Motoko Sentinels, a new ordinal collection that launched on the Bioniq Marketplace, saw its trading volume increase following the Bitcoin halving, despite the high trading volumes immediately following the event. 



Although total ordinal volume had decreased by over 58% the day following the Bitcoin halving due to high network fees, the Motoko Sentinel collection saw its trading volume increase by 20%. 



Kyle Langham, the director of data and analytics at DFINITY, told Blockworks that this is because the Bioniq marketplace operates on the Internet Computer Protocol (ICP). This network, which is natively integrated with Bitcoin, can maintain lower transaction costs regardless of the fee environment on the native Bitcoin chain.



Read more: Bitcoin ordinals volume jumps while ERC-404 experiment loses steam



“ICP is what you call a generation three blockchain. We’re not trying to replicate Ethereum or Solana; we’re trying to replicate AWS but on the blockchain,” Langham said.



Applications hosted on ICP will already be integrated with Web2, enabling developers to make API calls on ICP. The team is also working on Web3 integrations, or what it calls “chain fusion.”



“We integrated with Bitcoin a year and a half ago at the protocol level, so there’s a Bitcoin light node running on ICP facilitating developers to build ordinal marketplaces — like Bioniq — on top of ICP that can communicate directly with the Bitcoin network,” Langham said. 



Bob Bodily, co-founder and CEO of Bioniq, notes that through building on ICP, the marketplace can offer users faster transactions at lower costs. 



“You can do more with your ordinals, and with your runes, or BRC-20 tokens when you bridge them to a more programmable blockchain,” Bodily said. “There are a lot of limitations on Bitcoin One.”



Bodily explains that users using ordinal marketplaces on Bitcoin layer-1 may encounter problems like MEV bots and getting sniped in the

Motoko Sentinels gain traction despite ordinal volume decrease post-halving 

The team behind restaking protocol EigenLayer dropped a white paper for a native token on Monday.



The Eigen Labs team went into detail about the structure of the EIGEN token in a 43-page paper. The token will be distributed by the Eigen Foundation and the supply will sit at 1.67 billion at launch, according to a statement provided to The Block. 



45% of the tokens were allocated to the foundation’s community, while stakedrops, community initiatives and ecosystem development have each been allocated 15%.



Early investors are set to receive nearly 30%, while early contributors receive 25.5%. 



According to the Eigen Foundation, season one will focus on users who have staked directly with EigenLayer and those who staked in “EigenLayer via [Liquired Restaking Tokens].”



During Phase 2, another 10% will be given to “people who interacted with EigenLayer in more complex ways, where determining the appropriate EigenLayer end user was either not possible or required an opinionated decision.”



“EIGEN serves a fully complementary role to ETH with ETH staking powering objective fault slashing and EIGEN staking powering slashing for intersubjective faults. We view this intersubjective work token as taking the Ethereum ecosystem one step closer to the goal of building the Open Verifiable Digital Commons,” the team wrote.



Read more: Restaking protocol EigenLayer heads to Ethereum mainnet



Claims, according to the website, are set to start May 10, but the initial float won’t be tradeable until June. 



EIGEN “solves fundamental challenges like universality, isolation, metering, and compensation. By using social consensus and forking, EIGEN empowers the secure execution of diverse digital tasks with crypto economic security,” the website said.



Prior to the announcement, founder Sreeram Kannan seemed to indicate that the team was at work behind the scenes after the told Unchained’s Laura Shin that the team hadn’t thought far enough head

Eigen Labs drops white paper debuting EIGEN token

As the snows of Crypto Winter melt and a thousand seed rounds bloom, too many Web3 teams are making the mistake our forebears have warned about for decades: They’re rolling their own crypto. 



Crypto, in this case, means cryptography — the software and mathematical techniques that secure the internet, your credit card and the Web3 protocols we know and love.



Why is crypto different from, say, general app development? Think of it this way. If you've just developed the hottest new platform for streaming bird videos to tech-savvy cats, you're probably thrilled if it works 99.9% of the time. But if instead you've built the hottest new crypto wallet, preventing attempted thefts 99.9% of the time obviously won’t work: Attackers will just keep trying until they’ve drained your users' funds. Persistence is worthwhile when the payoff is a payout.



Unfortunately, as computer security legend Bruce Schneier says, "Anyone, from the most clueless amateur to the best cryptographer, can create an algorithm that he himself can’t break." The tough part, as Schneier says, is building systems other people can’t break. Sadly, Web3 teams emboldened by inexperience (and overworked auditors) keep rolling their own crypto. What’s the result?



Bad crypto implementations



Cryptographic algorithms are incredibly delicate. Even a well understood, secure algorithm is easy to break if it’s implemented poorly. 



Consider the hundreds of millions of dollars stolen in the last two years because of a textbook mistake: Generating secret keys in a predictable way that’s easy for attackers to guess. We still see these bugs a few times a year, even though avoiding them is Cryptography Engineering 101.



But not all bugs are that simple. Some take engineering intuition and expertise to spot, and not all cryptographers specialize in engineering. Applied cryptographers and crypto engineering specialists are well-versed in subtle implementation bugs because (hopefully)

You’re still rolling your own crypto. You need to stop.

Grab your popcorn



Custodia’s court battle isn’t over yet.



The firm’s fight against the Federal Reserve entered a new phase after it filed a notice of appeal on Friday. Last month, US District Court Judge Scott Skavdahl sided with the Kansas City Fed in a summary judgment.



The crypto-focused bank, in its initial complaint filed in 2021, alleged that it would be reduced to being a “second-class citizen” by not being authorized for a Master Account with the Fed. That account would allow Custodia to directly access the Fed’s banking system rather than going through an intermediary bank.



The suit was filed after the Fed dragged its feet and delayed Custodia’s application, and has been ongoing ever since. The Fed officially denied the master account bid in January 2023, two years after the initial filing.



Judge Skavdahl, in his judgment last month, wrote that the Fed maintains the “discretion to grant or deny master account requests” and that the Fed didn’t “owe” Custodia master account approval. 



Read more: Why Custodia’s loss isn’t the end of its Fed fight



So Custodia took the most obvious next step (other than just accepting that judgment) and submitted its appeal notice to the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals. 



If Custodia is able to successfully win its bid for an appeal and goes on to receive a successful judgment, then the Fed will have no choice but to seriously consider its bid. After its initial denial, Custodia alleged that the Fed’s decision was “arbitrary” — a word that crypto became very familiar with after an Appeals Court sided with Grayscale in its lawsuit against the SEC last year. 



However, if the judge’s original decision is upheld, then not only does Custodia have to allow an intermediary bank to access the Fed’s system on its behalf, but also set a potentially exclusionary precedent.



Custodia’s case is the latest in an array of crypto-centric cases that may set the tone for how the

Empire Newsletter: Custodia keeps its Fed lawsuit alive

Demand for the US spot bitcoin ETFs remains at a standstill following an initial surge of significant investment inflows.



The country’s ETF category, which comprises 11 funds, saw net outflows hit $328 million last week, according to Farside Investors data. 



It marked the third straight week of net outflows for the segment, as Grayscale’s bitcoin ETF continues to be the driver of that fate. Net money flowing out of the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust ETF (GBTC) totaled $454 million from April 22 to April 26, the data shows. 



The difference in recent weeks has been the fastest-growing funds in the space seeing demand stop altogether, or going negative, on certain days. 



The 71-day net inflow streak for BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) ended Wednesday before the fund again saw $0 worth of flows on Thursday and Friday. 



Read more: BlackRock’s bitcoin ETF inflows halt after 71-day streak, data shows



Fidelity Investments’ Wise Origin Bitcoin Fund (FBTC), which also notched several neutral flow days, saw its first days of net outflows on Thursday and Friday — at $23 million and $3 million, respectively. 



Given the slowdown for the BlackRock and Fidelity products, combined net inflows for Grayscale’s competitors fell to $126 million last week — a total unable to fully make up for GBTC’s hemorrhaging.



Many have followed bitcoin ETF flows in recent months as a sort of barometer for broader sentiment in the space. The pace at which these funds had been buying bitcoin for weeks exceeded that at which new BTC was being issued — contributing to a new all-time high for bitcoin last month.  



Last week’s $328 million of US spot bitcoin ETF outflows was a bit more severe than the prior two weeks. Overall, $204 million in assets had left the sector during the week prior to last, while net investor money exiting the funds totaled $83 million from April 8 to April 12.



Trading volumes for crypto exchange-traded products (ETPs) more

Bitcoin ETF snapshot: A few firsts during another week of outflows

The US Securities and Exchange Commission has been investigating ethereum and its potential status as a security for over a year, new court filings Monday reveal. 



Consensys, which filed its lawsuit against the SEC last week, alleges the SEC has been quietly building its case against ether since at least early 2023 in a plan to reverse its previous public assertion that the asset is a commodity. 



The crypto firm claims that SEC director of the division of enforcement Gurbir Grewal in March 2023 approved a Formal Order of Investigation into the buying and selling of ether. Formal Orders allow the agency to issue subpoenas and collect witness testimony under oath.



Read more: SEC seeks to regulate ETH as a security, Consensys alleges in lawsuit



The timeline, Consensys says, explains why in April 2023 SEC Chairman Gary Gensler refused to answer whether or not ether was a commodity or a security when asked during Congressional testimony. 



“He did not want to admit that his SEC had already secretly cemented its power-grab by issuing an order of investigation designating ETH as a security,” Consensys’ team wrote in the unredacted complaint, filed Monday. 



Consensys’ suit makes two major claims. First, that ether is not a security and the SEC’s investigation is unlawful. Second, Consensys says the SEC has plans to target the company for its MetaMask product, which securities regulators say is a broker-dealer. 



Read more: Ether is the Schrödinger’s cat of crypto



Consensys received a Wells notice stating the SEC wanted to pursue an enforcement action against them for alleged securities law violations via its MetaMask Swaps and Staking products, the complaint adds. The Wells notice, according to the complaint, does not mention any charges against Consensys relating to ETH specifically.



Historically, the SEC has targeted specific tokens by naming them as securities in lawsuits it files against exchanges. In the agency’s June 2023

SEC has been investigating ETH for over a year, new court filing shows 

Franklin Templeton's crypto-focused research director remains optimistic about the future of the space despite recent outflows from bitcoin ETFs.



In an interview with Blockworks, Christopher Jensen highlighted the emergence of new buyer types as a positive indicator for long-term growth.



Jensen also said the recent Bitcoin halving exposed gaps in clients' understanding of cryptocurrency. He emphasized Franklin Templeton’s commitment to bridging these educational shortfalls, aiming to increase client knowledge and engagement in Web3.



This need for education comes at what could prove a critical time for the US bitcoin ETF market. The US boasts 11 spot bitcoin ETF funds, which allow participants to gain bitcoin exposure via traditional investment vehicles without buying and holding the crypto asset themselves.



Despite seeing $12 billion of net inflows to date, these funds have collectively endured net outflows across three straight weeks for the first time since launching in January. The ETFs bled $328 million in assets from April 22 to April 26, according to data from Farside Investors.



Read more: BlackRock’s bitcoin ETF inflows halt after 71-day streak, data shows



Jensen noted that increased geopolitical concerns and the belief that interest rates could stay higher for longer are likely contributors to the demand halt. 



But the journey of understanding digital assets is an educational process that takes time, he added. 



“There are lots of platforms, there are lots of institutions that are interested and are doing work,” Jensen explained. “So we don’t think the flows for the ETPs are done even though they’ve cooled off in recent weeks.”



Franklin Templeton — a fund group with roughly $1.5 trillion in assets under management — has not gathered assets for its BTC fund as well as most of its competitors. The Franklin Bitcoin ETF (EZBC) had $330 million in assets under management, well behind inflow leaders BlackRock and

New mix of bitcoin buyers bode well for ecosystem: Franklin Templeton exec

Less than seven months after its last round of layoffs, Web3 gaming and NFT company Yuga Labs cut more roles Friday. It was not clear how many staff were affected by the layoffs. 



“To put it simply: Yuga lost its way. Getting ourselves centered and on the right path means being a smaller, more agile and cryptonative team,” CEO Greg Solano wrote in a Slack message that he then screenshotted and posted on X to announce the restructuring. 



Read more: Yuga’s Greg Solano resumes role as CEO, pledges stronger ‘cryptonative’ focus



Crypto-nativity was one of Solano’s pledges when he took over as CEO in February. Solano was a Yuga Labs co-founder who took back the reins from former Activision Blizzard CEO Daniel Alegre less than a year into Alegre’s tenure. 



In the aftermath of Harvard-educated Alegre’s regime, Yuga’s creative spirit has been partially squelched by “labyrinthine corporate processes,” Solano wrote Monday. 



The owner of the Bored Apes and CryptoPunks intellectual property last made layoffs in October 2023, saying at the time the company still had over 120 employees.



Read more: Yuga Labs announces US layoffs as part of broader restructuring



In recent months, Yuga has placed increasing emphasis on its Otherside metaverse project, though the execution hasn’t been flawless. Some users were underwhelmed by a recent play test, with one saying the Otherside felt like a “proof of concept.”



In other hiring news from Yuga Labs, Won Kim announced this week he’d left Bored Room Ventures to become the company’s head of brand partnerships. 



Anchorage, DCG make executive hires



Two institutionally-focused crypto firms made executive hires this week.



Anchorage Digital made former Coinbase Custody CEO Aaron Schnarch its chief operating officer. In the role, Schnarch will oversee “all business lines including custody, trading, staking, settlement and self-custody, as well as sales, marketing and business

Crypto Hiring: Yuga Labs resumes layoffs, CEO says company ‘lost its way’

If something in crypto can be sold, there’s a good chance it will be.



This week, a yellow legal pad with “Buy Bitcoin” scribbled on it sold for 16 bitcoin, worth over $1 million. 



The legal pad was held up behind then-Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen during a 2017 Congressional hearing in an episode that’s become iconic in the Bitcoin community. The auction for the piece of memorabilia was held at PubKey, a New York City bar popular among Bitcoiners.



Christian Langalis, the then-intern on Capitol Hill who flashed the Buy Bitcoin sign, took home most of the auction’s proceeds. 



Also this week, the crypto exchange CoinEx auctioned off the first satoshi of a block mined after Bitcoin’s recent halving event. Satoshis, or sats, are Bitcoin’s smallest unit and have been popularized recently by Ordinals being inscribed on them. CoinEx got access to the satoshi by way of a partnership with mining pool ViaBTC.



The sat netted double what the “Buy Bitcoin” sign did, selling in the end for $2.1 million.



Yet another alien punk sale



Bitcoin memorabilia weren’t the only items selling this week. For the third time since the beginning of March, a CryptoPunk sold for more than $10 million. 



On Thursday, Punk #635 sold for $12.41 million, making it the fourth-most expensive punk sale ever. The second- and third-largest sales came on March 20 and March 4, respectively. 



Read more: Someone bought a CryptoPunk for $16M



As with the other recent sales, Punk #635 is an alien punk, or one of nine CryptoPunks out of the 10,000 that have blue-ish skin. 



“To me, owning a Punk has never been about the floor price…It’s about my belief that NFTs will be the future of ownership,” the punk’s apparent new owner wrote on X.



One interesting stat:




Crypto-focused VC firm Stratos reported that its investment in the memecoin DogWifHat yielded a 300x return for the fund in Q1.




Also of note:




Blockworks bought a goat.



Web3

Web3 Watch: ‘Buy Bitcoin’ sign, first post-halving satoshi go up for sale

Two more restaking-related protocols announced funding rounds this week, as venture investors look to gain exposure to EigenLayer’s burgeoning ecosystem.



Aligned Layer announced a $20 million Series A led by Hack VC. The round also drew participation from a spate of smaller crypto-focused venture firms. 



Aligned Layer plans to launch as an actively validated service (AVS) on EigenLayer. AVSs are products secured via EigenLayer’s restaking, which is a means of putting staked ether to use outside of securing Ethereum, drawing an extra layer of usage out of the capital providing Ethereum’s security. 



Read more: What was behind the run on Renzo’s liquid restaked ETH?



AVSs can be any kind of blockchain-related protocol or service, and the few already live on EigenLayer’s mainnet encompass things like data availability, rollup creation and oracle data. Notably, these AVSs have struggled to turn a profit so far, as EigenLayer is yet to enable in-protocol payments.



Aligned Layer is an EigenLayer-secured protocol for verifying zero-knowledge proofs, which are cryptographic proofs showing a statement to be true without revealing the contents of the statement. 



Aligned Layer hopes to make zero-knowledge proof verification cheaper. In a blog post explaining its decision to invest, Hack VC likened Aligned Layer to a data availability provider for zero-knowledge proofs.



Read more: 0G Labs raises $35M for data availability, spurring competition with Celestia, EigenLayer, others



Also this week, Othentic announced $4 million in seed funding led by Finality and Breyer Capital. Othentic offers a software stack that helps AVS developers spin up a distributed system based on EigenLayer’s shared security model.



Othentic “simplifies AVS development on EigenLayer with pre-built components, reduced engineering overhead and a faster time to market,” Nader Dabit, the director of developer relations at Eigen Labs, said on X. 



Movement Labs raises

Funding Wrap: Investors place more EigenLayer bets

The huge sums of money lost to crypto scams and frauds is probably the biggest financial looting in the history of the USA. 



The FBI recorded losses over $12.5 billion in 2023, 22% more than the previous year. The agency’s Internet Crime Center received a record 880,418 complaints from Americans about potential crypto and online thefts. Considering that most of the targeted individuals do not report their cases to law enforcement, these statistics imply an even more chilling reality. 



We need collective action to resolve this situation, from robust security solutions to innovative regulatory and policy frameworks. It’s the only way out — and many already affected are on borrowed time. 



We call upon community leaders, politicians and policymakers to step up and protect vulnerable communities. The present circumstances necessitate proactive and enduring measures from them. This is a battle between good and evil, where regulators and crypto innovators should be allies, not adversaries. 



Whether one likes it or not, crypto is here to stay: but it cannot persist in its current form. We must prioritize accountability and transparency to enable this groundbreaking technology to thrive and ensure that more people prosper in a secure financial landscape.



Let’s make crime illegal again. 



Strategic interventions are mission-critical



Washington DC must urgently take decisive action to protect consumers from the rampant frauds plaguing the crypto realm. 



With another bull cycle underway, the influx of new users and capital only heightens the risk. 



The US, the biggest financial superpower, is in dire need of a robust and unambiguous regulatory framework to effectively combat crypto-related crimes. The current lack thereof has left investors, traders and consumers vulnerable to significant risks. The fragmented oversight by agencies like the SEC, CFTC and IRS has created loopholes ripe for exploitation by hackers. Enforcing anti-money

Crypto crime is too easy

Anyone who says that cryptocurrency is useless needs to spend $50 in crypto to buy a goat in Kenya.



All the talk about creating a new type of finance — throwing off the shackles of Wall Street once and for all — boils down to how easy crypto has made it to sit in my apartment in New York City, push a few buttons on my phone, and name a goat after a post-Impressionist painter.




Vincent van goat is here pic.twitter.com/RsDAVgY4hl— richard opany (@OpanyRichard) April 24, 2024




But the story of Vincent Van Goat starts much earlier than that.



At the beginning of April, Twitter user Richard Opany responded to a Worldcoin promotional tweet with an interesting bit of information: “I use the coins to buy myself a goat during this Easter.” He then posted a picture of said goat, adding “thanks.”



Crypto Twitter was tickled by the idea of someone using what aims to be the future currency of a universal world income for its intended use case. Twitter personalities Nic Carter and Zack Voell responded to Opany with queries about how to buy more goats, and the goat race was on.



By checking the crypto wallets that Opany has posted to solicit goat donations, he seems to have received about $2,900 in 15 different tokens so far. That would break down to about 58 goats, if he had unlimited space in his goat house. To be clear, we don’t know that he doesn’t, as he recently shared that only 30 goats can be safely housed in his new, expanded goat enclosure. 



But who exactly is Richard Opany, crypto’s newest goat maven?



While the expected goat-themed memecoins have popped up around Opany’s goat business, he had maintained that he had no affiliation with any goat coins up until yesterday, when he shared his new role as marketing director at Goat Dzaddy, which, worriedly for Vincent Van Goat, has a GOAT MEAT token affiliation.



Speaking to Opany via DM, the most important thing that I wanted to get straight was the specifics of his new crypto