MegaETH's MEGA Token Goes Live on 13 Exchanges at $1.6B FDV

Hi! In today’s edition:

• 🏎️ MegaETH launched its MEGA token on 13 major exchanges simultaneously, reaching an FDV of roughly $1.6 billion, after the network met its first KPI milestone requiring 10 live ecosystem apps

• 🔥 The U.S. Senate voted unanimously to ban senators and staff from trading on prediction markets, in a rules change that takes effect immediately, driven by insider trading concerns tied to the Iran war and the Venezuela operation

• 🔒 The Arbitrum DAO opened a vote — running through May 7 — to release the 30,766 ETH frozen by its Security Council after the Kelp DAO exploit into the DeFi United recovery fund

• 🏦 Gemini's affiliate Gemini Olympus received a CFTC Derivatives Clearing Organization license, completing the exchange's regulatory infrastructure for prediction markets, futures, options, and perpetuals

Today’s newsletter is brought to you by Nexo!

Unlock Exclusive Rates with Nexo

Nexo is a premier digital wealth platform offering:

• crypto yield up to 15% (based on stated annual interest rates)

• crypto-backed credit lines from 1.9%

• a wide range of digital assets.

Join today and get 30-day access to exclusive rates.

MegaETH Goes Live on 13 Exchanges, Launches at $1.6B FDV

MegaETH launched its MEGA token Thursday on 13 major centralized exchanges simultaneously, including Binance, Coinbase, OKX, Bybit, and KuCoin, closing out a seven-day countdown that began after the network hit its first ecosystem milestone. Trading opened to a fully diluted valuation of roughly $1.6 billion, with the token initially reaching $0.22 before pulling back to around $0.15 within hours — a pattern common to large token launches with thin float.

MEGA has a fixed supply of 10 billion tokens, but 53.3% of that supply is not released on a time-based schedule. It unlocks when the network hits specific KPI targets, starting with the requirement that at least 10 "Mega Mafia" apps demonstrate real usage tied to USDM, the protocol's native stablecoin. That milestone was cleared on April 23, triggering the countdown. USDM supply surged from roughly $62.9 million to over $300 million during the launch period.

MegaETH's backers include Vitalik Buterin, Joseph Lubin, and Dragonfly Capital. The project raised over $100 million across multiple rounds, including a public sale that drew more than $1.39 billion in commitments and closed heavily oversubscribed. Circulating supply at launch stood at roughly 11.3% of total supply.

Senate Bans Itself From Prediction Markets — Effective Immediately

The U.S. Senate voted unanimously by voice vote Thursday to ban senators and their staff from trading on prediction markets, in a rules change that takes effect immediately. The resolution was introduced by Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-OH) and broadened by an amendment from Sen. Alex Padilla (D-CA) to include Senate staff. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called it "a no-brainer" and urged the House and the Trump administration to adopt similar rules.

The vote came against a backdrop of mounting insider trading concerns. Earlier this month, the Associated Press reported that a group of new Polymarket accounts made suspiciously timed and specific bets on a U.S.-Iran ceasefire, netting hundreds of thousands of dollars. The White House warned staff against using private information to trade on prediction markets the same day. A U.S. Army Special Forces master sergeant was also charged this month for using classified information to bet on the operation that captured Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro. Kalshi separately suspended and fined a U.S. Senate candidate and two House candidates for political insider trading on their own campaigns.

The resolution applies only to the Senate. Rep. Ashley Hinson (R-IA) said she would introduce a similar measure in the House. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) has called for broader legislation banning wagering on government actions, terrorism, and events where participants may control or know the outcome.

Arbitrum DAO Votes to Send Frozen Kelp Attacker ETH to DeFi United

The Arbitrum DAO opened a governance vote Thursday to release 30,766 ETH — worth approximately $71 million — frozen by the Arbitrum Security Council after the Kelp DAO exploit into the DeFi United recovery initiative. The vote concludes on May 7. In the first hour, 16.9 million ARB tokens were cast in favor with zero opposing votes.

The Security Council froze the funds on April 20, after the Kelp DAO attacker moved them to an Arbitrum One address. Nine of the council's 12 members voted to execute the emergency freeze, citing input from law enforcement regarding the exploiter's identity. The move recovered roughly a quarter of the $292 million stolen in the April 18 exploit, widely attributed to North Korea's Lazarus Group. The funds have been sitting in a governance-controlled wallet ever since, accessible only through a DAO vote.

If the proposal passes, the Arbitrum DAO would become the largest single contributor to DeFi United, the Aave-led coalition assembled to restore rsETH's backing and close the bad debt created across lending protocols. Total pledges to the effort have now surpassed $311 million, including contributions from Consensys, Mantle, and Stani Kulechov. An Aave DAO vote to contribute an additional 25,000 ETH is also pending.

Gemini Completes Its CFTC Stack, Clears Path to Prediction Markets and Perps

Gemini's affiliate Gemini Olympus received a Derivatives Clearing Organization (DCO) license from the CFTC on Wednesday, giving the exchange the regulatory infrastructure to clear and settle derivatives trades in-house without relying on a third-party clearinghouse. Gemini shares (GEMI) jumped 8% on the news.

The approval follows the December 2025 Designated Contract Market (DCM) license granted to another Gemini affiliate, Gemini Titan, which enabled the launch of Gemini's predictions marketplace. With both licenses in place, Gemini now controls the full trade lifecycle for its own products — from listing through settlement. Cameron Winklevoss called it "a major milestone" and a building block for a financial services super app. The company said Gemini Titan will now explore expanding into crypto futures, options, and perpetual contracts for U.S. customers.

Gemini had been working toward the DCM license since March 2020, a five-year process. The DCO application was filed just one week after the DCM was approved in December, and the CFTC registered it by order on April 29. The company is pursuing a futures commission merchant (FCM) license as the remaining piece of what the industry calls the full CFTC stack.

• 📊 Crypto is the most muted topic on X's For You feed, ahead of politics, the Iran conflict, and sports, according to data from the platform's head of product, Nikita Bier, shared after X launched a snooze feature for Premium users. Bier attributed the pattern to AI-generated spam and InfoFi apps that reward engagement, saying accounts that overpost low-quality crypto content are hurting their own reach.

• 💀 Wasabi Protocol, a perpetuals trading platform on Ethereum and Base, was drained of about $4.55 million after attackers compromised its deployer admin key and used it to upgrade vault contracts to malicious implementations. The protocol had no timelock or multisig on the admin role — a single private key controlled the entire permission system — pushing April's DeFi exploit losses past $770 million year-to-date.

• ⚖️ Senators Warren and Wyden sent letters to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino demanding information about a reported loan Tether made to a trust benefiting Lutnick's four children, which critics say may have funded his transfer of Cantor Fitzgerald to his family as part of his ethics divestiture. The senators wrote that the arrangement "would raise serious questions about the relationship between Secretary Lutnick and Tether" and demanded responses by May 13. 

• 🇰🇷 South Korean prosecutors requested a 20-year prison sentence for Delio CEO Jeong Sang-ho at closing arguments in Seoul, accusing him of embezzling $169 million in crypto assets from nearly 2,800 investors through false promotion and deliberate deception. Delio froze withdrawals in June 2023 and was declared bankrupt in November 2024; a first-instance verdict is scheduled for July 16.

• 🔒️ Polymarket partnered with Chainalysis to deploy on-chain market surveillance tools, including a detection model built to flag insider trading patterns, following the arrest of a U.S. Army soldier who allegedly used classified information to net roughly $409,881 in profits on the platform. The deal also gives Polymarket investigative tools to produce blockchain-verified evidence for law enforcement and regulators. 

• 📉 World Liberty Financial's proposal to unlock 62 billion WLFI tokens passed with 99.5% support, though voting power is concentrated in four wallets controlling roughly 40% of the total, drawing criticism from Tron founder Justin Sun and others who called it a rug pull. Under the plan, insiders would burn 10% of their holdings, about 4.5 billion tokens, before the remainder unlocks over a five-year schedule following a two-year cliff.

• 🟡 Anchorage Digital tapped M0 as its core technology provider for stablecoin issuance, combining M0's modular infrastructure — already used by Stripe, MoonPay, and MetaMask — with Anchorage's federally chartered custody and regulatory stack. The partnership gives fintechs, payment platforms, and app developers a pre-integrated path to launch U.S.-regulated stablecoins without building the full compliance stack themselves.

• 🌐 AllUnity, the DWS, Flow Traders, and Galaxy Digital joint venture, expanded its MiCA-compliant EURAU euro stablecoin to Solana, enabling faster, cheaper euro-denominated transfers for businesses and developers. The expansion comes as the euro stablecoin market has doubled since early 2025 to nearly $1 billion, with French Finance Minister Roland Lescure publicly calling for more euro-denominated digital assets.

• 🏦 Coinbase Asset Management launched CUSHY, a stablecoin credit strategy targeting institutional investors, with a tokenized share class available on Ethereum, Solana, and Base through Superstate's FundOS platform. The fund captures yield from three sources: asset-based lending, liquid digital-economy credit, and structural alpha from tokenization incentives and onchain market positions, with Northern Trust handling fund administration.

• 💸 MARA Holdings agreed to acquire Long Ridge Energy from FTAI Infrastructure for $1.5 billion, including the assumption of at least $785 million in debt, adding a 505 MW gas plant and over 1,600 acres in Hannibal, Ohio for a planned AI data center campus. The deal lifts MARA's total power capacity by 65% to 2.2 GW; construction on initial AI buildout is targeted to begin in early 2027, with first capacity ready by mid-2028.

• 💰 XO Market closed a $6 million seed round led by 20VC, Picus Capital, and Coinbase Ventures to build a user-generated prediction market platform, positioning itself as the "YouTube of prediction markets" against curator-driven rivals like Kalshi and Polymarket. The platform has generated more than $150 million in trading volume and attracted over 30,000 users since launching its mainnet beta in November, with a coming XO Vaults product designed to democratize market making.

• 📈 Exponent Finance, a Solana-based yield exchange, raised $5 million in a seed round led by Multicoin Capital, with Solana Ventures, RockawayX, and Solana Labs CEO Anatoly Yakovenko participating. The platform has processed more than $2 billion in yield volume across 35,000 users since launching in late 2024 and plans to expand into an onchain interest rate order book and strategy vaults.

Most people who've been in crypto long enough have a story. A lost phrase. A frozen account. An exchange that went dark overnight. The assets were real. The access wasn't.

Bron is a self-custody wallet built on the same MPC architecture that institutions use to protect eight-figure portfolios, except it's designed for individuals. No seed phrase. Two trusted contacts replace it. If you lose access, you're back in 48 hours.

This is what serious storage looks like.

1. Spencer Bogart: Why Tokens Reward Buybacks and Equity Doesn't

2. Bitwise: Chainlink in Plain English