Jailbird Tweets, Token Leaps 💩

Hi!

In today’s edition:

• 💬 SBF’s tweet-driven token surge

• ⚠️ Wintermute pulls SOL stash

• 💡 SEC drops another crypto case

• 🚨 OKX fesses up and pays up

• 💰 Ethena wrangles $100M

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FTX Token Spikes 40% After SBF Posts From Prison

Former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried triggered a massive surge in the price of FTX’s native token, FTT, after posting a series of tweets on layoffs, presumably while still incarcerated.

FTT surged 40% within five minutes of Bankman-Fried’s X thread, reaching a high of $2.12 before retreating below $1.80 around half an hour later. 

“I have a lot of sympathy for gov’t employees: I, too, have not checked my email for the past few (hundred) days … And I can confirm that being unemployed is a lot less relaxing than it looks,” Bankman-Fried said in a post at 5:53 p.m. ET.

Bankman-Fried then rambled on about the challenges of firing employees, saying from his experience that it was “usually not the employee’s fault that they got fired” but that it was also “correct to let them go anyway.”

His posts come after Elon Musk, head of the Trump administration’s so-called “department of government efficiency,” said all federal employees were to summarize their work over the week, and that failure to do so would be interpreted as a resignation.

OKX Settles With DOJ for $505M

Crypto exchange OKX has pleaded guilty and agreed to pay $505 million in penalties to settle charges brought by the U.S. Department of Justice. 

As part of the settlement, OKX will pay an $84 million fine and forfeit $421 million of user fees. It received a 25% discount on the full penalty following its cooperation and timely remediation.

The exchange admitted to operating an unlicensed money-transmitting business in the U.S. 

“We had a small percentage of customers who were able to use our international services due to historical compliance gaps,” OKX said. 

The company also said there had been no allegations of customer harm or charges against any of its employees. 

It has also agreed to retain a compliance consultant through 2027 to ensure adequate controls are in place to prevent potential further violations.

Ethena Raises $100M to Launch New Token for TradFi

Ethena, the issuer of synthetic dollar stablecoin USDe, has raised $100 million in a private token sale to launch another token, Bloomberg reported on Monday. 

The funding round reportedly saw participation by Franklin Templeton and Fidelity Investments-associated F-Prime Capital.

The new token is said to be aimed at traditional financial institutions. In a January blog post, Ethena Labs founder Guy Young said the protocol intended to launch a TradFi wrapped sUSDe named iUSDe.

Young said the new token would be identical to iUSDe except for an additional wrapper contract that introduced transfer restrictions at the token level, making it fit for use by traditional finance entities.

“With the market as it exists today, we see more than $10b iUSDe of additional capacity for these pools of capital,” Young said at the time.

Ethena late last year entered a partnership with World Liberty Financial, a DeFi project backed by U.S. President Donald Trump, to integrate sUSDe with the project’s Aave instance.

Additionally, Ethena Labs integrated Chaos Labs’ Edge Proof of Reserves Oracles to provide real-time verification of USDe’s reserves, ensuring transparency and automated risk alerts amid growing scrutiny of synthetic stablecoins.

SOL Sinks After Wintermute Pulls Over $70M From Binance

Crypto market maker Wintermute withdrew more than $72.5 million of SOL from Binance in the 24 hours to 6 p.m. on Monday, sparking fears of compounding selling pressure for the token ahead of one of the biggest unlocks in its history.

SOL fell 14%, with its price hitting a four-month low of $138.64 on the day.

The upcoming unlock on March 1 is set to release approximately 11.2 million SOL tokens currently worth around $1.6 billion into circulation. 

For market participants, another cause for concern is the fact that a significant portion of the soon-to-be-unlocked supply was purchased at FTX auctions at a discount to current prices.

FTX liquidated $2.6 billion of SOL last May as part of its bankruptcy proceedings, triggering a 4% drop in the token’s price.

After the upcoming token unlock, only 0.3% of SOL’s supply will remain to be unlocked.

SEC Drops Investigation of Robinhood Crypto

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has closed its investigation of Robinhood’s crypto unit, with no plans to move forward with enforcement action.

“Let me be crystal clear — this investigation never should have been opened,” Robinhood’s legal chief, Dan Gallagher, said in a statement. 

“We appreciate the formal closing of this investigation, and we are happy to see a return to the rule of law and commitment to fairness at the SEC,” he said.

The SEC’s decision is the latest in a series of U-turns the regulator has made in relation to crypto lawsuits over the past few weeks. Three days earlier, the agency agreed in principle to close a case against crypto exchange Coinbase, and it filed a joint motion with Binance to pause an ongoing legal battle for 60 days.

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• 🔄 Ethereum’s Pectra upgrade went live on the Holesky testnet, marking a crucial step toward improving scalability and validator efficiency, although finalization issues may delay its rollout on the Sepolia testnet and mainnet activation.

• ⚡ Sonic, the rebranded Fantom blockchain, is experiencing a surge in total value locked and user activity, driven by high DeFi yields and an ongoing incentive program that will distribute $160 million worth of S tokens to early adopters.

• 💰 U.S. authorities seized $31 million of crypto linked to the 2021 Uranium Finance hack in one of the largest recoveries following a DeFi exploit, although the platform remains defunct with victims still awaiting restitution.

• 🏦 Restaking startup Byzantine Finance secured $3 million in pre-seed funding to build an aggregation layer designed for institutions, allowing them to stake assets across multiple blockchains while maintaining security and liquidity.

• 🐸 Memes Lab raised $2.3 million in a seed round led by early-stage crypto Venture firm Lemniscap to develop a unified platform on TON for creating, trading, and distributing memecoins, aiming to simplify the process while boosting community engagement.

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