Polymarket Wants Back In

In today's Unchained Daily newsletter:

• 🔥 Polymarket is asking the CFTC to lift its U.S. ban and let Americans trade on its crypto-native exchange

• 🪙 Bitcoin holds near $77,600 while oil is around $103 per barrel, and Trump preps an extended Hormuz blockade

•  🔐 Postquant Labs launched Quip Network, a post-quantum Bitcoin wallet that uses a Layer 2 to add quantum-resistant signatures without requiring a protocol change

• ⚖️ A judge didn't just deny SBF's retrial request — he said the whole motion looks like part of a reputation-rebuilding scheme SBF planned before he was even charged

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Polymarket Seeks CFTC Approval to Reopen Main Exchange to U.S. Traders

Polymarket is in active talks with the CFTC to lift the four-year ban that has kept U.S. traders off its main international exchange, Bloomberg reported Tuesday. The conversations are separate from the company's existing CFTC-approved U.S. beta, which has seen limited trading since launching in December and focuses mainly on sports markets. What Polymarket is after this time is direct access to its primary, crypto-native platform, where more than $10 billion in monthly volume already flows from non-U.S. users.

A formal commission vote would be required to lift the ban, a process that may be simpler now that four of five CFTC commission seats are vacant and Chairman Michael Selig is the only sitting member. One option under discussion is merging the main exchange's blockchain infrastructure with the licenses held by the domestic platform. Polymarket's main exchange produces the bulk of the industry's volume and hosts contract types, including war-related markets, that U.S.-regulated platforms currently cannot offer.

Bitcoin Holds Near $77,600 as Trump Preps Extended Hormuz Blockade and Fed Decision Looms

Bitcoin held just below $77,600 on Wednesday in Asian trading hours, barely moving as Brent crude pushed above $103 a barrel on a Wall Street Journal report that President Trump has instructed aides to prepare for an extended U.S. naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. Altcoins have not fared as well: ether is down 2.6% on the week, XRP down 3.8%, and Solana down 3.2%. Dogecoin is the only top-10 token outside stablecoins to print green, up 5.5%.

Analysts are divided on what bitcoin's calm signals. Zaheer Ebtikar, founder of Split Research, argued the seller base that was spooked by macro and quantum fears has already exited, leaving the market with less downside depth. The Fed's two-day policy meeting concludes Wednesday, and market watchers expect no rate change; $75,000 is seen as the key downside support level if the FOMC disappoints.

New Wallet Offers Bitcoin Quantum Protection Without Touching the Protocol

Postquant Labs announced Quip on Tuesday, a bitcoin wallet that adds post-quantum signature protection using a Layer 2 approach built on Arch Network, a Bitcoin native smart contract layer, without any change to Bitcoin's base protocol. The wallet uses WOTS+ (Winternitz One-Time Signature), a tested cryptographic scheme that does not rely on the elliptic curve math a quantum computer could eventually break.

The launch arrives in the middle of an active fight over how Bitcoin should respond to quantum risk. BIP-361, backed by Jameson Lopp and others, would phase out vulnerable addresses on a five-year timeline and freeze an estimated 5.6 million unmigrated coins, including roughly 1 million believed to belong to Satoshi Nakamoto. Critics have called that proposal "authoritarian and confiscatory." Quip's team argues that a Layer 2 solution can provide similar protection without the years-long consensus fight a protocol upgrade would require. A third-party audit is currently underway.

Judge Kaplan Rejects SBF's New Trial Bid, Calls Claims 'Wildly Conspiratorial'

U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan denied Sam Bankman-Fried's pro se motion for a new trial on Tuesday, calling his arguments "baseless on multiple independently sufficient levels" and his claims of government witness tampering "wildly conspiratorial and entirely contradicted by the record." Kaplan also refused to let Bankman-Fried withdraw the motion before he ruled on it, after SBF argued he couldn't get a "fair hearing" from the same judge who sentenced him.

Bankman-Fried filed the retrial motion in February, arguing that testimony from former FTX Digital Markets co-CEO Ryan Salame and former head of data science Daniel Chapsky, both of whom did not appear at his 2023 trial, would undercut the government's case. Kaplan rejected the premise entirely. Bankman-Fried's 25-year sentence remains in place. However, he still has an appeal pending before the Second Circuit.

DON'T MISS UNEASY MONEY LIVE

Today on Uneasy Money, Kain Warwick, Taylor Monahan, and Luca Netz dig into DeFi United, the industry-wide $300M+ effort to make Kelp's rsETH holders whole after the April 18 exploit, and the harder debate it has triggered: are DeFi yields actually compensating users for tail risk? 

They also unpack Pump.fun's $370M PUMP burn, the OpenAI agentic phone rumor, and more. 

Streams today at 4pm ET.

Join us on X, YouTube or PumpFun.

• ⚖️ LayerZero pledged 10,000 ETH to the DeFi United recovery effort, splitting the contribution between a direct donation to the fund and a deposit into Aave to strengthen its markets. The move comes five days after LayerZero first signaled it would contribute, and puts its total commitment at roughly $23 million at current prices, placing it among the initiative's larger donors alongside Consensys and Aave founder Stani Kulechov.

• ⚖️ Gannon Ken Van Dyke, the U.S. Army Special Forces soldier accused of using classified intelligence on the Maduro raid to win more than $400,000 on Polymarket, pleaded not guilty in Manhattan federal court on Tuesday. The case, described by prosecutors as the first insider trading prosecution tied to prediction markets, carries a combined maximum sentence of 60 years; Van Dyke was released on a $250,000 bond.

• ⚖️ The CFTC sued Wisconsin on Tuesday in response to the state's lawsuits against Kalshi, Polymarket, Coinbase, Robinhood, and Crypto.com over alleged illegal sports betting, making Wisconsin the fifth state the agency has sued in April alone. Chairman Mike Selig framed the action as a direct defense of federal jurisdiction over derivatives, saying states "cannot circumvent the clear directive of Congress."

• 🤖 CFTC Chairman Mike Selig told CoinDesk the agency is building AI tools to review crypto registration applications, flag incomplete submissions, and conduct market surveillance. The push comes as the agency has shed more than 20% of its workforce under federal staffing cuts, with staff now training on Microsoft Copilot while in-house tools for swap data review are also in development.

• 🇨🇦 Canada proposed banning crypto ATMs in its spring economic update, calling them a "primary method for scammers to defraud victims." Canada currently has nearly 4,000 crypto ATMs, more per capita than any country in the world; the government said Canadians will still be able to buy crypto at brick-and-mortar money service businesses.

• 📉 Robinhood's Q1 crypto revenue fell 47% year-over-year to $134 million, the third consecutive quarterly decline, as the crypto market pulled back through early 2026. A 320% surge in prediction market revenue to $147 million helped offset the drop, with users trading a record 8.8 billion event contracts in the quarter.

• 🔥 Pump.fun burned $370 million worth of PUMP tokens it had accumulated through nine months of revenue-funded buybacks, removing roughly 36% of the token's circulating supply. The Solana-based memecoin launchpad also announced a new programmatic buyback-and-burn scheme funded by 50% of platform revenue for the next year, scaling back from a prior model that directed 100% of revenue to buybacks.

• 📊 An Ethereum ICO wallet moved approximately 10,000 ETH — worth about $23 million — after more than a decade of dormancy, drawing market attention as large transfers from long-inactive wallets often precede sales. The wallet's original investment in Ethereum's 2015 ICO was roughly $3,100, representing an unrealized return of around 7,465 times.

• 🟡 Tether partnered with Canaan and ACME Swisstech to develop a new class of modular bitcoin mining systems built around application-specific hash board modules rather than sealed, off-the-shelf rigs. The design separates compute from power and enclosure to allow independent optimization of each layer, with the first deployment targeting an immersion-cooled facility in South America.

• 💻 Ostium launched a decentralized execution layer that routes onchain trades through a network of institutional hedging partners including Jump, enabling users to trade stocks, commodities, FX, and indices directly from self-custody wallets with institutional-grade execution. The upgrade replaces a single liquidity pool model with a separate capital pool that hedges net directional exposure offchain, settling once daily.

• 🏦 Standard Chartered, BlackRock, and OKX launched a collateral framework allowing institutional clients to use BlackRock's BUIDL tokenized U.S. Treasury fund as trading collateral on OKX Middle East, with Standard Chartered serving as off-exchange custodian. The companies describe it as the first such framework backed by a globally systemically important bank, allowing clients to continue earning Treasury yield while their collateral remains in regulated custody.

• 🏦 State Street plans to launch tokenized fund servicing from Luxembourg by year's end, extending its fund administration, custody, and transfer agency capabilities to digitally native fund structures alongside traditional funds under a single operating model. The $54.5 trillion custodian selected Luxembourg for its first delivery location due to the jurisdiction's established fund ecosystem and legal framework for digital assets.

• 🌐 Visa partnered with WeFi, a "deobanking" platform co-founded by former Tether CEO Reeve Collins, to explore stablecoin-based payments and onchain banking in select markets across Europe, Asia, and Latin America. WeFi's model keeps users in self-custody of their assets while enabling spending across Visa's global payment network, with a focus on serving underbanked populations.

• 🇮🇱 Israel's Capital Market Authority approved its first regulated stablecoin, a shekel-pegged token called BILS, issued by crypto exchange Bits of Gold on the Solana blockchain after a two-year pilot. The token is backed 1:1 with reserves held in segregated Israeli bank accounts and audited by EY, and is designed to support real-time payments, onchain trading, and institutional settlement.

• 📉 Galaxy Digital posted a $216 million net loss in Q1 2026, driven by unrealized markdowns on digital asset holdings as the total crypto market cap fell roughly 20% during the quarter. CEO Mike Novogratz described 2026 as a "transition year" for the industry and pointed to the firm's Helios data campus in West Texas, which began recognizing revenue from its CoreWeave lease agreement, as a key de-risking milestone for the business.

• 💸 Liquid, a 24/7 multi-asset trading platform founded by former Two Sigma quant Franklyn Wang, closed an $18 million seed round co-led by Neo and Left Lane Capital, bringing its total funding to $25.6 million. The platform allows users to trade more than 500 markets spanning crypto, equities, commodities, FX, and pre-IPO assets in one place, and has processed over $3 billion in volume since launching in August 2025.

• 💸 NUVA Digital, an RWA marketplace co-incubated by Animoca Brands and Nuva Labs, raised $5.2 million in a seed round led by Morgan Creek Digital to build its self-custodial platform for institutional-grade tokenized asset vaults. The funding will be used to expand its vault marketplace, add issuer integrations, and support multi-chain deployment of the platform.

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