So Cringe!

🐋 Traders target a $520M BTC short, 📊 Robinhood enters prediction markets, 🔄 Ethena & Securitize team up for a new blockchain, and more!

Author

Juan Aranovich
March 18, 2025

Hi! In today’s edition:

  • 🤯 Solana’s anti-“woke” ad backfires

  • 📉 Harpoons out for a whale’s BTC short

  • 🎰 Robinhood bets on prediction markets

  • ⚡ Ethena, Securitize unveil DeFi blockchain

  • 🔥 Crypto.com’s 70B CRO mint: Fair play?

  • 🏛️ Behind closed doors at the White House Crypto Summit

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By Tikta, Steven Ehrlich and Veronica Irwin

Solana has deleted a controversial anti-“woke” ad posted on X just nine hours after sharing it.

The now-deleted — but heavily reposted — commercial featured a human embodiment of America speaking to a therapist who diagnoses him with “rational thinking syndrome” and suggests he should focus on pronouns rather than action verbs such as “innovating” and “doing.”

The physical manifestation of America eventually declares that he wants to “invent technologies, not genders.”

The ad was slammed by members of the crypto community for being a cringeworthy attempt at getting the attention of the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump and Elon Musk, both of whom are pushing a rightwing, anti-personal gender identity agenda so intolerant that it has prompted the sacking of at least one federal worker for as little as refusing to remove pronouns from his email signature.

“Offensive, cringe, and pandering. Base is for everyone,” said Base Product Lead Anneri van der Merwe on X. “Solana co-opted the 'is for everyone' phrase last week too. This ad shows there's still a long way to go in truly embracing that ethos.”

Crypto traders went whale hunting on Monday, targeting a large leveraged short position on decentralized trading platform Hyperliquid.

A Hyperliquid whale opened a $300 million short position with 40x leverage on BTC that has since grown to $520 million. The whale is the same trader that made Hyperliquid absorb a $4 million loss after a 50x leveraged ETH bet earlier this month.

Pseudonymous trader CBB attempted to coordinate an effort to liquidate the whale's position by driving the price of BTC higher. Among those participating in that attempt was Tron founder Justin Sun, according to a screenshot shared by CBB on X. 

Although the price of BTC moved higher than the initial liquidation price of $84,690, the whale ultimately avoided disaster by adding $5 million of USDC to the position and increasing its maintenance margin.

As of 9:30 pm ET on Monday, the whale’s position had an unrealized profit of $3.3 million with a liquidation price of $85,558.

Robinhood has launched a new prediction markets hub in partnership with U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission-regulated prediction markets firm Kalshi.

The prediction markets hub is directly integrated into the Robinhood app, and is available to the trading platform’s customer base across the U.S.  Users will pay a fee of $0.02 per contract, split equally between Kalshi and Robinhood.

At launch, users will be able to bet on the Federal Reserve's target interest rate for May and the men's and women's NCAA basketball tournaments.

The launch comes after previous attempts by Robinhood to enter the prediction market space, including a brief foray during the 2024 U.S. presidential election and a canceled Super Bowl betting market.

Ethena Labs and Securitize on Monday announced an upcoming Ethereum virtual machine-compatible blockchain designed to support decentralized finance and tokenized assets.

The Converge blockchain, set to launch during the second quarter of the year, will cater to both retail and institutional investors, offering standard DeFi applications alongside financial products that comply with institutional requirements. 

Ethena founder Guy Young said the intent behind the blockchain was to fill “a clear gap in the market.”

Cross-chain protocols LayerZero and Wormhole will facilitate interoperability support, while oracles RedStone and Pyth will supply real-time price data.

Ethena Labs plans to migrate its existing DeFi ecosystem, which currently holds nearly $6 billion of assets, to Converge. 

The network will use Ethena's ENA token for governance and network security, while the stablecoins USDe and USDtb will serve as gas tokens.

On Sunday it looked as though Crypto.com’s controversial proposal to mint 70 billion CRO to undo a 2021 burn of the same number of tokens, meant to remove them from circulation forever, might fail. For most of the proposal’s voting period, which ran from March 2-16, the yes votes barely outstripped the nos, but the project had not reached the 33.4% quorum of eligible votes to go into effect.  

That changed at 2:00 p.m. UTC on Sunday, when 3.35 billion CRO tokens were added to the pro category, achieving the quorum and pushing the vote well over the top. The final tally: 61.18% yes, 17.61% no, 20.11% abstain, and 0.11% veto. Turnout ended up being 70.18%, more than double the necessary 33.4% required.

But with Crypto.com itself controlling a significant share of the voting power, many in the community are questioning whether this vote was truly fair. Was the outcome ever really in doubt?

5 Ideas Pitched at the White House Crypto Summit Behind Closed Doors

Before the cameras started rolling at the inaugural White House Crypto Summit on March 7, attendees were given the opportunity to pitch specific crypto policy ideas to the White House crypto team and top regulators. 

President Donald Trump himself was not present for the discussion, and attended the summit only for roughly the 30 minutes that were broadcast. 

However, crypto “czar” David Sacks, Executive Director of the President’s Digital Assets Advisory Council Bo Hines, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce, Commodity Futures Trading Commission Acting Chair Caroline Pham, Small Business Administrator Kelly Loeffler, and House Majority Whip Tom Emmer were all present for that portion of the event, according to one summit attendee.

Although the White House made no promises, the ideas pitched could have a major impact on the future of crypto regulation. So, what exactly was on the table?

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  • 🟠 Strategy added 130 BTC for $10.7 million last week, at an average price of $82,981 per bitcoin, bringing its total holdings to 499,226 BTC worth more than $41 billion, although the latest purchase was much smaller than the firm’s previous billion-dollar acquisitions.

  • ⚒️ Bitcoin developers are rallying around a soft fork proposal featuring BIP 119 (CTV) and BIP 348 (CSFS) that could improve self-custody, fee efficiency, and contract-based applications, although widespread miner and stakeholder support is still required.

  • 🚀 Arbitrum’s main developers, Offchain Labs and the Arbitrum Foundation, introduced “Onchain Labs” to provide go-to-market support for experimental and volatile projects, aiming to accelerate application development within the ecosystem.

  • 💵 U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs saw their largest daily net inflows in six weeks, adding $274.6 million on Monday after five weeks of $5.4 billion in outflows, with Fidelity’s FBTC and Ark/21Shares’ ARKB leading the surge amid renewed institutional demand.

  • 📉 Standard Chartered Bank cut its 2025 year-end ether price target from $10,000 to $4,000, citing a $50 billion market cap drop due to layer 2 blockchains such as Coinbase’s Base, while predicting a recovery that still lags other digital assets.