GM! ☕️ 

There’s a bit of optimism in the air this week - not the full bull parade, but enough green to make you double check if your chart settings are correct ⌚️ 

Feels like the market’s trying to remember what hope feels like 🥲 

This week, we’re discussing:

• 🤯 Fattest rug of this cycle - 6B wiped out in MINUTES

• 😵 Amazon cloud outage WIPES OUT biggest CEX

• 👀 Crypto UX - Not all pain is onchain

• 🤌 Stables volume surpassed Visa's in Q1 - report

• 🤡 Tokenized garbage - BASE "teaches" users a "valuable lesson"

Meanwhile, the W3oF Degen Portfolio continues its performance art piece titled "Perpetual Meh." While the rest of the market flirts with recovery, our picks are staging a silent protest. (I, for one, blame Vitalik).

If you’ve got a coin that still believes in miracles, come drop it in the Discord.

Fattest rug of this cycle - 6B wiped out in MINUTES

On April 13, $OM - the token of Real World Asset protocol Mantra - evaporated.

• Down 90% in minutes. It was a good old fashioned liquidity death spiral. The same kind that wiped out LUNA, only this time without the algorithmic BS. Just centralized exchanges, thin books, a touch of leverage, and a reminder that DeFi can be really brutal 🔨 

• According to onchain data, over 43 million $OM was dumped across Binance and OKX shortly before the cascade. Bybit alone liquidated $71 million. Whether this was an inside job, a coordinated effort to dump it into oblivion by exchanges or just poor decisions meeting bad timing is irrelevant. The result was the same: $6 billion in value gone 💸 

Retail bagholders met the ground first.

Then came the PR damage control.

Within hours, Mantra CEO John Mullin promised to burn the team's entire token allocation - 300 million $OM, roughly 17% of the total supply. These tokens were locked anyway, set to vest over the next few years. Still, burning them was framed as a self-sacrificial gesture to "earn back trust" 🤷‍♂️ 

Users in the space called it desperate.

This guy said what many were thinking: burning locked tokens sounds noble until you realize you’ve just removed the team's only incentive to keep working 🤔 

Others pointed out that no DAO vote had taken place yet, and no tokens were actually burned.

Meanwhile, exchanges denied responsibility.

The crash, they said, was due to “cross exchange liquidations” and not coordinated dumping - which is the same as saying “gravity caused the fall” - it’s true, but it’s doubtful that it’s the whole truth 🫠 

OM’s collapse is this cycle’s first real LUNA moment - not because of a broken peg or a stablecoin scam, but because it revealed the same thing: how fragile “trust” becomes when liquidity vanishes and your entire ecosystem is built on oversold and overleveraged tokens that can be sold faster than you can type “rug?” 💰️ 💰️ 

Let’s not pretend this was unforeseeable. And let’s not pretend Mantra is the last one.

Amazon cloud outage WIPES OUT biggest CEX

On April 15th, the world’s largest crypto exchanges hit pause – not because of a market crash or an attack but because…. Amazon Web Services burped 🙄 

• Withdrawals and trading halted on Binance, KuCoin, and others.

• Wallet apps like Rabby and analytics platforms like DeBank also started reporting errors ❗️ 

• For 63 minutes, the industry that once promised to never rely on banks, states, or centralized choke points found itself paralyzed by the very thing it was meant to replace – centralized infrastructure with a kill switch ⚡️ 

Binance opened withdrawals five minutes after the issue was flagged. KuCoin's CEO chimed in to say everything was under control.

CEX love to parade around as the future of resilience. But the reality is that it’s running on the same AWS backend as your favorite pizza tracker 🤷 

This isn’t new. Amazon’s data centers have already gone dark multiple times – in 2015 and in late 2024 – each time freezing financial markets, disrupting apps, and exposing how shallow the decentralization really runs 💾 

Most major exchanges, DeFi interfaces, and even wallets quietly depend on AWS for uptime, bandwidth, storage, and more.

The decentralization LARP

It's not that AWS shouldn't exist. It's that crypto shouldn’t collapse when it does.

The AWS incident doesn’t just expose tech fragility – it exposes narrative fraud.

For years, crypto’s been selling a dream of sovereign systems built on unstoppable code. But the actual architecture is riddled with points of failure that look a lot like the legacy systems it claims to rebel against 😐️ 

Not all pain is onchain

Crypto user experience has been abusive for years.

Now Ambire is running live interviews to document the trauma 🤓 

No more guessing what went wrong. If your last wallet experience felt like emotional damage in UI form, this is your moment 👆️ 

Apply. Share the pain. Get rewarded.

Because some interfaces deserve to be put on trial.

Stables volume surpassed Visa’s in Q1 – report

In Q1 2025, stablecoins did what every fintech pitch deck has been pretending to do for a decade - they flipped VISA.

• Bitwise’s latest report shows that for the first time ever, there were more stablecoin transactions than Visa ones.

• Not by a landslide, but enough to make the point. The point being: crypto rails are no longer experimental. They're infrastructure now - and they're scaling without asking anyone for permission 💵 

Behind the scenes, stablecoins pushed over $218B in assets under management, with a 13.5% quarterly jump 🚀 

Market cap is now hovering around $237B. And while prices across crypto dipped post-election, usage didn’t flinch. If anything, it ramped up 🤯 

“The best worst quarter in crypto history” - prices down, lawsuits flying, headlines are bearish - and yet stablecoins are settling more value than the global plastic overlords. Visa, who?

It gets worse (for TradFi) 👇️ 

• Tokenized real-world assets - like treasuries - are catching fire. From $14B in Q4 to $19B in Q1, with most of that going into on-chain treasuries.

• That’s a 35% jump in three months for the most boring asset in existence. Boring until it’s programmable and permissionless.

DeFi also refused to die. 

Venture funding clocked its second-highest level since early 2022, led by projects building yield-bearing stablecoins and token infrastructure. Apparently, someone forgot to tell investors it’s a bear market 🧠 

It means the rails are changing - not like you usually hear it - in theory, in 5 years - NOW. The biggest payments story of the quarter isn’t a flashy Apple Pay integration or a new fintech IPO. It’s stablecoins.

Silent, composable, and settling trillions while old guys are still printing out PDFs 🤏 

The transition isn’t coming. It happened.

Tokenized garbage – BASE “teaches” users a “valuable lesson”

Coinbase’s Base chain just pulled off, or at least allowed a huge rugpull to happen - and then stepped back like a proud parent watching their kid learn to ride a bike by crashing face first into the pavement.

• It started with a memecoin: BASEISFOREVERYONE - quietly minted on Zora, no warning, no roadmap, and no disclaimers. But it was tweeted from Base’s official account. And that was enough 🪙 

• Degens swarmed. Price pumped. Within two minutes, the token hit a $80M+ market cap. And then, as is tradition, it nosedived 88% in the blink of an eye - and 94% by the seventh minute 📉 

The chain that spent two years swearing it wouldn’t launch a token had, in effect, launched a token. Not just any token - a shitcoin, posted from its blue check corporate account with the words “Base is for everyone” scribbled like a welcome sign over a burning clown car 🤪 

What followed was peak corporate gaslighting 👇️ 

• Base didn’t delete the tweet. Didn’t issue a clarification. Jesse Pollak, the project's founder, kept posting like nothing happened - casually retweeting threads that framed the dump as a teachable moment.

• A “valuable lesson” in crypto speculation, some claimed. And Base just amplified it, as if to say: see? the pain was the point.

Coinbase’s official line: “Base did not launch a token”.

According to them, what you saw wasn’t a launch, but just another piece of content auto-tokenized on Zora. A social experiment. A misunderstanding. An illusion.

Nothing to see here. Except the price chart bleeding out like a crime scene. 🤡 

This is not just hypocrisy. This is theater.

What Coinbase and Base won’t say themselves, they’re happy to retweet from others - letting the community do the PR gymnastics: “it was a lesson,” “people should DYOR,” “memecoins are entertainment” and other stale takes from 6 cycles ago.

But behind the irony is a simple truth: they let a token pump off their own credibility, then pretended it was someone else’s mess 🤷‍♂️ 

Other worthy reads

“Bitcoin - trade after trade” by fejau:

Elections ending didn’t end Polymarket:

Vitalik: Why I support privacy

MEMES

That's all for now, frens.

We'll meet in a week! And remember, the market conditions are temporary, but our commitment to building a better DeFi is here to stay. Thanks for joining us, and we look forward to seeing you back next week. Cheers!

Yours, The 🔥 Team

Brought to you by Ambire: The Only Web3 Wallet That You’ll Need!