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Eric Trump Calls Sun's Lawsuit 'Ridiculous'

Eric Trump Calls Sun's Lawsuit 'Ridiculous'

Plus: 📉 Polymarket stumbles while Kalshi pulls ahead | ⚖️ SBF pulls his retrial bid | 🇺🇸 The US military is running a Bitcoin node

David Okoya
April 23, 2026

Hi! In today’s edition:

⚖️ Eric Trump and co-founder Zach Witkoff publicly fired back at Justin Sun's lawsuit against World Liberty Financial
📉 Polymarket has fallen behind Kalshi in trading volume and valuation, weighed down by delays and operational stumbles
⚖️ Sam Bankman-Fried withdrew his motion for a new trial, saying he won't get a fair hearing from Judge Kaplan
🇺🇸 Admiral Samuel Paparo told Congress the US military is running a live Bitcoin node for cybersecurity research

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Eric Trump Backs World Liberty Financial Against Justin Sun, Calls Lawsuit 'Ridiculous'

Eric Trump and World Liberty Financial co-founder Zach Witkoff fired back at Justin Sun's lawsuit on Wednesday, dismissing the Tron founder's claims as a "desperate attempt to deflect attention" from his own misconduct. Eric Trump posted on X: "The only thing more ridiculous than this lawsuit is spending $6 million on a banana duct-taped to a wall" — a dig at Sun's notorious 2024 art purchase. Witkoff said the claims are "entirely meritless" and that World Liberty would seek to have the case thrown out promptly.

Sun filed a federal complaint in California on Tuesday alleging WLFI operators froze his roughly $75 million token position, stripped his governance rights, and threatened to permanently burn his holdings unless he continued investing and minted the project's USD1 stablecoin on their terms. The lawsuit also claims "World Liberty is on the verge of collapse" and questions whether it holds enough reserves to back USD1. Neither Eric Trump nor Witkoff addressed those specific allegations in their responses.

Polymarket Loses Prediction Market Lead to Kalshi After String of Stumbles

Polymarket, long the dominant player in prediction market trading volume, has fallen behind rival Kalshi in both trading volume and valuation as a string of operational failures slows its push to reach US customers, Bloomberg reported. Kalshi raised $1 billion at a $22 billion valuation last month; Polymarket is reportedly weighing a raise at only $15 billion. Year-to-date notional volume now stands at $37.5 billion for Kalshi versus $29.2 billion for Polymarket.

The stumbles have piled up: a botched fee rollout that an employee admitted on Discord was "terrible," a scheduled five-minute exchange restart that stretched into more than an hour, and a Washington pop-up bar that drew criticism for technical snafus. Intercontinental Exchange, which has committed up to $2 billion to Polymarket, has at times grown impatient. ICE CEO Jeff Sprecher reportedly told Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan "You're not going to be a prime time company unless you can access the US legally."

Sam Bankman-Fried Withdraws New Trial Motion, Says He Won't Get a Fair Hearing From Judge

Sam Bankman-Fried moved to withdraw his motion for a new trial on Wednesday, saying he would not get a fair hearing.

“I do not believe I will get a fair hearing on this topic in front of you,” Bankman-Fried told Judge Lewis Kaplan in a letter.

The former FTX CEO, serving a 25-year sentence for fraud, said he had conceived and drafted the Rule 33 motion himself while incarcerated in Brooklyn, consulting his law-professor parents Barbara Fried and Joseph Bankman only for editorial suggestions and help printing the document.

Bankman-Fried said he is withdrawing his motion without prejudice so he can refile after his direct appeal and a separate request for a different judge are resolved. He had already asked in February that a new judge rule on the retrial motion, accusing Kaplan of "extreme prejudice." Both that reassignment request and his main appeal of the conviction and 25-year sentence are pending before the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

US Government Runs a Bitcoin Node for Security Testing, Admiral Tells Congress

Admiral Samuel Paparo, commander of US Indo-Pacific Command, told the House Armed Services Committee on Wednesday that the US government is running a live node on the Bitcoin network as part of cybersecurity experimentation.

"We have a node on the Bitcoin network right now," Paparo said. "We're not mining Bitcoin. We're using it to monitor, and we're doing a number of operational tests to secure and protect networks using the Bitcoin protocol."

Paparo framed Bitcoin primarily as a computer science tool rather than a financial asset, touting its potential to help secure military networks and "project power." He said the government is in an "experimentation” phase and did not address Trump's Strategic Bitcoin Reserve directly. He also praised the GENIUS Act stablecoin legislation as a step toward maintaining the hegemony of the US dollar.

DON’T MISS THE BITS + BIPS & UNCHAINED SHOW TODAY

First, Blockworks researchers Luke Leasure, Shaunda Devens and Carlos Gonzalez-Campo join Bits+ Bips to argue that the knock on effects of the $292 million Kelp DAO exploit on Aave exposes a structural flaw in monolithic lending markets.

Then, on Unchained, Arkham CEO Miguel Morel walks Laura through how the Lazarus Group is laundering the Kelp DAO loot before Arbitrum Security Council member Griff Green joins to explain the decision to freeze $71 million of the loot.

It all starts at noon ET — don't miss it.

Join us on X, YouTube or PumpFun.

🦠 Lazarus Group deployed a new macOS malware campaign dubbed "Mach-O Man" that tricks crypto and fintech executives into pasting malicious commands into their Mac terminals via fake urgent meeting invites, per CertiK. The toolkit auto-deletes after execution and is linked to the same state-directed campaign behind the $500 million Drift and Kelp DAO exploits this month.
💸 The FTX bankruptcy estate sold a 5% stake in AI coding startup Cursor for $200,000 in 2023 — the same price Alameda Research originally paid — and the position would be worth roughly $3 billion today following SpaceX's $60 billion option to acquire the company. The miss is now being used by Sam Bankman-Fried's camp to argue the estate destroyed billions in creditor value by liquidating too early.
🎬 A new Satoshi documentary makes the case that Hal Finney and Len Sassaman were Bitcoin's co-creators. Both men died before they could confirm or deny the theory.
⚖️ Kalshi flagged additional insider trading cases on its prediction markets, including a Virginia politician Mark Moran, who appeared on the reality show FBoy Island. The company is building out enforcement infrastructure as it faces growing regulatory scrutiny over who profits from non-public information.
🏛️ New York and Illinois banned government employees from insider trading on prediction markets. The bans follow a wave of documented cases of politically connected traders profiting on Kalshi and Polymarket.
⛓️ Coinbase-incubated Base launched its Azul testnet upgrade, introducing multiproofs as a step toward greater decentralization of its sequencer and validation architecture. The upgrade is part of Base's multi-year roadmap to reduce reliance on Coinbase as a central operator.
🔒 The UK Financial Conduct Authority raided eight illegal peer-to-peer crypto trading hubs across London in a coordinated sweep, its first major enforcement action targeting unregistered in-person crypto exchanges. The FCA said the hubs were processing millions in transactions outside the regulated system.
👋 MetaMask co-founder Dan Finlay announced his departure from Consensys, the blockchain software firm that built and maintains MetaMask. Finlay had been with the company since its early days and was a key architect of the wallet's original design.

🇷🇺 Russia's State Duma passed a sweeping crypto bill in its first reading, formally classifying digital assets as property and permitting their use in cross-border trade settlements while maintaining a domestic payments ban. The bill targets July 1, 2026 implementation and is widely seen as designed to help Russian exporters and importers route payments around Western sanctions.
🇺🇿 Uzbekistan launched a special crypto mining zone offering a 10-year tax holiday to attract mining operations. The move follows a string of countries in Central Asia competing to capture relocating hash rate with low-cost energy and regulatory incentives.

💰 Blockchain Capital is raising $700 million across its seventh early-stage fund and second growth fund simultaneously, per Bloomberg. The firm has already begun deploying capital from both vehicles and expects to close the raise in five to six months.
💸 Valour, the ETP arm of DeFi Technologies, secured $11 million in institutional investment into its Hedera ETPs, with $10 million on Börse Frankfurt and $1 million on Sweden's Spotlight exchange.

Enter Bitcoin Capital Markets