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“The miracle of compounding returns is overwhelmed by the tyranny of compounding costs.” 



— John Bogle



Could stablecoins kill the airlines?​​



The Economist writes that the four biggest US airlines would all have made a loss last year if not for their side hustle selling loyalty points.



Delta, for example, made an operating profit of $6 billion on the year, $7 billion of which came from selling loyalty points to credit card companies. 



Incredibly, Delta says 1% of America’s GDP is spent through its co-branded cards.



In total, US consumers paid $187 billion in credit card interchange fees last year, which always seems ripe for disruption.



But The Economist points out that roughly three-quarters of interchange fees are returned to customers as rewards or rebates.



People love their rewards, especially the airline rewards that make travel feel like it’s free.This could be a defensive moat for the credit card companies that stablecoin issuers are hoping to disrupt.



Understandably, the airlines would like the card companies to maintain that moat — so much so that they lobbied against an amendment to the GENIUS Act that would have lowered interchange fees.



In a letter to Congress, the airline industry warned that the legislation would “lead to significantly fewer passengers and flights.”



The amendment was dropped, but if stablecoins really catch on, it could have the same effect: fewer flights and higher ticket prices.



But what if stablecoins offer points, too? 



The New York Times reported this morning that big US banks planning to issue stablecoins also “plan to operate rewards programs, similar to existing credit card promotions, to woo customers to their own coins.”



PancakeSwap diplomacy



The Wall Street Journal reports that Binance is making a concerted effort to promote World Liberty Financial’s USD1

Thursday links: Points, pancakes, DATs and merger arb

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Here’s a weekly snapshot of the Solana ecosystem.



SOL’s price briefly flirted with the $200 mark before it dipped to $193 amid a broader market dip this morning.



Unlike BTC and ETH, SOL does not enjoy an institutional bid (yet) from treasury companies. SOL DATs, mainly Upexi (UPXI) and DeFi Development Corp (DFDV), have accumulated about $596 billion in SOL, compared to $11 billion in ETH and $86 billion in BTC.







Looking at daily REV (all fees paid to transact onchain), Solana’s REV has stayed relatively stagnant at the $2.5 million to $3.5 million mark for months.







Net inflows into SOL’s sole institutional ETF — the REX-Osprey SOL Staking ETF (SSK) — have slowed. The fund drew $3.7 million for the week of Aug. 4-10, compared to $58.3 million in its launch week. Daily net flows were $5.2 million on Tuesday.







Over on the memecoin side of the world, Pump lost its dominance to Letsbonk through July, but recently reclaimed its spot in the last week. Yesterday, Pump saw 30,550 tokens launched compared to 1,499 on Letsbonk.







The PUMP token has traded down to $0.0036, after it briefly touched its ICO price of $0.004 last night.



The Axiom trading bot continues to dominate the trading bot market, regardless of which launchpad is winning. Axiom has grown to 60% market share since its inception in February.







Over on the perps market, Drift has been having a good month, hitting $500 million in open interest yesterday. Its zero-fee trading for BTC and ETH introduced in mid-July has sparked a growth of volumes, as seen in the below chart.







Despite its growth, though, the perps crown in Solana is still held by Jupiter. 



Based on trading volumes, Drift has about $17.1 billion in the last 30 days, compared to Jupiter perp volumes of $23.1 billion. Both are of course still eclipsed by Hyperliquid’s trading volumes of ~$371 billion

The state of Solana in 6 charts

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It’s amazing how quickly things can change in one week.



It feels like only yesterday that the Fed appeared unlikely to cut rates at all in September. Now, we’re beginning to price in the chance of not just a 25 basis point cut, but a 50 bps one!







In a Tuesday Fox Business interview, Treasury Secretary Bessent added fuel to the speculation by saying "the real thing now to think about is: Should we get a 50 basis point rate cut in September?”



I’m old enough to remember when Bessent said he wouldn’t comment on future monetary policy decisions. But here we are. 



So, should the Fed cut 50 bps in September? Let’s look at both sides of the argument. 



No cuts



Although this month’s CPI print was pretty tame and consensus, there are some underlying inflation pressures building. 



Core goods, one of the biggest drivers of the disinflation story over the last couple years, is now beginning to accelerate higher, largely driven by tariffs:







Despite a pretty nasty jobs report last week, forward-looking estimates point to a labor market that is beginning to reaccelerate again. 



In the most recent business headcount surveys, the amount of businesses that planned on meaningfully increasing headcount in the next year bounced higher:



Looking at Visa’s US spending momentum index, the consumer appears pretty resilient in the face of tariffs and their spending habits are looking like they’re beginning to tick higher:



Based on this confluence of data, I could make the argument that the economy is beginning to reaccelerate. If the Fed were to cut in September based on lagging data such as NFP, it could end up being a mistake that makes the bond market sell off like it did last year when the Fed did the same thing. 



Cut and go big



Consumption is the engine that drives the US economy. Ever since Q4 2024, it’s been meaningfully

Should the Fed cut 50bps in September?

Circle is building its own blockchain — and it’s not a rollup, but a layer-1.



In doing so, the American stablecoin issuer is betting that the shortest path between a dollar and a smart contract is the one it controls — full-stack, sovereign, and custom-built for payments.



The new chain, dubbed Arc, will be Ethereum-compatible, but use USDC for gas, and feature sub-second deterministic finality. 



The big question for Ethereum is whether Arc will shift stablecoin activity or function more like a hub-and-spoke architecture, internalizing issuance and settlement while routing liquidity and flow outward to the broader EVM ecosystem via CCTP and other bridges.



The decision to build a new sovereign chain — rather than deploying on a modular layer 2 — has reignited a familiar argument on Crypto Twitter: does this mark a return to enterprise chains, or is it simply the logical architecture for a dollar-native payments platform? Does it weaken Ethereum’s long-held role as crypto’s settlement layer for stablecoins, or further entrench it through cross-chain interoperability and network effects?



The answers may hinge less on ideology than execution, and whether Circle pursues Arc as a walled garden or merely a better bank.



Vertical integration



Circle declined to comment on Arc’s technical design, citing a quiet period. But what we know from the published light paper is that the L1 is built on Malachite, a new high-performance BFT consensus engine originally developed by Informal Systems as a rewrite of Tendermint. Circle has hired the core team of nine behind Malachite, but the engine remains open-source and is already being used elsewhere, including in Starknet’s decentralization roadmap.



Informal co-founder Ethan Buchman told Blockworks he views Malachite as akin to the Rust language: “Originally developed at Mozilla, now used by everyone.”



For Buchman, Circle’s decision to launch its own chain is not a rejection of Ethereum,

Why Circle chose an L1 — and what it means for Ethereum

TeraWulf’s stock soared Thursday after revealing a 10-year deal with AI cloud platform Fluidstack that also aligns the bitcoin miner with Google.



The decade-long high-performance computing (HPC) colocation agreements — with two five-year extension options — come as bitcoin miners have looked to diversify income streams in recent years away from volatile crypto-linked revenues.



TeraWulf is set to deliver to Fluidstack more than 200 megawatts of critical IT load at its Lake Mariner datacenter in New York, the company said Thursday. TeraWulf estimates $370 million in annual revenue from this deal. 



Perhaps a bigger takeaway from the deal is Google taking a roughly 8% stake in TeraWulf. The tech giant — as a result of backstopping $1.8 billion of Fluidstack’s lease obligations — is set to acquire about 41 million shares of WULF common stock.



Read more: CoreWeave’s pending Core Scientific buy gives ‘optionality’ as AI needs evolve



TeraWulf’s move to host AI workloads exhibits how a large miner can turn its energy infrastructure into stable, long-term revenue, said BlocksBridge Consulting founder Nishant Sharma.



“The scale and Google’s financial backing make it a standout and could inspire similar moves from peers,” Sharma added.



Despite Google’s involvement making the deal unique, TeraWulf’s deal resembles similar recent pivots across the mining segment. Sharma pointed to Bit Digital entering into a $44 million credit facility in June with the Royal Bank of Canada to expand its AI-focused infrastructure.



Gaining more attention was Core Scientific last year signing various 12-year contracts with CoreWeave. The bitcoin miner offered 200 MW of infrastructure to host the cloud provider’s HPC services; expected annual revenue stemming from the deal was $290 million.



CoreWeave then revealed last month that it would acquire Core Scientific in an all-stock deal.



“Like Core Scientific’s multi-hundred-megawatt

Google involved in BTC miner TeraWulf’s ‘standout’ hosting deal 

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Blockchain devs are increasingly centering their new products around user accounts and identities — and are launching their own chains as a result.



Zink, an SVM L1 from ATMTA, is the latest new blockchain to join the trend. ATMTA is the studio behind the in-development space exploration game Star Atlas, which for years was expected to use Solana’s mainnet for all its crypto elements. 



But that now appears to be changing. While some die-hard Solana fans might see the move as a shakeup, those unfazed by this reveal might argue Star Atlas making its own chain was inevitable for scalability, anyway.



Zink uses zero-knowledge proofs to power features like “zProfiles,” which will give users a central identity with “global permission settings” that can automate transactions and connect and apply to multiple apps, according to a statement. 



ATMTA founder and CEO Michael Wagner told me via email that Zink is intended to be a “generalist consumer blockchain” long term, but that initially the studio is looking to bring other crypto gaming studios onboard to use the Zink chain.



“Zink will start as a largely centralized and permissioned blockchain. We do anticipate a validator set that includes several external parties on mainnet launch; large validators from Solana. But generally, ATMTA wants to control how the L1 matures in the early phases, and prioritize performance for Star Atlas,” Wagner explained. 




Star Atlas Dev Log 5: Spent time refactoring the crouch logic. State machine can get a bit complicated given support for toggle crouch and various movement abilities.Did you know if you hold forward and crouch during a dash or upon landing your character will try to slide? pic.twitter.com/EUbT5c4rEg— Chypto (@Chypto_) August 12, 2025




“However, we have a roadmap that ultimately leads to going open access and permissionless. I would anticipate we

Solana-compatible Star Atlas L1 plots December launch

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In July, we saw over $6 billion go into funding, a pretty big increase in comparison to June, according to Blockworks Research data. 







Look at the itty-bitty June bar in comparison to July 



Of that $6 billion, roughly $177 million came from M&A activity. To break that down further: 96 raise announcements were made in comparison to just 12 M&A announcements. Both June and May saw 10 or fewer M&A announcements, it did pick up ever so slightly. 







To give you a better idea of the breakdown



If we look at TIE data, which included Digital Asset Treasury company raises, then we can also gauge what stage of raises were the most popular last month. 







Source: The TIE Terminal



With the rise of the Digital Asset Treasury companies, there is a decent amount of post-IPO equity being raised. But, excluding DATs, most raise announcements were either seed rounds or Series A rounds. 



Let’s break down venture funding further: Coinbase Ventures was one of the most active investors in the last month, participating in 21 rounds. 







To put all of this in perspective, June saw a bit of a comeback in funding after a very slow May, and it looks like July is yet again showing another pick up. 



Last month also outpaced March, which had been the most successful month since 2021 based on Blockworks Research data, which goes to show how large the appetite is. Currently, DATs clearly reign supreme if we’re looking at total fundraising. 







Source: TIE Terminal



Payments, however, also saw a decent amount of activity. As did DeFi (which was the second most popular category in June for fundraising). 



Here’s my take: DATs are the hot item of the moment, and it shows in the data. However, I’m curious to see if they can continue this momentum into August (which, like the summer months, tends to be seasonally weak) or if we’ll see a slight decline next month.

Crypto funding tops $6B in July: Blockworks Research

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



— Hester Peirce




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 speech last week, SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce delivered a defense of privacy that wouldn’t be out of place on the original cypherpunk mailing list.



She even cited Eric Hughes, founder of the mailing list and author of A Cypherpunk Manifesto, 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.” 



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

A regulator’s radical defense of privacy

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Lightspeed has exclusively learned that Maple — one of Solana's largest onchain asset managers — is bringing its yield-bearing syrupUSDC stablecoin into perpetual futures markets operated by Drift, Solana'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's biggest wins is that its DeFi ecosystem can move at the speed of centralized markets. It doesn't matter how advanced your strategies are or how complex your positions get.



The network's speed means traders can rebalance instantly, while staying entirely onchain. That'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's onchain perps market, which also means Drift's open interest should climb, and we're more likely to see syrupUSDC adoption spread across more protocols.



SyrupUSDC is backed by Maple's institutional lending pools and earns a steady yield from over-collateralized loans. Drift's cross-collateral system treats it like USDC for

Yield-bearing margin arrives on Drift

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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. 



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 filing.



Shares opened at $90 around 1 p.m. ET — roughly 143% higher than the IPO price. The company’s stock quickly surged to $118, but had dropped below the opening price when the market closed.



Source: Yahoo finance



Circle stock debuted 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. 



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



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. 



But Amber Group and OSL Group are trading at

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

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.




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. Get at me in DM to verify and lets get this party started!! pic.twitter.com/D0KqEg4Ldr— 0xc4ad (@0xc4ad) August 13, 2020




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 wrote, 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 tweeted, 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't really know today. Looks as hard to know as Satoshi's identity.”



Since that chaotic start, Curve Finance has grown from a stablecoin-focused AMM DEX into a core layer of DeFi’s liquidity stack, influencing protocol design across the industry. Reflecting on its

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

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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.







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). 



Yesterday, Base engineer Youssef El Allali shared 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.







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 short-lived fad like Friendtech or StarsArena, Zora has something those don’t — backing from Coinbase.




Introducing... Zora Coins Agent 🤖An AI agent that uses Base Account Spend Permissions, @CoinbaseDev server wallets and @zoradevs SDK to buy you any creator coin you wantJust give it the handle and it will do the rest, no clicks, no pop-ups, all managed by spend permissions pic.twitter.com/Y1U37EQKCY— Youssef (@0xyoussea) August 13, 2025




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