GM, frens! ☕️

Everything in nature changes. Seasons turn, temperatures swing, things grow, fade, then come back in a different form. Nothing stays frozen forever, even when it feels like it will 🥶 

Our space is not that different. Moods change, narratives rotate, markets cool off and heat back up again. But the people who last the longest usually aren’t the ones fighting change - they’re the ones learning how to move with it.

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

• 🪙 Trump branded crypto lands in the orbit of major scam network

• 🔥 Ambire: rescuing users out of approval prison

• ✉️ TON returns to Telegram

• 🤏 RWA is getting weirder - and better

• 🥽 Animoca abandons the Metaverse idea for AI agents

Below is how $WALLET is trading right now.

And as always, our Discord is always open if you’re down to watch the changes together with us 🫡 

Trump branded crypto lands in the orbit of major scam network

Our space always had a special talent for collapsing the distance between power and filth. One minute you have a cool story about innovation, sovereignty, leadership etc etc and the next, somebody starts pulling on the wires and finds a scam network underneath. This, sadly, stays extremely common.

And that is more or less where Trump’s World Liberty Financial has landed 🍊 

The latest reporting from Wall Street Journal links Trump’s crypto venture to a company called AB network, whose key figures were sanctioned by the US Treasury for ties to a giant pig butchering network. Not a small time rug run out of a basement. A giant scam machine allegedly tied to billions stolen from victims 💸 

AB existed somewhere in the same dirty neighborhood. The point is that World Liberty apparently partnered with it anyway 👇️ 

That partnership let World Liberty’s USD1 stablecoin operate on AB’s network. It was announced less than a month after Treasury sanctions hit more than 140 people and companies tied to the same scam ecosystem. That is recent enough that any serious due diligence process should have been screaming 🤔 

The reporting also points at Chase Herro and Zachary Folkman as the operational brains behind World Liberty’s technical direction, while federal investigators are now looking into earlier ventures tied to them, including Yield Game and Dough Finance, for possible infrastructure overlap with the same laundering and scam universe 🥷 

So this is not just a bad partner story. It is starting to look more like a pattern check, with investigators asking whether the wallets, builders and relationships around this thing were already dirtier than the branding suggested. Horrible look, naturally.

And pig butchering itself is one of the vilest things in crypto because it is not just a quick rug or similar, it is long form fraud. Faking relationships and trust, faking success, then the trap closes and clean harvest once the victim is softened up enough 🤷‍♂️ 

There is still no direct evidence in the reporting that Trump or his family knew about the full history of the people on the other side of this partnership.

But it does not save the project from the much more obvious problem: if your future partner’s top people end up on a Treasury sanctions list and you still manage to roll out a partnership weeks later, then either the checks were weak or nobody involved was treating this like a serious financial product. None of those options are good 🤐 

What makes it worse is how familiar this whole thing feels - that is, how crypto keeps finding new ways to dress up old rot. And yeah nobody will probably be shocked. The question is how many times our space can keep running this exact script - big names up front, serious dirt underneath, some sort of scam later - before everyone just assumes that is the default architecture and crypto has no future beyond this 🤦‍♂️ 

Ambire: rescuing users out of approval prison

Token approvals are one of those little crypto rituals everyone hates and keeps pretending are normal. Click approve, click again, hope you did not leave some cursed unlimited permission sitting around for six months, then promise yourself you will clean it up later. Naturally, later never comes.

Ambire is trying to kill that whole routine 🔨 

• The wallet has been pushing a much cleaner flow around approvals. You can set the exact approval amount before each app interaction instead of handing out the usual infinite blank check 🤓 

• You can batch an approval with the action that follows it into one transaction. And once the action is done, the approval resets back to zero, so there is nothing left hanging around waiting to be forgotten and abused later.

That alone already fixes one of the dumbest habits in onchain life. But Ambire is also leaning into the cleanup side. The wallet lets users batch revoke old approvals too, instead of making them crawl through explorers and approval dashboards one permission at a time like it is still 2022 and suffering builds character.

Most users do not enjoy thinking about allowances, lingering permissions or whether some dusty contract still has access to their tokens. They just want to use apps and not leave half the door open behind them every time. Which also makes this extremely useful 👀 

TON returns to Telegram

For a while, TON had that strange half orphaned status in crypto.

Everyone knew where it came from, everyone knew Telegram had built the original thing, and everyone also knew the company got forced to step away after the SEC came down on the Gram sale years ago.

So TON kept moving, but with that weird split identity where the chain lived on, the community kept it breathing, and Telegram hovered around it like the ex who never fully left town.

Now that awkward phase looks over 👇️ 

TG’s foudner, Pavel Durov, recently said Telegram is taking over as the main force behind TON again, replacing the TON Foundation in that role and becoming the network’s largest validator 🔒️ 

At the same time, he said fees on TON have already dropped sixfold to nearly zero, with more upgrades, new dev tools and a rebuilt ton.org site supposed to roll out within the next two to three weeks 📆 

It was not exactly out of nowhere, but it still landed like a real turning point because TON has already gone through a full soap opera cycle by now.

• Telegram launched the original project in 2018, got kneecapped by US regulators, backed away, open sourced the code, and then the community carried it forward through NewTON and later the TON Foundation. So for years, TON was basically the child Telegram could not officially raise, while still obviously sharing DNA with the family 🙄 

• The mini game boom on Telegram dragged TON back into the spotlight. Notcoin and the rest of that circus brought in users fast, pushed attention through the roof and sent the token flying.

• TON hit around $8 at one point, and for a minute it looked like the Telegram crypto machine had finally found its mass market trick. Then the tap game hype cooled off, Durov got arrested in France, confidence took a hit, and the whole ecosystem sagged again 📉 

The founder is also pointing to the “Make TON Great Again” rollout, with the first step already done and more changes lined up behind it. Silly slogan, obviously, but the point underneath it is clear enough 🥸 

TON is also adopting new Rust based nodes and rolling out Builders Portal 2.0. Their thinking is that if Telegram really wants TON to support more apps, more transactions and more serious usage inside its own ecosystem, that backend work has to happen first 🔧 

So what Telegram seems to be doing now is different in kind.

Instead of trying to ride another consumer hype cycle first, it is rebuilding the chain / messenger app integration around speed, fee compression and tooling and only then hoping usage follows from there.

RWA is getting weirder - and better

RWA has always felt like a very specific genre of promise. Somebody would wrap a treasury or a bank product or talk about “bringing TradFi onchain” or similar and everyone would nod like history was being made because a bond had found a wallet 💰️ 

That story is still real enough - tokenized RWA value has now pushed past $30 billion, according to rwa.xyz, with U.S. Treasury debt still making up the biggest chunk of the market.

Total distributed asset value sits a little above $30.9 billion with Ethereum still leading by market share 🤔 

But the more interesting part is that RWA is clearly getting more diverse 👀 

It is no longer just the usual stack of funds, bills and other respectable paper getting dressed up for crypto.

One of the cleaner examples sits in a place that sounds almost ridiculous next to government debt, but works anyway: Pokemon collectibles 🥚 

• Weekly revenue across Pokemon TCG marketplaces hit $5.38 million for the week ending April 6, just below the all time high from September 2025. The current run was spread across six consecutive weeks, and Courtyard was responsible for most of it.

• This is not the old NFT model all over again with different art on top. The token layer here is being used more like a liquidity wrapper around a real collectible market. Physical cards are stored with a custodian, backed by a redeemable NFT claim, and traded in smaller, faster and more flexible ways than the usual collector market allows. The tokenization in this case is turning into a workable subcategory for collectibles 🤓 

Because wrapping coal onchain, wrapping a fund onchain, wrapping another money market product onchain - sure, all of that grows the category, but it does not really stretch the imagination 🪨 

• It mostly proves that existing financial products can be distributed in cleaner digital form. Useful, yes. Inspiring, not exactly. Pokemon is different because it shows tokenization can latch onto markets that already have real demand, obsessive participants and messy liquidity, then make them easier to trade without inventing fake demand from scratch 📈 

And that is probably why this corner has staying power.

• People were already spending stupid money on rare cards long before crypto touched them. The tokenized layer did not create the obsession. It gave the obsession a faster market structure ⚙️ 

• That is still a much healthier setup than the old NFT era, where the token itself was often the whole story and the underlying thing barely existed outside of the hype machine. Here, the underlying market is very real, the asset is tangible, and the token simply makes access, trading and delivery easier.

If you think about it, that may not sound especially impressive. It might even sound a little silly. Pokemon cards, really? But that is kind of the point 🐣 

If this works for something as niche, chaotic and collector driven as Pokemon, the same logic can apply to a lot of other things people already buy, hold and trade in the physical world. 🪙 

Crypto is not just about putting an asset online.

It is about giving physical markets a trading layer they never really had before - one that is faster, more fluid and much less trapped by the usual friction of the offline world 🤠 

Animoca abandons the Metaverse idea for AI agents

Back in the big metaverse era, the idea behind it all was simple enough: people would spend more and more of their lives inside digital worlds, buying things, socializing, working and collecting assets there like it was the most natural next step on earth.

Crypto loved that idea because it gave tokens, wallets and digital ownership a giant stage to perform on 💵 

Now Animoca Brands is talking like that version of the future missed the point 🤷‍♂️ 

• At Consensus, Yat Siu said the Metaverse should not really be thought of as a place at all 🙅 

• In his (updated) version, the bigger opportunity is not humans walking around VR worlds with expensive headsets on… it is AI agents doing things for people in the background, handling payments, bookings, coordination and all the other digital chores most people barely want to do for themselves - i.e a completely different unrelated thing.

• That is a pretty clean break from the old line. Animoca spent years as one of the biggest believers in the Metaverse thesis, especially when the market was still drunk on virtual land, digital identity and the idea that everyone would eventually hang out in game like online worlds for half their life 🥽 

• Now the company is leaning toward something much less cinematic and probably much more different: software doing the work, blockchain sitting underneath it and humans mostly staying out 🤔 

Siu’s point is basically that crypto still has an onboarding problem because normal people do not want to learn how to operate like crypto natives. They do not want to manage seed phrases, bounce between wallets or figure out why some transaction failed halfway through.

• So the new bet is that AI agents may solve that by interacting with wallets, smart contracts and apps directly through code. In other words, instead of teaching billions of humans to behave more like crypto users, the industry may just build systems where machines do the crypto part and people only see the result 🧾 

That is also where Siu gets deliberately aggressive with the numbers. He said there could eventually be 50 to 100 billion AI agents roaming the internet, and that there may end up being more agents than humans in this system 🤖 

• In this model, blockchains stop being pitched mainly as finance for people and start being pitched as finance and identity infrastructure for machines. Wallets, tokens and onchain payments would not disappear. They would just move one step further into the background and become the rails agents use to talk, transact and coordinate with each other 🤨 

The company announced a $10 million initiative through Animoca Minds to fund devs building AI agent applications. Animoca seems to be actively reallocating attention away from the old immersive world thesis and toward agent based systems that would work in ordinary life.

Yes, that makes more sense than another round of metaverse revival talk (which would be basically lying, because nobody needs it) but how is it really related to the VR Metaverse? These guys truly have an interesting approach at pivoting away from failed narratives 🫠 

And yup people were never going to live in cartoon office parks just because tech investors wanted a new frontier.

Other worthy reads

“SATO: bitcoin reimagined on ethereum. the full thesis” by Rune:

“The biggest financial shift since the internet is already underway.” by Cprinze:

Non USD stablecoin MC has grown by a lot, according to Elton:

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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