Bitcoin Breaks $100K as ETH Outperforms

Plus, ❌ Stablecoin bill hits deadlock, 💸 Coinbase profits crash, ⚖️ Mashinsky gets 12 years, 🏛️ Ripple settles, 🇪🇺 CRO ETF launches despite drama.

Author

Juan Aranovich
May 09, 2025

Hi! In today’s edition:

  • ❌ Stablecoin bill stalls

  • 🚀 Liquidations follow Bitcoin surge

  • 📉 Coinbase profit collapses

  • ⚖️ Celsius’s Mashinsky jailed

  • 🤝 Ripple and SEC settle

  • 🇪🇺 CRO ETF launches despite drama

By Jason Brett, Tikta and Steven Ehrlich

The U.S. Senate came close to passing long-awaited stablecoin legislation this week — but ultimately, politics prevailed over policy.

The Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins Act (GENIUS Act), was blocked on the floor in a 48-49 cloture vote. Although the vote was a procedural step to allow for debate, and potentially a quick floor vote thereafter, the sudden roadblock sent a loud message: A widely negotiated legislation on stablecoins is not immune to broader partisan tensions.

Now, with both sides trading blame, the question is: Will they find a way back to the table before August, or has this bill already run out of time?

Laura will do a livestream TODAY at 9:30 a.m. ET with crypto lawyers Kristin Smith and Amanda Tuminelli to delve into all the drama. 

Turn on your notifications on X or YouTube to avoid missing it!

Around $800 million in short position liquidations took place over a 24-hour period starting on Thursday amid total liquidations of around $933 million as Bitcoin surged above $100,000.

Bitcoin accounted for $375 million of those liquidations. 

The OG cryptocurrency’s ascent north of $100,000 was the first time it had reached such a level since January, propelled by optimism about a new trade agreement between the U.S. and the UK about which markets appeared to show some signs of relief in the hope that it might pave the way for an easing of tensions over the punishing trade tariffs imposed by the Trump administration.

BTC hit $103,969 — a four-month high — late on Thursday before easing slightly.

“Bitcoin open interest as a percentage of market cap remains comfortably below 2%,” said analyst James Van Straten. “This is the key difference in market flows between the January all-time high and the current pricing. Pure spot demand — over the past two weeks, price has climbed while open interest as a % has declined.”

Ether accounted for $309 million of liquidations. 

Ether led an altcoin rally, with a 21% surge over 24 hours to $2,200, continuing its upward trend after bitcoin settled lower. The increase was ETH’s biggest daily gain since 2021.

Coinbase on Thursday reported first-quarter 2025 results that missed both earnings and revenue estimates, driven by a notable decline in trading activity.

The crypto exchange’s net income for the quarter came in at $66 million, down almost 95% from the $1.2 billion it reported during the same period last year.

Coinbase reported a below-forecast revenue of $2.03 billion, a 24% year-over-year increase on Q1 2024 but a sequential decline of around 10% from the previous quarter.

Overall trading volume dipped 10% from Q4 last year. Consumer trading volume fell 17% quarter over quarter, and institutional trading volume dropped 9%.

Earlier in the day, Coinbase announced it would acquire crypto options exchange Derebit for $2.9 billion in a landmark deal that would be the biggest acquisition in crypto industry history.

The deal would give Coinbase a dominant foothold in crypto derivatives, as Derebit controls around 85% of the global crypto options market.

Laura recorded a livestream on X and YouTube about the planned blockbuster acquisition yesterday with Owen Lau, a senior analyst at Oppenheimer. The episode will be out on all podcast platforms today at 9 a.m. ET.

Alex Mashinsky, the founder and former CEO of bankrupt crypto lender Celsius Network, was sentenced to 12 years in U.S. federal prison on Thursday after pleading guilty to securities and commodities fraud.

District Judge John Koeltl delivered the sentence — the longest prison term handed down to a crypto executive apart from the 25-year sentence earned by FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried.

Mashinsky admitted to misleading Celsius customers about the safety and profitability of their investments, and to manipulating the value of Celsius's native token, CEL, for personal gain.

The former CEO’s sentence will begin on Sept. 12 following a delay he was granted to attend his daughter’s wedding. 

He will serve his sentence at the Federal Correctional Institution, Otisville, in upstate New York.

Ripple Labs and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission have reached a settlement agreement that, pending court approval, will end their multi-year legal dispute over XRP sales.

Under the agreement, Ripple will pay a $50 million penalty to the SEC — a significant reduction from the $125 million fine originally ordered by the court last August, and a tiny fraction of the $2 billion the SEC had initially sought.

The remaining $75 million of the $125 million held in escrow will be returned to Ripple.

Both sides have agreed to drop their respective appeals, and the settlement preserves Judge Analisa Torres’s July 2023 summary judgment that Ripple’s institutional sales of XRP violated securities laws, but that programmatic and secondary sales, such as those made on exchanges to retail investors, were not securities violations.

Crypto.com, the founding firm and controlling entity behind the $9.5 billion Cronos blockchain, pushed through a controversial vote — against the wishes of its community — to remint 70 billion CRO tokens that were taken out of circulation back in 2021, as Unchained previously has reported.

The total supply is now back up to its original 100 billion units, with the new tokens placed in a strategic reserve operated by Cronos Labs to be released periodically during the coming years.

And now, despite a community backlash and eyebrow-raising financials, a new ETF tracking CRO has hit European markets.

Will investors buy into this latest wheeze?

  • 💀 Zerebro’s Jeffy Yu, whose viral fake suicide drove $LLJEFFY to a $105 million market cap before crashing 87%, was this week found alive at his parents’ house, admitting he faked his death after claiming to have been harassed.

  • 😡 U.S. President Donald Trump reportedly felt manipulated after learning that a lobbyist working for Ripple had drafted his viral Truth Social post promoting XRP, Solana, and Cardano for a U.S. crypto reserve, according to a report by Politico.

  • 💸 Meta is reportedly developing a stablecoin to handle payouts and has hired Ginger Baker, a crypto product veteran, to lead the effort, revisiting crypto after the collapse of its earlier Diem project amid increasing competition and regulation.

  • 🚔 German prosecutors announced on Friday that they had seized $38 million of crypto, servers, and data from privacy-focused platform eXch, accusing it of laundering criminal proceeds including funds linked to North Korea’s Lazarus group and handling $1.9 billion in anonymous swaps since 2014.

  • 🔐 Obol launched its OBOL token to decentralize governance of its distributed validator technology, which secures nearly $1 billion in ETH across 800+ operators, including major providers such as Lido and EtherFi.

  • 💵 Stripe launched Stablecoin Financial Accounts in 101 countries to let businesses hold, receive, and send USDC or USDB globally, just months after closing its $1.1 billion acquisition of Bridge.

  • 📲 Robert Leshner’s Superstate launched Opening Bell to let SEC-registered stocks trade natively on blockchain networks like Solana, bypassing traditional exchanges and enabling real-time settlement and DeFi integration for companies such as SOL Strategies.

  • 🏦 Jump Crypto took an undisclosed equity stake in tokenization leader Securitize, aiming to expand institutional access to onchain real-world assets, which have already surpassed $22 billion across major financial firms such as BlackRock and KKR.

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What’s  funny is that I selected this meme yesterday when ETH was trading at $1,950, and it’s now at over $2,300. Shows how wild the ETH pump was!