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1) What
Plus, 🧐 Brewing conflict at the CFTC, 🏦 Ethereum ETF staking advances, 🇦🇷 Milei woos Buterin, and more!
Juan Aranovich
February 21, 2025
Happy Friday! In today’s edition:
🎭 SBF turns Trumper
🎰 CFTC nominee: Fox / henhouse?
✅ SEC mulls ETH staking ETFs
🇦🇷 Milei chases Ethereum endorsement
📉 Pi token crash: What happened?
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By Tikta and Veronica Irwin
Former FTX Chief Executive Sam Bankman-Fried’s political orientation appears to have changed since he donated to Joe Biden’s presidential election campaign in 2020.
In an interview from prison with the rightwing New York Sun website, Bankman-Fried said: “The Biden administration was just incredibly destructive and difficult to work with,” adding that the Republican Party was “far more reasonable.”
He also drew parallels between the way his criminal trial had been handled and President Donald Trump’s repeated false allegations of “prosecutorial abuse” on the campaign trail last year.
Bankman-Fried said he shared Trump’s resentment of Judge Lewis Kaplan, who presided over both his own trial and the lawsuit against the then-presidential candidate brought by Elle magazine columnist E. Jean Carroll, in which Trump was found liable for sexual abuse and defamation.
“I know President Trump had a lot of frustrations with Judge Kaplan,” he said. “I certainly did as well.”
Bankman-Fried’s remarks come amid reports that his parents, Joseph Bankman and Barbara Fried, have held meetings with lawyers and individuals connected with Trump's coterie to discuss clemency for their son.
Gamblers on Polymarket give Bankman-Fried only a 3% chance of receiving a presidential pardon from Trump.
Brian Quintenz, President Donald Trump’s nominee to chair the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, will likely involve himself in matters relating to prediction markets, despite apparent conflicts of interest, two sources directly familiar with the matter told Unchained.
Quintenz has since 2021 served on the board of prediction market Kalshi, which competes with blockchain-based platform Polymarket.
Senior regulators typically recuse themselves from rulemaking and enforcement matters where recently held job titles or investments may compromise their objectivity.
Avoiding recusal would free Quintenz — who as CFTC chair would decide what issues rise to the top of the commission’s agenda — to prioritize rulemaking and regulatory interpretations related to prediction markets such as Kalshi and Polymarket.
As the Trump administration bins ethics rules and demolishes consumer protections, does Quintenz’s appointment — and attitude — open the door for a regulatory reassessment of prediction markets? And will his decisions pass the sniff test?
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has acknowledged two 19b-4 filings from issuers seeking approval for staking in Ethereum ETFs — one from NYSE Arca on behalf of Grayscale, and another from Cboe BZX on behalf of 21Shares.
“No surprise, but nice to see progress,” Nate Geraci, president of investment advisory firm The ETF Store said on X.
A source who spoke with the SEC recently told a Fox Business reporter that the agency was “very, very interested” in staking and was asking the industry to elaborate on the type of staking and its benefits in a memo.
The same source is also understood to be expecting agency guidance on staking in the near future.
Argentinian President Javier Milei has extended an informal invitation to Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin to host the network’s next Devconnect conference in the country.
“It would be an honour for Argentina to host Devconnect,” Milei said on X in response to a post by Buterin suggesting Argentina as a host nation. “I agree that it would be a great opportunity for our country,”
Milei’s missive comes despite the fact that he is at the center of a scandal local media are calling “cryptogate” — a development that many other leaders would treat as a crisis, yet which doesn’t appear to have dampened his desire to engage with the crypto industry.
Unlike the Ethereum Foundation's principal event, Devcon, Devconnect is a less centralized, week-long series of multiple independent events and workshops.
"Argentina's Ethereum community is full of amazing builders, who have already contributed some of the most important software in the Ethereum ecosystem,” Buterin wrote on X, referring to the aftermath of the LIBRA imbroglio, which saw the token soar after being promoted by Milei then crash, leaving many investors nursing losses and fueling talk of insider trading.
The Pi Network's open mainnet launch triggered a significant but short-lived rally for its native token, Pi, followed by a sharp collapse in its price.
Pi surged more than 45% during the first hour after the mainnet launch, reaching a high of $2.10 before plunging 59% to a low of $0.61 in the hours that followed. Pi was trading at $0.85 with a fully diluted value of $85.6 billion at press time.
Founded by Stanford University graduates in March 2019, the Pi Network allows users to mine Pi coins using their smartphones without significant battery drain or expensive hardware. As of this month, the network had more than 47 million engaged users worldwide.
The shift from a closed beta system to an open network enabled transactions beyond Pi's ecosystem and allowed early miners to cash out of their positions — a development that may have contributed to the price crash.
Mantle is building the largest sustainable hub for on-chain finance. Launching three new core innovation pillars: Enhanced Index Fund, Mantle Banking and MantleX.
🎤 Ye (formerly Kanye West) is launching the YZY token, reserving 70% for himself as a way to bypass mainstream platforms after clothing manufacturers, banks and social media companies cut ties with him over his inflammatory and antisemitic rhetoric, following a strategy similar to that behind Donald Trump’s TRUMP coin.
💸 Sky Protocol co-founder Rune Christensen on Thursday implemented emergency governance changes to prevent what he called a failed attempt to take over the protocol, alleging that a group of token holders had sought to manipulate the price of its native MKR in order to do so.
🖼️ OpenSea reclaimed 71.5% of Ethereum NFT trading volume in the week to Thursday, more than doubling its market share in a month after announcing its long-awaited $SEA token, which sparked a surge in transactions and daily trading volume.
🎭 Crypto intelligence platform Kaito’s AI-powered token airdrop sparked controversy on Thursday after it disproportionately rewarded social media influencers, while the token debuted at a $1.7 billion fully diluted valuation, despite mixed community reactions over its fairness.
🚨 The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission yesterday rebranded its crypto enforcement unit as the “Cyber and Emerging Technologies Unit,” reducing its size and shifting its focus away from aggressive digital asset crackdowns under the agency’s new Republican leadership.
☁️ Decentralized storage network AR.IO on Thursday launched its mainnet and ARIO token, aiming to create a “permanent cloud” built on Arweave’s pay-once model, offering censorship-resistant data hosting as an alternative to traditional cloud giants.
🏦 The European Central Bank is developing a fiat settlement system for distributed ledger transactions, starting with a link to its existing Target system before exploring a fully integrated DLT-based solution for financial markets
⚡ Bitcoin staking platform Acre secured $4 million at a $90 million valuation from investors including Draper Dragon, Big Brain Holdings and Orange DAO, offering BTC holders a way to earn yield through staking and DeFi integrations without interacting with other blockchains.
cmon, we're not broke, we're pre-rich
— naiive (@naiivememe)
4:18 AM • Feb 21, 2025
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