Circle Spurns Ripple’s $5B Takeover Offer

Plus, 📈 Bitcoin defies gravity, 🪙 Coinbase hikes BTC loan limits, 📊 Grayscale debuts BTC adopter ETF, and more!

Author

Juan Aranovich
May 01, 2025

Good Thursday! In today’s edition:

  • 💸 Circle to Ripple: No deal

  • 📈 Bitcoin rebounds as shares slump

  • 🪙 Coinbase boosts BTC loan cap

  • 📊 Grayscale launches Bitcoin adoption ETF

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

Stablecoin issuer Circle rejected an acquisition bid by XRP-issuer Ripple in April, according to a report by Bloomberg. 

Circle dismissed Ripple’s $4 billion to $5 billion acquisition offer, made shortly after Circle filed for an initial public offering, deeming it too low relative to its valuation. Circle had previously been valued at $9 billion during a failed special purpose acquisition company merger attempt in 2022.

Ripple’s bid is part of a broader strategy to expand its presence in the stablecoin and payments infrastructure market, especially after the launch of its RLUSD stablecoin late last year. 

RLUSD currently has a market cap of around $317 million, far below the $61.5 billion market cap of Circle’s USDC, according to CoinMarketCap.

Ripple remains interested in acquiring Circle but has not decided whether to make a higher follow-up offer, Bloomberg reported, citing unnamed sources.

Bitcoin defied gravity overnight ET on Wednesday and into the early hours of Thursday, bucking losses on equity markets amid a double-whammy of grim U.S. economic news after it had earlier also dropped alongside stock prices.

Bitcoin had lost almost 2% of its value on Wednesday morning, mirroring the broader decline in equities, before changing course and settling above $95,300 as of 5:30 a.m. ET on Thursday. 

U.S. GDP contracted by 0.3% during the first quarter, setting the country up for a possible technical recession. 

The contraction was the first decline in GDP since Q1 2022 and a reversal from 2.4% growth in Q4 last year, driven by a 41.3% surge in imports as businesses and consumers rushed to buy goods ahead of President Donald Trump’s mooted reimposition of punishing tariffs on all of the U.S.’s trading partners.

ADP jobs data also came in on Wednesday, showing that the U.S. labor market appears to be cooling. Private employers added just 62,000 jobs in April, little more than half of a Dow Jones consensus estimate of 120,000 and the smallest gain since last July.

Early in the U.S. trading session, major stock indices fell by around 2% following the troubling economic news, which contributed to a risk-off sentiment that also impacted crypto.

Onchain analytics platform Glassnode warned that bitcoin could face a “notable increase” in sell-side pressure as its price continued to rise, particularly from long-term holders who are currently sitting on unrealized profits of 350%. 

Crypto exchange Coinbase has increased the maximum limit for its bitcoin-backed USDC loans to $1 million, a tenfold jump from the previous cap of $100,000.

This move follows strong demand for the loans, which have generated more than $130 million in total onchain originations since their relaunch in January.

Coinbase said that since then, more than 4,211 wallets had originated loans, backed by approximately $227 million of onchain collateral.

The exchange reintroduced the product through a new partnership with decentralized finance protocol Morpho, following the shutdown of its previous Borrow program in November 2023.

Borrowers must overcollateralize their loans, with their BTC automatically converted into Coinbase Wrapped Bitcoin (cbBTC) — a token fully backed by Bitcoin held in Coinbase’s custody. The cbBTC is deposited into Morpho, which oversees loan terms and adjusts interest rates dynamically.

Grayscale, the world’s biggest crypto-native asset manager, on Thursday launched a new exchange-traded fund based on companies’ bitcoin adoption. 

The Grayscale Bitcoin Adopters ETF, which trades under the ticker BCOR, tracks the Indxx Bitcoin Adopters Index, a proprietary benchmark that measures the performance of companies integrating bitcoin into their corporate treasury strategies. Index constituent companies must hold at least 100 BTC on their balance sheets. 

Notably, the ETF prioritizes companies outside the Bitcoin mining industry.

BCOR trades on the NYSE Arca, with a net asset value per share of $25.31 and more than $1 million in assets under management as of launch.

Grayscale’s Bitcoin Trust ETF (GBTC) continues to generate more revenue than all other spot Bitcoin ETFs combined, even though it charges the heftiest fees in the industry, at 1.5%, up to seven times higher than its rivals.

  • 🕵️‍♂️💥 Layer 2 Movement Labs is investigating whether it was duped into handing a shadowy firm control of 66 million MOVE tokens, more than 5% of its supply, through a market-making contract that experts say incentivized artificial price inflation followed by a $38 million token dump just one day after launch. Internal documents reveal that Rentech, an intermediary with no public track record, appeared on both sides of the agreement, prompting Binance to ban the token’s market-making account, Movement, to initiate a buyback, and auditors to probe the roles of co-founders, legal counsel, and unofficial advisers in what insiders described as “possibly the worst agreement” they had ever seen.

  • 💵 Decentralized stablecoin protocol Ethena partnered today with the TON Foundation to integrate its $4.7 billion synthetic stablecoins, USDe and sUSDe, into Telegram via a new tsUSDe token, offering users up to 10% additional yield through TON wallets such as Tonkeeper and TONHub as part of its broader 2025 expansion strategy.

  • 🛡️ Coinbase on Wednesday urged the U.S. Supreme Court to curtail the Internal Revenue Service’s access to crypto user data in a case stemming from a 2016 records request, arguing that such “John Doe” summonses enabled mass surveillance by linking blockchain addresses to real-world identities without proper warrants.

  • ⚖️ The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has formally closed its investigation of PayPal’s stablecoin with no enforcement action, marking yet another case dropped under the Trump administration’s crypto-friendly shift, which has also paused probes of Coinbase, Gemini, and Uniswap.

  • 🌍 OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s identity-focused crypto project World on Wednesday began its U.S. rollout across six cities, introduced plans for a Visa-linked spending card, partnered with Match Group to test verified profiles on Tinder Japan, and announced in-app access to Kalshi prediction markets.

  • 📊 Robinhood’s Q1 crypto revenue dropped to $252 million from $358 million in Q4 last year, despite doubling year-over-year as overall trading volume fell to $46 billion amid market headwinds, even as total company revenue jumped 50% and earnings exceeded expectations.

  • 📲 Tokenization firm Libre is set to tokenize $500 million worth of Telegram-issued bonds into the Telegram Bond Fund on the TON blockchain, offering accredited investors exposure to real-world assets and enabling their use as collateral in onchain applications.

  • ⚽ Football collectibles platform FIFA Collect will migrate its NFT platform from Algorand to its own EVM-compatible blockchain starting May 20, ending support for Algorand wallets and shifting users to Ethereum-based tools such as MetaMask to support new features and better scalability.

  • 🇧🇷 Digital currency exchange Mercado Bitcoin partnered with interoperability platform Wormhole to enable cross-chain access for over 340 tokenized products, including fixed-income assets and carbon credits, across 30+ blockchains as part of a broader multichain expansion fueled by $200 million in tokenization efforts.

  • 💳 Visa and crypto card firm Baanx on Wednesday launched a new payment card in the U.S. that allows users to spend Circle’s USDC directly from self-custodial wallets via smart contracts, while also revealing plans for a Mastercard card tied to MetaMask wallets.

  • 🧠 Digital asset investment firm Re7 Capital launched a $10 million fund to support up to 30 early-stage SocialFi startups, betting on the maturing alignment of infrastructure, talent, and user behavior despite the category’s current lack of mainstream traction.

  • 🌾 Tether finalized a controlling 70% stake in Latin American agribusiness Adecoagro, expanding beyond crypto into food, bioenergy, and renewable assets across three countries as part of its broader plan to tokenize real-world infrastructure via its Hadron platform.

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  1. Austin Cambpell, managing partner and founder of Zero Knowledge Consulting and adjunct professor at New York University's Stern School of Business, on interest-bearing stablecoins

  2. A16z crypto: A guide to stablecoins: What, why, and how 

  3. What Would It Take? By Matt Hougan, CIO of Bitwise