GM ☕️ 

Last week hinted at a shift - this week’s confirming it. There’s energy again.

You can feel it in the way people are talking, the way liquidity’s flowing, the way random garbage is suddenly relevant again.

It’s loud - and in crypto, that’s when things get interesting 👀 

Here’s what we’ve got lined up:

• 🍕 Market gets a new ATH on Pizza Day, BTC flips Amazon

• 🌕️ SafeMoon CEO found guilty on all charges

• 🗣️ Hawk Tuah girl gets an FBI visit over her crypto scam

• 🪙 Kraken lists popular tokenized stocks

The W3oF Degen Portfolio inched upward - just a little, but in this space, even a small gain feels like winning the moral lottery 🎰 

It’s progress, and for now, that’s enough.

As always, The Discord is open if you want to help us push our luck 🫢 

Market gets a new ATH on Pizza Day, BTC flips Amazon

BTC picked the most fitting day to humble Amazon. The leading crypto didn't just hit new highs – it flexed a $2.205 trillion market cap, officially dethroning Jeff Bezos' retail empire by $70 billion 🤯 

The timing couldn't be more interesting 👇️ 

• 15 years after Laszlo Hanyecz paid 10,000 BTC for two Papa John's pizzas, the asset decided to celebrate by making Amazon look like pocket change.

What was once "highly speculative risk" now commands more market respect than the company that sells everything to everyone, huh.

• Price wise, BTC smashed past $111,000, setting another ATH yesterday 🏔️ 

The milestone signals something bigger than just one asset's performance, though.

• BlackRock's spot ETF saw $604 million in net inflows on Tuesday alone. BlackRock itself has jumped in the crypto game big time and is now also the second largest BTC holder, right behind Satoshi Nakamoto 👴 

When the world's largest asset manager is moving this much institutional money into crypto, you know the "experiment" phase is officially over. We're watching digital assets become a legitimate macro asset class in real time ⌚️ 

Some people in the space are calling this a process of becoming the benchmark currency. And some other analysts disagree, claiming the fundamentals haven't changed despite surpassing Amazon's market cap 🤷‍♂️ 

They're technically right – the asset is still the same. But fundamentals don't flip trillion dollar companies. Network effects and institutional conviction do 🪙

But, in the meantime:

• The broader crypto market hit $3.65 trillion yesterday, still a bit shy of the $3.71 trillion peak from late 2024.

Context matters here: we're building toward new records while individual assets casually overtake some of the world's most dominant corporations 🏎️ 

Market watchers see continued upside ahead, with some calling for $150,000 to $200,000 or even $1M price targets this cycle. That kind of talk used to sound like cope. Now it just sounds possible.

Adding to the heat: ETH is flying.

• ETH crossed $2,7K mark yesterday 🙂 

• Over 30,000 call spread contracts just got snapped up, with traders eyeing up to 6K per coin by EOY.

• That’s $7 million in directional bets from the kind of players who don’t place them lightly. Up 80% since April and still picking up steam.

Calling it what it is: extremely bullish🐂 

SafeMoon CEO found guilty on all charges

Braden Karony, the former CEO of SafeMoon, was found guilty on every single charge brought against him.

The verdict dropped on May 21 after a 12 day trial, with the jury convicting him of conspiracy to commit securities fraud, wire fraud, and money laundering 🤦‍♂️

• He’s now facing up to 45 years behind bars. The case was brutal. Prosecutors laid out how Karony and his team pumped SafeMoon at the top, lied about token security, and funneled the money through private wallets 🪙 

• The liquidity pool they said was “locked” wasn’t locked at all. They were sitting on it the whole time and draining it while promising buyers that nothing shady was happening 🔓️ 

Turns out Braden made off with more than $9 million. He spent it like a guy who thought he’d never get caught: a $2.2 million home as well as some other real estate, luxury cars including an Audi R8 and a Tesla and decked out trucks like a custom Ford F-550 and Jeep Gladiators 🤔 

This wasn’t considered a minor rug in court, the U.S. Justice Department called it one of the worst betrayals of crypto investors they’ve seen. The jury didn’t hesitate either 🔨 

• One co-defendant pled guilty early to reduce their sentence. Another ran. Kyle Nagy, the original platform creator, fled to Russia and is still missing. The court ordered the forfeiture of his property.

Earlier this year, Celsius CEO Alex Mashinsky got 12 years. FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried is already in prison, so overall it’s a good start.

The message is simple: if you run a rug factory and try to cash out while pretending everything’s fine, the law will catch up. Well, hopefully, at least 👮 

SafeMoon founders talked a big game about transparency and decentralization. In the end, they ran SafeMoon like a personal ATM.

Hawk Tuah girl gets an FBI visit over her crypto scam

We already covered the Hawk Tuah token scam when it first blew up.

It had all the signs from the start: quick meme coin backed by a stupid viral meme, no clear team, no product, and a chart that went straight up before it went straight into the floor 👎️ 

Now it turns out feds took it (sort of) seriously enough to knock on some doors 👮 

According to Hailey Welch, the TikTok personality who accidentally became the face of the Hawk Tuah Token, the FBI showed up at her grandmother’s house.

• She says her grandma panicked and called thinking she was having a heart attack.

• The agents were there to ask questions about the hawk tuah girl’s involvement with the token and whether she had a role in what most in the space have since called a textbook pump and dump.

• She later met with investigators and handed over her phone 📱 

• She also said that she sat in a room full of federal agents who went through her messages, asked her about her role, and looked into everything related to Hawk Token. The SEC got involved too. In the end, both agencies cleared her. She was never named in the final lawsuit 🤔 

Her version of events: she wasn’t a founder, she didn’t build anything, she didn’t receive any tokens. She says she was given lines to read and a small flat fee to promote. The script came from the actual operators. She filmed herself saying whatever was sent over and sent it back for them to post 🫠 

And yet she was the face. She was the one plastered all over the promo material. She was the one investors recognized.

So when HAWK launched, pumped, then dumped, her inbox was the one full of angry DMs from people who lost money. Blockchain analytics later showed most of the supply got dumped right after launch by wallets linked to insiders. Hailey said she had no idea.

She also said she feels terrible about it. Said she let people down. Said she thought she was just helping push something fun.

There’s nothing new here. Another memecoin built on someone’s fleeting internet fame. Another face who “didn’t understand” what she was part of. Another community left holding tokens that now trade for less than gas fees.

The girl got cleared. But the shitcoin didn’t just disappear. It wiped out real people with real money. The meme was never funny for them 🤷‍♂️ 

Kraken lists popular tokenized stocks

Stocks that used to live inside Wall Street’s walled garden just got dragged onto crypto rails 🚂 

Apple, Tesla, Nvidia, Microsoft and a few dozen more are now going to be tradeable on Kraken’s centralized exchange 📜 

• Kraken didn’t slap together a pitch deck about “democratizing access” or anything like this, they just listed stocks people already want and made them easier to get.

• Each token maps to a real share held by Backed Finance, a regulated custodian. It’s the same exposure you'd get through a traditional broker, minus the lunch breaks and regional access walls, which is not a bad idea in itself.

The comparison to Binance’s short-lived attempt in 2021 is unavoidable, though 👇️ 

• Binance rolled out something similar, but the legal foundation was shaky and the whole thing collapsed on contact with regulators 😶 

• Kraken took a slower path, waited until the compliance actually held up and rolled it out.

The appeal here isn’t theoretical - (and it has nothing to do with the central exchanges as they are).

• Think about it like this: if you’re sitting in Latin America or Southeast Asia and want to park stablecoins into, let’s say, Apple stock without cashing out, converting into dollars, finding a broker - and then wondering if the market’s open, you won’t be able to 🙅 

And tokenization could really fix that.

And yeah tokenized stocks aren’t something new. But they’ve mostly lived in whitepapers and pilot projects with a lifespan measured in weeks 🙃 

So the appeal is certainly there - wrapped stocks that move like any other coins. Settlements that don’t ask for business hours. Ownership that fits inside a wallet. Now let’s see how this experiment fares for Kraken (and then hope we would be able to safely do the same on decentralized platforms) 😇 

Other worthy reads

President Milei is shutting down investigation into $LIBRA:

“AI Entering the Physical Realm: Physical AI, Robotics, and Web3 Integration” by s4ammy:

Consumer crypto research from Ryan of Blockworks Research:

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

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