Founded in 2018, THORChain is an OG DeFi L1 chain that rose to fame with its innovative cross-chain swaps (THORSwap). Since then, the chain has expanded to offer lending and savings interest accounts.



As of earlier today, THORChain withdrawals from its Lending and Savers products have been officially halted. THORSwap and the underlying chain are fine.



The halted withdrawals come off the back of the painful decision by THORChain co-founder JP Thor two weeks ago to pause deposits into the Savers and Lending program for a six-to-twelve month period — a decision which was overturned by Thorchain validators.



The chain is sitting on about $200 million of BTC and ETH-denominated liabilities that it cannot afford to pay out, at least not without further crashing the price of its native token, RUNE.



Wait, why does RUNE enter the picture?



THORChain lending works differently to other DeFi money markets like Aave. On THORChain, lent collateral is instantly sold for its native RUNE token, which is then burned after swapping to a borrower’s desired debt asset. 



When borrowers repay their loan, new RUNE is minted again to repurchase the borrower’s pledged collateral from the market and repay it to borrowers.



This effectively places RUNE token holders as the counterparty for each loan.



This somewhat roundabout mechanism is nice if you’re bullish RUNE. The mechanism design places RUNE at the center of the value accrual flywheel and increases its demand. 



The key risk here, however, is that this depends on RUNE outperforming assets like BTC and ETH that it is borrowed against. Simply put, THORChain’s protocol design is long RUNE against BTC and ETH. 



When RUNE depreciates relative to BTC and ETH, more RUNE needs to be minted at the closure of the loan than the amount of RUNE that was burned initially.



This leads us to the unwanted outcome that is happening today: inflationary (and selling) pressure on RUNE rather than the intended effect of

THORChain halts withdrawals amid $200M insolvency

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“We’re just trying to be the onchain Apple.”



Now that’s a banger of a quote. 



James Zhang, founder of Jambo, said it to Empire host Santiago Santos in a bonus Empire episode last week. 



Jambo, for those of you who may not be aware, is an onchain mobile network. We’ll get more into it in a bit, but Zhang’s points about really looking to give folks access to the digital economy stood out to me. 



Right now, Jambo’s biggest user base is in Latin America. Zhang originally thought the biggest user base would perhaps be Africa, but that hasn’t been the case…yet. 



As Santos noted, “the next JPMorgan doesn’t look like JPMorgan. It looks like an MVNO with fintech services layered on top.”



People should be able to digitally access all the integrations without ever having to go into, say, a bank branch.   



For Jambo, that means not only reaching a user base, but ensuring those users are as loyal as I am to Apple. And that’s where crypto comes in. 



And now you know.







Check out the bonus Jambo episode of Empire above



I had a chance to chat with Zhang earlier this week, and I was curious how he’d classify Jambo. Is it a DePIN? Is it more? 



What can I say, I’m paid to be nosey. 



First let’s start with the basics. Jambo’s been around for a while, having last raised capital from a number of big VCs back in 2022. The round was led by both Pantera and Paradigm, if you want to be specific. 



Zhang’s the first one to admit that it was a totally different market when they last raised compared to now, and the team’s been hustling. Even back in 2022, the reception for Jambo was “great,” Zhang noted. There’s an appetite to disrupt the Latin American and African phone markets with a device that is “censorship resistant.”



But after the 2022 raise, Jambo and Zhang had to go into “cockroach mode” to survive the

Why Jambo could be 'the onchain Apple'

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At face value, President Trump is well on his way to giving crypto what it wants. 



A US government strategic crypto reserve. Or maybe it’s a stockpile. Is there a difference?



Anyone interested in wading into that debate is well covered on X and so on. 



Same goes for those keen to moralize the implications of US government agencies accumulating coins other than bitcoin — perhaps even ones backed by funds and entities controlled by appointed officials like venture capitalist David Sacks.



I’m taking a different path. Let’s put aside the US strategic stockpile. It doesn’t exist, yet.



What does verifiably exist onchain is the growing crypto portfolio of World Liberty Fi, the DeFi project endorsed by the Trump family. 



And because this is crypto — and it's on Ethereum — we know exactly what it’s doing at all times, and whether it’s underwater or not.



I touched on this earlier this week, but World Liberty Fi has bought more crypto since Trump’s inauguration on Monday. 



The chart below treats World Liberty Fi’s stockpile as a fund. Its performance is plotted by the blue line.



The crypto World Liberty Fi used to buy more coins came from its $300-million token sale. It currently holds a combined ~$53 million in USDT and USDT.



When the blue line goes into the red, World Liberty Fi’s accumulated portfolio is underwater. It’s otherwise ahead on its purchased crypto to date when it's in the green area. 



The portfolio is ahead by 4.3%, as of this morning, although there would be additional small gains related to liquid ETH staking which were not included in the analysis.



Most recently, World Liberty Fi spent $22.5 million on Thursday, on a mixture of ETH, TRX and wrapped BTC. That’s on top of the $2.65 million in TRX bought on Tuesday.



Those purchases brought World Liberty Fi total spend to $245.3 million across six different

World Liberty Fi’s $259M crypto stockpile is off to a good start

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Yesterday, Liam Heeger announced that he had departed Jump Crypto, where he was working on Solana’s Firedancer client, to found a company named Unto Labs that will build a high-performance layer-1 blockchain. Jump wasn’t happy with this news.



The firm filed a lawsuit against Heeger on Tuesday alleging that the former employee had violated a non-compete agreement by founding Unto. According to the lawsuit, Heeger, who was a lead software engineer for Firedancer, broke his non-compete partly by raising venture capital funds for Unto at the Solana Breakpoint conference while he was still employed by Jump.



Unto is building a “next generation layer-1 blockchain,” Heeger wrote on X. The post thread also notes Unto will not be built to run Solana like Firedancer but will be “re-imagining” blockchain architecture. The company is hiring two engineers, according to its job board. 



“Liam and Unto strongly deny [Jump’s] allegations and are confident in the integrity of our business practices,” a spokesperson for Unto said in an emailed statement. 



The Solana Foundation contracted Jump to write a high-performance Solana client from scratch in 2022. Heeger, who goes by CantalopePeel on GitHub and X, joined Jump to work on Firedancer in early 2023. As part of joining the company, he signed a non-compete agreement and agreed not to use Jump’s proprietary information to benefit anyone other than Jump, the suit says.



In September 2024, Jump sent Heeger — along with its head of R&D Kevin Bowers — to the Solana Breakpoint conference to give an update on Firedancer’s progress. Jump announced that Firedancer was live in non-voting mode, and a limited version of the client called Frankendancer was fully live. 



Jump now alleges that Heeger wasn’t just at Breakpoint to speak about Firedancer — he was also meeting with VCs to raise funds for a new

Jump sues former Firedancer Solana client engineer

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While CME Group doesn’t yet have concrete plans to launch XRP and/or SOL futures contracts, the company is certainly thinking about it.



The derivatives exchange launched bitcoin futures contracts in December 2017. It followed up with ether futures in early 2021. Fast forward to yesterday, when screenshots floated around social media signaling that XRP and SOL futures would come next month.







“A beta page from our website was released in error earlier today,” a CME spokesperson told me Wednesday. “Many mock-ups are included in that test environment, and no decisions have been made regarding XRP or SOL futures contracts.” 



This glimpse the company inadvertently gave into possible product plans comes as crypto ETF filings have accelerated in recent weeks. Among them are proposed spot XRP and SOL funds. 



A number of observers have said spot crypto ETF approvals by the SEC — outside of BTC and ETH — could take a while given the precedent of the regulator wanting to first see a regulated futures market. There’s also the fact that the SEC has named SOL a security and is moving forward with an appeal in its case against Ripple. 



Remember, too, that it was years after bitcoin and ether futures existed that ETFs holding those futures contracts came to market. Those notably preceded spot funds investing in those assets directly.



To that point, VolatilityShares filed for a solana futures ETF in December and ProShares followed that up with a similar filing last week.




NEW: ProShares just filed for a Solana Futures ETF. VolatilityShares also filed for one of these back in December. Interesting because there arent CME futures yet and i'm not sure if the Coinbase SOL futures are large and liquid enough? pic.twitter.com/7dUPIQw37z— James Seyffart (@JSeyff) January 17, 2025




Then there are Teucrium planned products that would invest in XRP

SOL, XRP futures coming? And what about a DOGE ETF?

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The US senator pushing for a national strategic bitcoin reserve just got a promotion. 



Cynthia Lummis, a Wyoming Republican who has long championed the crypto industry, will lead the new digital asset subcommittee under the Senate Banking Committee. 



Lummis debuted the text for the Bitcoin Reserve Bill last summer at the Bitcoin 2024 Conference in Nashville. She introduced the bill late last Congress but has not yet unveiled an updated text this session. 



The original bill sought to have the US government acquire a total of 1 million BTC — around 5% of the total supply. The bill permits sales of the asset for only one purpose: paying off the national deficit. 



“We will be debt free because of bitcoin,” Lummis said in Nashville. 



Now, with her own subcommittee and Senate Banking Chair Tim Scott’s ear, movement on the reserve could come a lot faster. Speculation that President Trump may create the stockpile via an executive order seems to have dissipated in recent weeks. 



But, it’s very possible we see some sort of presidential action from Trump directing the DOJ to refrain from auctioning seized bitcoin. 



In any case, Lummis seems committed to getting the reserve off the ground in Congress, saying on Thursday that lawmakers “need to urgently pass bipartisan legislation.” 



We’ll be curious to see what the subcommittee selects as its first hearing topic.







Start your day with top crypto insights from David Canellis and Katherine Ross. Subscribe to the Empire newsletter.



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US Senate creates first-ever digital asset subcommittee 

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A major thesis I have for 2025 is that FX will be one of the key macro assets to focus on. 



The big reason is that FX currencies are the exhaust valve for interest rate differentials between other countries, and therefore tariff implementation since that gets directly imputed into global capital flows that are key drivers of global currencies. 



With this belief in FX volatility being the key exhaust valve of Trump’s tariff and trade policy this year, I went ahead and interviewed one of the best macro FX traders I know: Brent Donnelly of Spectra Markets.











Of course, nothing beats watching the full episode, but here are a few of my favorite takeaways: 



On how much capital flows drive FX currency: 



“The hard thing is that the capital flow stuff kind of happens around the edges. So if you have a good capital flow story, that could be marginally biased in one direction. But if the bigger drivers like rate differentials are pointing in the other direction, it's not going to work. So capital flows tend to be more of like an accelerant, not a directional driver.”



On how emerging market currencies are mostly driven by carry trades:



“For an EM it's usually all about the carry. So if you can sell USD and buy Brazil and it goes nowhere for a year, let's just say you make 10% on that carry. That's a really good carry trade. So dollar Brazil is going to go up and down. But if you have the view that dollar Brazil is going to go down, it's kind of a free lunch. So like for two years in Mexico, it was basically a free lunch to own Mexican pesos because reshoring was good and that led to a steady and stable carry trade.”



On the impact of this week’s Bank of Japan rate hike:



“They did a hike recently of 15 basis points and they did one of 20 and now the market's expecting 25 and 22bps is priced in.



So then the question becomes this: If

FX lessons from Brent Donnelly 

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Rumors of a “second foundation” — a more commercially-oriented alternative to the Ethereum Foundation — turned out to be a ruse…sort of. Lido and P2P.org founder Konstantin Lomashuk teased the idea on X Wednesday, but quickly walked it back.



“If a second foundation ever does form, it must have a clear purpose that complements the enormous work of current contributors,” he wrote. “I appreciate everyone’s support and believe we need more organizations contributing to Ethereum.”



Before Lomashuk revealed he wasn’t serious, the notion was endorsed by a number of prominent Ethereum voices, including Uniswap founder Hayden Adams. “Moving technical development to a 2nd foundation is not crazy…[With] the right leader I bet it could raise big $ and have a huge impact,” Adams mused.



As if on cue, hours later a new group funded by the EF — going by the name Etherealize — emerged from stealth.



The new organization, which calls itself an “institutional marketing and product arm for the Ethereum ecosystem,” will be a resource for TradFi. The team of eight is led by Vivek Raman, who previously headed AI and crypto investment banking at BitOoda. Raman also had trading experience at Nomura, Deutsche Bank, UBS, and Morgan Stanley.



Grant Hummer, James Fickel and Philipp Muens are also signed on.



In its kick-off, Etherealize sounded “a note of gratitude for the [EF], who has ushered the growth of a new global economy.” It added: “The EF cannot — and should not — do it all. We’re here to help.”



Now, many of the same folks who’ve been calling for a leadership change at the EF are rallying behind the new group. Some, who just this week were removing .eth from their X names, have done an about-face.



As a content hub, the new website features half a dozen interactive graphs and four blog posts credited to Ramen. The content

Ethereum’s ‘second foundation’ was a ruse — then Etherealize launched

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North Korean hackers. Accidentally throwing out your seed phrase. The IRS, DOJ and SEC. Being forced to interact with customer service departments at exchanges.



As far as scary monsters in crypto go, those would be far up the list. Still, none scarier than the notion that the bull market has peaked without securing generational wealth.



All that has everyone searching for top signals. Hints that the fun is over for another four years.



Trump’s stupidly successful memecoin launch is a decent candidate. Especially so paired with bitcoin’s new all-time high around his inauguration. Was that the top?



It would be easy to agree if crypto was like it was in 2021. Back then, in the midst of the monster bull run, there were really only two memecoins — dogecoin and shiba inu — and both hit enormous peaks along with bitcoin.







Except, DOGE and SHIB didn’t peak at the same time. Looking back, the rotation between them is totally obvious.



DOGE, in blue, exploded from about $1 billion market cap to over $80 billion between January and May 2021, alongside bitcoin’s own rally from $20,000 to over $64,000.



It then drained as bitcoin corrected but never really came back at size. SHIB (in purple) shined instead, rallying from $3 billion market cap to almost $40 billion between September and the end of October — matching bitcoin’s rally almost exactly.



So, in retrospect, the Great Dog Coin Rotation was probably the most obvious top signal for the last cycle.



This time around, it’s much harder to tell.







The most simple read is that memecoins in 2021 topped out alongside bitcoin. So maybe a major rally in memecoins might mark the end in 2025. 



Except, there are just so many new launches — FARTCOIN, GOAT, AI16Z, PENGU, SPX and now TRUMP — making it difficult to spot an actual top for memecoins overall. 



One peak and correction feeds into

Why top signals could be less obvious this cycle

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Looking for a new narrative? Marc Boiron, CEO of Polygon Labs, has one for ya: yield-bearing stablecoins. 



Once these stablecoins are better understood, they’re set for takeoff, Boiron said. In fact, he wouldn’t be surprised if it ends up driving “a decent amount of activity in 2025.”



So far, stablecoins (not just yield-bearing ones) are up to a $207 billion market cap, per rwa.xyz data.



It’s not just the yield that’ll draw stablecoin activity, it’s also the regulatory clarity that we’re seeing over in Europe courtesy of MiCA. It’s even looking more and more likely that the US is on the regulatory path as well.



For companies — like fintechs — watching the stablecoin market from the sidelines, it’s hard to not feel the FOMO when looking at Tether’s attestations. And that’s clear from Boiron’s conversations with non-crypto native folks. 



This, shall we call them, new set of players are telling Boiron, “hey, we want our own stablecoin, because we can see how much money we can make off of it, and we've got a boatload of users, it's really easy to push them into that stablecoin and get a lot of volume, and obviously revenue from that as well.” 



“The second part of it is just having better rails for their users, knowing that there's a set of users who are [going to want to] send payments, especially remittances, as of right now, and they actually want to make that available rather than incurring” fees, he continued.



I mean, let’s take a look at Tether’s third-quarter attestation from last year. The firm reported a whopping $2.5 billion net profit in that quarter alone, even if it does bundle unrealized gains on bitcoin with other revenue in its disclosures.



No surprise that Tether’s topping the list



“Everybody sees how profitable Tether is, and they're like, ‘Okay, I can do that with less risk now,’ especially

Stablecoins will drive a 'decent amount' of activity in 2025: Polygon Labs CEO

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On Friday, the SEC filed suit against Nova Labs, the developer behind the Helium Mobile crypto-enabled cell network. The agency charged Nova Labs with fraud and registration violations.



The litigation wound up being the last of Gary Gensler’s four-year tenure as SEC chair, and it was a seemingly poetic way for Wall Street’s top cop to go out. The regulator frequently locked horns with the crypto industry, which bristled against his “regulation by enforcement” approach. His staff departs with a lawsuit against a company it had been investigating for years — and which many in crypto think could give the asset class real-world utility.



The SEC argued that Helium hotspots — which provide wireless connectivity and dole out token rewards — along with discovery mapping — where Helium Mobile users share their data with the company in exchange for tokens — both equate to unregistered securities sales. The agency also accused Nova Labs of fraudulently telling potential investors that Lime, Nestlé and Salesforce had used its wireless network.



A Nova Labs executive told me the Gensler-led SEC inquiry had been going on for two years prior to the suit and called the last-day lawsuit “as irresponsible as it is wrong-headed.”



The debate on whether most crypto tokens are securities has been a long-running one in crypto, although it may come to not matter as much: Fox Business reported President Trump aims to give the CFTC the regulatory lead on crypto, meaning the SEC won’t have as much say over alleged crypto securities.



As for the fraud part of things, Mashable reported in mid-2022 that Helium’s website said it had partnered with the scooter app Lime, and Lime said the partnership didn’t exist. The exposé led to a bit of egg on the face for Helium, which removed mentions of Lime as well as Salesforce from its website shortly thereafter. The SEC

Gensler wraps tenure as SEC chair with lawsuit against Nova Labs

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Congressional Republicans are working to reverse new IRS guidelines that require so-called “custodial brokers” to report transactions. 



Rep. Mike Carey and Sen. Ted Cruz this week introduced corresponding resolutions seeking to “roll back the disastrous IRS broker rule.” 



The legislation comes weeks after a group of crypto lobbying firms sued the IRS over the rule. They claim the requirement “exceeds the agencies’ statutory authority, violates the Administrative Procedure Act (“APA”) and is unconstitutional.” 



As it currently stands, starting in 2025, custodial brokers are required to report gross proceeds. In 2026, they will have to report cost basis for certain transactions. 



The final version of the 1099-DA form was published at the end of last year. While earlier drafts had included a section where brokers had to identify their “type” of business, the final form nixed this box. It’s a small change, but by cutting this section the IRS more or less punted the issue of DeFi actors. 



Even so, those opposed to the rule claim that the rule still imposes unfair reporting obligations on intermediaries and other actors in the crypto space. 



The resolutions have some co-sponsors (Sens. Cynthia Lummis and Tim Sheehy, to name a few), but neither have been scheduled for a markup or vote just yet. This is a hot-button issue in the crypto space though, so we’d expect companies to be directing a significant amount of their lobbying efforts here.







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