Trump Media Considers Launching Truth Social Utility Token

Hi! In today’s edition:

• 🪙 Trump Media Mulls Truth Social token

• 🧱 Ethereum L2 Scroll reaches ‘stage 1’ 

• 📬 Ledger users hit by phishing scam

• ⚖️ No double-jeopardy for Tornado Cash 

And… two new podcast episodes!

• 🎧 On Unchained: What SoftBank, Tether, and Cantor’s new BTC fund is all about

• 🎙️ On Bits + Bips: Is it time to get more bullish?

The Financial Freedom Report explores the role currency and banking play in the civil liberties and human rights struggles of those living under authoritarian regimes and how Bitcoin is used to push back.

Trump Media Mulls Utility Token for Truth Social Product Range

Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG), the loss-making company behind the U.S. president’s Truth Social and the streaming platform Truth+, is considering launching a native crypto utility token and a digital wallet.

The firm revealed those plans in a letter to Trump Media shareholders, saying the token would be part of a rewards program and would initially be used to pay for Truth+ subscription costs.

The token would “later be applied to other products and services in the Truth ecosphere,” the letter said.

The price of Trump’s official Solana-based memecoin, TRUMP, dropped more than 6% in under two-and-a-half hours following the news of a possible utility token launch. As of 6:30 a.m. ET on Wednesday, TRUMP was trading at $12.90, having recovered slightly to 5.4% below its price before the news emerged.

Scroll Becomes First to Achieve Stage 1 ZK Rollup Status

Zero-knowledge rollup Scroll became the first such rollup to achieve “stage 1” status earlier this week following a significant upgrade known as the Euclid update — a milestone that marks a major advance in the Ethereum layer 2 rollup ecosystem. 

Stage 1 status means a rollup has robust proof systems, transparent and partially decentralized governance, enforced upgrade delays, user exit guarantees, and emergency protections, while still allowing for some centralized intervention in emergencies.

In an X post last September, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said he considered stage 1 status the minimum standard for serious layer 2 projects.

Coinbase’s layer 2 network, Base, also said it had achieved stage 1 status on Tuesday after launching permissionless fault proofs and boosting the decentralization of its contract upgrade process. However, Base is an optimistic rollup — meaning that it assumes all transactions are valid unless proven otherwise — like Optimism, Arbitrum, and Ink, which are already stage 1.

Zero-knowledge rollups face greater challenges reaching stage 1 than optimistic rollups due to several technical and operational factors related to the fact that zero-knowledge proofs are not infinite.

Ledger Scammers Target Seed Phrases With Physical Letters

A new wave of scams is targeting Ledger hardware wallet users, with scammers sending physical letters that impersonate Ledger in an attempt to steal users' seed phrases.

Scammers mail letters that appear official, using Ledger’s logo, business address, and even a reference number, to appear legitimate. The letters claim there is a "critical security update" or a "mandatory validation process" required to keep a user’s wallet secure.

Recipients are instructed to scan a QR code or visit a website and enter their wallet’s private seed phrase to validate their device.

Ledger confirmed the scam by responding to bitcoin commentator Jacob Canfield on X, who posted the letter he received with a warning to his followers. 

“Always remember: Ledger will never call, DM, or ask for your 24-word recovery phrase,” Ledger said. “If someone does, it's a scam.” 

U.S. Federal Court Rules Tornado Cash Can’t Be Sanctioned Again

A federal judge in Texas has ruled that the U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) acted unlawfully when it sanctioned decentralized crypto mixer Tornado Cash.

Judge Robert Pitman of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas found on Monday that OFAC had exceeded its statutory authority by sanctioning the mixer, particularly its smart contracts, which are pieces of code on the blockchain. 

However, even after OFAC removed Tornado Cash from its sanctions list, plaintiffs in the case argued that the agency could potentially re-sanction Tornado Cash in the future, leaving users with legal uncertainty.

Judge Pitman determined that the re-sanctioning issue was not moot, siding with the plaintiffs and issuing a permanent injunction preventing OFAC from sanctioning Tornado Cash again unless it had a new legal justification.

The Department of Justice is still pursuing criminal charges against two Tornado Cash developers, Roman Storm and Roman Semenov, for conspiracy to launder money and other offenses. Semenov’s name is still on OFAC's sanctions list.

Why Twenty One Capital Is More About Volatility Than Bitcoin

The race for Bitcoin supremacy just got more complicated.

Twenty One Capital, backed by Tether, SoftBank, and Cantor Fitzgerald, plans to stack as much BTC as it possibly can.

But is this new venture really about Bitcoin… or about creating a hyper-volatile stock to play market cycles?

This week on Unchained, Jeff Park of Bitwise and Mark Palmer of Benchmark join to discuss:

• Why SoftBank and Tether are a “perfect match” — and why they’ve turned to Bitcoin

• How volatility, not bitcoin itself, might be the real asset investors are buying

• What Cantor’s involvement says about Wall Street’s readiness for crypto

• Why the launch timing matters

• Whether Twenty One could repeat MicroStrategy’s mistakes

• Whether these new Bitcoin vehicles are better bets than spot bitcoin or ETFs

Plus, is SoftBank getting into crypto a top signal? 👀

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pods, Fountain, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Amazon Music, or on your favorite podcast platform.

Bits + Bips: Why It’s Time to Be More Bullish on Bitcoin

It may have been a calmer week on the markets (thank God!), but there’s a lot to talk about!

This week on Bits + Bips, hosts James Seyffart, Ram Ahluwalia, and Steven Ehrlich, along with guest Charles Edwards of Capriole Investments, dive into:

• Whether it’s time to be bullish on all crypto assets

• Whether a Trump put actually exists

• The risks behind bitcoin treasury companies such as Twenty One Capital

• Why Solana ETFs might not be the smash success people expect

• The controversial invite to the White House for $TRUMP holders

• Why there’s a big disconnect in the markets

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pods, Fountain, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Amazon Music, or on your favorite podcast platform.

• 🚨 U.S. federal prosecutors are seeking a 20-year prison sentence for former Celsius CEO Alex Mashinsky, alleging that he knowingly misled customers, manipulated the CEL token for $48 million in personal gains, and contributed to nearly $7 billion of losses.

• ⚡ Kakarot, a StarkWare- and Vitalik-backed zero-knowledge Ethereum virtual machine, aims to start publishing real-time STARK proofs of Ethereum layer 1 blocks by the end of the year, using a fully independent stack, positioning itself as Ethereum’s first credible ZK-proof alternative to the dominant RISC-V approach.

• 🧠 Ledger Live on Tuesday added DeFi yield options between 5% and 9.9% APY for stablecoins such as USDT and DAI via protocols including Aave, Compound, and Morpho, offering a self-custody alternative to centralized yield platforms through its Kiln-powered interface.

• 🔁 Dex aggregator 1inch launched on Solana on Tuesday with maximal extractable value-protected swaps and Dutch auction-based order execution for more than 1 million tokens, and announced plans to connect Solana to 10 DeFi chains via cross-chain swaps to unify fragmented liquidity.

• 🧾 Samourai Wallet founders may see charges dropped as prosecutors evaluate their case under new U.S. Justice Department policy changes that restrict enforcement actions against crypto software providers, according to a joint court filing.

• 🏛️ BlackRock filed to launch tokenized shares of its $150.1 billion Treasury Trust Fund exclusively via BNY Mellon, marking its first move toward distributed ledger-based ownership in a product not directly tied to crypto.

• 📲 Personal finance company SoFi plans to reintroduce crypto trading within six months, citing Trump-era deregulatory policies as the reason it can offer coins again through its Invest platform, after halting services in 2023 amid regulatory pressure.

• 🌍 Circle received preliminary approval from Abu Dhabi’s Financial Services Regulatory Authority to operate as a money services provider, strengthening its Middle East expansion plans as USDC supply rose to $62 billion amid new payments initiatives and pending U.S. IPO procedures.

• 🧾 Camp Network raised $30 million in a Series A funding round co-led by 1kx and Blockchain Capital to scale its layer 1 blockchain that registers IP onchain and compensates creators whose content is used to train AI models, using a custom “proof of provenance” protocol.

• 🛡️ Miden, a Polygon spin-off focused on institutional privacy and transaction speed, secured $25 million from backers including a16z and 1kx to build zero-knowledge infrastructure for high-volume, regulatory-compliant applications.

Meet the ‘Crypto is Macro Now’ newsletter: where crypto and macro meet

A daily dose of updates and deep dives into how crypto is impacting the macro landscape and vice versa – markets, geopolitics, macro trends, tokenization, regulation, global adoption and more, delivered to your inbox for less than the price of a weekly New York coffee.

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