appears that token locking is simply much more efficient for reducing circulated supply as well as in aligning people with governance.”



Egorov is now focused on <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/michael-egorov-yield-basis-protocol">Yield Basis</a>, an interest-rate derivatives protocol. “I think ve-tokenomics is good, so I apply it there,” he said, adding that Yield Basis will split rewards between LP tokens and real yield without a boosting mechanism.



From an unplanned, community-triggered launch to becoming a foundational DeFi protocol, Curve’s story is proof that sometimes chaos — and a little mystery — can yield lasting decentralized infrastructure.



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Curve

Curve turns 5, marking a half-decade since DeFi’s strangest token launch

Kate Irwin

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



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Since the Zora app launched in September last year, it’s seen some adoption, with over 127,000 downloads on iOS and more than 50,000 downloads on Android, according to data from Appfigures and Google.



Out of those, nearly 18,000 Zora accounts are posting daily, Blockworks Research data shows. And 36% of daily posting Zora accounts are actually doing so not from Zora itself, but from the Base app.



<figure class="wp-block-image is-resized"><img decoding="async" src="https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXca2U_cdFXr4c7adzIPpiEYkTe1kFSr717AD8zRa-RjuL5s8uSdx41I3z_Y-hlAYqlXN-thwuO_D0RqT4P6RQnxPPR0DogZbfTF1WS8BNn3iDD1xXp5l2hzEevyHiJvF_II7WeREA?key=3HoGeV0_RBk32QwQrWRvSA" alt="" style="width:692px;height:auto"/></figure>



When the Coinbase Wallet app rebranded to just “Base” last month and integrated Zora for some users, that sparked a surge in Zora use through the Base app itself (Zora can also be accessed and used via a web browser).&nbsp;



Yesterday, Base engineer Youssef El Allali <a href="https://x.com/0xyoussea/status/1955424838379770241">shared</a> an AI agent tool that lets Base app users trade small amounts of Zora creators’ tokens by mentioning a Zora account’s handle, which could further speed up trading and further abstract it away from the mobile app itself.



<figure class="wp-block-image is-resized"><img decoding="async" src="https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXcqERkbYEtBqoya0ACzQwuu6fKsPpckfK9ZaJuYDFJ7UR0TmeXnYbK-PMlzE4uQLHSWYPtfUqnAYCQqtiVyqaCXXoA_5j6vBmILrS9kgsj7aPeFstwECGoe1RfMsHP6iCMSqeWu?key=3HoGeV0_RBk32QwQrWRvSA" alt="" style="width:694px;height:auto"/></figure>



When you join Zora, a creator token is automatically generated and associated with you, and other users can effectively “trade” you. There isn’t really an obvious reason to buy someone else’s token, though, other than to financially support them or potentially flip their token to make a quick buck.



And while some crypto traders may have written off Zora as a <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/zora-latest-content-coin-fad">short-lived fad</a> like Friendtech or StarsArena, Zora has something those don’t — backing from Coinbase.



<figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-twitter wp-block-embed-twitter"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="550" data-dnt="true">Introducing&#8230; Zora Coins Agent 🤖 An AI agent that uses Base Account Spend Permissions, <a href="https://twitter.com/CoinbaseDev?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@CoinbaseDev</a> server wallets and <a href="https://twitter.com/zoradevs?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@zoradevs</a> SDK to buy you any creator coin you want Just give it the handle and it will do the rest, no clicks, no pop-ups, all managed by spend permissions <a href="https://t.co/Y1U37EQKCY">pic.twitter.com/Y1U37EQKCY</a>&mdash; Youssef (@0xyoussea) <a href="https://twitter.com/0xyoussea/status/1955424838379770241?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">August 13, 2025</a></blockquote><script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
</div></figure>



So far, some of the Zora creator tokens’ market caps are surprising. As of Wednesday morning, about 20 Zora content creators, including ex-Coinbase employee turned Zora cofounder Jacob Horne, have creator account market caps of $1 million or more each.&nbsp;



45 creators have “market caps” of over half a million dollars each.&nbsp;



The top 10 accounts on Zora by market cap include a porn account, an AI art account, a crypto trading influencer, and some meme accounts, to name a few. Overall, it doesn’t look like art is dominating Zora’s financial landscape.&nbsp;



Some Zora accounts are personal and tied to individuals, while others are more anonymous or appear to represent a company or group.



But is it a good idea to assign “value” to people — or their personal posts or pieces of content — in such a rapidfire, mercurial way?&nbsp;



<figure class="wp-block-image is-resized"><img decoding="async" src="https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXehA1FjdF89Pc_GR6KhC7fvETj3ssKt9FiU_9fscip9vVSFZDZgEeH2rr5Te7aVFckbJfcRhbEU0KTnZpmlkBd4btjOhxYFYklJpBp4vdJRdZSxg2LhlqkuTybcJdVrxw4qSLGi?key=3HoGeV0_RBk32QwQrWRvSA" alt="" style="width:674px;height:auto"/></figure>



Some artists and founders aren’t so sure about Zora.&nbsp;



This week, Coinbase’s Base lead and unofficial Zora hype-man Jesse Pollak wrote: “Help I keep putting money into @zora and supporting creators and collecting content but my balance keeps going UP?!?!?”



“It doesn’t always go up,” electronic music artist and Royal founder Justin Blau <a href="https://x.com/justinblau/status/1955067797555315069">replied</a>. “The narrative is beginning to feel irresponsible. I don’t wanna wait another 4 years to convince creatives that crypto has more uses for them than memetic speculation.



“There is nothing wrong with speculation, just call it what it is. This disguising narrative is dangerous,” Blau continued.&nbsp;



Pollak hit back: “I didn&#8217;t promise up only. I described my experience that is very real. I&#8217;m also more optimistic than you about the combination of infinite creativity and a better creator economy.”



<figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-twitter wp-block-embed-twitter"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="550" data-dnt="true">I funded my Zora account and base app account with $100 (separately) supported a bunch of creators and posted original content over the past few weeks. Here’s my updated liquid balances: Zora: $0.29 base app: $1.35&mdash; foundnone.eth (@transmental) <a href="https://twitter.com/transmental/status/1953571741902811622?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">August 7, 2025</a></blockquote><script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
</div></figure>



Some other artists, like visual artist ThankYouX, aren’t sold on the Zora idea, either (ThankYouX has released his work as NFTs and integrated blockchain tech into his work since 2020).



“It just adds a purely speculative element which isn’t what art is about,” ThankYouX <a href="https://x.com/ThankYouX/status/1955074694669123659">wrote</a> of Zora. “And the Zora team is very irresponsible with how they’ve handled things by launching automatically for artist[s] and hyping the speculation element too much.”



Notably, Vitalik Buterin tried Zora recently — and argued, among other things, that requiring users to input email addresses (and the affiliated smart wallets tied to them) could contribute to user segregation on Ethereum.



“You want compatibility for existing ethereum uses, no?” he <a href="https://x.com/VitalikButerin/status/1954987470896107592">asked</a> Horne in a post. “Otherwise you&#8217;re creating two incompatible ecosystems, one for ‘real ethereum users’ [and] one for ‘mainstream people’; I actually think this is one of the biggest risks in ethereum UX right now.”



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Coinbase

‘Memetic speculation’: Users debate Zora, the creator-token app with Coinbase backing

The stock of crypto exchange Bullish popped in the first few minutes after its New York Stock Exchange listing Wednesday, marking more evidence of demand for equity exposure in the segment.&nbsp;



Bullish on Tuesday revealed the pricing of its initial public offering of 30 million shares at $37 per share. That was up from a per-share price between $32 and $33 that the company anticipated in a Monday <a href="https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1872195/000110465925075896/tm2421409-23_f1a.htm">filing</a> to the SEC.



BLSH shares opened around 1 pm ET at $90 — about 143% above the IPO price. Minutes later, the company’s stock surged to $118, according to Yahoo Finance data.&nbsp;



Led by former NYSE president Tom Farley, Bullish launched in 2021 with backing from Block.one, Thiel Capital, Galaxy Digital, Nomura and others. It offers a spot and derivatives exchange, as well as liquidity services; Bullish also owns crypto media company CoinDesk.



As of March 31, Bullish held $28 million in cash, $144 million of US dollar stablecoins and $1.7 billion worth of bitcoin and $22 million of ether, the Monday filing shows.



Bullish’s IPO comes about two months after stablecoin issuer Circle listed on the NYSE.&nbsp;



CRCL stock opened around $69 during its June 5 debut — more than double the upsized IPO price of $31 per share. The shares rose slightly above $100 that day before settling at $82 at market close.&nbsp;



Read more: <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/circle-shares-nyse-day-one">Circle ends NYSE debut up 167% from IPO price</a>



Though the USDC issuer’s stock price peaked near $300 on June 23, CRCL shares were trading for around $155 on Wednesday afternoon.



Industry watchers predicted Circle’s IPO would lead to more companies following suit.&nbsp;



Most recently, Figure Technology confidentially filed a draft registration statement with the SEC. Gemini and <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/grayscale-exposure-signals-etfs">Grayscale</a> did the same in June, while BitGo filed such paperwork last month.



Check out today’s Forward Guidance <a href="https://blockworks.co/newsletter/forward-guidance">newsletter</a> for more on Bullish’s NYSE debut.



This is a developing story.



Updated 8/13/2025 at 1:33 p.m. to correct an error in the article subheading.



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Bullish stock surges above $110 per share minutes after public debut

Offchain Labs, the company behind Arbitrum, has acquired smart account infrastructure provider ZeroDev in a move that signals its ambitions beyond scaling infrastructure.&nbsp;



The deal, which brings ZeroDev’s five-person team fully into Offchain Labs, represents what CEO Steven Goldfeder calls “a very logical next iteration” of the company’s mission.



Founded in 2018, <a href="https://blockworks.co/tag/offchain-labs">Offchain Labs</a> initially focused on scaling Ethereum with optimistic <a href="https://blockworks.co/tag/rollups">rollups</a>. But Goldfeder says the broader goal has always been “to solve the hardest problems that are standing in the way of bringing blockchain technology to mass adoption.”



In that light, the acquisition isn’t a pivot, Goldfeder told Blockworks. “We started off [with] layer two, we went down to layer one, and now we&#8217;re going a little bit further up&#8230;in the smart contract layer,” he said. “We can make these tools work seamlessly together.”



ZeroDev, whose platform powers <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/vitalik-buterin-eip-account-abstraction">smart account</a> infrastructure for projects like ApeChain, <a href="https://blockworks.co/podcast/lightspeed/1bd088c0-3f45-11ef-8d0e-33cba733fb4d">Infinex</a>, and Crossmint, fits neatly into that stack-wide ambition. “They’re the leaders, the innovators in the smart account space,” Goldfeder said. “It fit very well with the profile of our team.”



With smart accounts enabling features like gas abstraction, programmable security, and automated transactions, Offchain sees them as critical to <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/if-we-dont-make-crypto-invisible-it-will-never-reach-the-mainstream">onboarding the next wave</a> of users. The challenge today, according to Goldfeder, is not just the technology but the fractured developer experience; he flagged “wallet integration and wallet support” as a bottleneck.



“Often the user experience doesn&#8217;t seamlessly pull these all together in a way that&#8217;s abstracted away from the user,” Goldfeder said.



He offered a familiar metaphor: “When I go on YouTube to watch a video, I don’t get a pop-up that says, ‘Do you wanna watch this video on AWS or on GCP?’ I just want to watch my video.”



Chain fragmentation remains a UX hurdle, even within the <a href="https://blockworks.co/tag/arbitrum">Arbitrum</a> ecosystem. “If I&#8217;m a user on Arbitrum One and I want to go and buy an NFT on ApeChain…The gas on Arbitrum is ETH, the gas on ApeChain is APE, maybe I&#8217;m holding ARB, but there&#8217;s just a lot of manual steps.”



ZeroDev’s smart account tooling could help streamline this, and other of the “harder problems.”



“Everyone says Ethereum has a fragmentation problem,” Goldfeder said, “This is just another tool in our toolbox.”



That tooling focus doesn’t mean Offchain Labs is losing sight of <a href="https://blockworks.co/tag/scaling">scaling</a> fundamentals. The company is still exploring hybrid rollup architectures, including <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/zk-proofs-escape-velocity-eth">eventual ZK proof integration</a>.



For now, Offchain is betting that improved UX, smart accounts, and deeper vertical integration will push Ethereum’s most-used rollup into a new phase. “It’s not only about the raw technical components,” Goldfeder said, “but how do we actually package it up?”



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Arbitrum

Arbitrum’s next chapter: Smart accounts, UX, and Offchain Labs’ ZeroDev bet

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>.



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A16z and the DeFi Education Fund are asking the SEC for a safe harbor for blockchain technology. Simply put, this means that projects wouldn’t have to pursue broker registration for DeFi apps.&nbsp;



“While decentralized blockchain systems underlying apps are clearly excluded from the SEC’s broker-dealer registration regimes, apps face regulatory uncertainty because they are typically developed and maintained by centralized actors. The SEC has previously taken the position — through enforcement actions and Wells notices — that developers of apps could be deemed brokers if they enabled users to transact in securities,” a16z wrote in a blog post this morning. 



In order for an app to qualify, a16z and DEF proposed four criteria: underlying protocols have to be decentralized, it has to be non-custodial, there can’t be investment recommendations, and no discretion. 



“The guiding principle of the safe harbor is that only those Apps which do not engender the risks that the Exchange Act’s broker-dealer regulatory regime was designed to address should be eligible; in such cases, registration as a broker under the Exchange Act is unwarranted and inappropriate,” the two said in their official proposal to the SEC.



So, all in all, they have to be credibly neutral and permissionless. Makes sense, right?&nbsp;



Both DEF and a16z have made it pretty clear that they’re looking out for projects in crypto. Heck, if you missed it earlier this week, a16z’s Miles Jenning and Eddy Lazzarin even went on the <a href="https://blockworks.co/podcast/empire/5f38c3ec-749c-11f0-96bf-4bef818bfbd7">Empire podcast</a> to discuss safely launching tokens. 



<iframe loading="lazy" width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/zfqASHqSTl0?si=77yyTwKO1PPfGLSg" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>







“Developers shouldn’t have to guess whether building public, neutral, and non-custodial software exposes them to the risk of being treated like financial intermediaries,” a16z said. 



The push comes roughly a week after Tornado Cash’s Roman Storm <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/roman-storm-guilty-one-count">was found guilty</a> of conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money transmitter business by a jury in a trial that’s left all of us <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/opinion-tornado-cash-conviction-raises-alarm">wondering about</a> potential implications. This push from a16z and DEF would help to clear some of the current murkiness.&nbsp;



“This proposal aims to be flexible to account for the ever-evolving nature of early-stage tech development and is grounded in the understanding that most apps are fundamentally non-custodial, passive software tools that allow users to interact directly with public, decentralized network and protocol infrastructure — and, therefore, should not be subject to broker-dealer registration requirements,” DEF’s Amanda Tuminelli said. 



Despite the fact that it’s very clearly a new era at the SEC, there’s work to be done to allow projects and developers in the space to continue to innovate safely.&nbsp;



Now to see how the SEC plans to approach this topic.&nbsp;



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Empire Newsletter

A16z and DeFi Education Fund propose ‘safe harbor’ policies for DeFi apps

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">
“Just because you can doesn&#8217;t mean you should.”



—&nbsp; Aristotle, your conscience, your mom, and Jurassic Park
</blockquote>



We don’t usually get data on Americans’ retirement accounts, but a congressional request once prompted the Joint Committee on Taxation to <a href="https://www.finance.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/7.28.21%20JCT%20Mega%20IRA%20Data1.pdf">reveal</a> just how big some can get: In 2019, just 156 Roth IRAs held $15.6 billion in assets.



This begs an obvious question: Who needs a tax break on their $100 million of retirement savings?



$80 million of post-tax money seems like plenty to get by on after the age of 60 (even for all the tech moguls planning to live to 120).



But some have quite a lot more than that.&nbsp;



In 2021, ProPublica <a href="https://www.propublica.org/article/lord-of-the-roths-how-tech-mogul-peter-thiel-turned-a-retirement-account-for-the-middle-class-into-a-5-billion-dollar-tax-free-piggy-bank">reported</a> that Peter Thiel held more than $5 billion in a single, giant Roth IRA account.&nbsp;



Helpfully, it also detailed how he did it.



While you and I max out our Roth IRAs with $7,000 worth of index funds, others opt for more exotic investments — like early-stage equity.



In 1999, for example, Thiel used $1,700 of Roth IRA funds to buy 1.7 million shares of PayPal. Three years later, PayPal IPO’d at $13 a share — a 13,000-fold gain on his cost basis of $0.001 per share.



Because it was in an IRA, he owed no tax.&nbsp;



Better yet, he was able to roll those winnings, tax-free, into 10.2% of Facebook — acquired for $500,000 (still held in his Roth IRA), and an undisclosed portion of his stake in Palantir (now worth many billions).



Thiel was a co-founder of PayPal and Palantir and the first outside investor in Facebook, so the rest of us would never have had access to those kinds of deals. 



But President Trump <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/08/democratizing-access-to-alternative-assets-for-401k-investors/">proposed</a> last week that everyone be given access to alternative investments in their retirement accounts, crypto included. 



In response, critics have warned that crypto is ill-suited for retirement savings because it’s too risky.



But it’s already available to a small sliver of people — and at virtually no risk — via “Token Launch Roth IRAs,” an entertainingly extreme edge case in the debate over crypto in retirement accounts.



While equity founders like Peter Thiel have long been able to stash early-stage investments in their Roth IRAs, crypto founders could not — because how do you get a blockchain token into a brokerage account?



You couldn’t, until AnchorZero built the systems to add even pre-launch tokens to traditional retirement accounts, and Anchorage Digital Bank figured out how to custody them.



Simply put, AnchorZero’s Token Launch Roth IRAs are “the first and only solution for pre-launch tokens to eliminate capital gains taxes.”



This is not a problem I ever imagined needed solving.



In its enthusiasm for helping founders not pay taxes, AnchorZero’s website reads like a Scrooge McDuck parody of robber baron excess.



“Until now,” its <a href="https://anchorzero.com/insights/anchorzero-launches-token-optimized-roth-iras-for-tax-free-gains-on-digital-assets/">product announcement</a> explained, ”the only way to include tokens in an IRA was to wait until they were listed on a public exchange, by which time their value had often increased exponentially. AnchorZero’s solution is the first to support private, pre-launch tokens and derivatives, ensuring that founders can take advantage of the low-cost basis at token creation.”



The website offers an illustrative example, seemingly written by someone who doesn’t quite know how to read the room:



“Consider Alice, a crypto founder launching a new token. At creation, before public trading, the token’s market cap is a modest $10,000. As a savvy tax strategist, Alice allocates a portion of the token supply to her Roth IRA. When she decides to sell, her token interest is worth $50 million, which is entirely tax-free. Had she chosen to forgo the IRA approach, Alice would have owed $18.5 million in capital gains taxes, leaving her with $31.5 million — a staggering difference of millions in tax savings.”



If its website had ears, they’d have to be plugged while I yell at it: ALICE DOESN’T NEED A TAX BREAK!!!



But she was only just getting started.



“AnchorZero’s solution allows investors to reinvest tax-free gains into new tokens, startups and venture funds. Over time, the compounding benefits of the Roth IRA become even more pronounced. In Alice’s case, her IRA could grow to $815 million over 20 years, compared to $190 million without the tax advantages.”



These kinds of “Alice” examples are usually something like, “Alice sends $5 to Bob.”



But (to paraphrase Spinal Tap) this one goes to $815 million.



Gaming the byzantine US tax system is hardly a novel idea, but seeing it spelled out at that scale and on a public website feels different — as if hedge funds were running TV ads to gloat over how much money the carried-interest loophole was making them. Or Big Pharma put up billboards to crow about its Ireland tax dodges.



Bury it in euphemisms! Hide it in the fine print!! Do some dog whistling!!!&nbsp;



Or make the numbers 100x smaller, at least, please.



Because it’s one thing to exploit a loophole and it’s another thing to celebrate it. Especially one as egregious as this.



Has there ever been a more narrowly targeted tax dodge? 



The carried-interest loophole for hedge funds is pretty bad, but I’d guess there are more hedge fund managers in the US than there are crypto founders.



And pre-launch crypto tokens are sure to be priced even cheaper than pre-IPO PayPal shares.&nbsp;



On the one hand, AnchorZero is only offering to help those founders do something that the law allows.



On the other hand, why???



I marvel at the time, effort and investment it must have taken to build the complex systems required to help this tiny sliver of people who don’t need anyone’s help.



Even if you think every loophole deserves exploiting, is that really what you want to do with your limited time on Earth?



Personally, I’m not sure I’d sleep too much worse if I spent my days engineering new ways to telemarket fake tech support to seniors or catfish lonely bachelors.&nbsp;



Ethical considerations aside, these kinds of things can backfire, as we learned from <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/1at69qj/your_scientists_were_so_preoccupied_with_whether/">Jurassic Park</a>. (“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn&#8217;t stop to think if they should.”)



The danger here, I think, is that crypto already has an image problem.



Thanks to cabal memecoins, low-float-high-FDV project tokens and digital asset treasury companies, there’s a growing perception that most of the industry’s profits accrue to a small number of insiders at the expense of its retail investors.&nbsp;



This is especially unfortunate because a big part of crypto’s original appeal was that bitcoin was fair-launched and equally accessible to all.&nbsp;



If Token Launch Roth IRAs catch on — and how can they not? — we’ll have strayed further than ever from that ideal.



People will notice. Inevitably, we’ll get an exposé on a $5 billion Token Launch Roth IRA and it will make half of America hate crypto even more than it already does.&nbsp;



I could hardly blame them, if so.



The US government is currently in the process of handing the crypto industry everything it&#8217;s ever asked for.



The least we could do in return is pay our taxes!



Even Peter Thiel thinks the US tax system has “fairness problems” — because, he said, “you have super rich people paying a lower rate than people in the middle or upper middle class.”



Putting pre-launch tokens in retirement accounts would supercharge that problem.



And crypto’s image problem, too.



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When $100M isn’t enough: Token Launch Roth IRAs

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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Corporate blockchains have never looked so good.&nbsp;



In rapid succession, news broke that both payments giant Stripe and stablecoin darling Circle would be building their own layer-1 blockchains. While major companies coming onchain theoretically poses a competitive threat to all existing L1s, there may be reason to believe the news is particularly troublesome for <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pK5JGHHrEk">Solana’s vision</a> that “everything can fit in one computer.”



Stripe and Circle’s chains — named Tempo and Arc, respectively — are set to be EVM-based, which some Ethereum <a href="https://x.com/RyanSAdams/status/1955258607353684386">boosters</a> were quick to chalk up as bullish for Ethereum. That’s mostly engagement bait nonsense, in this newsletter writer’s view.&nbsp;



The EVM is a software environment. In my mind, the only way it directly implicates ETH the asset is by way of gas fees, but Circle is <a href="https://www.theblock.co/post/366540/circle-stablecoin-focused-evm-compatible-layer-1-blockchain-arc">using</a> USDC for gas fees. In Stripe’s case, it’s hard for me to imagine that the online payments behemoth won’t fight tooth and nail to pay as little in Ethereum gas fees as possible. Plus, both Stripe and Circle could put in jeopardy Ethereum’s mantle as the blockchain for stablecoins.



You have to squint a little bit to see why initiatives like Robinhood’s layer-2 would necessarily be bullish for ETH the asset. You may have to close your eyes fully to argue these EVM L1s are bullish ETH.



Still, Tempo or Arc seeing significant success could also turn out to be pretty bad for Solana, which is now 0/2 in the sweepstakes for big fintechs coming onchain this market cycle.



“Big companies launching L1s is kind of a rejection of the L2 thesis, but it&#8217;s even more of a rejection of the Solana thesis,” said mteam, the pseudonymous co-founder of Ethereum infrastructure firm Spire Labs.



When I asked them to elaborate further, mteam added: “I think the Solana thesis is more like this: Apps will want a shared state layer and thus will choose not to launch their own chains if they don&#8217;t need to. Any sort of L1 OR L2 premium being important to apps/infra/institutions looks to me like that thesis is even further from the truth vs. Ethereum&#8217;s L2 thesis.”



Basically, if major firms launch blockchains rather than launching apps on Solana’s blockchain, then the L2 thesis — which basically says most blockchain activity will take place on layer-2s settling to Ethereum — is less wrong than the Solana thesis.



“[This] is nonsense,” Helius CEO Mert Mumtaz said in response to mteam’s post. “It’s like saying ‘Yeah, the girl I love didn&#8217;t marry me, but she also didn&#8217;t marry another guy I don&#8217;t like and that&#8217;s worse for him!’&#8221;



I also think the bullish EVM L1 story lacks a value accrual mechanism for ETH — why would Stripe or Circle care about ether as money or a reserve currency? But, sure: The Solana thesis has not exactly been vindicated by where institutions have been deploying recently.



Although it may not really matter. Large firms approach blockchain with a range of seriousness and technical chops, and just because a big name announces a chain does not mean that chain will be a commercial success. <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/soneium-mainnet-censorship-complaints">Remember Soneium</a>?



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Circle

Do Stripe, Circle L1s refute the Solana thesis?

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>.



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



The most-repeated words on Circle’s first earnings call as a public company came from analysts: “Congrats on the IPO.”



But another prevailing sentiment related to the stablecoin issuer’s upcoming launch of a layer-1 blockchain called Arc. USDC will be the native asset for transaction fees; the blockchain’s litepaper notes the network would also support other local stablecoins.&nbsp;



Designed to let financial institutions build products and services onchain, Arc is set to go live by the year’s end, executives said.&nbsp;&nbsp;



“[With] Arc, we want to underpin all stablecoin finance — payments, FX, capital markets applications,” Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire said on this morning’s call.&nbsp;



This follows a Fortune <a href="https://fortune.com/crypto/2025/08/11/stripe-blockchain-tempo-paradigm/">report</a> that Stripe is building a payments-focused layer-1 blockchain of its own (you might remember <a href="https://fortune.com/crypto/2025/08/11/stripe-blockchain-tempo-paradigm/">Stripe’s purchase</a> of stablecoin platform Bridge last year). And Robinhood <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/robinhood-l2-staking-us">revealing a layer-2 blockchain plan</a> too.&nbsp;



It’s becoming harder to find people denying the growth potential of a stablecoin market that currently stands at $260 billion. USDC in circulation grew to ~$61 billion at the end of Q2 — a 90% year-over-year increase. That figure was ~$65 billion on Aug. 10.



Allaire mentioned more trading firms, asset managers and the like wanting to move between tokenized yield-bearing collateral and digital cash. Our readers have <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/tokenized-yield-funds-complement-stablecoins">heard that before</a>.&nbsp;



Circle got into this game in January via <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/circle-hashnote-deal-tokenized-money">its buy of Hashnote</a>, issuer of the US Yield Coin (USYC). It more recently revealed last month that Binance institutional customers could use USYC as off-exchange collateral for derivatives trades.&nbsp;



“We hope and expect that we will deploy this kind of architecture in more digital asset exchanges and ultimately on major traditional clearinghouses,” Allaire said.



More broadly, Circle’s Q2 revenue/reserve income totaled $658 million. The company attributed its quarterly net loss of $482 million to IPO-related non-cash charges. Circle’s adjusted EBITDA of $126 million was 3% above Wall Street expectations.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;



CRCL shares were trading around $166 at 1:30 p.m. ET — up 3% on the day. The stock <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/circle-shares-nyse-day-one">quickly surged</a> way above its IPO price but has dropped more than 40% from the nearly $300 peak it reached on June 23.



Compass Point analysts Ed Engel and Abdullah Dilawar said in a Tuesday note that they expected Circle to notch a higher gross margin than the $251 million it tallied in Q2. That was because of Binance’s USDC balances dropping and Coinbase’s on-platform USDC being down from Q1, they noted.



<figure class="wp-block-image is-resized"><img decoding="async" src="https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXcldVIdgacTgvGtlNfg0uPsREEiZ2InIPT7jLbykaZHbOYhJEH6UceZ_nJ9lP-EXrxndaO6n7gq4AQu7W_R4NTx7CWJyPaNBa8yFM3VuDMj-yh3AeDf-oApYPXqtyuKW11KckeRJQ?key=DujvNo2W2nzBFlIV8EXMUw" alt="" style="width:673px;height:auto"/></figure>



Alongside the Binance USYC news, Circle last month <a href="https://www.circle.com/pressroom/circle-and-okx-partner-to-deepen-usdc-liquidity-worldwide">linked up</a> with OKX and fintech <a href="https://www.circle.com/pressroom/fis-partners-with-circle-to-unlock-stablecoin-money-movement-functionality-for-financial-institution-customers">FIS</a>.&nbsp;



“While CRCL&#8217;s lower margin guidance could be due to conservatism, CRCL&#8217;s recent partnerships don&#8217;t seem to benefitting the near-term margin outlook,” Engel and Dilawar wrote.&nbsp;



Clearly the company continues to build products, with its Circle Payments Network launch in May, and now Arc. As for <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/crypto-ma-mergers-feeding-frenzy-kraken">inorganic growth via M&amp;A</a>, Allaire said the company would be “careful and deliberate.”



He added: “I don’t think our strategy here is to go try and do big, complex acquisitions to kind of throw additional business lines next to what we do. I think we take a full-stack integrated platform view…and so we only want to do things that really fit clearly in that kind of product mandate.”



Circle obviously remains a top stock to watch amid a growing universe of public crypto firms.



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Takeaways from Circle’s first post-IPO earnings call

For most Starknet dapps, attracting EVM users requires getting over a UX speed bump: set up a Starknet wallet, bridge assets over, and learn a new account system.&nbsp;



Extended, a decentralized <a href="https://blockworks.co/tag/perpetuals">perpetual futures</a> exchange formerly called X10 and built by a team of ex-Revolut developers, decided to skip that playbook. The exchange today announced it has migrated from StarkEx to Starknet <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/extended-hybrid-derivatives-exchange">as planned</a>, and now offers more than 50 markets and leverage up to 100x.&nbsp;



But that’s table stakes these days; its real hook is that traders coming from <a href="https://blockworks.co/tag/evm">EVM</a> DEXs don’t have to bridge to Starknet at all.



“With Extended EVM users don&#8217;t need to touch [or] interact with Starknet,” CEO Ruslan Fakhrutdinov told Blockworks. “If you deposit from <a href="https://blockworks.co/tag/arbitrum">Arbitrum</a>, you can withdraw to any other EVM chain, but if the wallet under which the account was created is an EVM wallet, you will not be able to withdraw to Starknet.”



Starknet wallet users — such as Ready (formerly Argent) and Braavos — are also welcome but will deposit and withdraw only to or from Starknet.



It’s a hard split no other Starknet dapp is running today, and it works because of Starknet’s native <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/ethereum-devs-debate-account-abstraction">account abstraction</a>, according to <a href="https://blockworks.co/tag/starkware">StarkWare</a> CEO Eli Ben-Sasson.



“You can support any kind of signatures. So you&#8217;re still using <a href="https://blockworks.co/tag/metamask">Metamask</a> and these things to sign on your transactions,” Ben-Sasson told Blockworks. Hardware wallets, EVM wallets, even Bitcoin wallets can connect if dapps want to manage such an integration.



Under the hood, Extended is temporarily running two versions — the original StarkEx, StarkWare’s earlier scaling engine, and the new Starknet one — but will nudge users over in a three-phase process: two weeks of dual operation, two weeks of reduce-only on StarkEx, and then a final freeze with forced position closures.



Points and trading history carry over, and new accounts now spin up directly on Starknet.



Extended is arriving with some early momentum — average daily volumes of $319 million, open interest above $55 million, and a 55% repeat depositor rate in its Community Vault program, the team reports.



For EVM traders, it’s an unusual offer: a Starknet-settled perp venue you can reach from six major EVM chains.



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXeEO-gIfduJkmBv_w4b_q9FLroYujEalA8Yr4uGHGdZMts8TFprRESWM3d4J_KWUONaMJFvbeTdsUEbyMutQx5tZvCb9_3sSOQD_3nj3TrgGQVkE3-McFN6OnfSr5DkClAsRLqh?key=i_QzdzulFbDnwJUC7Ppvjw" alt=""/></figure>



Source: extended.exchange



The offering includes TradFi pairs like EUR/USD, gold, oil, and an SPX index. Arbitrum rival Ostium <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/ostium-dex-points-rwa-arbitrum">has been touting the same</a>. On Starknet, Extended competes with <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/starkware-appchain-defi-cefi">Paradex</a>, with both angling for a CEX-like user experience.



The Extended team says the migration sets up a bigger product roadmap, including unified margin, integrated lending, and eventually spot.



By walling off the Starknet side from the EVM side, Extended is betting it can capture both audiences without forcing either to change habits. For Starknet, that means more on-chain volume. For EVM traders, it means tapping into a new set of markets with the same wallet, networks, and flows they already use.&nbsp;



If the model sticks, it could be a template for how non-Ethereum chains court EVM liquidity with less friction.



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Ethereum

EVM in front, Starknet in the back

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



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Remember Bigcoin?&nbsp;



If you don’t, I don’t blame you. Its bubble popped fast.&nbsp;



The Abstract-based crypto “mining” game saw a sudden surge of activity back in April, reaching a cumulative user count of nearly 70,000 <a href="https://dune.com/Marcov/bigcoin">according</a> to some <a href="https://dune.com/hawkyang/bigcoin">dashboards</a>.&nbsp;



Players had to buy a virtual room and spend the game’s token, BIG, to add passive BIG mining rigs. Those rigs take the form of pixelated computers, GPUs, animals like Pudgy Penguins, or other objects. The rigs earned players more BIG over time.



The original game loop was about earning BIG and expanding their facilities. To get a larger room that can fit more mining rigs, players also have to — you guessed it — pay with BIG.



But initial hype around the game didn’t last. By June, the game was seeing less than 40 new users joining daily.



BIG’s price remains <a href="https://www.geckoterminal.com/abstract/pools/0x4e8e8cc1c6548aa41ecb187967d377bf15673c15">down 93%</a> from its April 11 all-time high.&nbsp;



But it’s climbed about 290% in the past month.



What gives? Its creator, an anon who goes by “Bigtoshi,” announced his departure from the project last month and has <a href="https://x.com/satoshibigmoto/status/1944756770121175159">handed</a> it over to a small group of community members.



One of Bigcoin 2.0’s core contributors is a crypto entrepreneur (and reported ex-game developer) who goes by the pseudonym <a href="https://decrypt.co/138765/how-elon-musk-parody-twitter-account-spawned-gaming-startup">BoredElon</a>.&nbsp;



Bored, who takes protecting his real identity seriously, describes himself as a Bigcoin whale. He’s tried his hand at a few different crypto projects in recent years, from his BoredBox crypto gaming lootbox idea to his Edison metaverse project. Neither of those projects are currently active.



<figure class="wp-block-image is-resized"><img decoding="async" src="https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXdVoMCsZjPrmZWCCyID4jEv6PNnHoJ-NHeg4zqc2-UUlFTEdOwKIwAtQK-Bt0cuMX-UyyFBHx4-wR9THWY6nZ8wVEEOmMfh5PSKH8IDV68-q7hfmmRNn_lrZQJD_Pu464ZE8Hv9ag?key=Gx3OHwQaZj763ylvmQcyCQ" alt="" style="width:558px;height:auto"/></figure>



The <a href="https://docs.bigcoin.tech/">new Bigcoin</a> is being overseen by a “handful” of community members, including Bored, plus a trader who goes by EJR, and a few others. They’ve just <a href="https://x.com/bigcoinmining/status/1954936991285453017">turned</a> the pixelated “mining” rigs into over <a href="https://opensea.io/collection/bigcoin-miners">29,000 Abstract NFTs</a> on OpenSea in a way that generates royalties so the new team can build up a treasury to reinvest into further building out the game.



The new team also wants to be able to add more BIG liquidity so that buyers won’t have to pay a lot in slippage.



Of course, BIG’s price crash was nothing new. Like many, many low-cap tokens before it, BIG’s price spiked upon launch, only to dump and trail downward for months after. That price action, plus the fact that those who started “mining” early got more rewards, spurred (arguably valid) accusations that the whole thing was just a Ponzi.



<figure class="wp-block-image size-large is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1548" height="1020" src="https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/image-1.png?w=1024&amp;h=1024" alt="" class="wp-image-106017" style="width:720px;height:auto" srcset="https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/image-1.png?w=1548 1548w, https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/image-1.png?w=300 300w, https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/image-1.png?w=1024 1024w, https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/image-1.png?w=768 768w, https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/image-1.png?w=1536 1536w, https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/image-1.png?w=390 390w, https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/image-1.png?w=396 396w, https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/image-1.png?w=332 332w, https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/image-1.png?w=80 80w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1548px) 100vw, 1548px" /><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Image: BIG price history via GeckoTerminal.&nbsp;</figcaption></figure>



Bored said this week that BIG’s price “got out of control” when it first launched.&nbsp;



As a result, that created some unrealistic expectations. And, like with most tokens, the price plunge spurred anger from those who bought the top.&nbsp;&nbsp;



“The problem with a lot of tokens today is they can be created in seconds,” Bored said during a <a href="https://x.com/i/broadcasts/1MnGnPYYoyjxO">livestream</a> of the game yesterday, where he displayed his “mining” facilities onscreen.



“I think the first iteration of Bigcoin definitely felt like a Ponzi,” Bored told me when I asked him during the stream if the <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/bigcoin-mining-game-faces-ponzi-allegations-amid-token-price-swings">“Ponzi” accusations</a> were fair. “I don’t think the current version of Bigcoin is a Ponzi at all,” he said.



Over half of the BIG that&#8217;s been mined has already been burned, with over 9 million burned out of 16.9 million mined (BIG has a capped 21 million supply).



Michael Lee, co-inventor of Abstract and former VP at Activision Blizzard, confirmed to me in a message that Bored and Bigtoshi aren’t the same person.



“Bigcoin’s handover to its community mirrors Bitcoin — its success depends on outgrowing its founder and becoming a project owned by everyone, yet no one. In this story, notable members like Bored step into the role of Michael Saylor.” Lee said.



He added: “With merge mining, Bigcoin’s promise is to evolve into a fair token launcher — free from KOLs, whales, cabals, bundlers, and market makers — for the people. Like Bitcoin, put in the work and mine the tokens.”



Whether Bigcoin 2.0 succeeds in this way is still up in the air, of course. But about 215 unique wallets have already bought into the new NFTs, suggesting at least some believe it can happen.



Update 8/12/2025 at 3:50 pm E.T.: wording around token burning changed for clarity.



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Abstract mining game Bigcoin plots comeback after BIG crash

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">
“The limited liability corporation is the greatest single discovery of modern times.”



— Nicholas Butler, Nobel Laureate
</blockquote>



When the novel but seemingly innocuous idea of “limited liability” came before parliament in 1856, it proved surprisingly contentious.



It’s hard to fathom now, but before then, investors were typically on the hook for the debts incurred by the companies they invested in.



Imagine getting a bill in 2008 for your share of the $619 billion of debt that Lehman Brothers defaulted on, just because you bought the stock in 2007.



In the 1850s, though, many in the House of Lords thought that was exactly how investing should work.



Lord Monteagle, for example, <a href="https://hansard.parliament.uk/Lords/1856-03-14/debates/c537cbb3-78b9-49f9-a288-e0fa2f06eee1/LimitedLiability">warned</a> that limited liability was a practice &#8220;of a most dangerous character” because it would “excite speculation and gambling.&#8221;



Lord Overstone agreed, predicting that limited liability would “stir up the terrible demon of speculation” and “make trade more like a vast lottery wheel than that field of steady honesty and cautious enterprise.&#8221;



Earl Grey even put down his cup of tea long enough to warn that speculators starting limited liability companies would recruit “dupes to join him in the most absurd projects.&#8221;



In the end, the Joint Stock Companies Act passed with relative ease, but the concept of limited liability made even the businessmen who stood to benefit uneasy.



Would creditors still lend if companies could simply walk away from their debts?



They would, as it turned out — and at a scale previously unimagined.&nbsp;



Limited liability made it possible to raise giant pools of capital from thousands of small investors, who no longer had to fear putting their personal wealth at risk.



As corporations grew larger and more complex, however, so too did the problem of governance: Shareholders had no binding authority over those who managed the companies they nominally owned.



Fortunately, the mid-19th century also saw Acts of Parliament in the UK and general incorporation laws in the US that made it standard for shareholders to have a binding say in how companies were managed.



This marked a shift from shareholder input as a courtesy to shareholder power as law.



By the turn of the century, the combination of limited liability and shareholder governance had proven to be a genuine revolution.



“I weigh my words,” Nicholas Butler declared in 1911, “when I say that in my judgment the limited liability corporation is the greatest single discovery of modern times.”



“Even steam and electricity are far less important than the limited liability corporation,” he added, “and they would be reduced to comparative impotence without it.”&nbsp;



But it wasn’t only big industrial corporations that stood to benefit from these ideas.



Decades later, the same principles of limited liability and shareholder governance were finally extended to small, closely held businesses.



Not in London, this time, but Wyoming.



In 1977, the sparsely populated Cowboy State became the first place to establish the limited liability company (LLC) — to not much reaction. Few knew what to make of this part-corporation, part-partnership hybrid entity at the time.&nbsp;&nbsp;



LLCs only caught on in the 1990s after the IRS finally ruled on their tax treatment, and the other 49 states finally recognized them.&nbsp;



With those hurdles cleared, LLCs proved wildly popular because they extended the liability protections and legal powers of a corporation to smaller, more flexible groups — without the formalities of corporate governance.



Now, LLCs outnumber corporations in the US by more than 10 to one.



In 2024, Wyoming made corporate history again by extending that same liability shield and legal recognition to decentralized crypto communities.



The Decentralized Unincorporated Nonprofit Association (DUNA) was created to give DAOs legal standing without forcing them to sacrifice decentralization.



A DUNA can do things that would normally require a hierarchy of executive decision makers — enter into contracts, appear in court, pay taxes —&nbsp; but remain governed entirely by its community of token holders.



Importantly, DUNAs shield governance participants from personal liability for collective decisions.



They also make those decisions legally binding: DUNAs make onchain token holder votes enforceable off-chain, so insiders can’t ignore them.



Like previous innovations in governance, DUNAs have been slow to catch on.&nbsp;



DAOs have so far preferred to incorporate in the Cayman Islands, become a Swiss foundation or just forgo legal existence entirely.&nbsp;



This afternoon, however, the Uniswap Foundation <a href="https://gov.uniswap.org/t/rfc-establish-uniswap-governance-as-duni-a-wyoming-duna/25770">proposed</a> that UNI token holders adopt a Wyoming-registered DUNA, with the new entity to be known as “DUNI.”



DUNI, the proposal says, would be “purpose-built to preserve Uniswap’s decentralized governance structure, while enabling engagement with the offchain world.”



In other words, UNI token holders would continue to govern the protocol and the purpose of the DUNA would simply be to ensure that their decisions are executed.



The proposal offered some examples: “Governance can turn on the protocol fee, fund innovation, form partnerships and navigate legal obligations with confidence.”



That first of these — the protocol fee — will get the most attention.



But I don’t think it should, simply because the “N” in DUNA stands for non-profit.



That doesn’t mean DUNI will be a charity — DUNAs are permitted to earn and distribute revenue.



It does, however, mean that DUNI is intended for something other than maximizing profits for token holders.



Wyoming law puts “a ceiling on the value that a blockchain network can extract from users and compensate members with,” as Miles Jennings and David Kerr wrote in their <a href="https://a16zcrypto.com/posts/article/duna-for-daos/?utm_source=chatgpt.com">intro explainer</a> on DUNAs.



They note that some may “balk at hurdles to value extraction.”&nbsp;



But that, presumably, is what the crypto-inspired law intended: Crypto was meant to be about creating value, not extracting it.



If DUNAs become as significant as LLCs, it will be because it also enabled new kinds of communities to operate in the legal and financial system without adopting its old hierarchies — but also because it gives legal standing to “open blockchain networks that function more like public infrastructure than proprietary technology,” as Jennings and Kerr write.



I’m not sure how popular that will prove — much of crypto may have gone too far toward the “speculation and gambling” that Lord Monteagle warned us about.



But if Uniswap token holders vote to become a Wyoming DUNA, it will at least make an alternative trail to decentralization plain for all to see.



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Did crypto just have its LLC moment?

Donovan Choy

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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ORCA is up 19.6% on the week as the Orca DAO prepares to deploy its treasury assets toward a token buyback initiative.



The governance <a href="https://v2.realms.today/dao/66Du7mXgS2KMQBUk6m9h3TszMjqZqdWhsG3Duuf69VNW/proposal/7tCCK3wSWvbRcQwvSuVRgvBFDqsZRNRSB9xZLjST5tKd/overview">proposal</a>, which opened for voting last Wednesday, would see the staking of treasury assets into the Orca validator node.&nbsp;



Then the Orca Council will withdraw assets when “deemed appropriate” to conduct buybacks over the next 24 months.



As of today, Orca’s <a href="https://solscan.io/account/DWo8SNtdBDuebAEeVDf7cWBQ6DUvoDbS7K4QTrQvYS1S">treasury</a> holds 55,127 SOL ($9.9 million) and 503k USDC.



The vote for the proposal ends in about 24 hours, and is likely to pass with currently a 100% “yes” response and a 51% quorum already met.



Orca is Solana’s third-largest DEX, with about $19-20 billion in July trading volumes.



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXfP5yYyYHcGNpHtbtSQ_NqLzNqoJagS8KYCzZEwz6LJcjnaU1Tvh3T49hWFks2QtJul3E9JbTevgoZRebjxDI5rmbL6KPMnzwcNDfh6vtTgKduRAzPN_e4O3RuBZBfJOA7zaIhL?key=B-8owsZhO3CYf42-JzF2GQ" alt=""/></figure>



On a YTD basis, Orca has generated about <a href="https://defillama.com/protocol/fees/orca">$115 million</a> in fees.



50% of these fees go toward protocol development, while 30% are directed to the treasury wallet that fuels ORCA buybacks should the aforementioned governance proposal pass.



The remaining 20% of fees are allocated to a separate ongoing ORCA buyback initiative that will eventually go toward ORCA staking.



The Orca team told me that staking is slated for launch in September, so that’s two potential value accrual streams for ORCA token holders in the near term.



On a market cap-to-revenue basis, ORCA trades about 24% lower (7.36x) than RAY (9.63x), which may suggest some relative upside for ORCA if revenues are consistent.&nbsp;



But that’s a big if when you take into account the rise of <a href="https://lightspeed-4bed7b.beehiiv.com/p/seek-peek">prop AMMs</a> on Solana that points to an increasingly hyper-competitive and commoditized DEX landscape.



Orca isn’t resting on its laurels, though. The team also launched <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/orca-solana-token-launchpad">Wavebreak in beta</a> two weeks ago, a memecoin launchpad built on Orca’s own proprietary in-house tech stack.



Compared to your average launchpad, Orca’s Wavebreak is <a href="https://docs.orca.so/wavebreak/what-is-wavebreak?utm_source=chatgpt.com">designed</a> to be “human-first,” meaning tokens in the bonding phase are designed to be protected from sniper bots.



Outside of Solana, Orca is also the dominant DEX on the SVM-based Ethereum L2 chain, Eclipse. Orca’s Eclipse deployment has far lower usage than Solana, though — about <a href="https://defillama.com/protocol/dexs/orca">93 million</a> in July volumes vs. 20 billion on Solana.



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<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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Orca DEX plans buybacks and token staking

Vitalik Buterin thinks Ethereum’s ZK proving stack is turning a corner, and wants the ecosystem to use that momentum to eliminate one of its most persistent UX roadblocks: week-long L2 withdrawals on optimistic <a href="https://blockworks.co/tag/rollups">rollups</a>.



Fraud proof windows — a requirement for canonical bridging from rollups like <a href="https://blockworks.co/tag/base">Base</a> back to Ethereum — are “simply far too long for people,” Buterin wrote in a <a href="https://x.com/VitalikButerin/status/1953131251436818684">post</a> on X last week.



“This creates large incentives to instead use solutions with unacceptable trust assumptions (eg. multisigs/MPC) that undermine the whole point of having L2s instead of fully independent L1s,” he said.



The centrality of Ethereum mainnet as an economic link will be a key factor going forward, Buterin has suggested in a new <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNSnYIjoqOM">interview</a> published today.



“The thing that keeps the L1 relevant is where assets — even if most of the activity happens on L2s — are issued on the L1,” Buterin said, adding, “Encouraging assets to actually be issued on L1 and making it economically viable to do that…is one of these really important pieces in terms of keeping the L1 central.”



Historically, optimistic proof systems required multi-day challenge periods. Getting rid of that limitation requires <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/brief-history-zk-tech">a shift away from optimistic proofs</a>, as some validity proof-based rollups already have. The technological lift is much lower today.



“ZKVMs are, like, almost production-ready this year in a way that was totally not true…even one year ago,” Buterin said.



Against that backdrop, last week’s <a href="https://blockworks.co/podcast/0xresearch/da41bb88-4f69-11ef-b450-077f7ab33a70">Succinct Prover Network</a> mainnet launch is more than just another infra story.&nbsp;



Succinct’s decentralized marketplace lets applications submit proof requests while independent provers compete to fulfill them, receiving payments in the new <a href="https://blockworks.co/price/prove">PROVE</a> token. The network already supports more than 35 protocols and has fulfilled over five million such requests securing $4 billion in value, according to Succinct Labs.



Developers are able to access global proving power using an API call, with no custom infrastructure required. That will help commoditize proof generation, co-founder Uma Roy said, with the goal to make verifiable computation “the standard for how crypto integrates with the broader internet,” making the kind of frequent validity proofs Buterin describes more economical.



Tarun Chitra, <a href="https://x.com/SuccinctLabs/status/1953139765345435992">speaking</a> on the Succinct Labs launch stream, framed the long-term impact in terms that go beyond “faster and cheaper” L2s:



“If ETH mainnet has ZK as a first-class citizen, you&#8217;ll be able to do this type of stuff, like using your collateral on mainnet somewhere else without bridging,” Chitra said.



Buterin also outlined a path beyond the one-hour target: “In the longer term, we can solve this with aggregation: N proofs from N rollups (plus txs from privacy-protocol users) can be replaced by a single proof that proves the validity of the N proofs. This becomes economical to submit once per slot, enabling the endgame: near-instant native cross-L2 asset movement through the L1.”



If these developments become reality, the capital efficiency gains could be significant. Faster canonical exits reduce reliance on trusted bridge operators, free up liquidity for market-makers and asset issuers, and concentrate settlement activity — and ETH demand — back on the base layer.



Steven Goldfeder, co-founder of <a href="https://blockworks.co/tag/offchain-labs">Offchain Labs</a> building <a href="https://blockworks.co/tag/arbitrum">Arbitrum</a> is less confident that a pure ZK approach is ready for prime time, however.



Despite the work to accelerate progress on validity proofs, “we haven&#8217;t reached the tipping point yet where ZK technology — particularly in the form that it&#8217;s packaged up in these full-on ZK rollups — is competitive with optimistic technology, and that&#8217;s in terms of speed cost and maturity, basically the technical parity,” Goldfeder told Blockworks.



Even so, Arbitrum’s cryptography team is top-notch and has endeavored to take a non-biased view on the competing architectures over time.&nbsp;



“We&#8217;ll probably integrate a more hybrid variant of zero knowledge proofs at some point,” Goldfeder said. “So rather than go all in, and say this is ZK rollup only, it&#8217;s more of an optimistic rollup that can be closed out more quickly by ZK proof.”



Over the weekend, ETH closed at its third-highest weekly close ever, and it’s now within 10% of its (non-inflation-adjusted) all-time high. Part of that bid may be macro and <a href="https://blockworks.co/podcast/empire/7ffa3c40-6e62-11f0-a847-7f882b11347f">DAT driven</a>, but part may also be the market starting to price in the key technical pieces falling into place: maturing ZK tech, decentralized proving capacity, and a clear path to solving interoperability and UX woes.



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