GM, frens! ☕️ 🔥 

People like to think decisions come from logic. Most of the time, they don’t. We feel one thing, do another, then spend the next week explaining to ourselves why it was actually rational all along. Humans are funny like that.

Web3 might be the purest example of it. Fear looks like conviction. Greed looks like research. Confidence disappears exactly when it would be most useful. The difference between what we feel and what we do is often where the interesting stuff happens.

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

• ⚽️ The World Cup is becoming a crypto playground

• 🪙 Bitcoin DeFi hits another wall - why it never works?

• 🔥 Ambire adds Clear Signing

• 🤦‍♂️ Crypto degens found a new way to make things worse

• 📈 SBF wants a pardon, and FTT suddenly woke up

Below is how $WALLET is trading right now.

The Discord is open if you're willing to admit your emotions have touched a trade or two 🫢 

The World Cup Is becoming a crypto playground

The World Cup has not even properly settled in yet and the money machine is already wide awake.

That is not new, obviously. The World Cup has always been more than football. It is tourism, TV rights, sponsorships, ticket sales, city budgets, fan travel and every brand on earth trying to attach itself to the biggest sports event on the planet ⚽️ 

But this time, crypto is much deeper in the mix.

• The 2026 World Cup is already unusual on its own. It is the first edition with 48 teams, spread across the United States and Canada (of all places) and Mexico, with 104 matches across 16 host cities.

• More games means more tickets, more hotels, more travel, more policing, more transport chaos and more chances for someone to sell fans something they probably do not need 🤔 

And the bill is not small.

Host cities are dealing with heavy infrastructure and security costs while FIFA is expected to pull in massive revenue from the tournament.

Some reports put FIFA’s revenue target around the $13 billion mark, while cities are left dealing with transport, public safety and local logistics. In the U.S., federal security grants have been approved, but cities are still worried the money may not cover the real cost of hosting 💵 

Fans are feeling it too. Ticket prices have already drawn backlash, with dynamic pricing making some matches extremely expensive. News outlets reported that high costs, travel complexity and visa issues are already hurting expected demand from international visitors, with some hotels and airlines not seeing the boom they hoped for 💰️ 

So on one side, this is a giant football event. On the other, it is also a test of how much money can be squeezed out of attention.

That is where crypto enters.

FIFA has already named Kraken as the Official Crypto Exchange Supporter of the 2026 World Cup. The deal is built around fan engagement across the host cities.

• FIFA also has its own digital collectibles play through FIFA Collect, which has moved onto a FIFA Blockchain powered by Avalanche. That means NFTs, collectibles, digital items and whatever else gets wrapped in the usual “fan experience” language 🖼️ 

Then there are prediction markets.

• With every match, group table and tournament outcome becoming something people can bet or trade around, the World Cup is perfect material for crypto-native speculation. Football already runs on opinions. Crypto just gives those opinions a market 💹 

And then, naturally, the meme coins arrived.

More than 16,000 World Cup related tokens were reportedly launched in two months, with May alone producing over 11,000 new football-themed tokens. Daily DEX buy volume for those tokens reportedly peaked at around $542 million on May 13 🤐 

As always in our industry, every major cultural event becomes a token factory. Elections, court cases, celebrity drama, wars, sports, viral videos, dead animals, live animals, typo tattoos. If people are watching it, someone will try to turn it into a meme play 🐸 

The World Cup just happens to be perfect bait. It is global, emotional and tribal. People already pick sides before the games even start. Crypto just turns that existing attention into thousands of small markets, most of which will probably die before the knockout stage.

At the same time, this is not just some random degen side quest. Big brands are involved now. FIFA is not some tiny protocol account posting dog memes.

So the World Cup is becoming a strange mix of official crypto adoption and pure speculative chaos.

And that is also probably the most honest image of crypto in 2026.

Bitcoin DeFi hits another wall - why didn’t it work out?

The space loves to dunk on Ethereum so much. Especially about the price. Half of crypto Twitter treats ETH like a punching bag whether the price isn’t pumping, which, to be fair, has been often enough to make the jokes write themselves 🙄 

HOWEVER if you step back for a second, most of this industry exists because Ethereum made DeFi what it is 👇️ 

All those finance experiments and every other strange little corner of crypto finance did not appear out of thin air, they came from a programmable chain where people could actually build things with money.

And that is the part that fails to work on Bitcoin 👇️ 

• Bitcoin, being the biggest asset in crypto, the oldest brand and the one coin normies have actually heard of, is still awkward as a financial playground 💸 

• You can hold it, transfer it and treat it like digital gold. That is powerful, sure. But you cannot really build the same kind of open DeFi economy on native Bitcoin the way Ethereum has built one around ETH, stablecoins and smart contracts.

• Botanix was one of the projects trying to change that. It wanted to bring Ethereum style functionality to Bitcoin through a Bitcoin layer 2 network. The idea was clear enough: give BTC holders something more to do than just sit on their coins and hope the chart eventually remembers to go up 🤔 

In theory, that makes sense. Bitcoin has enormous value sitting idle. If even a small part of that capital moved into Bitcoin native DeFi, it could become a serious market. Lending, trading, yield, payments and applications around BTC sound like an obvious opportunity 🪙 

In practice, Botanix says it did not work 🫢 

• The project is now shutting down after four years. Users have been told to withdraw their Bitcoin and other assets before July 9. After that, remaining assets will be swept and become unrecoverable. That is not exactly the ending any project wants after raising money, building infrastructure and trying to sell the idea of real utility on Bitcoin 😵 

• Botanix’s own post mortem was pretty blunt. The team said the technology and products worked, but the market was not there.

That is probably the cleanest summary of the whole Bitcoin DeFi problem.

• The project raised around $14.4 million across funding rounds in 2023 and 2024. It tried to build a Bitcoin based blockchain with Ethereum like smart contract functionality. Its Spiderchain design combined an EVM compatible chain with proof of stake style consensus, giving developers a familiar environment while still tying the story back to Bitcoin 💰️ 

But the numbers never matched the ambition, Botanix had only around $119,500 in total value locked at closure. For a project trying to unlock Bitcoin DeFi, that is a pathetic number.

Bitcoin holders mostly still treat BTC as a reserve asset. They buy it, hold it, maybe move it to cold storage and then yell at everyone else about monetary discipline. They are not exactly rushing to bridge into experimental Bitcoin DeFi apps to chase yield or test new protocols 🤷‍♂️ 

For now, most people who want BTC exposure inside DeFi already use versions of wrapped Bitcoin on Ethereum or other general purpose chains. It is not perfect but it works well enough for most users. If you want lending, yield or leveraged exposure, using wBTC or another synthetic BTC asset on a mature DeFi chain is simply easier than waiting for Bitcoin native infrastructure to catch up. That’s just reality.

Botanix is not the only project trying. Rootstock, Stacks, Citrea and other Bitcoin aligned networks are still working on different versions of the same idea. Some lean more into Bitcoin security. Some focus on rollups, some try to build more Bitcoin native applications instead of copying Ethereum style DeFi 🫥 

But the ETH comparison becomes impossible to avoid. Ethereum has plenty of problems. But Ethereum also gave crypto its first real application layer that actually works and has real demand. DeFi, stablecoins, DAOs, NFTs, tokenized assets and most of the onchain economy grew from that base. Not from Bitcoin.

Bitcoin gave crypto its money myth. Ethereum gave it something to do 🪙 

Ambire adds Clear Signing

Wallet security in crypto is a major bummer when a user has to approve something they cannot actually read.

That is what clear signing is trying to fix, and Ambire is now among the first wallets to implement it 👇️ 

• The feature is powered by EIP-7730 and lets users see what they are approving before they sign. Instead of staring at unreadable transaction data and trusting that nothing weird is hiding inside, users get a clearer view of the action in front of them.

• Blind signing has been one of crypto’s longest running problems. People are told to verify before signing, then most wallets show them cryptic codes that almost nobody can understand.

Clear signing does not remove every risk. Bad links, fake apps and careless approvals can still hurt users. But it gives users a better way to see what a transaction actually does before the signature happens 🧠 

“Know what you sign” - that definitely the right direction.

Crypto degens found a new way to make things worse

There’s always been a weird corner of crypto where the line between joke, trade and self-humiliation gets blurry.

At first it was mostly memes. Then it became livestreams with random stunts and tokens launching around whatever got attention for five minutes. Every cycle, someone finds a way to make the incentives worse 😐️ 

Pump.fun’s GO is the latest example:

• The recently launched platform lets users create and complete bounties for almost any task. In theory, that could mean harmless internet challenges. In practice, because this is crypto, it quickly turned into people doing strange, extremely embarrassing, risky and outright criminal things for tiny rewards.

The story that dragged it into the spotlight involved a user called Arivu, who said he completed a Pump.fun GO bounty asking someone to tattoo the ticker “$boutywork” on their forehead and provide video proof 🤳 

• The twist is that the real token was supposed to be $Bountywork, but the bounty itself used the misspelled version. Arivu said he followed the task exactly and got the exact name from the bounty tattooed on his forehead. He later posted that it was not his mistake and asked the Pump.fun team to review it correctly 🤦‍♂️ 

• A Solana token using the ticker BOUTYWORK started trading on PumpSwap. According to CoinDesk, it quickly reached more than $600,000 in market cap, pulled in over $3.5 million in 24-hour volume, gained more than 2,600 holders and had roughly $43,000 in liquidity.

• Arivu later said he received his $20,000, but not from the original bounty in the clean way people might expect. He said the money came from trading fees from a token someone else launched around the situation. He thanked users and said they changed his life.

So the person doing the stunt becomes content. The content becomes a token. The token becomes a trade. The trade becomes the real prize. The person at the center might get paid, but the bigger money often goes to whoever turns the stunt into a market fast enough 🫠 

This whole thing feels less like innocent cute “internet chaos” and more like a bad, extremely dangerous incentive system for turbo degens. On purpose 💀 

Pump.fun GO was presented as a way to “pay anyone to do anything” and that sounds funny for about three seconds, until you remember that crypto users will absolutely test the worst version of any idea if there is money or clout involved.

• There were other bounties too. Some were just silly, like a watermelon eating challenge for around $93. Others were darker, like a bounty offering about $663 for someone to go to Skid Row in Los Angeles and interview homeless people on camera about who they voted for.

• Then there were the physically risky ones. One bounty asked people to drink a whole bottle of alcohol while promoting a token, with videos showing multiple submissions where users appeared to chug bottles in about a minute. Another offered around $266 for someone to shave their head while screaming “Jobcoin” 🤯 

• That is the direction this stuff naturally goes. Once attention has a price, people start pushing further to get it. The tasks get weirder. The risk goes up. Until it gets absurd.

This is not new for Pump.fun either.

The platform already had a history of garbage livestream behavior. Previous streams included extreme dark humor, disturbing threats, people locking themselves in bathrooms and other stunts meant to pump tokens through shock value. The platform has said it moderates dark or malicious content, but it’s very far from truth 🙄 

That is the core problem here.

Memecoins used to be sold as jokes. Some still are. A funny ticker, a stupid image, a community running with the bit. That side can be harmless enough. But the deeper we go the more different it becomes. Degens turn real people and their financial problems into launch material. They reward public embarrassment, pressure, danger and humiliation if there is enough volume on the other side 🥴 

And every time the market gets more crappy, the behavior seems to get worse.

When prices are up, people can pretend they are building culture. When prices are down, the desperation shows. Suddenly the “community experiment” becomes someone drinking on camera, shaving their head, tattooing a typo on their face or filming vulnerable people in the street for a bounty 🤪 

That is not culture.

That honestly says more about the current state of degens than any thinkpiece could.

There is always someone ready to turn anything into a token. There is always someone ready to buy it. There is always someone ready to do something regrettable if the reward is large enough.

SBF wants a pardon and FTT suddenly woke up

Sam Bankman-Fried is back in the news and the FTX chapter of the industry still refuses to stay closed.

The former FTX CEO is serving a 25 year prison sentence after the exchange collapsed in 2022 and left customers, investors and lenders dealing with billions in damage. Now he says he would “absolutely” welcome a presidential pardon from Donald Trump 🤪 

He made the comment in an interview with Fox Business, while avoiding a direct answer on whether his family is lobbying for clemency. That alone was enough to get people talking again, but then FTT, the old FTX exchange token, jumped more than 50% after the interview went live 🤦‍♂️ 

That is probably the most crypto part of the whole thing. The exchange is dead, the founder is in prison and the token was clearly a scam but it still moves because his name entered the feed again.

• SBF is trying to reframe the FTX collapse around the bankruptcy recovery. His argument is that customers may end up getting more than their original deposits back, with some possibly receiving up to 170% of their initial balance because “crypto prices recovered” 🤡 

• That sounds convenient, but it does not erase the actual problem. People lost access to their money. The exchange imploded. Users were thrown into years of bankruptcy proceedings they never signed up for. Getting repaid later because the market bounced does not make the original disaster clean.

FTX was not just a bad trade or a failed startup. It became one of the biggest trust collapses crypto has ever had and created a whole bear cycle for years just because of how it collapsed, with a lot of people losing billions in total 💰️ 

SBF was convicted on charges including wire fraud and conspiracy, and the court case made clear how much damage was done across customers, investors and Alameda lenders.

So his angle and explanation for the pardon doesn’t land at all here. SBF was not caught in some harmless gray area. FTX blew up with user funds stuck inside it 🤷‍♂️ 

The FTT move says something about the market too. There is no real revival story here. Traders saw a headline, saw attention coming back to FTX and chased the volatility.

That is not redemption. That is just crypto being unable to let a corpse stop trading.

Other worthy reads

“the coming crisis: crypto, AI, and spaceflight” by mert:

“Game of Stonking” by playrisk:

“Post Human Society Stocks is the Only Alpha in Market Right Now” by VD:

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!