Solana's Tokenomics Debate Just Got Two Competing Proposals

Hi! In today’s edition:

• 🌞 Solana's tokenomics debate intensified with two competing community proposals, and the co-founder is actively engaging with both

• 🏛️ The same agency that spent years restricting crypto perpetuals just opened the door, and two firms walked through first 

• ❄️ A federal court order over a private DeFi dispute froze an entire confidential stablecoin pool, exposing what happens when smart contracts meet US law 

• 📉 The trade that once defined institutional crypto exposure just had its third-worst week ever, but something else is quietly attracting capital

Solana Founder Engages with Two Competing Tokenomics Proposals

A pseudonymous developer known as cavemanloverboy introduced SIMD-547, titled "Improving SOL tokenomics via a resource-based base fee," over the weekend, while SIMD-0411, originally proposed by Helius researchers Lostin and 0xIchigo, has been reignited in active discussion.

SIMD-547 adds a base fee priced by compute units, data loaded, and write locks taken, all of which is burned. Estimates suggest daily burn could rise from 648 SOL to between 10,800 and 64,800 SOL, a 16x to 100x increase. SIMD-0411 takes a different lever: doubling the disinflation rate from -15% to -30%, accelerating the timeline to terminal 1.5% inflation from 6.2 years to 3.1 years, and cutting emissions by 22.3 million SOL (roughly $2.9 billion) over six years.

Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko has been actively shaping both designs. SolStrategies CEO Michael Hubbard offered a critical read on SIMD-547.

CFTC Opens the US Crypto Perp Door With First Approvals at Kalshi and Coinbase

The CFTC approved Kalshi to list the first true bitcoin perpetual contract on a US-regulated exchange on Friday and simultaneously issued a no-action letter allowing Coinbase to route US customers into global crypto perps and options markets through its Bermuda subsidiary.

Kalshi's BTCPERP is the first regulated US bitcoin perpetual. Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour called it the company's evolution "from prediction market leader to next-gen derivatives exchange." Coinbase chief legal officer Paul Grewal called the no-action letter a "massive first for the industry."

CFTC Chair Mike Selig called the announcement "a major step forward in delivering on President Trump's goal of cementing America as the crypto capital of the world," issuing a CFTC policy statement and an opinion piece the same day.

Court Order Forces Circle to Freeze $12.6 Million in Zama's Confidential USDC Contract

A federal judge ordered Circle to blacklist Zama's confidential USDC contract (cUSDC) on Friday night, freezing approximately $12.6 million in pooled user funds. The order came in a class-action suit alleging Overnight Finance creator Maxim Ermilov moved $15.77 million from a shared treasury into the contract just before an OVN holder vote to liquidate the treasury.

US District Judge P. Casey Pitts issued a text-only order directing Circle to block the USDC in the wallet and set a hearing on the restraining order for Monday, June 1. Because cUSDC is a wrapper that holds USDC backing every confidential token holder, blacklisting the contract locks the entire pool rather than one person's deposit.

Zama CEO Rand Hindi said the protocol was "caught in a crossfire" and noted more than 99% of the contract's funds came from the disputed deposit, indicating the contract had minimal usage before the transfer.

Bitcoin ETFs Post Third-Worst Weekly Outflow Ever as Capital Rotates to Alts

Spot Bitcoin ETFs recorded $1.42 billion in net outflows last week (May 25-29), the third-highest weekly outflow since the funds began trading in January 2024, according to SoSoValue data. BlackRock's IBIT led with $966 million in weekly outflows.

The outflow streak extended to 10 consecutive days by Friday, the longest on record for the category. Ether ETFs lost $241 million in their third consecutive week of outflows. Total Bitcoin ETF net assets fell to $94.17 billion.

The capital is rotating rather than exiting. Spot HYPE ETFs drew $25.57 million, XRP ETFs added $15.2 million, and Solana ETFs brought in $2.36 million in net inflows over the same week. The divergence comes as the S&P 500 logged its ninth straight weekly gain on AI optimism.

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The CEO of NYSE parent ICE says Hyperliquid is bigger than Nasdaq and has already met with its founders — while raising regulatory alarms about the offshore perps gap. Jamie Dimon publicly called Brian Armstrong full of sh!t over stablecoin yield in the CLARITY Act fight, and DTCC just named Stellar as its first public blockchain partner.

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• 💵 JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon went on Fox Business Friday and called Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong "full of sh*t" while vowing to fight the CLARITY Act, arguing it lets crypto firms pay interest on stablecoin deposits without bank-style protections. Armstrong responded with a hockey-themed meme as the battle over stablecoin yield rewards became the central obstacle to the bill's progress.

• 🇮🇷 Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told the Reagan National Economic Forum that the US has now seized approximately $1 billion in Iranian cryptocurrency under Operation Economic Fury, the cumulative total since the campaign launched in March 2025. Bessent said authorities had "outright grabbed the wallets" and that Iran's inflation has now exceeded 200%.

• 📊 Coinbase became the first US-registered exchange to receive CFTC clearance to route customer funds into global crypto perpetuals, with the no-action letter allowing routing through Coinbase Bermuda and digital asset margin collateral. The same Friday CFTC action that opened the US perp door at Kalshi also gave Coinbase the global side.

• 🏗️ Aave overhauled its asset listing standards after the April $230 million rsETH exploit exposed bridge risks. The new framework adds stricter requirements for cross-chain assets, including verifier independence, multi-source oracle setups, and tighter collateral parameters for bridged tokens.

• 🧩 Sui developers traced three mainnet halts over the past 48 hours to upgrade bugs, including a fix that the team acknowledged it knew carried halt risk before shipping. The disclosure marks the network's second multi-halt incident in five months.

• 🌉 The Cosmos-based Gravity Bridge was drained of approximately $5.4 million in what researchers describe as a suspected private key compromise. The exploit follows a string of bridge incidents that have made cross-chain infrastructure one of DeFi's most attacked surfaces.

• 🤖 The SEC sued a Texas man named Bradon Watson over an alleged $12.3 million crypto scheme built on fake AI trading bots through his firm, Privvy. The agency alleges Watson promised investors AI-driven returns through bots that did not exist.

• 🤝 Market maker Wintermute began providing liquidity on both Kalshi and Polymarket, connecting the two largest prediction markets through a single institutional liquidity source. The move follows the Comer probe and broader prediction-market regulatory scrutiny.

• 🪙 Texas appointed CleanSpark executive Matt Schultz and bitcoin miner CEO Cole Smith to its Strategic Bitcoin Reserve advisory committee, signaling the state's intent to give mining-aligned voices direct input on how its public BTC reserve operates.

• 🔓 A whitehat developer helped rescue $2 million worth of ETH locked in a 2016 ICO contract for nine years by exploiting a vulnerability in the contract to extract funds and return them to the rightful owner. The episode highlights both how much value sits frozen in early Ethereum infrastructure and how whitehat coordination can recover it.

1. Nic Carter: Stablecoins are private money. There’s nothing wrong with that

2. Arjun Khemani: Zcash: Hard Money for a Private World