Comeback Kid 🎉

Plus, 📉 Pectra problems, 🤯 Cardano’s summit snub, 🎭 Ripple’s role in Trump’s reserve, and more!

Author

Juan Aranovich
March 06, 2025

Hi! In today’s edition:

  • 🔥 Jump’s rebound 

  • 📉 Sepolia’s Pectra problems

  • ⚖️ ParaSwap: Payback time?

  • 🚀 Axelar ETF filing sees AXL surge

  • 🤯 Ripple execs cheer for SOL

  • 🤔 Cardano non grata

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Chicago-based trading firm Jump is said to be returning its crypto operations to full strength, planning to hire a group of crypto engineers and other personnel for U.S. government liaison and policy-related roles. 

Jump was once a major force in the crypto space before it was caught up in the fallout of Terra’s LUNA collapse and FTX’s bankruptcy.

In May 2023, Jump’s crypto-focused unit, Jump Crypto, scaled back operations in the U.S. amid heightened regulatory scrutiny. By November that year, Jump Crypto’s headcount had reportedly dropped 50% and it had spun off its cross-chain protocol, Wormhole, as an independent entity. 

Late last year, Jump Crypto subsidiary Tai Mo Shan agreed to pay $123 million to settle a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission investigation related to the TerraUSD collapse, without admitting wrongdoing. 

Jump Crypto also donated $15 million to Fairshake, a super-PAC supporting crypto-friendly congressional candidates for the 2024 election cycle.

The Sepolia testnet ran into issues with empty blocks on Wednesday due to a misconfigured custom deposit contract after Ethereum’s much-anticipated Pectra was deployed on the final testnet. 

The hiccup disrupted transaction inclusion in blocks, raising concerns about Pectra’s readiness for a mainnet launch.

“Well, seems like I jinxed it,” Ethereum core developer Tim Beiko said on X just an hour after confirming that Pectra had finalised on Sepolia.

“We're investigating an issue caused by the custom deposit contract on Sepolia,” he said. “This has caused some EL [execution layer] clients to have issues including transactions in blocks.”

Developers deployed a fix for the issue around five hours later, Beiko said, noting that explorers, wallets, and infrastructure providers could continue to face issues until they upgraded their nodes.

Pectra’s deployment on the Holesky testnet also suffered from problems. On Holesky, the issue was misconfigured validators and "correlation penalties," which caused delays in finalizing the upgrade.

Delegates of the ParaSwap DAO are debating a request from Bybit to return 44.67 wETH, worth around $101,000, that the protocol earned in transaction fees from state-sponsored North Korean hacking group Lazarus’s money laundering.

Bybit submitted a proposal to the ParaSwap DAO asking for the funds to be frozen and sent back to one of the exchange’s wETH addresses. 

“While this was an automated process, it has inadvertently resulted in the DAO holding proceeds linked to a widely reported exploit,” Bybit said on ParaSwap’s governance forum. 

Supporters argue that refunding the fees would demonstrate ethical responsibility and strengthen trust between centralized and decentralized platforms. 

Critics, however, claim that returning the funds could set a “dangerous” precedent challenging the principle of "code is law" and could lead to similar demands in future cases.

“I'm leaning towards returning most of the fund minus 10% Bybit official bounty. Just worried about the precedents being set here,” ParaSwap DAO delegate and pseudonymous DeFi researcher Ignas said on X. 

AXL Surges as Canary Capital Files for Axelar ETF

Canary Capital, founded by former Valkyrie Funds co-founder Steven McClurg, on Wednesday filed to launch an ETF tracking the price of Axelar’s native token, AXL.

AXL surged 15% in a matter of minutes after news spread that Canary had filed an S-1 registration for the fund with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

A flurry of crypto-ETF applications have made their way to the SEC register since the Trump administration came to power, but Canary’s gambit marks the first time an issuer has expressed interest in launching an ETF tracking a token outside the top 100 by market capitalization.

McClurg expressed bullish sentiment on the token, saying: “There is no question that AXL will be a top 20 token by market capitalization” as the market discovers the Axelar protocol. 

“This is why we took the risk,” he said.

Ripple Labs executives, including CEO Brad Garlinghouse and Chief Legal Officer Stu Alderoty, reportedly pitched U.S. President Donald Trump to include SOL in the crypto reserve plan announced on Sunday to give it more legitimacy among the crypto community, according to two sources familiar with the matter. 

The inclusion of SOL also helped Ripple convey that it was advocating for a crypto reserve that included several American tokens. 

Ripple Labs, which issues the token XRP, has been criticized for years as a largely speculative asset with insufficient usage to justify its $145 billion market capitalization. 

However, if greater legitimacy was the aim, the plan was unsuccessful as the public announcement was still met with ridicule by the crypto community. It did not help that Trump failed to mention bitcoin and ether in a social media post on the subject.

So, is the reserve a serious project that will accumulate large amounts of XRP, SOL, and ADA, or is it simply a way to give early investors and the insiders behind those tokens a public relations boost?

Charles Hoskinson, the founder of Cardano, has not been invited to the White House Crypto Summit on Friday, according to a West Wing source familiar with the guest list. 

“They are running around town trying to push their own sort of narrative,” the source said. “They are not involved in anything about trying to influence policy and they are not invited to Friday’s summit.” 

Hoskinson’s name was expected on the guest list for the Friday event after U.S. President Donald Trump said that Cardano’s $35.6 billion token, ADA, would be included in a crypto reserve in a post on his social media platform, Truth Social, on Sunday. 

Is Cardano being left out in the cold?

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  • 🇦🇷 An Argentinian prosecutor is pushing to freeze $110 million of assets tied to the Libra memecoin scandal, to which the country’s president, Javier Milei, is allegedly linked, following the Solana-based token’s 90% crash after Milei endorsed it.

  • 🗳️ The Uniswap DAO this week approved an additional $540,000 of UNI rewards to fund its Delegate Reward Initiative, incentivizing 15 governance participants to boost voting participation and community engagement.

  • 📲 Arbitrum’s ARB token jumped 12% to $0.42 after Robinhood listed it, reversing its recent slump to an all-time low of $0.35, but long-term price pressure remains due to its circulating supply tripling in the past year.

  • 💵 The Aave DAO is considering launching a yield-bearing “savings” version of its GHO stablecoin, aiming to attract more users and stabilize its growing $300 million supply.

  • 💎 A new report by Franklin Templeton highlights a stark valuation gap between Solana and Ethereum DeFi tokens, despite Solana’s protocols experiencing 2,400% fee growth compared to Ethereum’s 150%.

  • 📚 Ripple is launching a $50 million nonprofit, led by its legal chief, to promote crypto education in the U.S. amid ongoing regulatory battles.

  • 🔗 Coinbase sees a renewed opportunity to introduce security tokens in the U.S. as the Trump administration pushes for crypto-friendly policies, reviving a plan the exchange was forced to abandon in 2021.

  • ⛏️ Belarus may enter Bitcoin mining using surplus energy, with the country’s dictator, Alexander Lukashenko, citing the U.S. government’s crypto reserve plans as a sign of growing global demand.

  • 📊 Crypto asset manager Bitwise applied to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to launch an exchange-traded fund tracking Aptos (APT), making it the latest layer 1 token targeted for institutional investment.

  • 💰 VC firm Foundation Capital secured $600 million for its 11th fund, continuing its early-stage investment strategy with a focus on crypto, fintech, and artificial intelligence, following successful bets on Solana, OpenSea, and Binance U.S.

  • 💨 Blockchain infrastructure startup DoubleZero raised $28 million at a $400 million valuation to develop a private fiber optic network optimized for blockchain data transmission, with investors competing for a stake in its upcoming $600 million round.

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