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“I’m always trying to figure out where the puck is going,” Pantera’s Paul Veradittakit told me. 



It’s a key part of how Veradittakit determines whether or not he’s interested in investing time and, of course, money into a project. 



Veradittakit’s been around the industry for over a decade. If he hadn’t joined Pantera, he might have been one of the first employees at Coinbase. Instead, he and Pantera founder Dan Morehead decided to invest in companies that were building like Coinbase in other parts of the world. 



Veradittakit said Pantera’s invested in 22 unicorns, with him taking the lead on 17 of them. 



He’s now focused on finding the next winners of this cycle, especially since times have changed and, well, you know the rest. His bread and butter is Series A rounds, which are when a firm raises significant capital for the first time.



Veradittakit said there’s a bit of flexibility in a seed round, but that isn’t the case for a Series A. In order to put money behind a firm, he’d need to see it as a billion-dollar company, and his focus is on hunting for those future unicorns. 



“While a founder is great, I'm looking for someone who will not stop until they succeed. Someone hungry, someone who won't take no for an answer, will continue to find answers to problems,” he told me. Bonus points if they’re constantly information-seeking.



“The other thing that I look at is if the company already has a product. Then I want to see that the product is something that clients and customers love…It's even better if we're able to use the product ourselves; then we could even provide a lot of value just from us being an investor.”



Fund V



Pantera is in the middle of raising for its next big fund: Pantera Fund V. 



“Our last fund was $1.25 billion; this fund is targeted to be a billion…Quite a bit of interest from existing

How Pantera's Paul Veradittakit spots crypto unicorns

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The Solana Foundation is tightening its leash on the validators receiving its stake. 



The Solana Foundation now says that for every new validator added to the Solana Foundation Delegation Program, it will remove three long-standing ones with under 1,000 SOL in external stake. The goal: have fewer validators relying on foundation stake and more earning authentic backing from the community.



Blockworks Research data lead Dan Smith estimated that at current staking levels, around 150 Solana validators would lose their foundation stake under the new rule. 



The Solana Foundation has a sizable stash of SOL tokens, and it stakes some of those tokens with smaller validators. Those validators who go through KYC checks and enlist in the program also have some of their voting costs covered for a year. The program has booted participants before: In June 2024, it cut a group of validators found to have been operating private mempools, which can be used for sandwich attacks. 



This all may sound like inside baseball, but the delegation program is pretty central to Solana’s validator landscape. Last year, a report from Solana infrastructure shop Helius found 72% of validators receive foundation stake. 



Solana validators earn revenue partly through inflation, priority fees, and MEV, which all scale as validators attract more delegated stake. In other words, finding lots of stake is the whole ballgame for validators. By booting validators from the delegation program, the Solana Foundation is forcing validators to either find new sources of stake or potentially go out of business.



The SFDP is a good program for bootstrapping a bigger validator set, but the Solana Foundation keeping some validators afloat obviously can’t last forever. It’s probably healthy for Solana to discourage freeloading.



Still, count this as one of a continuing string of woes for smaller Solana

Solana Foundation begins pruning validators from delegation program

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“Capital runs as surely and instantly where it is most wanted, and where there is most to be made of it, as water runs to find its level.”— Walter Bagehot (1873)




Q: What’s it cost to have dinner with the president?



The official website promoting a “Dinner with President TRUMP” pitches the opportunity as “The most EXCLUSIVE INVITATION in the World.” 



(Reader beware, the site has more capitalization than a German dictionary.)



Specifically, the dinner is “Only for the TOP 220 $TRUMP Coin Holders,” which does indeed make it pretty exclusive: You’d need to buy about $380,000 of TRUMP to break into the top 220, per Solscan.



It might not take quite as much as that because some of the addresses in the top 220 are exchanges (which presumably won’t register their holdings) and some are individual holders who might not want to be KYC’d — the Secret Service will want names, not just FmEMyxFASzDyADXycG8CCTrNB1AMSdoigog3SixNzMNb (as the current 220th-largest holder is publicly known).



Still, anything close to that seems like a steep price for a 220 person dinner — even if it is “the most EXCLUSIVE INVITATION.”



Also, it’s not.



Slightly lower down on the site is an invitation for the top 25 holders of TRUMP to an “Exclusive Reception.”



I did the math and 25 is less than 220, so I think that must be the world’s most exclusive invitation.



I’m sure they will both feel exclusive — in both cases, “Black Tie is optional and preferred.” 



But the top 25 also get a tour: “PLUS, We have separately by us arranged for a Special VIP Tour for you.”



(Correct grammar appears to be optional and not preferred.)



The 25th-largest holder of $TRUMP (excluding exchanges) currently holds about $5 million worth.



Interestingly, this implies that the market is pricing the event with 11x fewer people at 13x the cost

Crypto prices dinner with the president

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While stablecoin legislation has dominated recent headlines, House Representatives are in the final stages of drafting a crypto market structure bill, according to people familiar with the matter. 



I’m told that the discussion draft is expected to be released by the end of the month. The timeline aligns with President Trump’s goal of having both stablecoin and market structure bills passed by the end of this summer. 



Representatives will likely pull from the Financial Innovation and Technology for the 21st Century Act (FIT21), which the House passed last Congress. FIT21, among other things, sought to make the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) the primary regulator for digital asset spot markets, shifting authority from the SEC. 



FIT21’s passage was largely celebrated — even by some members of the industry who were not completely onboard with details of the legislation — for being the first digital asset legislation to make it through a chamber of Congress. With bipartisan support, we might add: 71 Democrats voted in favor of FIT21. 



The House Financial Services Committee’s Digital Assets Subcommittee and the House Agriculture Committee each held hearings on crypto market structure earlier this month. Conversations focused on how best to divide authority between the SEC and CFTC.  



The STABLE Act in the House and the GENIUS Act in the Senate both await further action. Each bill passed their respective committee markups but neither has been scheduled for a floor vote. The two pieces of legislation are similar, although the GENIUS Act grants state regulators more authority over stablecoin issuers.







Get the news in your inbox. Explore Blockworks newsletters:




Blockworks Daily: Unpacking crypto and the markets.



Empire: Crypto news and analysis to start your day.



Forward Guidance: The intersection of crypto, macro and

House prepares second stab at a crypto market structure bill

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Coinbase was pretty frank in its blog post earlier today.  



“Our relationship with PayPal will take the payments revolution forward,” it stated. 



You might recall that PayPal launched its PYUSD stablecoin in August 2023. This morning, Coinbase said it would waive fees on USD-PYUSD conversions and expand support for stablecoins to PayPal's largest merchant partners.



It’s part of the crypto exchange’s wider goal of “promoting broader adoption of faster and more efficient financial services.”



This isn’t Coinbase’s first partnership with a stablecoin issuer. It acquired an equity stake in Circle in 2023, and earns interest income on its USDC reserves. Coinbase’s stablecoin revenue amounted to $910 million in 2024 — up 31% from the year prior. 



Free global USDC transfers are available on Coinbase’s layer-2, Base. The company noted in its February shareholder letter: “Stablecoins have found market fit…reinforcing their role as a cornerstone of the onchain economy.”



A Coinbase spokesperson clarified to me this morning that this PayPal link-up does not change its existing relationship with Circle. 



“Instead, it pushes the entire stablecoin ecosystem forward,” the rep said. 



The big potential for stablecoins (currently sporting a ~$230 billion market cap) and the broader tokenization space are well documented. We’ve mentioned them in the last couple newsletters, in fact. 



When I asked for more details on how Coinbase expects to collaborate with PayPal going forward (as mentioned in the blog), the spokesperson wasn’t super specific. 



Essentially the exchange looks to allow stablecoins “to be integrated into a wide range of decentralized financial and payments applications directly on blockchain networks.”



More updates on those initiatives are set to come “if regulatory conditions permit,” the spokesperson

Coinbase seeks ‘payments revolution’ via PayPal link-up

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It’s clear at this point that one of the Trump administration’s primary goals is to lower trade deficits with other countries, specifically goods trade deficits.



Source: Fred



It’s important to make that distinction because, in fact, the US runs a services surplus!







The US mechanically imports “stuff” from other countries that manufacture it both better and cheaper. And as the reserve currency of the world, US dollars flow into those other countries to fund those purchases.



Those foreign dollars then get reinvested and held in US-denominated assets such as Treasurys and US equities. This mechanical demand has created an artificially strong US dollar for many decades, paired with a hollowing out of the US middle class whose manufacturing jobs have been offshored. 



Source: MacroMicro



Effectively, the grand tradeoff in globalism has been access to cheap “stuff” but a hollowing-out of that once-strong manufacturing base. 



One of the great laws of (economic) nature is the balance of payments equilibrium. Mechanically, that currency account deficit (stuff coming in) must be offset by a capital account surplus (money going out to pay for the stuff coming in).







This structural capital account surplus that’s held for many years has resulted in a structural bid to US denominated assets. That has led to mechanically-lower Treasury yields (lowering borrowing costs for the government) and higher multiples on US equities relative to other countries (a P much greater than E, in a typical P/E ratio). 



The Trump administration has been loud and clear that it wants to decrease the current account deficit. Although it doesn’t speak this second part as loudly, that comes with a lower capital account surplus that would reverse that trend of lower bond yields and higher equity multiples. Effectively, the Trump administration is telling

Trump is telling you to sell US assets

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RTFKT, Nike’s abandoned digital brand pronounced “artifact,” lost its CloneX art overnight.



The art for all 19,500 Ethereum NFTs in the collection was replaced with a black background with white text that reads: “This content has been restricted. Using Cloudflare's basic service in this manner is a violation of the Terms of Service. Please visit cfl.re/tos for more.”



That URL redirects to a Cloudflare terms page that states that a more basic Cloudflare plan does not allow clients to stream videos. “We limited your ability to use our services to deliver video bits from our network to your visitors. This is because every second of a typical video requires as much bandwidth as loading a full web page,” the page reads.



“Unfortunately, while most people respect these limitations and understand they exist to ensure high quality of service for all Cloudflare customers, some users attempt to misconfigure our service to stream video in violation of our Terms of Service,” the post continues.







The issue, then, appears to be due to the fact that the CloneX NFT data was not being hosted on an adequate Cloudflare plan. Others, like Yuga Labs blockchain lead 0xQuit, speculated that RTFKT may have forgotten to pay their Cloudflare bill and saw their service cancelled (RTFKT lead Samuel Cardillo told me it has “nothing to do” with an unpaid bill).



Other RTFKT collections — like its NFTs with artist Fewocious, its Animus Eggs, and its Nike Dunk Cryptokicks — still had visible video art live as of Thursday at 10:30am ET white the CloneX art was gone.



The CloneX shakeup appears to have happened overnight, when several X users noticed the issue and flagged it on social media.



“And some of you thought this was the next @cryptopunksnfts since it was abandoned,” Ape Ventures founder Xeer wrote early Thursday morning. Unlike most NFT collections,

Cloudflare removes RTFKT CloneX NFT art due to Terms of Service violation

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Here’s a common paradox L1s face today:



L1s want to enable application-specific L2 chains because every app cannot coexist in the same blockchain environment. Builders want freedom to customize. 



But when every appchain is making their own independent design decisions, you have fragmentation. Then they leave your L1.







Ethereum, Cosmos, Avalanche and Polkadot have all suffered from similar problems.



Initia’s architecture



Initia, which is launching its mainnet today, is determined to run back the same appchain vision while avoiding the pitfalls of fragmentation.



Appchains that choose to build on Initia benefit from a tightly integrated and opinionated tech stack — what Initia calls the “Interwoven Stack.”



All Initia appchains are built with the same stack and standards. They share a canonical bridge (LayerZero), cross-chain messaging (Cosmos IBC), underlying framework (Cosmos SDK) and standardized gas token (native USDC via Noble is the default though chains can change it) across chains, as well as and data availability layer (Celestia).



Appchains can run on whichever execution environment they prefer. Of the 18 announced teams building on the Interwoven Stack, they are generally evenly split between the EVM, MoveVM and WasmVM, Initia’s co-founder Zon told me.



They can also leverage common MEV infrastructure like POB (Protocol Owned Builder) and Protorev to capture non-toxic MEV, use a common enshrined oracle (Connect), a common multisig (Initia Multisig), block explorer (Initiascan) and domain name service (Initia Username).







You get the idea — it’s every essential public good possible to allow an ecosystem of differently-minded builders to run on common standards without suffering fragmentation.



OK, well what about the L1? 



The Initia L1 runs on the MoveVM and CometBFT consensus with single slot finality and a 500 ms

Running back the appchain vision: Initia mainnet launches today

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Eleven years ago this week, one of the first great Bitcoin documentaries, The Rise and Rise of Bitcoin, premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival.



The film is rare in that it was made by someone with real skin in the game.



It centers around Daniel Mross, a Pittsburgh-native computer programmer who began mining bitcoin in 2011 and went on to found Bitcoin-focused investment fund Maximalist Capital.



Filmed by brother Nicholas between 2013 and 2014, when bitcoin was headed to $100 for the first time, Dan travels the world to meet major figures in the space, as yet only four years into its lifespan.



They meet Charlie Shrem, then-CEO of bitcoin exchange service BitInstant as it worked through sudden supply issues resulting from Mt Gox downtime; Eric Voorhees, when BitDice was still a big deal; and Mark Karpeles, who gave a secretive tour of Mt Gox’s office in Japan only months before it went down for good.



Brian Armstrong and Fred Ehrsam also make cameos. Coinbase was timely: The global Bitcoin economy was actively reckoning with the growing need for more crypto exchanges in light of the Mt Gox debacle.











The Rise and Rise of Bitcoin has a 7.1 rating on IMDb



The Mross brothers even visit Gavin Andresen — still lead maintainer at the time — at his Massachusetts home. “Do your neighbors know that you’re at the center of one of the most disruptive technologies?” Daniel asked. 



“I think they know that I do this wacky Bitcoin project… I don’t think they know quite how big it is yet,” Andresen replied.



One electric scene shows Roger Ver — before the Block Size Wars, when he was Bitcoin Jesus — explain the benefits of Bitcoin (and BitPay, in which he was an early investor) to a Korean grocery store owner in the Bay Area.



Bitcoin and BitPay’s low fees compared to credit cards were a major selling point. “I guarantee over the

Two cures to treat Bitcoin nostalgia for the 2010s

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A bank, but make it DeFi. 



Ether.fi is launching the first DeFi bank, a decentralized and non-custodial alternative to traditional banks. 



Basically, the project is expanding into a new category, “which is not a traditional bank, in the sense that it doesn’t take users’ deposits, but it really is a viable alternative to banks,” CEO Mike Silagadze told me.



“Our plan from the beginning was to build this larger platform that really became a bank alternative for users,” Silagadze noted. “I think over the next year…you [will] actually see…half a dozen companies launch something that starts looking a lot like this, where it’s basically like a Revolut or a neobank…but built on DeFi crypto rails.”



As anyone who regularly uses DeFi knows, “there’s this...awful dance you have to go through, basically, where you put some stuff onchain, you do stuff there, hopefully you’re in some rewards or yields.” Then, Silagadze continued, “you have to get the money offchain,” so you go to an exchange and sell your crypto for fiat, and the fiat has to go somewhere… and yeah, you get the idea. It’s not an easy process.



Ether.fi’s goal is to onboard crypto natives that already use its other products,  then work to onboard the less-crypto-native folks who use centralized exchanges or are perhaps crypto-curious. 



Over the past year, the project has found success in its product launches and currently offers both Ether.fi Stake and Ether.fi Liquid. 



“Even for myself, I probably do 70 to 80% of my finances now on Ether.fi and...hopefully soon, adding a few features, I’ll really be able to move close to 100%, which is what we want to offer to people. So that’s kind of...the culmination of this vision we had from the early days,” Silagadze told me. 



But it’s also expanding to the US, with Silagadze noting that the country is “open for

Ether.fi expands to US, launches DeFi bank

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“There are only two ways to make money in business: bundling and unbundling.”



— Jim Barksdale, former CEO of Netscape




Stablecoins might unbundle banking (and then re-bundle it)



Bundling and unbundling aren’t the only ways to make money, of course — you can also invent something new or do an old thing more efficiently, for example.



But Jim Barksdale’s comment — made spontaneously to close a roadshow meeting for the Netscape IPO — became a dictum in tech circles because it explains a lot of things about the business of technology.



Much of the internet revolution, for example, can be framed as unbundling. 



The internet caused newspapers to be unbundled into Craigslist, search engines and blog posts.



Fiber optics caused cable TV to be unbundled into streaming services.



Barksdale's Netscape might be said to have unbundled the internet, letting users bypass bundled services like AOL and CompuServe, including email, news, chat and curated web access.



Sometimes, these unbundled services then get rebundled.



It used to be that to listen to a single song we liked, we had to buy 12 of them bundled into an album.



With the advent of the internet, we could buy each song individually as MP3 files (or download them illegally for free).



Now, we typically buy a bundle of millions of songs from Apple Music or Spotify.



Something similar may now be happening with crypto and banking.



Stablecoins are often described as tokenized dollars or money market funds issued by a crypto version of narrow banks.



But the best way to understand their potential significance might be as an attempt to unbundle banking.



Banks bundle all kinds of financial services: deposits, custody, payments, credit cards, lending, asset management, investment banking — most of which you are probably not interested in when you open a bank account.

Stablecoins might unbundle banking (and then rebundle it)

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Solana is up. At $151.30, SOL is back at monthly highs, reversing an oh-so-steep early April dip. It's pretty well outperforming broader crypto markets, which aren't doing too badly themselves as they ride a wave of short squeezes, ETF inflows, and a sudden softening of trade war rhetoric. 



Some ecosystem tokens caught the bullish wave, too, including Jupiter’s JUP, which is up 25% on the week.



Yesterday, a report from Blockworks Research laid out all the ways in which Jupiter is becoming irreplaceable. Jupiter now commands 95% of DEX aggregator volume and 80% of perpetuals trading on Solana. It generates north of $280 million in annualized revenue and still trades at one of the lowest P/S ratios in DeFi.



Since launching in 2021 as a swap router, Jupiter has made no secret of its intent to become Solana's super-app: home to perps, its own launchpad, a mobile wallet, a memecoin terminal, and more recently, NFT integrations via its DRiP Haus acquisition. Its liquidity index fund, JLP, is now the third-largest TVL pool on Solana — behind only Jito and Kamino. Its recent API upgrades (here's looking at you, Ultra Mode) are quietly reshaping user behavior. I mean, come on. It's pulling in $5–10 million in optional monthly fees.



Jupiter's routing upgrades (Juno), cross-chain testnet (Jupnet) and rapid-fire acquisitions (SolanaFM, Coinhall, SonarWatch, Ultimate Wallet, Moonshot) signal a protocol building not just liquidity, but full-stack control. It's a surgical level of vertical integration rarely seen: data, analytics, interface and distribution, all consolidated under a single roof. Its treasury is buying back JUP at speed; so far, they're over $20 million repurchased in under two months.



Risks worth watching mostly deal with looming token unlocks. The Jupiter team took heat recently-ish over its compensation and governance transparency. Plus, competition