Circle’s IPO Sparks Fury From Early Backer

Hi! In today’s edition:

• 🤬 Arca CIO to Circle: “Fuck you!”

• 🤑 Circle stock surges after $1.1B IPO

• 💣 Trump-Musk feud triggers huge wipeout

• 🛑 Trump crypto firm rounds on copycat wallet

• 💸 Solana gets syrupy with Maple’s new stablecoin

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Early Circle Backer Slams IPO in Expletive-Filled Letter

USDC issuer Circle had an enormously successful public debut on the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday, with its stock almost tripling in value as it soared 168%, but not everyone was happy.

 Jeff Dorman, the chief investment officer at Arca, one of Circle’s earliest backers, shared a brutally critical open letter to the firm and its founder on X.

He headed up the letter in a now-deleted post on X: “An open letter to @jerallaire and @circle called ‘Fuck you!’”

Dorman said Arca had placed an order for $10 million of Circle’s IPO shares months ago on “Day 1” of Circle’s roadshow, but that it had received only “a measly” $135,000 allocation of the stock — just 1.35% of its order. 

Describing Arca’s stock allocation as “a joke,” he said: “You decide to give fat allocations to TradFi mutual funds and hedge funds who likely didn’t even read your prospectus, have no wallets, and will never use your product.

“Most of Arca’s management team left Wall Street eight years ago to start a crypto-native company specifically to get away from TradFi clowns like you,” Dorman said. “Ironically, you’ve come full Circle.

"You and Coinbase deserve each other," he said, "A match made in heaven of two incompetent management teams who were early, but screw up everything you touch."

Dorman said Arca would close its Circle accounts, tell all of the dealers it works with that it would stop accepting USDC, begin using rival stablecoins such as USDT, and actively discourage other crypto firms from partnering with Circle.

"If you want to see how irrelevant and generic your product has become, this is a decision that was easy to make and doesn’t affect our business one bit because there are perfect substitutes everywhere," he said.

Circle has not responded publicly to Dorman’s accusations.

Circle, Issuer of the $61.5 Billion USDC, Raises $1.1 Billion in Landmark IPO

When Circle filed its S-1 with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on April 1, many outside observers were shocked, and not in a good way. Despite its $60 billion supply of USDC at the time, the company made a profit of only $156 million last year. In contrast, rival Tether made a massive $13 billion.

Circle was targeting a multibillion-dollar valuation, and trolls on X were quick to wonder, despite its size, whether it could make enough money to justify such a number. 

Some were even meaner, pointing out how Coinbase likely made a significantly higher profit from USDC than Circle. 

On its S-1, Circle pointed out that it paid more than $1 billion in distribution costs last year, which is interpreted to mean its close partnership with Coinbase. 

In its 2024 annual report, Coinbase reported $910.46 million in stablecoin revenue. You do the math.

But when it came time for investors to show their cards, they bet big on Circle.

As investors ignore profits and bid Circle’s stock into the stratosphere, is this the start of something massive, or just another high-stakes hype cycle?

Crypto Liquidations Top $980M as Trump-Musk Feud Escalates

The crypto market has seen liquidations top $980 million, driven by a sharp shift to risk-off sentiment amid a public falling-out between U.S. President Donald Trump and his former right-hand man, Elon Musk.

At least $892 million of long positions was liquidated among 227,825 traders as bitcoin declined 3% and ether fell as much as 7% in a 24-hour period, according to data from Coinglass.

The fallout began over Trump’s signature spending bill, known as the Big Beautiful Bill Act, which advances many of his major domestic policy priorities, including tax cuts and reductions in government spending, including Medicaid and Affordable Care Act cuts that will leave around 11 million Americans without any form of health insurance.

By late Thursday evening, the fallout had escalated, with both men attacking each other on their respective social media platforms.

Writing on Truth Social, Trump accused Musk of going "crazy" after losing the electric vehicle mandate and suggested that he had been generous to the billionaire entrepreneur in the past. 

Musk escalated the feud by writing on X that Trump’s name appeared in government documents related to convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

World Liberty Financial Tries to Shut Down Unofficial Trump Wallet

Trump family-run crypto company World Liberty Financial has issued a cease-and-desist letter to Fight Fight Fight, the Trump Organization affiliate behind the recently announced TRUMP Wallet and the TRUMP memecoin, which launched three days before Donald Trump’s inauguration as U.S. president.

World Liberty Financial’s cease-and-desist warning demands that Fight Fight Fight and NFT marketplace Magic Eden, which created the wallet in partnership with Fight Fight Fight, immediately stop developing and promoting it, citing infringements on the Trump crypto brand, according to a report by Bloomberg. 

Magic Eden shared details of a waitlist to sign up for the wallet earlier this week.

Trump’s sons, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., quickly disavowed any connection with the wallet project when news of its launch emerged.

Together with CIC Digital, another business affiliated with the Trump Organization, Fight Fight Fight controls 80% of the TRUMP token supply, holdings of which are subject to a three-year unlocking schedule.

Maple Finance Expands to Solana With Yield-Bearing Stablecoin

Decentralized lending platform Maple Finance has expanded its operations to the Solana blockchain and deployed its flagship yield-bearing stablecoin, syrupUSDC, which was previously available only on Ethereum.

The launch is supported by an initial $30 million of onchain liquidity, designed to establish a robust foundation for lending, trading, and collateral provisioning within the Solana ecosystem.

The syrupUSDC stablecoin offers an institutional-grade yield of around 6.5% and is available on Solana-native platforms such as Kamino and Orca.

The Maple Finance team said the decision to expand to Solana had been made because the blockchain had become “the next major liquidity venue.” The team said Solana’s scale and low-latency settlement was an “ideal environment” for Maple’s next growth phase.

• 🇺🇸 Truth Social this week filed an S-1 with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for a spot bitcoin ETF listing on NYSE Arca, including a unique risk disclosure referencing Trump’s crypto policies and regulatory shifts in developments such as the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve.

• ⚰️ Yuga Labs has proposed dismantling the ApeCoin DAO and transferring its assets to a new entity named ApeCo, arguing that DAO governance has become inefficient and misaligned with the company’s efforts to refocus on ApeChain, Bored Ape Yacht Club, and Otherside.

• 🏧 CoinFlip, a Bitcoin ATM operator with global reach, is exploring a sale that could exceed $1 billion in valuation, joining a broader wave of crypto M&A amid rising bitcoin prices and public market activity.

• 🐖 The U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Asset Control  on Thursday sanctioned Philippine tech firm Funnull Technology and its administrator, Liu Lizhi, for enabling crypto fraud schemes that cost American victims more than $200 million through scam sites using cloud-purchased infrastructure.

• 🚪 Binance’s financial crimes chief, Tigran Gambaryan, is leaving the firm after being detained for eight months in Nigeria on money laundering charges that were later dropped as the company continues to exit legal troubles globally.

• 🧑‍💻 Taiwan-based crypto exchange BitoPro has confirmed a May hack that drained more than $11 million from an old hot wallet, but said it fully had replenished the funds, moved assets to new wallets, and was investigating the breach with cybersecurity partners.

• 🇯🇵 Metaplanet, Japan’s answer to Michael Saylor’s Strategy, has launched a $5.4 billion equity raise to scale bitcoin acquisitions toward a 210,000 BTC goal by 2027, aiming to join the bitcoin 1% club while leveraging moving strike warrants and other instruments to minimize market disruption.

• 📲 Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi says the company is exploring stablecoins as a potential payment option to lower global transaction costs, calling them a practical crypto use case while remaining skeptical about bitcoin’s volatility and long-term utility.

• 📱 Tether made a strategic investment in Abu Dhabi-based Shiga Digital to expand blockchain-based financial services such as foreign exchange and treasury tools across Africa, reinforcing its growing presence on the continent.

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