Bitcoin is breaking free!

Plus, ⚖️ Meteora sued over $69M losses, ⚠️ XRP dev kit backdoored, 🏛️ New SEC chair shares crypto vision, and more!

Author

Juan Aranovich
April 23, 2025

Hi! In today’s edition:

  • 💰 BTC hits $94K as stock correlation drops

  • 🧨 Meteora sued over pump-and-dump

  • 🧑‍💻 XRP Ledger dev kit compromised

  • 🧑‍⚖️ SEC’s new boss sets crypto course

  • 🔥 Is Mantra’s OM burn really final?

  • 🎙️ New Bits + Bips: Is the Fed still in control of the dollar?

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 Steven Ehrlich

Bitcoin has surged past the $94,000 mark, reclaiming the level for the first time since early March, as U.S. spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds rounded out three consecutive days of strong inflows that saw more than $1.4 billion enter the market, according to CoinGlass data.

Bitcoin, which had become increasingly correlated with stock market movements, has shown signs of decoupling during the past week. 

BTC’s 30-day Pearson correlation with the Nasdaq and S&P 500 now stands at 0.47, down from more than 0.90 during previous market selloffs. 

“If long-term participants continue increasing their positions, short-term supply gets flushed out,” said IT Tech, a pseudonymous analyst at onchain market data analytics platform CryptoQuant. “This setup may serve as a constructive base for future price recovery.” 

Meteora, a decentralized exchange on the Solana blockchain, is facing a class-action lawsuit in New York. 

The complaint, filed at the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, alleges that Meteora, its CEO, Benjamin Chow, venture firm Kelsier Labs, and several executives orchestrated a fraudulent launch of a memecoin named $M3M3 last December, resulting in investor losses of at least $69 million.

The plaintiffs suing Meteora on behalf of all investors that purchased $M3M3 tokens claim that insiders, including Meteora leadership and Kelsier Labs, secretly amassed up to 95% of the M3M3 token’s supply using more than 150 wallets before public trading began. 

During the initial trading window, public access was restricted, allowing insiders to inflate the price through coordinated trades, the complaint said. 

After artificially driving up the token’s price, the insiders sold their holdings en masse, causing the token’s value to crash within days of its launch, it said. 

Meteora and Kelsier Labs have faced similar allegations in the past, including controversies surrounding the LIBRA and MELANIA memecoin projects, in which insiders were accused of exploiting private liquidity mechanisms for personal gain.

The official JavaScript library used for interacting with the XRP Ledger — xrpl.js — contains a major security vulnerability, according to developer-centric security firm Aikido.

The vulnerability, which Aikido described as a "crypto-stealing backdoor," was found in several versions of the library distributed via the Node Package Manager (NPM).

Aikido noted that a malicious actor using the NPM username “mukulljangid” had started publishing five new versions of the package on Monday. 

“This package is used by hundreds of thousands of applications and websites, making it a potentially catastrophic supply chain attack on the cryptocurrency ecosystem,” the security firm said.

The XRP Ledger Foundation said on X on Monday that it had already published an updated NPM package to remove the previously compromised version, urging users of the 2.14x branch to update immediately. 

Newly appointed U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chairman Paul Atkins has promised a “new day” in the regulator’s approach to crypto as it focuses on enabling the industry.

“A top priority of my chairmanship will be to provide a firm regulatory foundation for digital assets through a rational, coherent and principled approach,” Atkins said at his swearing-in ceremony on Tuesday.

Atkins plans to work with Congress, SEC commissioners, and stakeholders to develop a structured foundation for digital assets.

The SEC has already begun rolling back enforcement actions against crypto firms, clarifying that stablecoins, memecoins, and crypto mining generally fall outside securities regulations.

Mantra founder and CEO John Mullin is working hard to try and win back the confidence of the blockchain’s community after OM tokens plummeted 91.7% in a single day on April 13, nosediving from $6.31 to $0.52 and erasing $5.63 billion in value.

Given the speed and scale of the plunge, many OM holders feared that Mullin and the team at Mantra, a layer 1 for real world assets, had engaged in a rug pull, in which major holders had sold their tokens onto retail investors, tanking their price. Mullin denies that allegation.

Now he’s burning nearly all his tokens to prove his commitment. But after what Crypto.com pulled with its massive reissuance of burned CRO tokens, can a burn ever really be final?

An independent Federal Reserve has long been the cornerstone of U.S. economic stability, but what happens when that foundation is shaken?

In this week’s episode of Bits + Bips, the panel digs into one of the most dramatic threats yet to financial markets: President Donald Trump’s suggestion that he could fire Fed Chair Jerome Powell. It’s not just political theater — it’s a potential major blow to the credibility of the U.S. dollar and the independence of the world’s most important central bank.

Joining the panel is Zach Pandl, Head of Research at Grayscale, who explores why a rotation away from U.S. dollar assets might already be happening and what that means for bitcoin.

Plus:

  • Why the Fed’s independence is so crucial

  • The telltale signs of a structural capital rotation out of the U.S.

  • Has bitcoin really decoupled from equities?

  • How young crypto HODLers might react to their first bear market

  • And why this moment may look more like Argentina than America

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pods, Fountain, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Amazon Music, or on your favorite podcast platform.

  • 📊 Financial services giant Cantor Fitzgerald is reportedly teaming up with SoftBank, Tether, and Bitfinex to launch a $3 billion bitcoin investment entity named 21 Capital, which will pool BTC from all parties and seek to mirror Strategy’s public market accumulation model.

  • 🇪🇺 The European Central Bank is reportedly demanding revisions to the EU’s MiCA regulation over fears that U.S. support for dollar-backed stablecoins could destabilize the bloc’s economy, but the European Commission has rejected its concerns, saying that current laws remain sufficient.

  • ⚖️ Matter Labs, the developer of ZKsync, is facing a lawsuit brought by defunct blockchain firm BANKEX, which alleges that two former employees stole its Plasma-related intellectual property to launch the now heavily venture capital-backed Ethereum layer 2 project.

  • 🏗️ Janover, now renamed DeFi Development Corp, on Tuesday announced its purchase of another $11.5 million of SOL, bringing its holdings to more than $36 million as it rebrands around a Solana-focused treasury strategy backed by former Kraken executives.

  • 🧠 Arch Labs closed $13 million in a Pantera-led round to develop ArchVM, a virtual machine aiming to bring native smart contracts with Solana-like speed to Bitcoin without bridging assets to other networks.

  • 🔌 Bitdeer, the Bitcoin mining firm backed by Tether, secured a $200 million credit facility from Matrix Finance, founded by Bitdeer’s own Jihan Wu, and has already drawn down $43 million to fund expansion and hardware upgrades.

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