GM ☕️ 

Sometimes the only honest thing to say is that we’re all figuring it out as we go. Plans change, signals get messy, and half the time you only see the pattern after it’s over.

That’s not weakness, it’s just how this game is played 🫵 

Here’s what we’ve been watching:

• 🔥 ETH pumps to a near-new ATH

• 🎁 Ambire Rewards Season 1 locks in 20M $stkWALLET pool

• 👛 Crypto wallets vs Google’s licensing trap

• 🎩 Dogwifhat’s $800K beanie sale is peak degen theater

The W3oF Degen Portfolio held its ground this week 👀 

Get in the Discord with us and let’s poke it with a stick 🫠 

ETH pumps to a near-new ATH

The week began with Ethereum caught in the middle of another potential FUD campaign.

• Onchain trackers flagged a $12.8M ETH transfer, 2,975 coins, moving from an address long believed to be linked to the Ethereum Foundation.

• The connection seemed convincing: back in 2017, the address had received ETH from a Foundation wallet, a detail that quickly lit up Twitter with speculation 🤔 

Though by the time the theories reached full volume, Ethereum Foundation co-Executive Director Hsiao-Wei Wang stepped in to cut through it.

The wallet in question was not under Foundation control. Rather, it was an original whale who bought his bag way back in the ICO sale 💰️ 💰️ 

Many similar addresses from the early days still hold ETH allocations, but they’ve been out of Foundation hands for years. The numbers provided by Hsiao-Wei underline this: in 2014, the Foundation held 9% of all ETH in existence. Today, that figure is below 0.3% 🤏 

• This gradual reduction hasn’t been accidental. For years, the Foundation has been strategically scaling down its holdings to reduce its influence over the network 👇️ 

• Their last notable move came in July, selling 10,000 ETH directly to SharpLink Gaming, a transaction that unexpectedly made the gaming firm the second-largest corporate ETH holder 👀 

While the Foundation lightens its position, corporate treasuries have been moving in the opposite direction.

In just a few months, institutional and corporate buyers have accumulated over $14 billion in ETH 🪙 

That warning hasn’t slowed the pump. ETH went up 30% in a week, hitting $4,704, only 2.35% shy of its ATH 🤯 

For traders and long term holders, the combination of cleared up rumors, strong inflows, and steady network growth has been enough to turn early August doubts into near euphoric confidence 🫡 

Solana ragebait

While Ethereum was closing the gap to its record price, Solana’s official account took aim.

Over the weekend, it posted a comparison between Ethereum’s mainnet throughput, around 19 transactions per second, and NASDAQ’s 2,000 TPS.

On the surface, it looked like a performance flex (?) but in reality it landed as an apples to oranges punch at a decentralized network using an (approximated) benchmark from a closed, centralized government system 🤦‍♂️ 

• Ethereum’s scaling ecosystem, including rollups like Optimism, Arbitrum, and Base - operates well above mainnet throughput 🤔 

• The ecosystem’s combined TPS sits between 200 and 300, with a peak near 2,000. Most of that activity is concentrated on Base 🤓 

The reaction from Ethereum’s corner was quick.

Community suggested the post was a defensive swing in response to Ethereum’s regained momentum 💲 

• Even the notoriously low profile Polynya weighed in, noting that NASDAQ’s infrastructure is built for parallel processing at extreme scale, something no blockchain can match without fundamentally different physics.

Solana’s current TPS, roughly 4,000, still outpaces Ethereum’s, but throughput isn’t the full measure of network value ⏲️ 

In the months since the memecoin casino hype began fading Solana wasn’t really able to match Ethereum’s depth of applications, institutional adoption, and ongoing technical development, i.e producing anything worthy of actual use.

After shrugging all this off, Ethereum ends the week within striking distance of its ATH, backed by strong market inflows and a clean rep.

Solana, meanwhile, has been left defending a speed statistic that does little to change the perception of its ecosystem. It’s a bit pathetic really 😶 

Ambire Rewards Season 1 locks in 20M $stkWALLET pool

Season 1 of Ambire Rewards is getting HOT 👀 

It’s running with 20 million $stkWALLET in the pool. That’s the confirmed payout for the first run, large enough to matter and locked from the start 💰️ 

The figure came out of a community vote, 105 wallets took part (the highest turnout in Ambire governance to date) but the process isn’t the headline. The size of the pool is. It’s a statement that Season 1 is being backed with real weight, not pocket change 🏋️ 

If you’ve already minted your Rewards character, you’re in position to compete for a slice. If you haven’t, now’s when it actually starts to count.

20 million tokens, a record engaged community, and the race already underway. That’s how Ambire’s starting the season 🫡 

Crypto wallets vs Google’s licensing trap

For a moment, it looked like the world’s largest mobile app marketplace was about to lock the door on half the crypto wallet industry.

Google Play rolled out a new policy requiring wallet developers in 15 jurisdictions, including the US and EU, to hold the kind of licenses usually reserved for banks and custodial exchanges 👇️ 

The language was blunt: US based wallet devs would need FinCEN registration as a Money Services Business and a state money transmitter license, or a full bank charter 🤯 

In the EU, they’d need a MiCA issued CASP license 😐️ 

The problem here is that non-custodial wallets don’t actually fit those categories.

• Under US law and FinCEN’s own 2019 guidance, unhosted wallets aren’t money transmitters.

• Under MiCA, CASPs (Crypto-Asset Service Provider) are entities that hold or issue assets, which wallet software does not 🙃 

Yet Google’s first draft made no distinction.

The effect would have been obvious: force AML/KYC obligations onto non custodial wallets, crush smaller open source projects under compliance costs, and turn the Play Store into a walled garden of corporate approved apps 🤪 

The backlash was immediate.

Devs, regular community members (and even Twitter’s original founder) started pointing out that Google was going far beyond legal requirements, effectively enforcing banking rules by monopoly 🧐 

Within hours, Google’s comms team was on X saying non-custodial wallets weren’t meant to be in scope, and that the Play Store policy would be updated 👇️ 

The formal policy change now carves them out.

Crisis averted, at least for that corner of the ecosystem.

Hypocrisy check

Even with the walkback, the episode tells alot about Google’s messy history with crypto.

Over the years, the Play Store has banned mining apps (even those with simple info about mining), crypto dApps, slapped away games with tokenized features and even banned simple crypto news apps that had no crypto mechanics whatsoever 🔨 

Therefore, it’s usually assumed the gate swings shut faster for crypto than for any other category of software 🤷‍♂️ 

Yet just as this wallet policy thing was unfolding, Google’s parent company Alphabet inked a deal with crypto miner - turned AI infrastructure firm TeraWulf.

The arrangement has Alphabet backstopping $1.8 billion in lease payments for 200 megawatts of data center capacity, in exchange for an equity stake 🫰 

It’s a direct bet on the same infrastructure the company won’t touch on its mobile storefront 🙄 

If nothing else, the non custodial exemption shows that a well organized pushback can still correct corporate overreach. In a landscape where regulation by prosecution is already giving way to regulation by platform policy, that’s not nothing.

But the hypocrisy lingers: Google doesn’t want most crypto in its app store, unless there’s a billion dollar infrastructure play on the other end of the table 🃏 

Dogwifhat’s $800K beanie sale is peak degen theater

There’s a certain joy in watching turbodegens operate.

Not admiration exactly, more like the fascination you get at a reptile house, staring at a creature that evolved purely for survival in an absurd ecosystem 🦎 

They live in a world where market caps are conjured from memes, fortunes turn on a tweet, and yes, someone just paid nearly $800,000 for a dog’s old knitted hat 👒 

• The hat in question isn’t just any hat. It’s the original pink beanie worn by Achi, the Shiba Inu that became the face of Dogwifhat, Solana’s breakout memecoin from late 2023.

• Achi first wore it in 2018 for what was supposed to be a cute Christmas decoration. Then came the Instagram upload, the Reddit threads, the Twitter memes - and finally, the WIF token, which sprinted to a billion dollar market cap during the memecoin hype cycle.

The beanie went up for auction on Bitcoin Ordinals marketplace Ord City.

The winner was “Finn,” founder of Solana memecoin launchpad Bags, who bought it for 6.8 BTC (about $794K).

He called it “a $1B hat for $0.7M” and hinted it would be “given back to the community” in some form.

True to form, part of the bid came from trading fees on a Bags token called “BUY THE HAT,” which mooned 700% in day just because degens wanted that hat way too much 😲 

The hat vs. … the picture of the hat

Here’s where it gets even more absurd: the physical beanie fetched less than one fifth of what its NFT photograph sold for 💀 

In March 2024, the image of Dogwifhat’s hat went for 1,210.8 ETH - $4.3M at the time, in an NFT auction on Foundation. That coincided with WIF’s memecoin ATH, when the hype was so hot the JPEG beat the object 💵 

Today, WIF trades down over 70% from its peak but still clinging to a near $1B market cap. The beanie’s sale proves the meme hasn’t died, but this also proves that meme markets aren’t bound by reality 🐶 

Sometimes the shadow sells for more than the thing casting it? 🤪 

Other worthy reads

Coinbase completes the acquisition of Deribit:

“Financial AI is Inevitable” by bebis:

RWA Ecosystem Map by RedStone:

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!