GM, frens! ☕️ 

Some weeks feel heavier than others. Not just on the charts, but everywhere. The kind of week where attention’s scattered, and most things feel slightly off balance.

Still, we keep building, watching, adjusting 🫡 

The space has been sluggish - plenty of noise, not much follow through. You can feel the hesitation.

Here’s what we’ve been watching:

• 🤯 MEV bots 🤖 are holding scaling hostage

• 🔱 Ethereum Foundation forks Ambire for their new wallet project

• 🪙 JPMorgan didn’t like your tokens, so they made their own

• 💣️ X/Twitter WIPES OUT pumpfun's and a handful of meme accounts overnight

• 🥷 Israel hackers loot an Iranian crypto exchange

The W3oF Degen Portfolio barely moved. A quiet week, which isn’t the worst outcome lately.

And yes - dark mode is here. Small touch, but it makes everything feel just a bit more dialed in 🤗 

Don’t forget to come and unpack the week with us in the Discord 🐐 

MEV bots are holding scaling hostage

For all the talk about scaling, one inconvenient truth keeps getting pushed under the rug: the pipes are clogged because everyone’s chasing profit, even if it’s peanuts 🥜 

• A fresh analysis from head of strategy of Flashbots just ripped the mask off. MEV - those friendly little bots sandwiching and frontrunning your swaps - now eat up to 50%-80% of gas on some L2s while paying less than 10% of the total fees 🤯 

• Yup, half the blockspace is being sold to the highest bidder so some bot can flip coins a few cents higher 🤦‍♂️ 

Take Base, the Coinbase-backed L2, as a case study 👇️ 

• Between November 2024 and February 2025, its effective throughput rose by 11M per second - equivalent to three full Ethereum mainnets. But Flashbots found that almost the entire increase was swallowed by spam 🗑️ 

• In that same timeframe, two searchers controlled 80% of all spam transactions on the network. One specific arbitrage trade, which netted just $0.12 in profit and paid only $0.02 in fees, required 350 failed attempts 🥴 

• Total gas used: 132 million - nearly four full Ethereum blocks. All for twelve cents.

This isn’t an isolated problem. Solana reports that 40% of its blockspace is consumed by MEV. The patterns are repeating across chains. But the real kicker is that the issue isn’t just technical - it’s economic 🫰 

Flashbots outlines four reasons this mess exists:

• Transaction expressivity lets searchers encode logic-heavy bids (bots can get real fancy with their orders – but only if they fire them off like confetti and waste gas in process)

• Private mempools force searchers to blindly guess (basically, no one's showing their hand, so bots just slam the table and hope it’s blackjack).

• Fees are too cheap to disincentivize failure. Missing 99 times is fine if hit #100 pays. Spam is acceptable to them.

• And there's no proper auction mechanism for blockspace. It’s just gas chugging chaos and whoever yells loudest wins.

The result is what they call a “spam auction” - a market that incentivizes maximal gas waste just to win invisible races.

More blockspace doesn't solve it. As Base’s capacity expanded to 26M gas/s, actual usable throughput stayed stuck at 12M gas/s. The extra room didn’t help - it just gave bots more room to thrash 🤖 

Flashbots is now proposing programmable privacy via TEEs (trusted execution environments), which would let searchers see transactions without being able to frontrun or sandwich. Paired with a proper MEV auction model, this could shift extraction off chain, or at least off spam 🤔 

So until that changes things are clear: scaling isn’t scaling. It’s just moving the ceiling higher while MEV digs a hole under the floor 🤷‍♂️ 

Ethereum Foundation forks Ambire for their new wallet project

Ambire’s code just got the highest kind of compliment: a fork 😮 

• During a recent talk, the Ethereum Foundation’s new co-CEO revealed an internal R&D wallet project built on Ambire’s architecture.

• The prototype, developed by Wonderland is now being used as a sandbox for crosschain UX, privacy features, and abstracted signing 👇️ 

Considering Ethereum has never had an official wallet - for better or worse - this could be the first time that changes 🤯 

And if that wallet ends up being based on Ambire? Well, that says something, doesn’t it 👀 

JPMorgan didn’t like your tokens, so they made their own

Not long ago, the mere mention of “crypto” in traditional finance circles was enough to trigger allergic reactions. Now JPMorgan is rolling out its own token like it’s the most normal thing in the world 🧐 

The new token, JPMD, isn’t a stablecoin or just a token. It’s a “permissioned deposit token,” which is basically a bank issued IOU with blockchain flavor.

It’s only for institutions. And it runs on Base.

JPMD is created to settle payments 24/7, pay interest to institutional holders, and offer whatever “enhanced compliance” is supposed to mean when it’s printed by a bank instead of a DAO. It’s basically TradFi in web3 cosplay 💰️ 

JPMorgan is tripping over itself to clarify that JPMD is not a stablecoin. Instead, they’re calling it a “digital representation of commercial bank deposits” 🥸 

Functionally though, it settles payments, stays pegged, and only exists because someone deposited dollars on the other end 🤷‍♂️ 

Why now?

Because the timing finally makes sense 👇️ 

• ETFs are live. Institutions are circling. Stablecoin regulation is brewing on both sides of the Atlantic 📜 

• Tokenized finance is quietly becoming the new baseline. If banks want a piece of the plumbing, they have to move - even if that means playing nice with the Ethereum ecosystem 🙃 

The irony

Crypto spent a decade trying to kill banks. Now banks are crawling into crypto, deploying ERC20s and calling it “progress” 🫠 

That doesn’t mean we won - but it does mean they had to copy the playbook.

And if JPM is doing it, you can bet the others won’t be far behind 🧠 

X (Twitter) WIPES OUT pump.fun and a handful of meme accounts overnight

Late on June 16, X hit the nuke button 🧨 

• Without warning or explanation, the platform suspended the accounts of pump.fun, its founder Alon Cohen, and a slew of meme coin devs, trading tools, and crypto anons. One of the most chaotic corners of the ecosystem went dark overnight 😲 

• The true reasons are still a mystery. X's standard “violated the rules” message was the only tombstone left on the affected pages. But it didn’t take long for theories to flood the timeline 👨‍🔬

Some say it was API abuse – tools allegedly scraping X data via unofficial means to avoid hefty API fees 💸 

Others claim pressure from the law, citing SEC investigations into Pump.fun’s rug factory launches. Take your pick.

The lights went out, liquidity followed

Within hours of the purge, the effects were measurable. Blockchain analytics flagged a surge of freshly minted memecoins - many protest tokens, some just opportunistic.

But behind the memes was panic. 15 out of 31 tokens that had just left Pump.fun’s bonding curve the same day were directly linked to banned accounts. Dashboards showed capital hemorrhaging from affected tokens. New launches stalled 🔨 

The accounts for Bloom, Gmgn and BullX platforms got suspended as well. All part of the same informal tool stack that powered memecoin launches.

It was a decapitation strike. And it landed clean. For better or worse, the meme economy runs on attention.

The accounts were restored a bit later, but not after the damage was already done.

A turning point for crypto’s social layer?

The bans triggered a deeper conversation 🗣️ 

If Twitter/X is crypto’s town square, what happens when the mayor starts ejecting people at random?

If your entire token launch strategy relies on a single platform’s goodwill, are you really decentralized? 🙈 

For many builders, this could be a wake up call. Decentralized alternatives could suddenly be back in vogue.

Not because they’re better, but because they can’t pull the rug on your account overnight at least.

Israel hackers loot an Iranian crypto exchange

Everyone knew the war would bleed into crypto - we just didn’t know how soon.

$90 million drained from Iran’s biggest crypto exchange, Nobitex, and claimed by pro Israel hackers going by “Predatory Sparrow” 🤔 

The haul included customer funds routed straight into wallets tagged with anti-IRGC (the Iranian ruling party) slurs.

The op wasn’t just about draining wallets - it was targeted, symbolic, and timed. It followed airstrikes in Tehran and paralleled other hacks hitting Iran’s infrastructure, from gas stations to a state owned TV broadcaster.

Coincidence? Not likely. This was digital war 🪖 

In posts shared on X, the hackers claimed Nobitex had helped Iran bypass sanctions.

Blockchain forensics confirmed the stolen funds were rerouted into useless vanity addresses and were essentially burned.

Just a day earlier, Predatory Sparrow claimed they fried the servers at Bank Sepah, Iran’s state-run lender.

Iranian media tried to play it off as “precautionary suspensions”. But locals found ATMs turned off, apps down, and state TV hijacked with clips calling for uprising 📢 

The escalation signals a new chapter in the region’s conflict - where digital infrastructure becomes just as bombed as physical assets. Except it’s not just banks and servers anymore - crypto rails are now part of the battlefield 😢 

With Iran’s economy already cornered and its crypto sector heavily used for sanctions evasion, hitting Nobitex was both a message and a flex for the Israelis.

And as always in war - there were casualties. This time, it wasn’t just the regime getting burned. Regular people, the ones just using Nobitex to send remittances or hedge against the rial, woke up to find their balances vaporized 😐️ 

Crypto’s not apolitical. It never was - and moments like this remind us it never will be.

Other worthy reads

“DeFi Derivatives: Everything You Need To Know”, article by DiogenesCasares:

“6 usecases for DePin” by a16zcrypto:

Trump’s back to his pro-crypto posting mode:

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!