Bitcoin Breaks $99K as Fed Holds Rates Steady

Plus, 🧱 Robinhood eyes tokenized stocks for Europeans, 🔥 ETH turns deflationary, 🎣 Coinbase users scammed, and more!

Author

Juan Aranovich
May 08, 2025

Hi! In today’s edition:

  • 📈 Bitcoin tops $99K as Fed holds rates

  • 🧪 Robinhood explores Solana & Arbitrum

  • 🔥 Ethereum burn spikes post-Pectra

  • 🎣 Coinbase users scammed for $45M

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

Bitcoin is once again trading above the $99,000 mark, having gained 2.7% in the hours that followed news that the U.S. Federal Reserve would keep its benchmark interest rate steady at 4.25% to 4.5%.

The Fed cited growing economic uncertainty, persistent inflation, and a stable labor market as reasons for maintaining its current policy stance, resisting public calls from President Donald Trump to lower rates.

Bitcoin’s positive price action comes despite market volatility driven by a trade war initiated by the U.S. against China and persistent political uncertainty around Washington’s tariff policies that has convulsed global markets in recent weeks.

“Macro is 50-50, Fed is undecided, Bitcoin traders are undecided ... yet ... long-term Bitcoin holders know where we are going,” 21st Capital co-founder Sina G., who conceals his real name, said on X. 

Robinhood Eyes Arbitrum, Solana for New Blockchain Securities Platform

Retail brokerage Robinhood is reportedly developing a blockchain-based platform to allow retail investors in Europe to trade tokenized versions of U.S. securities, according to a report by Bloomberg. 

Robinhood is said to be in discussions with layer 2 scaling solution Arbitrum and high-speed blockchain Solana as potential partners to support the tokenization process, although agreements have yet to be finalized.

The initiative aims to expand Robinhood’s reach in the European market by leveraging blockchain technology to provide 24/7 access, faster settlement, and lower costs than traditional market intermediaries.

The development comes after Robinhood secured a brokerage license in Lithuania, granting it regulated access to the entire European Union.

“While everyone's focused on [Federal Reserve Chair] Jerome Powell, Robinhood is evaluating whether to use Solana or Arbitrum as the backbone of a new service that will let European retail investors trade U.S. stocks,” Bitwise Chief Investment Officer Matt Hougan said. 

“The long-term outlook for crypto is dependent on crypto-specific fundamentals, not 25bps rate cuts,” he said.

Ethereum’s issuance appears to have turned deflationary again, according to data from analytics platform Ultrasound.money showing that the burn rate spiked after Ethereum’s widely anticipated Pectra upgrade went live on Wednesday.

Although changes to gas targets and blob transaction dynamics following Pectra may have increased base fees and burn pressure, especially as validator growth and staking rewards slow, the dramatic decrease was more likely a bug in the Ultrasound.money dashboard.

“On Etherscan, recent blocks show static block rewards = 0 post-Pectra,” pseudonymous market commentator Klintoshi said on X. “Validators are only receiving transaction fees now — and a portion of those fees is still being burned (per EIP-1559). So ETH supply is actively decreasing with no issuance compensating for it.

“That would explain the deflation shown on Ultrasound.money — not a bug, but a temporary shift in issuance mechanics,” Klintoshi said.

Ethereum’s “ultra sound money” narrative refers to its ability to maintain a deflationary supply in which more ETH is burned than issued, reducing the total supply over time. That deflationary dynamic is driven by network activity and the EIP-1559 burn mechanism, which destroys a portion of transaction fees.

Ethereum’s network activity and transaction fees dropped sharply early this year, leading to a reduction in the daily ETH burn rate year-to-date.

More than $45 million has been stolen from Coinbase users during the past week alone through social engineering scams that have resulted in over $300 million in user losses, according to blockchain investigator ZachXBT.

ZachXBT shared the theft addresses in his Telegram channel on Wednesday, noting that “no other major exchange has the same problem.”

Attackers impersonated Coinbase support using spoofed phone numbers and emails, often leveraging stolen personal data to make their communications appear legitimate.

Victims then received emails with fake case IDs, instructing them to move assets to a Coinbase Wallet and whitelist a new address, effectively handing control to the scammers.

“For the vast majority of the time these theft addresses are not being reported at all by Coinbase in popular compliance tools even after the thefts went on for weeks,” ZachXBT said in a thread first explaining the scam in February.

  • 🕵️ G7 leaders are expected to discuss North Korea’s crypto theft operations, responsible for the misappropriation of $1.34 billion of funds last year, at a summit next month following the $1.4 billion hack of Bybit, which was attributed to the Lazarus Group.

  • 📝 Binance founder Changpeng “CZ” Zhao confirmed this week that he had officially requested a pardon from U.S. President Donald Trump following a four-month prison sentence for anti-money laundering compliance failures, citing recent media reports as the reason for finally submitting the application.

  • 📉 Arbitrum DAO has proposed reducing the quorum threshold for votes from 5% to 4.5% in response to a 71% token price drop and a steep decline in governance participation since last year.

  • 📂 Internal U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission documents released by Coinbase on Wednesday reveal that New York Attorney General Letitia James asked the SEC to formally declare ETH a security during the state’s 2023 lawsuit against KuCoin, although the agency ultimately declined to take a firm stance.

  • 🚫 Democratic Rep. Ritchie Torres is set to introduce a bill banning presidents, lawmakers, and their families from issuing or promoting crypto tokens that use their likenesses, following Donald Trump’s aggressive entry into digital assets and related fundraising activity.

  • 🔓 The U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency now allows banks to both buy and sell crypto on behalf of clients and delegate custody and execution duties to external providers, removing previous restrictions that required regulatory approval.

  • 📈 David Bailey, a former Trump crypto advisor and CEO of Bitcoin Magazine’s parent company, is reportedly raising $300 million via equity and debt to form a public bitcoin investment firm named Nakamoto, joining a wave of institutions pivoting toward BTC-focused strategies.

  • 💳 Visa made a strategic investment in stablecoin infrastructure startup BVNK, which processes $12 billion annually and recently expanded to the U.S., as part of a growing push by TradFi giants into blockchain-based payments.

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