Phantom Launches Perps Trading With Hyperliquid

Hi! In today’s edition:

• 🧪 Phantom’s Hyperliquid perps experiment begins

• 🚫 Tornado Cash sanctions tossed from trial

• 🧠 Eigen Labs trims team, bets on verifiable cloud

• ⚙️ Polygon to ship its most complex fork

• 🫣 Some token-treasury firms look ready to collapse

On the podcast:

• 🎙️ Unchained: Crypto fintech showdown – Coinbase vs Robinhood

• 🎧 Bits + Bips on tokenization + tariffs

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Phantom Wallet Launches Direct Perpetual Trading With Hyperliquid

Non-custodial crypto wallet Phantom has introduced direct perpetual futures trading within its wallet interface, powered by decentralized exchange and layer 1 blockchain Hyperliquid.

The integration allows users to access and trade over 100 crypto markets directly from the Phantom app, without the need for external exchanges or additional apps.

It also means users will have access to up to 40x leverage, with built-in risk management tools such as stop-loss and take-profit orders.

Users will first need to fund their perpetual futures balance with SOL, which will then automatically be converted into USDC on Hyperliquid. The gradual rollout will be made available to eligible users over the coming weeks, with users in the U.K. being barred entirely. 

“If just 10% of Phantom’s user base converts into Hyperliquid traders, that’s 1.5 million wallets entering the Hyperliquid ecosystem, which would nearly double the addressable user base for onchain perp trading overnight,” said pseudonymous onchain analyst JJ on X. 

Judge Likely to Exclude Tornado Cash Sanctions at Roman Storm Trial

U.S. District Judge Katherine Polk Failla has indicated that the 2022 U.S. Treasury sanctions against Tornado Cash will likely be barred from discussion at the upcoming criminal trial of Roman Storm, the co-founder and developer of the crypto mixing service.

As per Inner City Press’ reporting of a pretrial hearing, Judge Failla said she was “inclined to keep out the August 2022 sanctions, since they were later withdrawn,” referencing the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctions that were repealed in March after a federal court order.

She emphasized that since the sanctions were ultimately withdrawn, it would be unfair to suggest Storm had “consciousness of guilt for something he was not ultimately guilty of.”

While prosecutors will not be allowed to mention the sanctions and related civil court decisions, the Judge said she was unlikely to grant a motion that prevents references to North Korea or the Lazarus Group, which are central to the prosecution’s allegations of money laundering and sanctions violations.

Storm’s criminal trial is scheduled to begin on July 14 in New York.

Eigen Labs Cuts 25% of Workforce to Prioritize EigenCloud: Report

Eigen Labs has laid off 25% of its workforce, amounting to 29 employees, Blockworks reported on Tuesday. 

The layoffs were part of a strategic shift to focus on the development and expansion of its new platform EigenCloud, for which the company raised $70 million in June.

EigenCloud enables the creation of verifiable, trustless applications – both onchain and offchain – by combining traditional cloud programmability with cryptographic, blockchain-grade verifiability.

“While today’s reorganization is painful, I’m extremely optimistic about our future,” said Eigen Labs CEO Sreeram Kannan.

“Demand for verifiable compute is growing as developers build software for the AI era, and EigenCloud is uniquely positioned to service this market need with a cloud platform backed by billions in stake and thousands of operators around the world.”

Impacted staff will reportedly receive accelerated token vesting, three months of base pay, and career support.

EigenLayer’s native token EIGEN rose nearly 10% after the news to an intraday high of $1.17. The token has rallied significantly since its all-time low of $0.66 three months ago, but is still trading 80% lower than its record high of $5.65 in December. 

Polygon PoS to Ship ‘Most Complex’ Hard Fork Since Launch

The Polygon proof-of-stake (PoS) network is set to launch the Heimdall v2 consensus layer upgrade on July 10 – the “most technically complex hard fork” since the network’s inception in 2020, according to Polygon CEO Sandeep Nailwal.

Heimdall v2 is a modernized and revamped consensus client that remains central to Polygon PoS operations. It manages validators, block producer selection, state synchronization between Ethereum and Polygon, and other core functions.

It introduces CometBFT for consensus, replacing Tendermint, which streamlines transaction processing and improves state synchronization.

It will also result in a dramatic reduction in transaction finality, from around 90 seconds to just 5 seconds, enabling much faster network confirmations.

The fork will be executed tomorrow, July 10, 2025.

Nailwal warned that the hard fork could see finality lag by around 3 hours during the migration phase, and that while unlikely, a “large reorg” was still possible. 

These 4 Crypto Treasury Companies Are Primed for a Price Crash

With a market capitalization below $30 million in June, BitMine Immersion Technologies (BMNR), a bitcoin mining company based in Las Vegas, Nev., was a middling enterprise in a highly competitive industry. But that all changed on June 25, when the company announced its switch to a crypto treasury strategy focused on Ethereum. As part of the transformation, it raised $250 million through a private investment in public equity (PIPE) vehicle and named crypto permabull Tom Lee as chairman of its board of directors.

The stock immediately shot up over 1,300%. Today, with a market capitalization of $4.6 billion, the stock is trading at a premium of 17.23x its book value.

But with tens of millions of locked-up shares set to hit the market soon, is a brutal selloff just around the corner?

Bits + Bips: DATs Are Crypto's Biggest Trend. So Why Aren't They Boosting Markets?

What the new Trump’s tariff threats, stablecoin hype, and tokenized stocks reveal about the fragility of today’s markets. Plus, is it still a bull market?

In this episode of Bits + Bips, we examine how rising global trade tensions could impact macro conditions, the Fed’s next move, and market stability. We also explore how investors should position themselves with inflation cooling and an uncertain policy path at the Fed.

We then look at what’s happening on the crypto side: volume shifting to tokenized public equities, the growing number of corporate stablecoin plans, and whether the promise of tokenization is matched by meaningful traction.

Joining hosts Joe McCann, Ram Ahluwalia, and Steve Ehrlich is Rob Hadick of Dragonfly, who shares his perspective on product-market fit in crypto, shifting market structure, and where real adoption may emerge.

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

Coinbase and Robinhood Are Converging, but Who Wins the Onchain Fintech War?

The two giants at the intersection of fintech and crypto are racing to bring users onchain. Here’s what could determine who’ll get the biggest share of the pie.

The race to bring users onchain is heating up, but the competitors couldn’t be more different.

Coinbase, a crypto-native giant with deep infrastructure and institutional partnerships, is going head-to-head with Robinhood, a retail-focused fintech now making aggressive moves into tokenized assets and blockchain rails.

Their visions overlap (tokenized stocks, perpetuals, custom chains) but the strategies, philosophies, and user bases differ sharply.

In this episode, Laura speaks with Diogenes Casares (Klyra Protocol) and Ryan Yi (ex-Coinbase Ventures, CoinFund) to unpack:

• How these two companies will compete

• What levers they have to increase their profits

• How Base became a liquidity black hole for Ethereum

• Why Coinbase may have already won the “flows” game

• And how stablecoins, social, and tokenization could decide the winner

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

• 🧥🎲 The $237 million Polymarket bet on whether Zelenskyy would wear a suit ended with a controversial “No” ruling by UMA’s oracle, prompting backlash over vague criteria, precedent-based logic, and concerns around token-based governance.

• 🚫 New Zealand will outlaw all crypto ATMs and restrict international cash transfers over $5,000 under sweeping AML reforms, citing their use in laundering and fraud while expanding enforcement powers for financial surveillance.

• 📊 Trump Media filed for a Truth Social–branded “Crypto Blue Chip” ETF covering BTC, ETH, SOL, XRP, and CRO, following earlier filings for single and dual-asset crypto funds.

• 💱 Over 40 financial and tech firms are preparing to apply for Hong Kong’s stablecoin license ahead of the August 1 rollout, but only a handful are expected to receive approval as regulators maintain a high bar for entry.

• 🏦 ReserveOne, led by former Hut 8 CEO Jaime Leverton, plans to go public via a merger with M3-Brigade to raise over $1 billion for building a diversified crypto reserve of BTC, ETH, SOL, and other assets by year-end.

• 🚗🗺️ Volkswagen’s self-driving unit partnered with Solana-based Hivemapper to use crypto-incentivized real-time map data for robotaxi validation, highlighting a shift toward decentralized geospatial infrastructure.

• 📱 OpenSea acquired wallet maker Rally to strengthen its cross-chain token trading platform, naming Rally’s CEO as CTO and integrating its mobile-first tech across 17 blockchains.

• 🟠 Ego Death Capital closed a $100 million bitcoin-only fund to lead Series A rounds for startups treating Bitcoin as infrastructure, not speculation, including existing bets like Relai and Roxom.

1. Electric Capital: Beyond Stablecoins: The Case for Ethereum

2. DL News: How $55bn DeFi lending market overtook liquid staking