GM, frens! ☕️ 🔥 

Hitting the bottom gets a bad reputation. But sometimes it’s the first honest place you’ve been in a while. No wondering how much further you can stretch things. From there, every step is your own again.

Our space has a habit of reminding people that fresh starts rarely happen at the top. They usually begin after expectations have been reset and there’s finally room to build something better 🥴 

Here’s what we’re looking at this week:

• 🤖 JaredFromSubway bot gets REKT by its own game

• 🔥 Ambire showing how clear signing can improve wallet safety

• 💵 Polymarket got caught doing a fake bet ad campaign

• 🤔 Crypto is “waiting for buyers” as market pressure continues

• 💊 Pump.fun is still a rug casino

Below is how $WALLET is trading right now.

The Discord is open if you’re ready for whatever comes after the bottom 🤠 

JaredFromSubway bot gets REKT by its own game

There are not many crypto hacks where people feel sorry for the victim and this is probably not one of them 🫢 

• JaredFromSubway, one of Ethereum’s most infamous MEV bots, reportedly lost around $15 million after an attacker turned the bot’s own automation against it. The attacker built fake trading opportunities, waited for the bot to chase them and used its own approval logic as the trap 🔨 

For once, the machine doing the extracting became the thing being extracted from.

• Jared is best known as a sandwich bot. It watches pending trades, jumps in before a user’s transaction, then sells right after the user’s trade moves the price. The bot profits from the slippage. The regular trader gets worse execution.

That is the business model.

This kind of digital scum bot makes money by sitting in front of unsuspecting traders, including plenty of newbies who have no idea their trade is being watched and exploited at superhuman speed. Thousands upon thousands of users have been on the wrong side of these games over time, losing money because some bot found a way to insert itself into the transaction flow 🤖 

Maybe a lawyer can argue over whether sandwiching is legal, illegal, market manipulation, wire fraud or still sitting in one of crypto’s many disgusting gray zones. Let the lawyers enjoy their paperwork. The moral side is not complicated.

But that is, to be frank, what makes this hack so hard to mourn 🤔 

According to news reports, the attacker created fake pools and fake tokens that looked like profitable MEV routes. The bot analyzed those routes, saw what looked like an opportunity and generated the transactions needed to execute them. In doing so, it granted ERC-20 approvals to helper contracts controlled by the attacker.

The attacker did not drain everything immediately. Early transactions appear to have been used as tests, helping confirm how the bot behaved. Later, the route was changed so that the approvals stayed open instead of being consumed or revoked.

Once the permissions were sitting there, the attacker used them to pull WETH, USDC and USDT from the bot contract through transferFrom 💸 

That is a very clean and satisfying kind of irony. A bot designed to exploit transaction ordering got exploited through its own automated decision making 👇️ 

The response from the JaredFromSubway side is also something to behold.

The operator offered a bounty for the return of the funds. There were also public warnings and pressure around consequences if the funds were not returned 🤪 

And this is where it becomes almost insulting.

A sandwich bot that was milking money from regular traders for years suddenly wants fairness, cooperation and clean resolution when it is the one getting drained. The people behind it have the nerve to demand terms from the attacker after running one of the most annoying extraction machines in the space 🤡 

That does not make the attacker a hero. Stealing $15 million is still stealing $15 million.

But Jared should probably keep the moral speeches in a drawer.

Ambire showing how clear signing can improve wallet safety

One of crypto’s most annoying security problems is also one of its simplest: users are constantly asked to sign things they cannot actually read 🥸 

That is blind signing. You open a dApp, try to swap, bridge, stake or approve something, and the wallet shows raw transaction data, calldata, hashes or function names that mean almost nothing to a normal person. Then the user is expected to decide whether it is safe.

Not exactly the best setup for an industry built around self custody.

So Ambire’s latest blog breaks down how clear signing, powered by ERC-7730, is meant to fix that. The idea is straightforward: wallets should show transactions in plain language before users approve them 👇️ 

• Instead of showing unreadable technical data, a wallet could say something like: approve Uniswap to spend up to 100 USDC, deposit 500 USDC into Aave or swap 0.5 ETH for roughly 1,250 USDC.

• That does not change how the transaction works. It changes how the transaction is presented, which matters a lot. Users can finally see the action, the asset, the amount and the recipient before they sign 👀 

ERC-7730 works by letting protocols publish structured descriptors for their contract interactions. Wallets can then read that metadata and translate the transaction into something people can understand. Basically, protocols explain what their functions mean, and wallets use that to create a clearer signing screen 🧠 

This is also known as WYSIWYS: What You See Is What You Sign.

Clear signing is not a magic shield against every scam, though. You can still click bad links, fake apps can still exist and scammers will always find new ways to be annoying little goblins in a hoodie. But it raises the bar because many attacks depend on users approving something they do not understand 🫱 

For Ambire users, this fits the wallet’s overall direction: make self custody easier without taking control away from the user. Ambire already focuses on removing complexity through features like account abstraction, gas abstraction, transaction simulation and human-readable transactions. Supporting ERC-7730 pushes that further.

The wider ecosystem is moving too. Ledger has been a major contributor to clear signing and is transferring ERC-7730 governance to the Ethereum Foundation, while teams like WalletConnect, Trezor, MetaMask, Zama, Sourcify, Cyfrin and others are involved around the initiative.

The point is simple enough: crypto should not require users to understand raw smart contract data just to avoid losing funds 🤝 

If self custody is going to reach regular everyday people, wallets need to explain what users are signing before they sign it. Clear signing brings crypto closer to that reality.

Polymarket got caught doing a fake bet ad campaign

Polymarket was advertising itself around one basic idea: real money makes better signals.

So the latest report about its marketing is not exactly a small problem 👇️ 

According to a Wall Street Journal investigation, Polymarket paid creators to post videos that looked like real users placing bets and winning money. The issue is that many of those bets were not real. The videos were reportedly filmed on copycat versions of the Polymarket site, with fake trades and fake winnings shown as if they actually happened 🤦‍♂️ 

That is already bad. It gets worse when you remember what Polymarket is supposed to sell: trust in markets 😐️ 

The Journal reportedly reviewed more than 1,100 videos. Many were made on replica sites, including one that looked almost like Polymarket but used a fake domain. Some videos showed huge wins, even though the bets were staged and would not have produced those results in real life 🤯 

• Creators were allegedly paid monthly to make and spread this content, often without clearly labeling it as sponsored. The campaign also used a network of social media accounts to push the videos around TikTok, Instagram and YouTube 🎥 

So instead of organic hype, a lot of it was paid theater 🎭️ 

Polymarket already sits in a sensitive spot. It is a prediction market, not just another app selling a product. If the whole point is that “markets reveal cleaner truth than polls, media noise or influencer takes” as the founders were shilling it, then fake betting videos are the worst possible marketing choice.

How do you sell “truth markets” while using fake wins to make the product look more exciting? That’s just how you make people question the whole thing 🤷‍♂️ 

Polymarket has now said it is auditing its promotional content. Fine. That is the correct corporate sentence to say after a report like this.

But the damage is pretty obvious.

For users, the lesson is simple: if a video shows someone getting rich on a prediction market, assume it is marketing until proven otherwise.

Crypto is “waiting for buyers” as market pressure continues

We’re currently sitting in one of those uncomfortable spots where the whole market looks like it is waiting for someone else to step in first.

BTC is still the main level everyone is watching, mostly because it sets the tone for the rest of the industry. And it briefly fell toward $59,000 on June 24 before recovering closer to $61,500 🪙 

The issue is not only price. It is the amount of pressure stacking up around the market at the same time.

The first problem is ETF flows 👇️ 

• U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs saw $469 million in net outflows on June 24, while spot Ethereum ETFs also posted around $30 million in outflows.

• ETFs have been one of the cleanest ways to measure institutional appetite this cycle. When those flows are positive, crypto gets a steady support narrative. When they flip negative, the market suddenly needs real spot buyers to do the work.

Right now, those buyers are not exactly rushing in 🤔 

• Glassnode data showed the seven-day average for U.S. spot ETF flows falling close to negative $300 million per day, one of the more sustained redemption stretches since the products launched. More than 16,000 BTC have also left Grayscale’s GBTC over the last 90 days, which points to legacy-holder selling still dragging on the market.

Then there is the options side 📜 

• A major quarterly expiry, with around $10.6 billion in options open interest is coming due. Around 80% of those positions are reportedly out of the money.

• In simple terms, if price falls, market makers may be forced to sell more. If price rises, they may have to buy more. That can turn a drift into a bigger move. For crypto as a whole, Bitcoin losing a major floor rarely stays a Bitcoin-only problem. Alts usually take the hit harder 🪙 

Macro is not helping either.

The dollar has strengthened again, rate cut hopes didn’t come to life. A stronger dollar and higher for longer rate expectations tend to hurt risk assets, and crypto is still very much treated like a high beta risk market when things get tense 💰️ 

Some analysts also tied the recent weakness to a tech dump that’s also happening right now.

Pressure started around equities, with weakness in Asian markets and Nasdaq-related risk spilling into crypto. That is the thing people sometimes forget. Crypto has its own narratives, but when global risk gets hit, it usually trades with the rest of the speculative pile. Unfortunately 🫥 

Though, there are a few healthier signs under the surface 🥹 

Glassnode noted that the market is trading at a discount to its True Market Mean, while short-term holder cost basis has moved lower. That can sometimes be part of a bottoming process, as newer buyers accumulate below the cycle average. Some larger entities, including Strategy and Strive, reportedly used the dip to add more BTC as sentiment moved deeper into fear 🫣 

But that does not solve the main issue yet - crypto needing fresh demand.

So for now, the industry is waiting. Waiting for ETF flows to stabilize, waiting for macro pressure to ease, waiting for tech risk to stop bleeding into everything and, most importantly, waiting for buyers with enough conviction to stop the market from drifting lower 😶 

Pump.fun is still a rug casino

Pump.fun keeps giving the same answer every time someone asks whether this corner of crypto can become healthier.

“No.”

It is still happening. The platform is still pumping out endless disposable tokens, most of them still die almost instantly and the whole thing still runs on the same loop: launch, dump, repeat.

According to CoinGecko data, nearly 70% of Pump.fun tokens created since January 2024 stopped trading on the same day they launched. The study looked at more than 18.67 million tokens with at least some trading activity, and around 12.8 million were dead before day one was even over 💀 

• The numbers get worse after that. More than 80% of Pump.fun tokens were dead within two days, while only 4.55% survived past 90 days. So the “anyone can launch the next big thing” pitch mostly turns into millions of empty coins that exist just long enough for someone to gamble on them and move on.

• We have already discussed this side of crypto plenty of times: the livestream stunts, the bounty weirdness, the attention farming, the desperate attempt to turn every joke, person and trend into a ticker. Pump.fun is still sitting right in the middle of that machine 🎡 

And the problem is not only that people lose money. People lose money everywhere in crypto. The bigger issue is that Pump.fun keeps normalizing the lowest version of the industry 👇️ 

It does not push better products. It does not make crypto more useful. It does not help DeFi, payments, wallets or any serious part of the space. It just makes launching trash easier and faster 🤦‍♂️ 

Some meme coins can be fun. Some communities are great and are worth it, despite you losing money on a shitcoin. But when almost seven out of ten tokens die on launch day, the picture is impossible to dress up. This is not culture.

PF is not accidentally unhealthy.

It is unapologetically built around the fact that people will keep gambling, even when the odds are terrible and the graveyard is already visible from space 🥷 

Other worthy reads

“Tokenization: Who Actually Captures Value?” by DWF Ventures:

“Liquid Machine Labor, where robotics x crypto x ai x makes sense.” by EtherMage:

“The Art of Arbitrage” by Yuan Han Li:

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!