Base Said Words, Degens Heard ‘Buy’

Plus, 🏛️ Fed chair backs stablecoin rules, 🧪 Raydium debuts Pump.fun rival, 💵 Trump-backed DeFi raises $25M, and more!

Author

Juan Aranovich
April 17, 2025

Gm! In today’s edition:

  • 🎢 Base post triggers trading frenzy

  • 🏛️ Fed chair looks to rules for stablecoins

  • 🚀 Raydium launches Pump.fun rival

  • 💵 Trump DeFi project gets capital boost

The Financial Freedom Report explores the role currency and banking play in the civil liberties and human rights struggles of those living under authoritarian regimes and how Bitcoin is used to push back.

By Tikta and Veronica Irwin

Base Post Sparks Unofficial Token Trading Frenzy

Coinbase’s layer 2 network, Base, inadvertently triggered a speculative trading frenzy after a routine social media post was auto-minted as a tradable token.

At 3:12 p.m. ET on Wednesday, Base posted the phrase “Base is for everyone” from its official X account. 

Because the network is integrated with Zora, a decentralized social and minting protocol, the post was instantly converted into a collectible and tokenized — without a formal launch announcement or backing from Base itself.

Despite a clear disclaimer on Zora noting that the token and future coins are “not an official network or protocol token for Base, Coinbase, or any other related product,” the token’s market cap soared to an eye-popping $13 million before crashing 92% three hours later.

“So the TL;DR is solana manlets had no idea about how Zora works and got rekt,” pseudonymous X user Larp von Trier wrote.

As of 5 a.m. ET on Thursday, the token had regained ground and was trading at a market cap of $12.8 million. 

“Base is posting on Zora because we believe everyone should bring their content onchain, and use the tools that make it possible,” Base said on X. “Memes. Moments. Culture.”

U.S. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell reiterated the urgent need for a comprehensive regulatory framework for stablecoins on Wednesday.

Speaking at The Economic Club of Chicago, Powell emphasized the fact that both chambers of Congress were revisiting efforts to legislate a stablecoin framework.

“So Congress is again looking…at a legal framework for stablecoins,” Powell said. “Depending on what’s in it, that’s a good idea.” 

“Stablecoins are a digital product that could actually have fairly wide appeal,” he said, adding that the climate around the crypto sector was changing as it became more mainstream. 

Recent developments in stablecoin legislation include the progress of the GENIUS Act, a bill that cleared the Senate Banking Committee in an 18-6 vote last month.

Decentralized exchange Raydium has rolled out LaunchLab, a new token launchpad designed to compete directly with Pump.fun, the biggest memecoin launch platform on Solana. 

Raydium’s native RAY token surged 12% following the announcement.

Unlike Pump.fun, which uses only SOL as a quote asset, LaunchLab supports multiple tokens, including JitoSOL and stablecoins, as quote assets for new launches. 

It also integrates directly with Raydium’s v4 AMM automated market maker and offers a liquidity locker via NFTs, improved revenue-sharing for creators, and advanced liquidity management tools.

“Creators can opt-in [sic] to earn 10% of trading fees from the AMM pool post-graduation,” Raydium said.

Raydium’s move comes after Pump.fun announced plans to launch its own automated market maker, PumpSwap, intensifying competition between the two platforms that once shared a fairly symbiotic relationship.

Crypto market maker DWF Labs has announced a $25 million investment in World Liberty Financial, a DeFi project backed by U.S. President Donald Trump and his family.

The investment was funded by a private acquisition of World Liberty Financial tokens, and coincides with DWF Labs’ expansion into the U.S. market, marked by the opening of a new office in New York City, as it plans to strengthen partnerships with U.S. banks and support liquidity for World Liberty Financial’s USD1 U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoin.

USD1 has a market cap of around $128 million, with $30 million of value locked across chains. 

More than 113 million USD1 tokens have been minted on BNB Chain, representing nearly 90% of the token’s total supply.

Dubai-based DWF is run by Andrei Grachev, former CEO of crypto exchange Huobi. 

It has been at the center of controversy regarding alleged market manipulation and wash trading.

In 2023, Binance's market surveillance team reportedly uncovered evidence suggesting that DWF had been involved in pump-and-dump schemes and $300 million worth of wash trading. 

However, Binance insiders told The Wall Street Journal last year that Binance had fired the head of the market surveillance team who had led the investigation into DWF Labs.

Should Victims of Crypto Fraud Be Repaid at Current Prices? DOJ to Investigate

In a memo released last Monday, the U.S. Department of Justice said that it would reconsider the process by which investors in digital assets that are forfeited in fraud and theft cases are repaid at lower prices than the current spot value of those assets.

In the memo, the DOJ acknowledged the notable 2022 bankruptcy cases involving FTX, Voyager Digital, Celsius Network, Genesis Global, BlockFi, and Gemini Trust. 

Not all of those bankruptcies involved criminal charges, but the DOJ pointed out that many involved losses of digital assets due to “fraud and theft,” and also noted that the value of those assets had dramatically increased during the following years.

With billions in potential gains on the line, could the DOJ’s review finally tip the scales in favor of defrauded investors?

  • 🇨🇳 Despite China’s domestic crypto ban, local governments in the country have reportedly sold more than $400 million of seized digital assets through firms like Jiafenxiang and used the funds for public spending, converting the proceeds to yuan through offshore sales.

  • 🛑 A U.S. federal judge on Wednesday agreed with a decision by 18 Republican state attorneys general and the DeFi Education Fund to pause a lawsuit challenging the Securities and Exchange Commission’s crypto enforcement powers, citing the agency’s leadership transition under incoming chair Paul Atkins. A separate case brought by the DeFi Education Fund, the Texas Blockchain Council, and the Blockchain Association against the Internal Revenue Service was also dropped.

  • 📊 Investment manager VanEck will launch its NODE ETF on May 14, allocating at least 80% of assets across 30-60 crypto-linked companies and instruments to offer diversified exposure to the digital asset sector.

  • 🌆 Panama City now accepts BTC, ETH, USDC, and USDT for municipal payments including taxes and permits, using a partner bank to instantly convert crypto to dollars without needing new legislation.

  • ⚡ Bitcoin miner Auradine raised $153 million in an oversubscribed Series C round led by StepStone Group, to expand both its Teraflux mining hardware business and its new artificial intelligence infrastructure unit, AuraLinks AI.

  • 💵 DeFi protocol Neutrl secured $5 million to launch NUSD, a synthetic dollar token that captures returns by arbitraging discounted altcoins in over-the-counter markets, using hedge fund-style delta-neutral strategies previously inaccessible to retail investors.