Bitcoin Hits New All-Time High on Pizza Day

Plus, 📱 Solana Mobile launches new phone & token, ⚖️ SafeMoon’s fraudster CEO convicted, 🕵️‍♂️ Hacker trolls ZachXBT, and more!

Author

Juan Aranovich
May 22, 2025

Hi! In today’s edition:

  • 🍕 A Pizza Day slice of the action

  • 🪙 Solana drops phone & token combo

  • 👨‍⚖️ SafeMoon’s Karony faces 45 years

  • 😈 Coinbase hacker trolls ZachXBT

By Tikta

Bitcoin rallied to a new all-time high of $111,861 early on Bitcoin Pizza Day, celebrated every year on May 22 to commemorate the first real-world transaction in which bitcoin was used as a currency.

On May 22, 2010, Laszlo Hanyecz, a programmer from Florida, paid 10,000 BTC for two pizzas, marking bitcoin’s first commercial use. 

At the time, the transaction would have been worth around $41. Today, it would have been worth more than $1.1 billion.

Bitcoin’s price action led to $232 million worth of liquidations over 24 hours for those betting on a lower bitcoin price.

Bitcoin’s realized capitalization is nearing its next major milestone of $1 trillion, according to onchain intelligence platform Glassnode. 

Realized capitalization is an alternative to traditional market capitalization for digital assets, which instead of valuing every coin at the current market price, values each individual coin at the price it was last moved onchain.

“It took just 2 years to go from $1M to $1B (2011-2013), but nearly 6 years to move from $100B to $1T,” Glassnode said. “As BTC matures, growth slows and each leap requires exponentially more capital.”

Solana Mobile is launching a native token alongside a new Android phone named Seeker in a bid to reshape the mobile ecosystem around Web3 principles — decentralization, user ownership, and incentivized participation.

The SKR token will serve as the native asset powering the Solana Mobile ecosystem. It will operate as a means to incentivize and reward both developers and users who contribute to the growth of the platform, while also giving stakeholders actual ownership of the platform.

The token launch coincides with the rollout of TEEPIN (trusted execution environment platform infrastructure network), a decentralized, three-layer architecture that underpins the new trustless mobile platform.

The team envisions that SKR will be integral to that architecture, supporting secure, cryptographically validated interactions among users, devices, and developers.

“By leveraging secure hardware that already exists on modern smartphones and governing access onchain, we're unlocking open innovation, platform ownership, and a decentralized future for mobile,” said Anatoly Yakovenko, co-founder and CEO of Solana Labs.

Braden John Karony, the former CEO of crypto firm SafeMoon, was found guilty on Wednesday of all charges in a high-profile U.S. federal trial.

A New York jury convicted Karony of three felony counts, including conspiracy to commit securities fraud, wire fraud, and money laundering. 

Prosecutors argued that Karony and other SafeMoon executives had misled investors by making false claims about the project's success and the security of its token mechanics, particularly its supposed "locked" liquidity pools.

In reality, Karony and his associates withdrew tens of millions of dollars from the pools for their personal use, which included paying for luxury purchases.

Karony faces a potential prison sentence of up to 45 years for his role in the fraud. 

His conviction follows the testimony of former SafeMoon executive and co-conspirator Thomas Smith, who cooperated with authorities and pleaded guilty.

Kyle Nagy, the platform’s creator, was also charged but reportedly fled to Russia and remains at large as of the verdict date. 

Blockchain sleuth ZachXBT says the malicious actor who allegedly stole more than $300 million from Coinbase users recently by bribing customer support personnel has been trolling him onchain.

A screenshot of the onchain transaction posted on X shows that the person sent ZachXBT $0.06 ETH, embedding the message “L bozo,” with a link to the “James Worthy pack" video — a meme that shows NBA legend James Worthy smoking a cigar.

According to ZachXBT, the hacker sent his message right after swapping $42.5 million from BTC to ETH via THORchain, presumably looking to launder the stolen funds. 

THORChain took the opportunity to market a large-volume swap of 188.3 BTC worth over $20 million on X at the same time.

“You do realize all of the BTC originates from one of the Coinbase user thefts from the Coinbase breach right?” ZachXBT wrote in response.

  • 🔐 Coinbase confirmed 69,461 users were impacted by its December data breach involving bribed overseas support agents leaking IDs and contact data, as lawsuits mount and the U.S. Justice Department investigates.

  • ⚡ Succinct Labs’ Hypercube zkVM prototype proved 93% of Ethereum mainnet blocks in roughly 10 seconds using Jagged Polynomial Commitments, a breakthrough that could enable real-time proofs, boost gas limits up to 100×, and drastically reduce trust assumptions for rollups, light clients, and cross-chain messaging.

  • 🌍 Circles v2, launched by Gnosis co-founder Martin Köppelmann, has introduced a decentralized universal basic income model in which every user mints personal ERC-20 tokens at a fixed hourly rate and must build social trust networks for their tokens to hold value.

  • 🔫 Mitroplus Labs founder Festo Ivaibi was kidnapped in the Ugandan capital, Kampala and coerced into sending $500,000 in crypto, in what the firm says is one of at least 48 similar attacks targeting crypto holders in the country.

  • 🔄 Commodity Futures Trading Commission member Kristin Johnson became the fourth top official to announce her resignation, completing a full leadership exodus that will require Senate-confirmed replacements under President Donald Trump.

  • 🏛️ Hong Kong passed a new law requiring fiat-pegged stablecoin issuers to obtain licenses and comply with reserve, redemption, AML, and risk controls, marking a major regulatory shift aimed at restoring trust post-JPEX scandal while competing with the U.S. in shaping global crypto policy.

  • 📲 Banco Industrial, Guatemala’s biggest lender, integrated SukuPay’s USDC stablecoin rails via the Polygon network to enable U.S. remittances for under $1 using just a phone number in its Zigi app.

  • 💵 Open AI chief Sam Altman’s World Network raised $135 million from a16z and Bain Capital Crypto in a private WLD token sale to scale its eyeball-scanning Orb devices and expand access to its mini-app ecosystem.

  • 🦕 VOYA Games secured a $5 million raise led by 1kx and Makers Fund to launch “Craft World,” a post-apocalyptic NFT crafting game with 240,000 players and 1.1 million testnet trades already onchain.

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