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“It infuriates me to be wrong when I know I’m right.” 



— Molière




US equities returned to their all-time highs this week despite all the worrying politics: tariffs, Fed-bashing, the BLS drama.



Or are markets up because of politics?



A new research paper finds that a high level of political disagreement is predictive of positive returns for stocks.



The authors used a large language model to create 216 “virtual investors” with differing political and social views, asked them how they’d react to years of stock market news, and found that the stocks sparking the most disagreement delivered better returns.



This explains a lot: Disagreeing about politics is at an all-time high, so maybe it makes sense that stocks are, too?



If so, there should be many more gains to come.



Another academic study found that “many partisans interpret factual questions about economic conditions as opinion questions,” and that they answer such questions accordingly.



This also explains some things: Economists despair that people’s views of the economy are increasingly just a function of their politics. As it turns out, that’s because they think questions about the economy are about politics.



When the researchers offered a monetary incentive to answer the questions factually, the responses got much more accurate.



Perhaps that’s what happens in markets, as well: Prices fall on the initial wave of disagreement, then rebound as the drop incentivizes people to revisit the facts.



But this isn’t a case of clear-eyed professionals taking advantage of biased retail investors — another study finds that even the pros are misled by their politics.



“Republican-affiliated forecasters project 0.3-0.4 percentage points higher growth when Republicans hold the presidency, relative to Democratic-affiliated forecasters,” the researchers found.

Friday charts: Feel free to disagree

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President Trump yesterday got the ball rolling on allowing alternative assets in 401(k)s and other employee retirement plans. 



The executive order, signed Thursday afternoon, directs the Labor Department to “reexamine” its guidance on fiduciary responsibilities around alternative assets. This includes real estate, private equity and cryptocurrencies. 



The Labor Department is also tasked with working with the SEC and other federal agencies to evaluate regulations and determine which changes should be made. 



“Burdensome lawsuits that seek to challenge reasonable decisions by loyal, regulated fiduciaries, and stifling Department of Labor guidance issued since my first term, however, have denied millions of Americans opportunities to benefit from investment in alternative assets,” Trump wrote in Thursday’s order. 



“Such assets are an increasingly large portion of the portfolios of public pension and defined-benefit retirement plans and offer competitive returns along with diversification opportunities.”



Reports that Trump was due to sign the order started circling hours before he actually put pen to paper, so investors (crypto, mostly) began trading the news well in advance.



Bitcoin, as expected, rose on the news, gaining close to 3% Thursday before paring gains on Friday. As of 2 p.m. ET, BTC was trading 0.6% lower over 24 hours. ETH gained as much at 6% yesterday and was still in the green today, trading 3% higher over the day at 2 p.m. ET. 



Hedge funds and PE firms were also excited about the executive order, which kickstarts a regulatory change many of them have been seeking for years. 



The federal agencies have 180 days to complete their evaluations and give recommendations. Should new regulations be proposed, the process of writing, soliciting public comment and finalizing rules will likely take several months. 



401(k) and other

Crypto investors hopeful amid new regulatory orders

Ethereum’s next major upgrade, Fusaka, is still officially aiming for a November 2025 mainnet fork — but a surprise intervention on yesterday’s All Core Devs Consensus (ACDC) call revealed consensus-client teams want four extra weeks before release candidates are cut.



The request surfaced when Lodestar’s Matthew Keil warned the current September 1 deadline to finalize releases is “aggressive.”



“The timeline that we’ve been talking about is basically 4 extra weeks,” he told the group. The proposed change would move the release-cut date from early September to the end of the month. Mainnet would still target November, although its full effect won’t be felt until early 2026. 



Prysm’s Manu Nalepa backed the suggestion, stressing that “testing really close to mainnet regarding private [mempools]” is critical. 



“Prysm has also >4k lines of code yet to merge into our unstable branch,” Nalepa wrote his peers in the live chat.



The extra time would allow teams to merge large feature branches, resolve conflicts, and run stability testing on the exact code that will go live. This matters because merging late can introduce subtle bugs that earlier devnet runs never encountered, although testing processes have been beefed up over time.



Fusaka is set to deliver a package of improvements aimed at scaling Ethereum’s data availability and streamlining validator duties. Headline features include PeerDAS to improve how blob data is distributed across the network, raises to the maximum blob limit per block from six to nine, reduction of the target blob count to five to help smooth gas prices, and the addition of new opcodes and precompiles aimed at making the Ethereum Virtual Machine more efficient.



Two areas of testing are especially important: non-finality and private mempool behavior. In non-finality tests, validators stop finalizing blocks — for example, because of outages or mass exits — which leaves recent blocks open to

Ethereum’s Fusaka upgrade may face delay

A proposed deal to take a Joe McCann-led Solana treasury company public via a SPAC has been called off, according to three sources with knowledge of the matter.



The situation regarding the digital asset treasury company is still fluid, said one source, who noted the DAT may try to find a different path forward.



The reason behind the current deal’s demise was not immediately made clear. The news comes two weeks after a limited partner in Asymmetric, which is McCann’s hedge fund, posted on X that the fund is down nearly 80% on the year.



Read more: Why the appetite for DATs isn’t waning yet



Following last month’s post, McCann announced on X that Asymmetric LPs had been given the choice to exit or “roll over available capital into a specific illiquid investment,” presumably referring to the Solana DAT.



Read more: The practice and theory of DAT SPACs



McCann did not immediately respond to a request for comment.



The DAT was set to be called Accelerate, according to an investor pitch deck viewed by Blockworks. The firm had ambitions to raise up to $1.5 billion, according to Unchained, which first reported on the deal. Accelerate planned to go public via a SPAC with Gores Holdings X, which is a blank check company, Unchained added.



According to the pitch deck, McCann was set to serve as Accelerate’s co-founder and CEO. Komal Sethi, who the deck says is a board member at CoinList, would also be a co-founder and chief strategy officer. Sethi did not immediately respond to a LinkedIn message asking for comment.







Get the news in your inbox. Explore Blockworks newsletters:




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Empire: Crypto news and analysis to start your day.



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Supply Shock: Bitcoin, bitcoin, bitcoin.

Joe McCann-led Solana treasury vehicle SPAC deal is off: Sources

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"You are my creator, but I am your master — obey!"



— Frankenstein




If it's crypto, is it not money laundering?



Roman Storm declared yesterday’s partial verdict in the DOJ’s case against him a “big win,” dismissing his conviction on money transmission charges as “bullshit” and saying he expects to win on appeal.



Peter Van Valkenburgh makes a thoroughly convincing case that Storm should win an appeal. 



But also that the complexities of judge and jury selection mean it’s not a sure thing.



In short, the legal debate usually boils down to whether it’s possible to launder money without ever controlling it.



Tornado Cash, being non-custodial, never has control of anyone’s money, so its defenders reason that it can’t possibly be guilty of transmitting it.



What might be the consequences if the courts agree?



JP Konig believes it would mean the “decriminalization of crypto money laundering.”



If no one is liable for money that’s transmitted via immutable smart contracts, he reasons, why would anyone move money any other way? 



“Banks and fintechs,” Konig says, “will be incentivized to switch their database infrastructure over to crypto in order to qualify for this loophole.”



Global banks are thought to spend over $200 billion a year on financial crime compliance, so they would be highly incentivized to move their money transmitting to crypto rails. 



“Once the entire financial sector has migrated through the loophole,” Konig adds, “it will no longer be a crime to launder funds for criminals.” 



Is that the outcome we’re hoping for?



If Storm is correct that money transmitter laws don’t apply to Tornado Cash, we probably need new money transmitter laws.



The golem theory of DAOs



Henry Farrell and Bruce Schneider follow Konig’s line of reasoning, but think the Roman Storm case has implications

Thursday mailbag: Financial Frankensteins?

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Everyone is a storyteller.



Founders, investors, marketers, builders, academics, writers — we all make sense of our chaotic world by turning observable data into digestible narratives.



Problems can and do arise, however, when vanity metrics become a stand-in for real authoritative insights.



Take Uber, for instance. In the company’s early years, topline vanity metrics like total trips or total active riders were “meaningless” and almost never mentioned in internal meetings.



“Instead, the discussion was always centered on the dynamics of each individual network, which could be nudged up or down independently of each other, with increased marketing budget, incentive spend for either drivers or riders, product improvements or on-the-ground operational efforts,” former Uber growth exec Andrew Chen writes in his bestseller The Cold Start Problem.



Topline metrics convey an illusion of success, but obscure the context needed to track actual growth.



Crypto, too, suffers from many such vanity metrics.



The most egregious example is probably “daily active addresses.” The metric says so little for two reasons.



One, the creation of new wallets is completely frictionless. Two, this industry presents overt monetary incentives to spin up new wallets and game airdrops.



What about memecoin launchpad metrics?



If you’ve paid any attention to Solana lately, you’re probably aware that the ecosystem’s premier launchpad, pump.fun, has been ceding market share to Letsbonk in recent weeks. 



The “launchpad wars” have commanded a fair bit of attention on Crypto Twitter — I guess because watching the decline of the consumer application single-handedly responsible for propelling Solana back into relevance post-FTX is intriguing.



But recently, Pump has made a bit of a comeback: 23.9k tokens launched on Pump yesterday, against 3,954 on

Making sense of ‘launchpad wars’ data

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Last week’s macro super bowl, as we called it in our most recent Forward Guidance roundup, certainly lived up to expectations of fireworks. 



Just look at how much the market’s odds for a September rate cut have whipsawed:



Source: CME Group



That initial dip was caused by some pretty nasty PCE data that put into question the path of monetary policy. As seen in the chart below, inflation seems to be heading above the Fed’s 2% target:



Source: MacroMicro.me



More importantly, goods are now driving the inflation uptick, as opposed to the last two years, where most of the sticky inflation has been related to services. 



Core goods spent much of the last year in a slump, even dipping into deflation for a time. What's concerning now is that the recent rise appears tied to tariff-driven price hikes.



So that was the baseline heading into the FOMC meeting. 



But then…we got the jobs report. And it was a disaster of a print. So much so that Trump went off and fired the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics!



The primary catalyst that led to the repricing of rate cut odds for September were the huge revisions to the amount of jobs created in the last couple of months:



Source: MacroMicro.me



All of a sudden, everyone came to the realization that the labor market is at stall-speed and at risk of meaningfully deteriorating. 



So where does that leave us now in terms of how the Fed is thinking about its dual mandate? Fragmented, to say the least. 



On one hand, the labor market is screaming for a resumption of the rate-cutting cycle. On the other, inflation looks to be accelerating higher without having ever tapped the Fed’s 2% inflation target.



With this bifurcation in mind, it’s no surprise that we’ve seen the first two governor dissents at the Fed in 30 years:



Source: zerohedge



Looking forward, all eyes will be on the

The Fed’s dual mandate is causing bifurcations in policy

Yesterday’s partial verdict in U.S. v. Roman Storm is about more than the fate of one Tornado Cash developer. It dampens hopes of giving DeFi protocols greater access to the US market by sending chills through the entire open‑source community.



Storm was found guilty under 18 U.S.C. § 1960(b)(1)(C), which treats noncustodial code as "money transmitting" and thus a criminal offense, if it's used by anyone for illicit purposes. In the words of Ethereum core developer Preston van Loon: “This is a dark day for crypto and [Roman Storm].”



Sketchy legal foundations



At issue in rendering a verdict was how § 1960 defines “money transmission.” The law requires transmitting funds on behalf of the public and has traditionally meant moving others’ money as a custodial intermediary — not publishing permissionless code. Yet SDNY prosecutors convinced the jury that deploying immutable smart contracts meets that definition.



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



The government also shut out FinCEN’s own 2019 guidance on the matter, which explicitly carves out non‑custodial software providers from Money Service Business (MSB) liability, as DeFi Education Fund's Amanda Tuminelli explained: “The DOJ said they don’t have to listen to that guidance…They can come up with their own interpretation.”



That disregard for regulatory alignment undermines legal clarity and due process.



A warning for every DeFi dev



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

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

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Scenius Capital is making some moves.  



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



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



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



As Jacobs noted, it’s been quite a rough year for fundraising. We’ve seen both multi-billion dollar months, but then some months — like May for example — fell short of expectations. 



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



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



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



“Having [ParaFi’s] support, we think, really gives us a partner that has grown into an institutional, broadly

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

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“Ideas are easy. Execution is everything.”



― John Doerr




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



Execution, however, has never been its strong suit.



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



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



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



Still, these remain worthy aspirations.



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



People are using the chains!







Ethereum processed an all-time high of 46.7 million transactions in July, thanks largely to the smart contract chain’s new, higher gas limit. A higher gas limit increases the computational capacity of each block, which lowers the competition for blockspace. As a result, the median fee on

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

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Shortly after the Solana Saga debuted in 2023, the popular tech YouTuber Marques Brownlee, otherwise known as MKBHD, released a video titled “This is a Crypto Phone. Don’t Buy It.” Brownlee complained to his 20 million YouTube subscribers about the Saga’s mediocre specs, high price and overly niche crypto features. 



Brownlee followed that video with another, naming the Solana Saga the biggest smartphone bust of 2023, which caused Solana Labs to joke that it had released an award-winning phone.



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



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



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



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



Photo taken with the Seeker. Source: Jack Kubinec



Like its predecessor, the Seeker comes with a built-in “seed vault,” which is basically a very secure way to store crypto wallet keys. The phone comes with a native wallet that’s integrated with the seed vault and can be

Seeker review: Solana Mobile heard the critics

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



There’s currently a 91% chance the FOMC will lower rates by 25 basis points in September, per data from CME Group. 



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



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



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



The BOE issued a cut in May and held rates in June, citing conflict between Israel and Iran that sent oil prices higher. BOE officials reiterated that interest rates are on a “gradual downward path,” in the words of Gov. Andrew Bailey. 



“The world is highly unpredictable,” Bailey added. 



Fed Chair Powell agrees. Throughout 2025 he has emphasized the importance of monitoring economic data before adjusting policy. 



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



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