🔥 Blood in the Streets, Bets on the Table

💸 Crypto liquidations top the bill, 🔍 VCs buy on the sly amid the crash, 💸 $30M exits MELANIA wallets, 📊 A leveraged XRP ETF starts trading, 🥶 Circle gets cold feet on IPO, and more!

Author

Juan Aranovich
April 08, 2025

Hi! In today’s edition:

  • ⚠️ Crypto liquidations hit $1B 

  • 🧠 Markets panic, VCs go shopping

  • 🏃‍♂️ $30M exits MELANIA wallets

  • 🆕 First XRP ETF launches in U.S.

  • 🤔 Is Circle’s IPO still on?

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

Leveraged traders took a beating on Monday in another day of volatility on global markets as investors digested the impact of U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs, and investors in digital assets were not spared.

More than $1 billion of crypto derivatives traders’ positions had been liquidated over the 24-hour period to midday ET on Monday, according to data from analytics platform CoinGlass.

Bitcoin had rebounded to around $79,300 as of 3:15 a.m. ET on Tuesday as the biggest cryptocurrency by market capitalization recovered from an intraday low of $74,436. 

The whipsawing price action resulted in 63% of long positions being liquidated across all major centralized exchanges.

DeFi traders didn’t fare much better, onchain wallet tracker Lookonchain said on X, highlighting one whale that risked losing as much as $340 million if the price of ether fell to $1,119.30.

ETH, which dropped to a two-year low of $1,410, has since managed to gain some ground and was changing hands at around $1,570 at 3:15 a.m. ET on Tuesday.

Crypto continues to fall with the rest of the market as a result of U.S. President Donald Trump’s sweeping, indiscriminate global sanctions announcement last Wednesday.

But while most traders are panicking, some top VCs are quietly betting on a select few assets. 

So, which tokens have made their buy lists?

A transfer of $30 million from community funds of the Melania Trump crypto project MELANIA has been flagged by blockchain data firm Bubblemaps, which noted that the funds were “now being quietly sold, with no explanation from the team.”

“Last week, we reported that $2M of $MELANIA community funds were sold through single-sided liquidity,” Bubblemaps said. “We expected a response from the team or Hayden Davis — but none came.” 

Instead, the firm said the $30 million from MELANIA treasury funds had been split across multiple addresses, with $3 million sent to exchanges and $500,000 already sold.

The MELANIA memecoin is directly tied to self-described “hustling expert” Davis, who was behind the pumped-and-dumped LIBRA memecoin that cost tens of thousands of investors a collective $250 million in February. 

An Argentinian prosecutor investigating LIBRA’s collapse and also referencing Davis’s MELANIA activities has asked Interpol to issue a Red Notice for Davis. 

First-Ever XRP-Based ETF to Launch in U.S.

The first XRP-focused ETF in the U.S. will begin trading today on NYSE Arca.

The Teucrium 2x Long Daily XRP ETF, a leveraged product listed under the ticker XXRP, aims to deliver twice the daily performance of XRP futures through derivative instruments such as swaps and futures contracts.

Spot XRP ETFs are still awaiting approval in the U.S., with proposals from firms including Grayscale, WisdomTree, and 21Shares still under regulatory review.

“Very odd (maybe a first) that a new asset’s first ETF is leveraged,” Bloomberg ETF analyst Eric Balchunas said on X. “Spot XRP still not approved, altho[ugh] our odds are pretty high.” 

USDC issuer Circle is reportedly considering putting off plans to go public amid the Trump administration’s tariff-induced rout that has overwhelmed global markets.

Circle is “now watching anxiously before deciding what to do” with regard to its public listing, just three days after it filed an S-1 with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), according to a report by The Wall Street Journal.

Circle’s S-1 filing disclosed $1.68 billion in 2024 revenue, but just $156 million in net income, also revealing that Coinbase makes more from USDC by being a distribution partner than the issuer itself.

“I dug into their S-1 this weekend,” Rishi Dean, a former product director at Coinbase, wrote in an article on his website. “What I found was a business with real reach and growing revenue — but also deep fragility, concentrated exposure, and some tough product questions ahead.” 

“My TL;DR? I want Circle to win. But I’m not willing to personally put my money here yet,” Dean wrote.

  • ⚖️ The U.S. Department of Justice disbanded its crypto enforcement unit NCET immediately, redirecting focus away from prosecuting exchanges and mixers in line with Trump’s deregulatory executive order aimed at loosening federal oversight of digital assets.

  • 📈 Crypto-focused financial services firm Galaxy Digital received SEC approval to relocate from the Cayman Islands to Delaware, and it aims to debut on the Nasdaq as “GLXY” shortly after a May 9 shareholder vote.

  • 🇺🇸 Tether is considering launching a U.S.-only stablecoin if forthcoming regulations from the Trump administration create favorable conditions, with CEO Paolo Ardoino suggesting it could serve as a domestic settlement asset.

  • 📅 A Nigerian court postponed Binance’s $2 billion tax evasion case to April 30 as the exchange disputes the legitimacy of serving documents by email, arguing it lacks a local office and is registered in the Cayman Islands.

  • 🎁 Trump-backed DeFi project World Liberty Financial on Monday proposed a live airdrop test of its new USD1 stablecoin to the firm’s early supporters on Ethereum, as part of efforts to showcase the token’s onchain functionality ahead of full deployment.

  • 🎰 A wallet tied to vanished gambling project ZKasino was liquidated for $27 million during ethereum’s price crash, ending a year-long saga in which $40 million of investors’ ETH was converted, staked, and withheld following a controversial token swap.

  • 🕵️‍♂️ Crypto lawyer James Murphy sued the U.S. Department of Homeland Security on Monday, demanding documents he claims could reveal Satoshi Nakamoto’s identity, based on a 2019 interview with a federal agent.

  • 🇰🇷 South Korea’s $836 billion National Pension Service is evaluating blockchain to modernize its accounting infrastructure, reduce fund tampering risk, and improve transparency in managing retirement transactions.

  • 🌍 Pakistan appointed former Binance CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao as a strategic advisor to its newly formed Crypto Council, tasking him with helping develop regulatory frameworks and infrastructure to support blockchain innovation and digital finance adoption.

  • 📉 After buying 80,715 BTC for $7.66 billion during the first quarter of the year, Strategy reported $5.91 billion of unrealized losses and paused further purchases amid sliding prices and stalled interest in its equity offerings.

  • 💸 Blockchain startup Cap raised $8 million led by Franklin Templeton to build a stablecoin lending protocol that lets institutional and DeFi operators borrow users’ deposits and generate yield through restaking infrastructure.