GM, frens ☕️ 

Agency is one of those things you don’t notice until it’s missing.

It’s the difference between waiting for something to happen and just doing something about it. In crypto, that line shows up everywhere: some people follow the flow, others make small calls that end up shaping where it goes.

Most of the time it’s not big moves either. Just deciding, acting, and owning the result instead of outsourcing it 🏋️ 

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

• 📈 The market still can’t find a clean trend

• 🚢 Iran’s crypto toll plan brings digital assets into energy politics

• 🤦‍♂️ Hyperliquid gets another very serious… Fartcoin incident

• 📚️ CZ’s memoirs arrive and so do new rounds of founder beef

Below is how $WALLET is trading right now.

Our Discord is always open if you want to talk 🤠 

The market still can’t find a clean trend

Recently, it looked like the market finally had something clean to work with.

The pump came on the back of ceasefire news and the usual wave of macro relief that follows any sign the world might stop making things worse for five minutes.

That gave risk assets some room to breathe, crypto joined in and the price briefly made a run toward the top of its recent range 📈 

Then the pump quickly ran out of road.

• After getting close to the $73,000 area, the price got rejected and slipped back toward $71,000, wiping out a decent chunk of the pump and pulling roughly $50 billion out of the total crypto market 🪙 

• That kind of reversal says a lot about where things stand right now: the market still wants to react to good news but no one can fully trust it and every decent rally still feels like it is one goofy geo shenanigan away from turning back around.

The market stays volatile because the signals coming in from geopolitics are all over the place 🤪 

One update gives traders a reason to lean risk on, the next one throws doubt back into the room and the result is a market that keeps moving without fully committing to a direction.

The hesitation is showing up in the data too. Trading activity is still below normal levels and exchange depositing addresses have dropped toward decade lows, which usually points to slower participation. In other words, the pump looked good on the chart for a second but it still did not come with the kind of conviction that makes people believe a proper breakout is underway 👇️ 

Alts are showing that same uncertainty. The market as a whole still looks split between short bursts of optimism and a general lack of follow through.

Even the stronger parts of the board do not feel like they are being driven by clean confidence. They look more like reactions to news inside a market that is still trying to figure out what is real and what is just another temporary mood swing 🤔 

There was at least one cleaner bright spot. Morgan Stanley’s new ETF got off to a strong start, which shows institutional interest is still there even while the market chops around 🪚 

So for now, the industry is still rangebound, the price is still struggling to break cleanly higher and mixed geopolitical signals are keeping everything jumpy 😵 

Iran’s crypto toll plan brings digital assets into energy politics

For years, crypto’s “real world use case” adoption enthusiasts mostly had to survive on the usual menu: remittances, stablecoins, sanctions and the occasional pilot project that never really went anywhere.

Now there is a much stranger entry on the list 💀 

Iran is reportedly looking at using crypto and other digital payments to collect transit fees from oil tankers moving through the Strait of Hormuz.

Fully loaded vessels would have to send cargo details to Iranian authorities, get assessed on roughly a dollar per barrel and then settle that toll in digital assets, with crypto mentioned as one possible route 🤯 

That is not some niche detail buried in the fine print. The Strait of Hormuz is one of the most important shipping chokepoints on the planet.

Iran’s logic is not hard to understand here: digital assets offer a route around the usual dollar based rails and the paper trail that comes with them 💰️ 

That matters for any country already used to operating under financial restrictions. Russia has leaned on crypto for similar reasons, and Iran has been circling digital payment ideas for a while as it looks for ways to fund trade and reconstruction outside the systems controlled by the West 💵 

The proposal reportedly separates empty tankers from loaded ones, with the loaded vessels facing the reporting process and the toll 🪙 

Iranian officials would then apparently instruct crews on how to settle the payment in digital assets before clearing them for passage. There is also talk of routing traffic closer to Iran’s coastline.

This still leaves a lot of questions: how many shipping firms would actually comply. How would insurers react. How much of this is a real near term framework and how much is pressure theater during a fragile ceasefire window, etc.

Still, even before any full rollout, the message is already clear enough. Crypto is being treated less like a speculative side asset and more like a grown up infrastructure that can be used when states want payments to move outside the usual channels 🤷‍♂️ 

People love talking about adoption as if it only counts when a major bank smiles at it or a payment giant adds one more pilot program. But true adoption, as it turns out, happens in stranger messier places, where the point is not convenience but control, survival and leverage 🔨 

Hyperliquid gets another very serious… Fartcoin incident

Some corners of crypto are impossible to parody because they are already doing the job themselves.

You open the screen expecting some usual drama - leverage, liquidation, hacks, some platform under troubles - and then you realize the whole thing revolves around … a gigantic Fartcoin position blowing up on Hyperliquid 🤡 

At that point the market is not even trying to keep a straight face anymore.

The trade reportedly involved around 145 million Fartcoin spread across several wallets, (which is already the kind of sentence that should make any sane person close the tab 🤦‍♂️)

Instead, the position started unwinding hard enough to trigger Hyperliquid’s auto deleveraging system, handing gains to traders on the other side while the platform’s HLP vault took another hit 👇️ 

• PeckShield put the paper loss around $3 million, though the twist is that the trader may still have made money elsewhere through cross venue hedging. So this may not even have been some ordinary degen disaster 🤔 

• Researchers not that this may have been another case of someone using a ridiculous memecoin setup to lean on the platform’s liquidation system and let the venue absorb part of the chaos 🫠 

Hyperliquid has already had similar episodes tied to oversized positions and liquidity issues in names like JELLY and POPCAT. So this was could have been not some one off freak event that dropped out of the sky.

It is starting to look more like a recurring feature of the environment: build a concentrated bet, stress the mechanism, let the platform mechanics do the damage ⚡️ 

CZ’s memoirs arrive and so do new rounds of founder beef

CZ’s “long awaited” memoir officially launched this week and instead of just adding one more founder book to the crypto shelf it immediately kicked the whole space into drama mode 💃 

The book, Freedom of Money, goes back through CZ’s life and Binance’s rise, but what really got people talking were the parts where he revisits old fights and names names.

That is what set the space off 👇️ 

One of the biggest flashpoints was his retelling of the old OKx mess.

• In the book, CZ brings back the dispute around contract forgery allegations and his falling out with people tied to OKX and Star Xu.

• That was enough to get Star Xu responding publicly, calling CZ a liar and pushing back on the book’s version of events. So right away, the memoir stopped being just a memoir and turned into another round of a feud that clearly never died 🥊 

Then there is the Huobi angle.

• CZ writes that Huobi founder Li Lin told him in 2025 that he had been arrested because of a tip from Star Xu. Xu denied that too.

• So now the book was not just reopening old exchange drama, it was reopening claims about arrests, informants and personal betrayal 🤓 

CZ also described the collapse of FTX from his side and says that before Binance moved toward a possible acquisition, Sam Bankman-Fried called him asking for a couple of billion dollars, “like ordering a sandwich” 🥪 

CZ says he had no real desire to own FTX and that the letter of intent was mainly about assessing the situation and protecting users. He also retells his view that Caroline Ellison’s public offer to buy Binance’s FTT at $22 helped trigger the spiral, because it exposed a level the market could attack.

From there, things unraveled fast, FTT got crushed, billions left the exchange and the whole disaster became one more chapter in the industry’s hall of shame 🤦‍♂️ 

The memoir also brings up a Signal group chat created during the Terra and Luna collapse. According to CZ, it included him, Sam Bankman-Fried, Brian Armstrong and Jesse Powell, and later drew interest from the DOJ and the SEC.

Again, this is why people were glued to the book. Not because they wanted a meditation on freedom and finance, but because the thing is packed with stories where every paragraph feels like it could start another argument 🤳 

CZ also wrote that he met Gary Gensler back in 2019 before Gensler became SEC chair and even offered him an advisory role at Binance, which Gensler declined. In hindsight, that part obviously got attention too, because crypto loves nothing more than an old photo or old meeting that suddenly looks different once the future fallout is known 🕵️ 

The community also latched onto the personal material. There are old family photos, earlier life moments, shots from before Binance became the giant it is now. Those details gave the book some actual human texture. But even there, people were not really staying focused on the emotional journey for very long. They were flipping right back to the drama, the old accusations and the founder beef 🥩 

The book did not just tell CZ’s story in a clean straight line. It reopened half a dozen old stories that other people thought were buried well enough. And once that happened, crypto did what it always does. Everyone became a historian, a detective, a lawyer and a gossip all at once 🙃 

Other worthy reads

“Crypto Has a New King. Its Name is Hyperliquid.” by Our Crypto Talk:

“What are crypto builders actually building right now?” from Wintermute:

“The Big Thing: We Are In A World War That Isn’t Going To End Anytime Soon.” by Ray Dalio:

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

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