Good morning ☕️ 

Some weeks shout. Others barely whisper.

This one feels like a low hum in the background - steady, uneasy, but carrying just enough tension to keep you awake. In crypto, even a little bit of movement can change the whole direction.

Here’s what we’re following this week:

• 🔔 Ethereum’s wake up call – time to innovate, or die trying

• 🔥 Less hype, more shipping – Ambire’s way

• 🧀 Fine dining, shitcoin edition

• 🤦‍♂️ Shaq’s FTX adventure ends in a quiet payout

• 🤖 Nvidia scraps Arbitrum deal – AI bros only, no tokens allowed

The W3oF Degen Portfolio is doing what it does best: lowering expectations one chart at a time 🫥 

Not tanking, not pumping, just gently eroding the idea that things were ever supposed to get better quickly 🫠 

But if you think you can out-degen the odds, the door to out Discord is wide open 🚪 

Ethereum’s wake up call – time to innovate, or die trying

Remember when Ethereum was crypto’s unquestionable wunderkind – the golden goose laying DeFi eggs, the visionary platform, the beacon of decentralization? Yeah, 2025 would like a word 🙈 

ETH has spent most of this year embarrassing itself, now officially crowned as the worst performing bluechip of 2025 🔵 

And we're not talking about some small dump 👇️ 

ETH’s price dumped a sickening 51%, making Bitcoin’s mere 5% dip look almost heroic.

Even XRP – traditionally the crypto equivalent of a punching bag – managed to rise 1%. You know things are grim when XRP is outperforming Ethereum 😒 

• It’s not just the numbers, either. Ethereum’s humiliation this year runs deeper, fueled by institutional whales rushing for the exits 🐋 

• For example - Galaxy Digital, that didn’t just politely reduce its ETH holdings – they dumped over $100 million worth of Ether in a single week, sending panic waves through the market 🤯 

• The TVL, Total Value Locked, once Ethereum’s favorite metric, looks equally pathetic, collapsing by 43% since December. Investors who once flocked to Ethereum’s DeFi casinos now stare at their screens in quiet despair, watching competitors like Solana casually stroll past 🏇 

• Solana – the unstable younger sibling who couldn't stop tripping over network outages and ridicule. Well, they've quietly cleaned up their act, surpassing Ethereum in both staking market cap and key DEX volumes 📉 

Suddenly, Ethereum’s slow+expensive looks a whole lot less charming and a whole lot more outdated 🤷‍♂️ 

And if Ethereum is struggling to cling to its DeFi throne, the narrative isn’t faring much better. The once unshakeable "Ethereum dominance" story now resembles Swiss cheese – full of holes and rapidly losing its flavor 🧀 

Analysts aren’t shy anymore, openly suggesting that things aren’t looking that good 😐️ 

Technicals don’t offer much comfort either. ETH/BTC ratios have tanked to multi-year lows, levels not seen since pre-2020’s crypto Stone Age 🪨 

What about Ethereum’s famed developers, its vast ecosystem, its groundbreaking updates? Funny you should mention those. 🤦‍♂️ 

Competitors like Base and Solana have been vacuuming up developer talent and leaving Ethereum holding the proverbial bag 👜 

Turns out, if your fees remain stubbornly high and your transactions slow enough to test patience, developers start eyeing cheaper, quicker options.

But let’s pause the doom parade for a second. Ethereum isn’t quite dead yet. The core strength of Ethereum has always been its community – historically resilient, consistently inventive, and capable of surprising the market 🧠 

If there ever was a moment for the community and devs to step up with meaningful innovation, it's now.

They've pulled rabbits out of hats before – scaling solutions, network upgrades, novel token standards – and they might just do it again.

However, the clock is ticking louder than ever.

• Ethereum developers have had years to solve well known problems: painful gas fees, sluggish transaction speeds, and network congestion.

• If these issues used to be alarm bells quietly ringing in the background, now they're deafening loudspeakers blaring directly into their ears. Let’s hope they're finally listening.

The market isn’t going to wait around.

All told, Ethereum’s once-impenetrable armor looks thinner than ever. 2025 is shaping up as a painful identity crisis, a rude wake up call, and potentially a lasting shift in crypto’s balance of power.

Ethereum isn’t dead. But it’s looking uncomfortably mortal 💀 

Less hype, more shipping – Ambire’s way

Let’s be clear though – the devs are working hard 🛠️ 

They show up, they write code, they argue on GitHub for twelve hours straight over one line of YAML. They genuinely want Ethereum to work better.

Example - upcoming Pectra upgrade is bringing EIP-7702 – the long-awaited improvement that lets existing EOAs behave like smart accounts, without having to give up their original address. It’s a major step forward for wallets and user experience across the board.

In the meantime, Ambire is shipping.

While others prepared for what’s next, Ambire built for it. Batch transactions? Native. Gas abstraction? Already implemented. Smart Account features? Live and running on Sepolia.

Now, with 7702 landing on Mainnet in just two weeks, everything aligns.

And yes – even Ethereum.org quietly acknowledged it. A repost - just a nod from the core 😉 

Fine dining, shitcoin edition

Forget utility - bring a wallet. Preferably one holding a lot of $TRUMP.

• In news that somehow feels both entirely predictable and completely deranged, it turns out that the meme coin named after the former President is now your ticket to break bread with him - literally 🍞 

• According to a recently surfaced registration portal, holders of the top 220 $TRUMP wallets are invited to an exclusive Gala Dinner at Trump National Golf Club on May 22. No plus ones. Just cold wallet verification and a table among the most deeply committed degens to ever support a meme 🤯 

And yes, you do have to cover your own parking and shrimp cocktail.

The $TRUMP coin launched two days after his 2025 inauguration under the self-appointed title “Official Trump.”

It pumped to an insane $8 billion market cap before predictably dumping, and now sits around $2.7 billion - still eye wateringly high for a project with no utility and no roadmap 🤦‍♂️ 

But the discovery lit the fuse again.

The coin spiked over 70%, from $9.30 to $16, before cooling back to around $13. No product, no update, no new use case - just dinner 🍴 

As one commenter put it, “only in crypto do you 10x your bag because degens promised you chicken parm with a former president.”

The red carpet for max extractors

• The page hosting the invite was discovered mid-development and required wallet connection through gettrumpmemes.com. The URL alone deserves a prize.

• Now that it’s public, it’s clear this is less an event and more a loyalty test - with digital gatekeeping that would make the Secret Service jealous.

There’s also mandatory compliance screening, wallet address verification (and presumably, a vibe check to ensure you’ve been memeing Donald hard enough to qualify) 🤡 

To be fair, this isn’t just a dinner - it’s a snapshot of 2025 crypto. Coins built entirely on spectacle. Projects whose sole roadmap is clout. And a market that - at least for now - is perfectly fine with it.

Crypto’s new use case

There’s no staking. No lending. No governance.

There is, however, a chance to sit beside Donald J. Trump while discussing price action, rug pulls, and your favorite Telegram alpha group over filet mignon. And for many in this market, that’s a utility worth aping into 🤷‍♂️ 

Shitcoining isn’t just back - it’s booking reservations.

Shaq’s FTX adventure ends in a quiet payout

The big man blinked.

Shaquille O’Neal, one of FTX’s flashiest celebrity mascots during the good times, has quietly settled a class action lawsuit over his role in promoting the exchange.

The settlement comes without an admission of guilt, naturally – just a fat payout and hope that no one remembers the ads 💰️ 💰️ 

Details are still sealed, but here’s what’s clear: investors wanted blood over FTX’s collapse, and they weren’t letting the celebrity endorsers off easy 🔨 

• Shaq, who once appeared in prime-time crypto ads and called himself a “paid spokesperson,” spent months dodging process servers before finally getting served courtside at an NBA game.

This isn’t Shaq’s first payout either – he previously agreed to an $11M settlement over promoting Astrals, a Solana-based NFT project that also went nowhere fast 🤔 

Maybe it’s time for celebrities to stop jumping on the first meme coin with a logo and a marketing budget. Crypto is already wild enough without confused brand ambassadors waving around unvetted tokens like they’re sneakers 👟 

Celebrity endorsements don’t make shitcoins better. They just make the lawsuits easier to file later.

Nvidia scraps Arbitrum deal – AI bros only, no tokens allowed

It was supposed to be a big moment for Arbitrum. An AI accelerator partnership with Nvidia, one of the few companies on Earth whose products actually get hotter than crypto narratives in a bull market. But just before the announcement – poof. Pulled. No explanation.

The only thing dropping harder than token prices is Nvidia’s interest in anything blockchain-related.

The GPU giant didn't mince words back in 2023 – “Crypto doesn’t bring anything useful to society,” said CTO Michael Kagan 🤦‍♂️ 

• This isn’t some one-time thing. Nvidia has made it company policy to stay allergic to crypto – no tokens, no dApps, no funny JPEGs. Even if your AI startup has a whisper of blockchain in its GitHub history, don’t bother applying. The only chain Nvidia wants is the one choking their datacenter supply logistics.

• And yet, the Arbitrum collab was hyped. It was supposed to be the bridge between decentralization and machine learning. Instead, Nvidia slammed the door like a miner in 2018 realizing their rig can’t break even on electricity 🙅 

So now it’s AI first, last, and always. Nvidia's vision of the future runs on silicon logic, not smart contracts. They’ll happily fund your machine learning startup that solves climate change with 900 pages of Python – just don’t mention you minted an NFT once in 2021 🙃 

We can only guess that if crypto’s ever going to earn a seat at this table, it’ll have to bring more than memes 🤔 

Other worthy reads

Interesting details on Token2049, from lei.eth:

Dapp/tool recommendations, by Bojan:

Some other headlines from this week:

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!