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Crypto cycles tend to have two big innovations: something real and something ridiculous that distracts retail, pumps the wrong narrative and eventually implodes the market.



We've had a ton of innovations this cycle, but none have really stuck because memecoins showed up early and stole the show. However, if recent momentum from projects like Helium is anything to go by, the current run might get its more "serious" cycle innovation after all, thanks to decentralized physical infrastructure networks (DePIN).



DePIN uses crypto incentives and public coordination to bootstrap real-world infrastructure (like wireless coverage, sensor networks, GPU clusters, energy grids). Instead of billion-dollar telcos or centralized cloud platforms, the infrastructure gets built by communities and aligned with token rewards. In theory, it's the internet's final Frankenstein, turning crypto into a tool to build digital utility outward into meatspace.



In recent weeks, Helium has hit new all-time highs in DAO voting participation, $MOBILE validator onboarding and usage-based rewards. It’s also passed major protocol milestones: expanding 5G coverage to over 4,500 radios across 2,000+ US cities and driving real-world traffic to Helium Mobile's $20/month unlimited plan — now sold in 3,000 Walmart stores.



Take that in for a moment: These are actual phones using a crypto-backed, community-powered DePIN network.



Traditional telecom is bloated, centralized and hostile to innovation. Infrastructure costs are egregious, rural service is often non-existent, and MVNOs are locked into opaque backend deals. Helium is flipping this by letting users deploy coverage infrastructure, earn rewards based on network demand, and manage protocol upgrades through its onchain governance systems. It's basically Uber-for-cell-towers (ew, I know. Such a cheugy analogy at this point), except instead of

Solana’s biggest DePIN is setting records

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As the global trade war rages on, US companies navigating earnings season are being cautious to avoid forward-looking statements. 



We’ve already seen Delta Airlines pull its 2025 guidance, with executives saying tariff policy  “uncertainty” makes future projections challenging. CarMax also withdrew its long-term growth timeline. 



“Why put a target out there that’s really speculative, not knowing exactly where this environment is going to go?” CarMax CEO and president Bill Nash said on the company’s earnings call earlier this month. 



United Airlines executives took a different approach, opting on their earnings call to provide investors with two vastly different profit forecasts. On the high end — should conditions remain “stable” — adjusted earnings per share could be as high as $13.50. On the low end — if the US economy enters a recession — EPS could dip to $7. 



President Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariff policies may not be directly reflected in Q1 earnings. But we know that companies and consumers have changed their behavior in the past few months in anticipation of a global trade shift. 



US retail sales were up 1.4% in March, with big-ticket items like cars leading the way — a sign consumers were looking to lock in prices ahead of tariffs going into effect. The US ISM manufacturing inventories index also rose last month, signaling companies may have been stockpiling goods and supplies before import prices go up. 



The first of the so-called Magnificent 7 (Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia and Tesla) are scheduled to report earnings this week. Tesla kicks things off tomorrow, and Alphabet’s call is slated for Thursday. 



Tesla will be particularly interesting to watch — because of CEO Elon Musk’s ties to the White House and because tariffs are expected to impact the electric vehicle company.

Tesla to kick off Mag 7 earnings as more companies withdraw guidance

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Ah, “Base is for everyone.” If you haven’t heard that by now, go catch up quickly with this story.



Here’s a hot take: Base is not sexy. 



Jesse Pollak, Coinbase’s head of Base and Coinbase Wallet, has been on a posting spree since Base launched some “content coins” that pumped, dumped, and then pumped again. The first one was “Base is for everyone,” a token with seemingly no purpose other than to promote the idea that everyone should tokenize everything for profit but also, for funzies. 



One Pollak post with a GIF full of different phrases declared, among other things, that “Base is for pimping” while another made the claim that “Base is for squirting.” Those two in particular caused a stir on Crypto Twitter.



Both have shock value — and are also just a bit bizarre to state at all. In response to one post about the latter statement, Pollak said we should respect “provocative artists.” In another reply, he said he would love it if someone launched a “better OnlyFans on Base.”



But the company behind Base, Coinbase, isn’t for everyone.



As some have pointed out, Pollak’s wish for a Base-based OnlyFans is ironic considering Coinbase’s current terms block anyone from using Coinbase who conducts business around “any sexually-related services such as prostitution, escorts, pay-per view, [or] adult live chat features.” 



Because OnlyFans involves pay-per-view and chat features, OnlyFans and creators making similar content independently or on other platforms would be banned from using Coinbase.



Coinbase has banned all types of sexually suggestive work and sex work without distinction, lumping in lewd OnlyFans photos with activities that are illegal in most states.



When I posted about this, a number of reply guys didn’t deny that Coinbase is doing this. But they tried the good ol’ “it’s a blockchain” argument,

Coinbase's Jesse Pollak calls for ‘better OnlyFans on Base,’ apologizes for post about ‘pimping’

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“ETH sucks, it has no value accrual, and the L1 is dead,” says everyone with an X account. “Want Ethereum to return to its glory days? Forget the L2 roadmap — scale the L1!”



It appears the Ethereum inner circles are finally listening.




Our discussions about the Layer 1 scaling roadmap have been extensive, and the feedback so far suggests that the community appreciates our ambition. Turning that ambition into reality now depends on the focus of the core development teams and researchers.Following the recent…— Tomasz K. Stańczak (@tkstanczak) April 20, 2025




A new Vitalik blog post published yesterday lays out an exploratory long-term and “radical” plan to scale the execution layer of the Ethereum L1. It’s a seemingly stark acknowledgement of all the past year’s complaints. 







The upgrade, if done, may bring efficiency gains of over 100x to the L1, Vitalik says.



How would it actually be done?



Vitalik’s proposal looks to replace the beloved Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) with a general purpose RISC-V virtual machine — all while maintaining the backward-compatibility of old EVM contracts.



What is a RISC-V virtual machine?



“RISC-V” is a hardware instruction set architecture (ISA). The simplest way to think of it is as a standardized language that defines communication between the hardware and software.



Though RISC-V was not originally built for blockchain purposes, its open design allowed crypto developers to leverage it for building virtual machines that could generate zero-knowledge proofs at far lower resource costs than the EVM.



The outcome is what’s known as a zero knowledge virtual machine (zkVM), which enables developers to write applications in high level languages like Rust without needing to be trained in cryptography.



In the absence of zkVMs, companies that want to leverage zk tech to build a

Vitalik Buterin suggests replacing EVM with RISC-V to scale Ethereum

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Reading back the official transcript of a secret five-hour meeting between Julian Assange and then-Google CEO Eric Schmidt — released 12 years ago this week — gives an equally eerie feeling.



Along with veteran global affairs fixer Jared Cohen, who was head of internal think tank Google Ideas (now Jigsaw), Schmidt was co-writing a book, The New Digital Age, about the intersection of US global power and social media. It was set in the backdrop of the so-called “Twitter revolutions” of the Arab Spring in the early 2010s. 



The meeting was set under pretence of research for that book, with Schmidt and Cohen visiting a number of tech leaders around the same time. Assange published his account of the meeting in his own 2014 book When Google Met WikiLeaks. 



WikiLeaks was highly active in mid-2011, even with Assange under house arrest in rural UK as he fought extradition to Sweden. “Schmidt plunged in at the deep end, straightaway quizzing me on the organizational and technological underpinnings of WikiLeaks,” Assange wrote. WikiLeaks had just begun accepting bitcoin donations after a high-profile banking blockade cut them off from Bank of America, Mastercard, Visa, Western Union and PayPal.



Assange didn’t think much of the visit at the time, and had considered Schmidt “a politically unambitious Silicon Valley engineer, a relic of the good old days of computer science graduate culture on the West Coast.” 



But he felt differently after some digging into Google’s confluence with US foreign policy. “While WikiLeaks had been deeply involved in publishing the inner archive of the US State Department, the US State Department had, in effect, snuck into the WikiLeaks command center and hit me up for a free lunch.”



Bitcoin came up a few times during that lunch. The first was a little awkward: Schmidt, a former director of software engineering at Sun

WikiLeaks, Google and Bitcoin: What happened in 2011

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M&A szn is still going strong. 



Kado Software, the Web3 payments infrastructure company, was acquired by Swapped.com. 



The team declined to disclose the terms of the deal, but it plans to grow the US operations for Swapped.com, which is a Denmark-based firm. 



Emery Andrew, Kado’s founder, told me that the team’s been weighing its options for a while — from debating a fundraise to looking for the right fit to acquire it. 



It was an obvious choice, he added. Especially because Andrew will stay on to help helm the US operations and product expansion. He teased that they already have some products in the works, but they’re not yet ready to disclose them.



“By merging our expertise and vision, we can accelerate the creation of best-in-class Web3 products and UX, achieving more than either team could on its own. In addition, the US market expertise is something of great value to us,” Swapped.com CEO Thomas Franklin said in a statement. 



The company — which, transparently, was not one I was very familiar with before chatting with Andrew — is fairly new, only about three years old. Its focus is on expanding Web3 payments, which is what drew it to Kado. 



For Andrew, it’s about building the “next generation of crypto-native payments products.”



“It’s a natural progression that payments is a race to zero in terms of fees, as more players enter the market, it’s natural that there’s more competition,” he told me. Right now, it’s still quite expensive, but Andrew’s hoping to take a page out of the stablecoin book when looking at how Kado — and Swapped.com — can lower fees for users.  



And now we wait to see what products these two have up their sleeves. 



Note: Blockworks co-founder Jason Yanowitz is an investor in Kado.







Get the news in your inbox. Explore Blockworks newsletters:




Blockworks Daily: Unpacking crypto

Exclusive: Kado Software acquired by Swapped.com

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“I think the industry a year ago was messy, was very competitive,” LayerZero CEO Bryan Pellegrino told me. But it’s been “cleared up” thanks to the friendlier environment and overall adoption. 



Last month, the company saw $6 billion in transfers, he added, and $100 billion worth of assets were built on LayerZero.



Admittedly, Pellegrino added, he still thinks of crypto as an underdog industry, one that’s fairly small. But now that he’s regularly meeting with the BlackRocks and PayPals of the world, it might be time for a mindset shift. 



LayerZero dominates with a whopping 75% market share, introducing a new set of challenges for Pellegrino and his team.



“It's easy when you're fighting for market share, because it's very clear what you need to do. But then you get to 75% market share. And … the last 25% doesn't seem as incrementally important,” he explained. 



“How do we go from $6 billion a month to $100 billion a month? How do I make it so that every exchange that runs entire teams of people in the back end to deal with inventory management … you're basically custodying these things and interacting, and how can I make it so they don't ever need to think about that again?”



As LayerZero grows, Pellegrino noted, it’s become not just about the technology, and part of the challenge now is to make sure it’s used. 



At the end of last week, a16z announced that it bought $55 million worth of ZRO. The VC firm has previously invested in LayerZero. 



But what struck me about the announcement was the term length being included in the announcement. a16z Crypto partner Ali Yahya disclosed that the token purchase had a three-year lockup.




I’m excited to announce that we’ve invested an additional $55M in @LayerZero_Core tokens (ZRO), with a 3-year lockup. Our global financial system is evolving, and it's great to see the protocol enabling

Inside a16z Crypto's $55M ZRO purchase

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Colosseum is something like a hackathon organizer mixed with Y Combinator for Solana startups. I tend to view its hackathon entries as a proxy for what Solana builders are interested in, and I see its hackathon winners as a potential proxy for what Solana venture investors find valuable.



So this week on the Lightspeed podcast, I asked Colosseum co-founder Matty Taylor what he’s excited about from the organization’s newest hackathon, and his answer surprised me. 



“One of the things that we're most excited about is sort of a return to crypto cypherpunk roots,” Taylor said. He cited privacy-preserving applications and new takes on DAOs as examples. 



Taylor said he’s seeing “high performing [Solana] founders” showing a lot of interest in private trading technology, citing former Colosseum winner Darklake — which is building a zero-knowledge enabled DEX — as one example. He’s also seen builders facilitating private payments on existing stablecoins. 



Solana developers do seem to be growing more interested in onchain privacy. The RPC provider Helius just unveiled confidential balances, a more private version of Solana’s existing token extensions. The testnet-phase encryption infrastructure network Arcium has also been buzzy of late. 



Privacy is cypherpunk, but it’s also a necessity for some institutions to come onchain, as large capital allocators tend to like keeping their financial activities opaque. 



Taylor also mentioned DAOs, the crypto-native governance structure that has so far proved tricky to execute. Colosseum was an early supporter of markets-based governance platform MetaDAO, and Taylor talked about a futarchy-enabled token launchpad where funds are escrowed and subject to decision markets for how they should be spent. 



That kind of service has been tried for things like NFT roadmaps in the past — so it’s unclear whether

Solana founders ‘returning to cypherpunk roots’: Colosseum’s Taylor

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At the TokenizeThis conference in New York this week, I had the pleasure of moderating a conversation with executives from Dinari and STOKR on the potential for tokenized stocks. 



I also caught a panel on the retail adoption of tokenized real-world assets (RWAs) more broadly. The headwinds, tailwinds, what have you.



First things first: Stablecoins (primarily tokenized dollars, so to speak) are a nearly $230 billion market. Outside of that, onchain RWAs currently amount to $18.5 billion, RWA.xyz data shows.  



A recent report from Bitwise called Q1 “the best worst quarter in crypto’s history.” While asset prices fell, stablecoin market cap hit a new high and tokenized RWAs grew 37% quarter over quarter. Not to mention regulatory progress.



Source: Bitwise



You can see that big chunk in private credit, and the other substantial piece in the US Treasury debt category. Included in that is BlackRock’s tokenized money market fund, BUIDL, which recently hit the $2 billion Assets Under Management (AUM) mark.



Expected legislation in the US that “allows on-ramps and off-ramps to proliferate” will be crucial, Neoclassic Capital managing partner Mike Bucella said on the TokenizeThis stage Wednesday. Stablecoins and tokenized Treasury products will thus be “the foundation” for more creative onchain offerings in the coming years.



“The boring stuff is an absolute necessity, because it exists in the offchain world,” he explained. “If you can’t do that in the onchain world, then you’re not going to sit there and wait for some interesting onchain yield product; you’re going to go offchain into the traditional markets.”



As for where we go from here, Dinari Chief Business Officer Anna Wroblewska argued that after stablecoins and money market funds, publicly listed US stocks offer another easy access point for investors looking to move

Which tokenized RWA segments will boom next?

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Crypto marketplace Magic Eden’s Season 2 campaign launched on Thursday to reward users for engaging with its platform.



Staking Magic Eden ME tokens; trading NFTs, Runes, Ordinals or coins; and linking your crypto wallets on Magic Eden will all help you climb the season’s leaderboard to ultimately earn rewards in a few months. Runes are fungible tokens on the bitcoin blockchain, and Ordinals are like NFTs, but on bitcoin. 



Swapping tokens on Magic Eden will also help traders climb the leaderboard, according to a post from the firm. The post suggests the rewards for this season will consist of ME tokens again, like in Season 1.



This time, Magic Eden has said rewards are based on staking power and trading volume per user. It’s also changed up the visual look of the season and has updated the look of its leaderboard.




Babe wake up. Season 2 is finally here 🪄- Stake $ME- Trade on Magic Eden- EarnBut that's not all, we’re also shipping a whole suite of updates including leaderboard rankings, 0.5% EVM fees and an NFT platform overhaul.Touching grass can wait. Details 👇 pic.twitter.com/aQonbsywly— Magic Eden 🪄 (@MagicEden) April 17, 2025




Magic Eden’s Season 1 ended March 31 and resulted in a total of 10 million ME tokens being distributed to participants, currently worth about $8 million. Staking ME and completing quests in Season 1 granted users rewards.



Season 2’s top participants are expected to receive rewards at the end of the season in mid-August.



“Long-term, we’re super bullish on NFTs,” Magic Eden CEO Jack Lu previously told Blockworks in an interview, adding that the company is profitable despite broader bearish sentiment in the crypto industry (Lu said Magic Eden made $70 million to $75 million in 2024). 



Magic Eden still sees more success with Solana than Ethereum. On Thursday, daily Ethereum NFT volume from Magic Eden was

Magic Eden unveils Season 2 of ME token rewards

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More than a year after its initial announcement, Arbitrum launched Timeboost yesterday.



Timeboost is a new way of ordering transactions on Arbitrum. That seems pretty boring and unexciting on the surface, but hopefully we can show you why it’s a pretty big deal.



Transactions today on Arbitrum are ordered on a simple first come, first serve (FCFS) basis. Seems fair! But it’s problematic in practice:




Financial systems need a way to efficiently process transactions. When markets crash, a lending application like Aave needs a way to quickly liquidate pledged collateral before prices plummet further.



Since transactions are cheap and not regulated by prices due to the FCFS mechanism, MEV searchers repeatedly spam the network to increase their chances of transaction inclusion. This degrades the overall network user experience.




Think Uber without surge pricing. Sounds fair, but then everyone — regardless of their priority — would be calling for cabs, and a pregnant woman in labor who needs to get to the hospital asap struggles to get a ride.



Timeboost tries to mitigate this problem by introducing an auction where MEV searchers can bid for transaction priority. The winner of the auction gets their transaction fast-tracked in an “express lane.” 



This is roughly how it works:




Tony and Janice are MEV searchers. 



Both compete for priority inclusion — Tony pays 1 ETH and Janice pays 2 ETH in the auction.



Neither knows how much the other is bidding because transactions sit in a private mempool. 



Janice wins the auction and pays the price of Tony’s bid (1 ETH).



Tony’s transaction is delayed by 200ms while Janice’s transaction receives immediate inclusion in the express lane. Hence the name: Timeboost.




Timeboost in effect introduces an optional market pricing mechanism into its fee market. It’s similar to what EIP-1559 and

Arbitrum’s Timeboost goes live, generates $2,491 in DAO revenue on day 1

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Rizzo, the Bitcoin Historian here, back this week with the story of one of the younger Bitcoin legends — I’m talking about the one, the only Jack Mallers. 



If you’ve seen Jack in any of the dozens of interviews he’s given from his large, empty closet, you know he's an eloquent defender of Bitcoin. You may not know his long road to becoming a successful entrepreneur.



Before his work on Strike, he had a few Bitcoin startup ideas that didn’t quite work. Yet all that hard work paid off when he helped an entire nation onboard to a Bitcoin standard.



Bitcoin Legends: Jack Mallers







Not many can say their parents got them involved in Bitcoin, but Jack can. 



His father, William Mallers Jr., was a former Chicago Board of Trade chair who discovered bitcoin when it was under $100. He hosted a series of meet-ups in the Windy City, including one fateful afternoon when Andreas M. Antonopoulos showed up. According to Jack, the first time he truly understood Bitcoin was when the GOAT of all Bitcoin educators talked to him about the power of the tech.



One of my favorite Mallers moments was on Christmas Day 2013, when Jack and his siblings received gift cards purchased with bitcoin. The price was $1,200 back then, but the move was priceless and timeless.




2/ Here’s Jack and his siblings on Christmas day in 2013. These are gift cards his parents purchased him with #Bitcoin. The price was $1,200 pic.twitter.com/ZDv8XuTLIm— The Bitcoin Historian (@pete_rizzo_) August 13, 2024




It’s nearly cliché by now, but Jack didn’t dive into Bitcoin right away.



He enrolled in St. John's University in New York but soon dropped out. Instead, he returned to Chicago to attend a coding camp when he realized he was more interested in technology than academics. 



At 18, and after coding, he signed up for a school for entrepreneurs and launched his first app: