Dancing on Gensler’s Grave 🕺

Plus, 🌉 Ethereum’s intents solution, 🤯 Aptos targets Monad, and 🛑 Is the memecoin party over?

Author

Juan Aranovich
February 20, 2025

Good Thursday! In today’s edition:

  • 🏦 A decisive victory for DeFi 

  • 🧑‍💻 Ethereum: Statement of intents

  • 💸 LIBRA traders lose as insiders cash in

  • 🤯 IP theft: Aptos accuses Monad

  • 💀 How much trouble are memecoins in?

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By Tikta and Steven Ehrlich

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has voluntarily dismissed its own appeal of a ruling that blocked it from applying existing securities laws to decentralized finance.

The SEC, under then-Chairman Gary Gensler, had previously appealed a November ruling by a federal judge determining that the regulator’s modifications of the Dealer Rule were unlawful. Those changes, made more than a year ago, required DeFi protocols to register with the SEC as brokers.

Crypto lobbying groups Blockchain Association and Crypto Freedom Alliance of Texas filed a lawsuit against the SEC at the time, arguing that the new rules violated the Administrative Procedures Act.

“We first brought our lawsuit against the SEC to challenge the agency’s unlawful power grab, which sought to unilaterally redefine the boundaries of its statutory authority,” Blockchain Association CEO Kristin Smith said on X.

“With new leadership at the agency leading to today’s final dismissal, we’re looking forward to productive conversations between industry and the SEC moving forward,” she said.

The Ethereum Foundation on Wednesday unveiled a new interoperability initiative aimed at unifying and simplifying cross-chain transactions on Ethereum virtual machine-compatible networks.

The new Open Intents Framework aims to standardize intent execution across Ethereum and, importantly, addresses fragmentation issues in its layer 2 ecosystem, which currently has more than $36 billion in total value locked across 59 rollups.

Intents are declarative orders that focus on desired outcomes rather than specifying step-by-step instructions in the way that traditional transactions do, in an approach that allows systems to optimize and execute complex tasks automatically, simplifying the user experience. 

Open Intents is built on the ERC-7683 standard proposed by Uniswap Labs and the Across protocol, and features composable smart contracts for intent creation and a TypeScript-based solver for monitoring onchain events and executing intents.

The initiative has so far garnered support from 30 teams in the Ethereum ecosystem, including major layer 2 networks such as Arbitrum and Optimism.

More than eight in 10 traders looking to profit from the scandal-hit LIBRA token — among the pool of traders seeing absolute gains or losses of more than $1,000 — were caught up in its dramatic nosedive, according to a report by onchain analytics platform Nansen Research.

A total of 15,431 wallets chalked up positive or negative results above that threshold, 86.07% of which suffered losses amounting to a combined $251 million, clearly illustrating the magnitude of the meltdown. 

The remaining 2,101 profitable wallets enjoyed around $180 million in realized gains, adding to suspicions that some may have been insiders profiting at the expense of those who lost out.

The single biggest winner made a profit of $25 million, swapping $1.7 million of USDC for 12.3 million LIBRA tokens and subsequently sending those tokens to seven other wallets. However, based on when those wallets later sold the tokens (some did so at a loss), the full profit figure may be lower than initial estimates.

LIBRA had 50,700 unique holders at launch. As of 3:00 am ET on Feb. 18, 1,001 wallets were still holding the token, with combined unrealized losses of around $11 million. 

Aptos Research Director Accuses Monad of Copying Tech

Layer 1 blockchain Aptos’s research director, Alexander Spiegelman, has accused Ethereum virtual machine layer 1 Monad of plagiarizing its technology.

“I really don't understand why it takes so much time for Monad to copy Aptos tech,” Spiegelman said on X. “It's all open source, and we have peer reviewed paper for everything. It would be much easier for you guys if you stop trying to [hide] it and just copy directly.” 

Monad co-founder James Hunsaker hit back, saying: “Optimistic concurrency control was discovered in 1979, before your parents met each other. Software transactional memory (STM) I was working on in the Haskell context while you were still wearing diapers.”

“I’ve never looked at any Aptos code, in fact I never think about Aptos except when you post nonsense like this,” he added.

Monad and Aptos both aim to address scalability and performance issues in the blockchain space.

Monad offers speeds of 10,000 transactions per second with one-second finality and low gas fees. It uses parallel execution through optimistic execution, allowing simultaneous processing of multiple transactions.

Aptos employs dynamic parallelism, similar to Monad, with transactions processed optimistically without specifying which parts of the state they will affect.

Are Memecoins Collapsing? These 8 Charts May Be Signaling Yes

Memecoins were never a perfect antidote to the issues plaguing previous token launches such as initial coin offerings and airdrops, which were rife with inside deals, sybil attacks, and special bulk pricing for institutions. But to many people they seemed like a step in the right direction. Things were supposed to be fair and transparent — or at least less adversarial than previous token fads.

However, multiple high-profile flops may have shattered whatever is left of that illusion. U.S. President Donald Trump’s launch of $TRUMP on the eve of his inauguration left many supporters holding heavy bags. 

Then last week Argentinian President Javier Milei wrote a promotional post on social media about a memecoin named $LIBRA, which also quickly collapsed, revealing excessive sniping by insiders and causing the bottom to fall out of the memecoin market.

So, do these developments mark the beginning of the end of the memecoin phenomenon, or the end of the beginning? 

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  • ⚖️ Binance is being sued by Nigeria for $81 billion, allegedly for causing massive economic losses and evading $2 billion in taxes. Two executives have already been jailed amid broader legal troubles for the crypto giant.

  • 💵 Binance.US on Wednesday reinstated fiat deposits and withdrawals nearly two years after suspending them due to an SEC lawsuit.

  • 🕵️‍♂️ Hackers behind the $85 million Phemex exploit have begun laundering stolen funds through Tornado Cash and cross-chain bridges using complex transaction patterns to evade tracking, while a portion of the funds appears to have been cashed out via custodial platforms.

  • 🐷 Dave Portnoy, founder of the sports and pop culture site Barstool Sports, made $258,000 by launching and dumping the Solana-based GREED memecoin, later promoting a sequel token, GREED2, which briefly hit a $28 million market cap before plummeting below $750,000.

  • 🎨 OpenSea this week paused its OS2 points system for listings and bids just days after its launch following a backlash among users who drew comparisons with Blur’s controversial incentives, which had previously been blamed for driving NFT prices down despite volume surges.

  • 🇺🇸 The U.S. Senate confirmed Howard Lutnick as Secretary of Commerce, positioning a crypto advocate who has backed Tether and Bitcoin at the helm of trade policy in the new Trump administration.

  • 🌍 Countries under U.S. sanctions, led by Iran, received nearly $16 billion in illicit crypto transactions last year, accounting for 39% of such activity, using digital assets to bypass Western restrictions, according to a Chainalysis report.

  • 🇨🇿 Czech National Bank Governor Aleš Michl on Wednesday reaffirmed his support for Bitcoin as a potential reserve asset, arguing that it should not be grouped with other cryptocurrencies following recent memecoin-related scams.

  • 📜 The SEC is soliciting public comment on whether to approve options trading for spot Ethereum ETFs listed by Grayscale and Bitwise, a step that could mirror the regulatory path taken in relation to Bitcoin ETFs last year.

  • 💳 Tether led a $10 million investment in MANSA, a cross-border payments firm utilizing USDT to provide instant settlements and onchain liquidity solutions for businesses in emerging markets.

  • 💵 Universal, whose team is behind passive crypto index investment platform Alongside, raised $9 million from a16z and Coinbase to develop “uAssets,” a new cross-chain wrapped token system that allows seamless trading across different blockchain networks without traditional lockups.

  • 🖥️ Fluent Labs secured $8 million in funding led by Polychain Capital to develop its Ethereum layer 2 blended execution network, allowing developers to build applications that seamlessly integrate Ethereum virtual machine, Solana virtual machine, and WebAssembly environments.

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