Pectra Goes Live: Ethereum’s Game-Changing Upgrade Hits Mainnet

Good morning! In today’s edition:

• 🧪 Ethereum’s big upgrade

• 💵 MELANIA insiders cash in

• 📊 Is a NEAR ETF near?

• 🏦 World Liberty holders may get stablecoins

• 💥 House crypto session turns into a fight 

On the podcast:

• 🎧 ETH pivot: will it be enough?

• 🎤 Bits + Bips: Value investing is not for crypto

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.

Ethereum’s Biggest Upgrade Since The Merge Goes Live

Ethereum’s Pectra upgrade, widely regarded as the network’s most significant technical overhaul since The Merge in 2022, activated today at epoch 364032.

The hard fork merges the Prague (execution layer) and Electra (consensus layer) upgrades, implementing 11 Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) that target scalability, staking efficiency, and user experience.

Notably, the upgrade implements EIP7702, which enables externally owned accounts to function like smart contracts, allowing features such as programmable wallet logic, gasless transactions, and the ability to pay gas fees in tokens other than ETH.

“For years, upgrades made Ethereum work better. Pectra makes Ethereum feel better,” pseudonymous Ethereum developer @binji_x said on X. “It is Ethereum’s glow-up.”

Ahead of the upgrade, exchanges including Coinbase temporarily paused ETH deposits and withdrawals to ensure user fund safety.

If you want to learn all about Pectra, here’s an episode Laura recorded with two Ethereum researchers: 

MELANIA Insiders Made $100M Before Launch: Report

A group of crypto traders made nearly $100 million in profits by purchasing Melania Trump’s memecoin, MELANIA, just minutes before its official public launch on Jan. 19, according to an investigation by the Financial Times.

The report found that around 24 digital wallets bought $2.6 million worth of MELANIA tokens less than three minutes before Melania Trump announced the coin on social media. That reported early accumulation represented 16.7 million tokens among the 200 million available at launch.

MELANIA’s price surged from around $2 to $12.95 — a 550% increase — immediately after the announcement, allowing the traders to liquidate their positions rapidly. Around 81% of the tokens were sold within 12 hours, netting the traders $99.6 million.

Aside from those traders, MELANIA facilitators operating through MKT World — a firm that Melania Trump, whose previous surname was Knauss, owns and has used since 2021 for various ventures, including selling portraits of herself as the first lady, and which markets her memecoin — have reportedly withdrawn $64.7 million in profits from primary sales and fees.

Bitwise Files for NEAR Spot ETF

Bitwise Asset Management has submitted a Form S-1 registration statement to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) seeking approval to launch a spot exchange-traded fund based on the NEAR token.

NEAR is the native token of the Near Protocol, a layer 1 proof-of-stake blockchain that uses a unique sharding mechanism named Nightshade that splits the network into multiple parallel shards.

Bitwise’s NEAR ETF will use a trust model, tracking the value of NEAR held by the trust, net of expenses and liabilities.

NEAR joins a growing list of altcoins with pending spot ETF applications at the SEC.

Mentions of “cryptocurrency’” and “stablecoins” in SEC filings hit a record high last month.

Trump Family-Linked World Liberty Financial Proposes USD1 Airdrop Test

World Liberty Financial, a decentralized finance project with financial backing from the Trump family, has proposed a test airdrop of its USD1 stablecoin to holders of its WLFI token.

“This will allow World Liberty Financial to validate the technical functionality of its airdrop system in a live environment while thanking early supporters of the project,” the World Liberty Financial team said on its governance forum. 

If the proposal is passed, the test would airdrop eligible WLFI holders a fixed amount of USD1 on the Ethereum mainnet.

Six hours after the proposal was posted, 99.97% of 2,100 votes cast were in favor of passing it.

In related news, Senate Democrat Richard Blumenthal launched an inquiry into President Donald Trump’s crypto-linked ventures, requesting records from World Liberty Financial and the Trump memecoin project over potential legal violations and foreign entanglements.

A House Hearing on Crypto? More Like a Big Partisan Fight

The movement of crypto legislation through the U.S. Congress suffered a setback on Tuesday.

At the beginning of what was supposed to be a scheduled joint House hearing on the most significant bill to the crypto industry, on a digital asset market structure, Rep. Maxine Waters dramatically objected, derailing the session.

The splintering between the Democrats and Republicans over the issue calls into question whether either a stablecoin bill or a market structure bill will be on President Donald Trump’s desk to sign into law by August, as he has requested.

So, amid dueling narratives and growing accusations of corruption, is crypto regulation headed for another year of gridlock?

Ethereum Gave Away Too Much for Too Long. Will Its Pivot Be Enough?

Ethereum has finally changed its plans. Will this stop “developer bleed,” boost the price of ETH, and fend off competitors such as Solana?

After years of underperformance, Ethereum is trying to change course, from scaling the layer 1 to potentially dumping the Ethereum Virtual Machine. In this episode of Unchained, Tarun Chitra, CEO of crypto network simulation platform Gauntlet, and Max Resnick of Solana core development shop Anza break down each of these new changes, analyzing the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Is this a reset that can save Ethereum’s market position and price? Or has the protocol given away too much for too long?

Tarun and Max dive into:

• Whether the gas limit increase changes everything

• What went wrong with Ethereum’s economics and solo staking politics

• Max’s view on the single most important change Ethereum needs to make

• How ETH could claw back value from layer 2s

• What Max would do if he ran Ethereum

• Whether this pivot is too little, too late

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pods, Fountain, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Amazon Music, or on your favorite podcast platform.

Bits + Bips: Why Warren Buffett’s Strategy Would Lose Big Time in Crypto

More tariff uncertainty, Ethereum’s pivot, Ripple’s big swing, and why Apple’s crypto decision could change everything.

Crypto doesn’t reward fundamentals. It rewards attention. So what does that say about how investors such as Warren Buffett would fare today?

In this week’s Bits + Bips, the crew dissects what’s really behind the rally, why Ethereum’s sentiment problem may run deeper than roadmap delays, and how the U.S.’s stablecoin bill turned into a political tug of war.

Plus:

• Apple and NFTs: Why this matters more than people think

• Whether tariffs are about politics or actual policy

• Why Bessent is “the best” in the Trump administration

• And why Buffett’s era may be ending, with Portnoy rising in his place 😬

• 🚫 Movement Labs fired co-founder Rushi Manche on Tuesday after internal documents revealed secret token allocations and hidden advisors tied to the MOVE token.

• ⚖️ The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission this week formally dropped its appeal against New York-based prediction market Kalshi, ending a two-year legal battle and allowing the platform to legally offer political event contracts in the U.S., pending final court approval.

• 👀 Zerebro developer Jeffy Yu, previously believed to have died by suicide during a livestream, is now suspected to be alive after blockchain activity, a retracted obituary, and a letter surfaced suggesting he faked his own death to escape threats and harassment.

• ⏳ Lawyers for former Celsius CEO Alex Mashinsky this week asked for a lenient sentence of just over one year ahead of his May 8 sentencing, disputing the U.S. Justice Department’s request for 20 years and arguing that he was a non-violent, first-time offender being unfairly vilified.

• 🤯 FTX’s bankruptcy estate sold Alameda’s stake in Anysphere — the company behind Cursor — for $200,000 in 2023, but the same firm is now valued at $9 billion after its latest funding round, underscoring a potentially massive missed recovery for creditors.

• 🪙 New Hampshire authorized its treasury to allocate up to 10% of state funds into assets such as bitcoin, becoming the first U.S. state to adopt a digital asset reserve policy modeled on Satoshi Action Fund-influenced legislation.

• ⚡ Bitcoin payments app Strike launched a lending service offering 12-month loans from $75,000 to $2 million at a 12% APR, letting users borrow against BTC without selling, as centralized crypto lending shows signs of recovery following its 2022 collapse.

• 🐶 DogeOS raised $6.9 million led by Polychain to build an application layer on the Dogecoin blockchain, aiming to expand DOGE’s utility in consumer apps and decentralized finance while tapping into its large, pop culture-driven user base.

Meet the ‘Crypto is Macro Now’ newsletter: where crypto and macro meet

A daily dose of updates and deep dives into how crypto is impacting the macro landscape and vice versa – markets, geopolitics, macro trends, tokenization, regulation, global adoption and more, delivered to your inbox for less than the price of a weekly New York coffee.

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