GM ☕️ 

Crypto has a way of making every week feel like a test 🙄 

Sometimes it’s about endurance, sometimes timing, and sometimes just keeping your head straight when the signals are mixed. The questions change, but the grade always comes later.

Here’s what we’ve been watching:

• 🇬🇧 Coinbase vs United Kingdom – WTH happened?

• 🔥 Ambire builds out – and the market’s noticing

• 🐒 Scrap metal tycoon loads up on 5,000+ Yuga Labs NFTs

• 😡 Tornado Cash verdict angers the crypto community

• 🪙 China’s first “crypto” stablecoin – a state controlled test drive

The W3oF Degen Portfolio is still creeping back up, almost entirely thanks to ETH dragging us along for the ride. At this point, we’re basically passengers arguing over the aux cable.

Next week, we’ll be making some changes, time to see if we can add a little of our own momentum to the mix.

Join the discussion in the Discord before we reshuffle 😉 

Coinbase vs United Kingdom – WTH happened?

Last week, Coinbase decided Britain needed a CEX ad.

But not a funny or an artsy one 🤦‍♂️ 

What they came up with was a two minute roast called Everything Is Fine, featuring dripping ceilings, pothole strewn streets, and a shopper paying £100 for a box of frozen fish fingers 🐟️ 

Between the choruses, the point was clear: if this is “fine,” maybe the financial system isn’t.

The script was aimed squarely at one point: your financial system is rotting, and what we have is better.

It landed like a brick in a tea cup 🧱 

• Inside the fintech / crypto echo chamber, some community members clapped like seals, thrilled that someone was finally saying the quiet part out loud, that the UK is drowning in red tape, bleeding talent, and acting shocked when the innovators head to Dubai.

• Outside the bubble, regular people got upset over something else entirely: a rich American exchange wrapping itself in faux concern to flog accounts 🫰 

• The fish fingers, by the way, “cost about three quid in Tesco” according to the people living in UK, so accuracy clearly wasn’t on the storyboard.

But what clearly mattered to Coinbase was milking UK’s decline for marketing value, first and foremost 👇️ 

The perfect target

Coinbase didn’t have to completely invent the narrative here:

• The UK has spent years promising to be a “crypto hub” while moving extremely slow to make that reality.

• The FCA’s licensing process is enough to send firms packing. Pension funds treat anything crypto shaped like anthrax. And the government’s idea of “embracing innovation” usually amounts to just posts on social media 🤷‍♂️ 

The political scavengers

Predictably, the ad became political currency.

Nigel Farage, Leader of Reform UK party seized on it as proof that “Britain is broken” 🤔 

George Osborne, the ex Chancellor of the Exchequer wrote in the Financial Times that the country “missed the first crypto wave” and must not miss the second.

This is the same guy who, as Chancellor, was perfectly fine watching the first wave sail by 🤡 

It’s a familiar political move - ignore the rot when you’re in charge, then feign shock from the sidelines when someone else is in charge.

And with a cost of living crisis that’s been brewing across multiple governments, you can’t pin the wreckage on one party alone.

• Coinbase has history here, too. A 2021 ad got slapped down by the UK’s Advertising Standards Agency for being misleading. Brian Armstrong’s team knows the territory, and knows that friction with regulators plays well with a crypto audience that sees itself as the rebel camp ⚔️ 

• Despite this, Armstrong insists it wasn’t aimed at Keir Starmer’s Labour government. He framed it as a universal critique of broken traditional finance, something they’ve done in the US, too. Still, the imagery lined up neatly with years of gripes about Westminster’s inability to modernize, and that made it irresistible for critics and opportunists alike 🗣️ 

Maybe the message is even true to some extent, but that’s not the point.

The point is that the CEX isn’t obviously riding in to “fix” anything. Coinbase wants to be just another layer of middlemen in an industry that was supposed to get rid of them. Their interest in the UK is just pure desire to increase the market share 💰️ 

So the only real takeaway… if you’re waiting for either the government or big Wall Street’s crypto arms to deliver you a better system, you’re going to be waiting in the same leaking kitchen while the fish fingers defrost 🤡 

Ambire builds out – and the market’s noticing

In the meantime, Ambire is racking up milestones 👀 

Just a couple of recent ones:

• User numbers are climbing, transactions are hitting new highs, and ETH has forked the wallet for its own prototype project, Kohaku – aimed at cross chain single signature actions and privacy.

• Feature rollouts keep stacking: batching transactions and abstracting gas across ten chains, reorganized account views, and multi token swaps in a single step. They’re the sort of changes that quietly the baseline for a better UX 📱 

• Governance just broke past 100 voters in a single round, while 50 million $WALLET have been taken off the market through buybacks 🤯 

• Rewards Season 1 has 20 million $WALLET up for grabs, and the token price has doubled in the past month 📈 

The wallet’s expanding on every front - user growth, feature set, governance, and market presence all moving in sync 🫡 

More users means more eyes on governance, which fuels better decisions. More features mean stickier engagement, which supports token demand. And when $WALLET buybacks are paired with price momentum, the feedback loop gets stronger 💪 

If this pace holds, Ambire won’t just be another wallet keeping up with the space – it’ll be one of the few pulling the rest forward.

Scrap metal tycoon loads up on 5,000+ Yuga Labs NFTs

Adam Weitsman, an American scrap metal magnate and investor, has made a sizeable bet on Yuga Labs, the company best known for creating the Bored Ape Yacht Club 🐵 

• Earlier this week, Weitsman revealed that he purchased more than 5,000 NFTs from Yuga’s ecosystem, including collections tied to the company’s metaverse project, Otherside.

• On X, Weitsman described this as a “long term investment” and noted that he also plans further acquisitions on the open market before the end of the year. The haul reportedly includes Otherdeeds, Mega Koda, and Weapon Koda NFTs purchased directly from Yuga Labs 💰️ 🫲 

Yuga Labs, once a dominant player in the space, has in recent months pivoted towards supporting Otherside, a gamified virtual world it hopes will serve as a central hub for its IP.

• Otherside launched its first virtual land sale, “Otherdeeds,” in May 2022, selling out within hours and generating over $317 million in sales 💵 

• Owners of these NFTs receive rights to virtual land plots and associated in-game assets, including a creature called a Koda. Secondary market activity has cooled significantly since 2022, though, with the floor price of Otherdeeds around $640.

While the market for NFTs and metaverse projects has contracted sharply since the 2021–2022 boom, large acquisitions like this signal that some high net worth individuals still see long term value in established brands and their digital ecosystems, for some reason 🙃 

And it leaves a few open questions, too. Could this kind of buying spree actually spark a pump? Do these players know something the market doesn’t? Or is the NFT game simply over, no matter how many Kodas you own? 🤔 

Tornado Cash verdict angers the crypto community

We’ve been here before, not with Roman Storm, but with another Tornado Cash developer whose trial we discussed months ago.

Back then, the community was arguing about whether writing open source code could be treated as a criminal act. Now, the everyone is watching it happen again, this time with Storm, and you can feel the frustration 👇️ 

• On Wednesday, a Manhattan jury found Storm guilty of conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business.

• The verdict stopped short of convicting him on money laundering and sanctions charges, but the message many in the space heard was the same: building privacy tools can still land you in jail 🤦‍♂️ 

No matter whether courts actually recognize crypto coins as legal tender or useless digital trash, no matter if you actually helped launder money or just wrote the code with no ill intent.

Storm’s case has been a lightning rod for debate.

• Prosecutors allege Tornado Cash was used to launder more than $1 billion, including funds tied to North Korea’s Lazarus Group 🥷 

• Supporters argue that Storm wasn’t responsible for how third parties used the protocol, that his role was in developing a neutral tool, not in directing illicit transactions 👨‍💻 

The reaction from the crypto community was immediate and emotional.

Advocacy groups like the DeFi Education Fund, Coin Center, and the Blockchain Association called the verdict dangerous for open source development.

Developers on social channels echoed the sentiment, warning that the ruling could discourage the creation of privacy focused protocols altogether 😶 

There’s a broader fear here: if privacy infrastructure is treated as inherently suspect, then the scope for decentralized innovation narrows.

Builders might avoid working on non custodial, permissionless systems entirely, worried that they could be held personally liable if bad actors use their code 🤕 

• The community knows the stakes go beyond Tornado Cash. A precedent like this doesn’t just affect mixers, it touches wallets, privacy layers, and any onchain tool that gives users more control over their data 💻️ 

• And in an industry already on edge over regulatory overreach, the verdict has cemented a shared feeling: this is a fight over whether core principles of DeFi will survive in practice, not just in rhetoric.

Storm’s legal team plans to appeal, but even if the conviction is overturned, the signal it sends to regulators, prosecutors, and developers will linger.

Inside the community, the consensus is clear, the devs see this as a step in the wrong direction, and they’re preparing for a long battle to keep building without fear of the courtroom 🛠️ 

China’s first “crypto” stablecoin – a state controlled test drive

China’s not exactly the first name that comes to mind when you think “permissionless innovation”. But here we are, kind of - Beijing is greenlighting its first crypto stablecoin, with Hong Kong playing the role of test track.

Their goal is to internationalize the yuan and cut into dollar dominance.

The reality is less glamorous.

• The Hong Kong Monetary Authority is issuing a comically small number of licenses next year, citing “caution”: the state wants to be sure every cent is traceable before you can even think of minting 💵 

• The rollout will start with B2B use cases, no retail or wild onchain trading. Just a carefully fenced sandbox where the gatekeepers keep the keys 🗝️ 

The official narrative is that these stablecoins will “reshape payments” and “enhance competitiveness”.

But the subtext is about control. China wants the benefits of blockchain rails without the mess of decentralization. The same political machine that bans Bitcoin mining and censors exchanges is now deciding who gets to move tokenized yuan, and under what terms 🪙 

• Hong Kong’s slower pace compared to the US stablecoin market isn’t a mystery. Central banks, compliance first frameworks, and anti capital flight paranoia don’t exactly scream “move fast” 🤫 

• Even the limited stablecoin push is happening because Chinese state owned giants want settlement tools that work cross border, without giving up oversight to US banking rails.

So yes, this is a milestone, but it’s one that belongs in the “digital authoritarian finance” chapter, not the open crypto playbook 🫠 

The question now is whether these state minted coins will ever leak into the broader market in a way that actually matters… or if they’ll stay locked in the walled gardens of government approved ledgers.

Other worthy reads

A lot of new discussions around ETH tech surfacing recently:

“Agent or bot” by snubeaver:

Is the Four Year Cycle actually dead? By Arcana:

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 Web3 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!