Plot Twister 🌪️

Plus, 📈 Will Gemini go public? 💥 Trump firm eyes Bitcoin ETFs, 🏛️ An SEC signal on Solana, and more!

Author

Juan Aranovich
February 07, 2025

Happy Friday!

In today’s edition:

  • ⚖️ Tornado Cash co-founder scores a win 

  • 💰 Gemini mulls an IPO 

  • 🔥 Trump Media moves on ETFs

  • ⚡ Solana ETF advances at the SEC

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By Tikta

Alexey Pertsev, a co-founder of crypto mixing service Tornado Cash, is set to be released from pretrial detention on Friday following a decision by a court in the Netherlands, and will now work on his appeal under electronic monitoring. 

Tornado Cash’s native token, TORN, rallied after Pertsev posted news of his release on X, climbing more than 40% to an intraday high of $15.09.

“Dear Friends, on Friday 7 February at 10 am I will be free! It is not real freedom, but it is better than prison … Thank you to everyone who supported me and who made this possible,” Pertsev wrote in the post.

Pertsev was arrested in August 2022 on charges of money laundering shortly after the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned Tornado Cash, alleging that the platform was a key tool used by North Korean hacking group Lazarus. 

Earlier this month, a U.S. federal appeals court overturned sanctions imposed on Tornado Cash by the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control.

Crypto exchange and custodian Gemini, founded in 2014 by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, is considering an initial public offering in the U.S. this year, according to a report by Bloomberg.

Unnamed sources said the firm was in talks with potential advisers on a proposed listing, although no final decisions had yet been made.

As of November 2021, Gemini was valued at $7.1 billion following a $400 million series-D funding round. 

Earlier this month, Gemini COO Marshall Beard told The Street that the exchange had $9 billion in assets under management.

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Trump’s Media Firm Seeks Trademarks for Bitcoin Products

U.S. President Donald Trump’s media company, Trump Media & Technology Group, on Thursday filed trademark applications for several investment products, including a "Truth.Fi Bitcoin Plus ETF.”

The move is part of the firm’s expansion into financial services under the Truth.Fi brand, and it has plans to launch several customized exchange-traded funds and separately managed accounts this year.

Trump Media has partnered with investment giant Charles Schwab to develop the products. The Wall Street firm is expected to custody funds invested in them to the tune of as much as $250 million. 

Trump Media Chairman and CEO Devin Nunes said the funds would be aimed at giving investors a competitive alternative to the “woke funds” and debanking issues they encounter in the market.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday acknowledged a 19b-4 application by Grayscale for a Solana exchange-traded fund, bringing the prospect of ETFs based on the fifth-biggest cryptocurrency by market cap closer to reality.

“This is actually newsworthy because the SEC had refused to do this in recent filing attempts for SOL,” Bloomberg ETF analyst James Seyffart said on X.

He said the development was positive for crypto exchanges facing lawsuits in which the commission had alleged that SOL was a security.

The SEC also recognized several other crypto ETF-related applications on Thursday, including Grayscale's filing for a Litecoin ETF and BlackRock's proposal for in-kind creations and redemptions on its iShares Bitcoin ETF.

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  • 🐧🔥 Pudgy Penguins burned $150 million worth of unclaimed PENGU tokens after project lead Luca Netz ended an airdrop early, citing bot activity, but the token still slumped 18% in two days, despite the project remaining the third-largest NFT collection.

  • 🐻 Berachain’s BERA token jumped 71% after an airdrop on Thursday, hitting a $1.5 billion market cap, but critics slammed its tokenomics, venture capital-heavy allocations, and Ethereum virtual machine-identical structure, calling it a “grift Layer 1” designed to maximize valuation at the market cycle peak.

  • ⚖️ Watchdog Public Citizen urged the U.S. Department of Justice and Office of Government Ethics to investigate President Donald Trump’s Solana-based memecoin, alleging that it may violate federal laws on gift solicitation and could obscure foreign financial influence.

  • ⏳ Ex-Celsius CEO Alex Mashinsky requested a one-month delay in his sentencing for multibillion-dollar fraud and market manipulation on Wednesday, arguing for more time to prepare his defense after pleading guilty to the charges, but prosecutors agreed only to a one-week postponement.

  • 🏦 Ondo Finance unveiled plans for its own layer 1 blockchain, Ondo Chain, to support tokenized real-world assets, with backing from Franklin Templeton, WisdomTree, and Google Cloud, alongside a new tokenization platform aiming to make securities as transferable as stablecoins.

    Meanwhile, 💰  a wallet linked to Trump family-backed World Liberty Financial purchased $470,000 worth of ONDO tokens, marking its second investment in the RWA-focused protocol.

    Also, 🪙 World Liberty plans to create a “strategic reserve” of crypto assets, a move that echoes President Donald Trump’s call for a national bitcoin reserve.

  • ⚡️ Solana validators are set for a major revenue boost as they will soon receive 100% of priority fees, but some urge delaying the change until validators can distribute rewards fairly to stakers, who currently won’t benefit from the shift.

  • 📆 Ethereum developers scheduled testing for the Pectra upgrade on Holesky and Sepolia for this month and next, with a potential April mainnet launch, bringing wallet and validator improvements amid growing competition from other blockchains.

  • 🇨🇿 Czech President Petr Pavel signed a law exempting crypto held for over three years from capital gains tax, aligning with MiCA regulations, while also allowing transactions under $4,100 to go unreported, making the country one of the most crypto-friendly in Europe.