Wall Street Banks Plan Joint Stablecoin Project

Hi! In today’s edition:

• 💵 Wall Street wants a stablecoin

• 🚨 $220M drained from Sui’s Cetus DEX

• 🏛️ Trump’s crypto dealings spark new bill

• 🪙 Jupiter’s DeFi lending platform goes live

• 🎮 Animoca mulls IPO amid GameFi rethink

Big Wall Street Banks Explore Joint Stablecoin Initiative

Several of the largest U.S. banks — including JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, and Wells Fargo — are in early-stage discussions to launch a joint stablecoin, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal.

The effort is seen as a strategic response to growing competition from the crypto sector, particularly as stablecoins gain traction due to their efficiency in digital payments and cross-border transactions.

The talks involve entities co-owned by the banks, notably Early Warning Services, the operator of the Zelle payment network, and The Clearing House, which manages real-time payments.

The structure under consideration could allow both large and regional banks to participate, potentially creating a broad ecosystem for any such stablecoin.

Sources said the final decisions would depend on the fate of legislative action around stablecoins and other factors. 

Earlier this week, the GENIUS Act — the first comprehensive federal framework for regulating stablecoins — cleared a major procedural hurdle in the U.S. Senate.

Sui’s Biggest DEX Exploited for $220M

Cetus, the largest decentralized exchange and liquidity provider on the Sui blockchain, has suffered a massive exploit resulting in the theft of $220 million of digital assets.

The attacker exploited vulnerabilities in Cetus’s smart contracts by sending “spoof,” or fake, tokens with no real value to the protocol. The fake tokens manipulated Cetus’s price oracles and reserve calculations, tricking the protocol into treating them as valuable assets.

The attacker then used the spoof tokens to distort price data and drain liquidity pools, repeatedly withdrawing real assets such as SUI and USDC without depositing equivalent value.

The total value locked on Cetus dropped by more than $200 million, and the protocol’s native CETUS token plunged by over 40%.

Cetus promptly paused its smart contracts to prevent further losses, a move that allowed the protocol to safeguard and freeze between $160 million and $162 million of compromised assets.

The Sui Foundation and a large number of validators collaborated to identify wallet addresses linked to the stolen funds. The validators are now ignoring transactions from those addresses, effectively freezing the majority of the stolen assets on the network.

Despite those efforts, more than $60 million was successfully bridged to Ethereum and laundered through various wallets, with a portion swapped for USDC stablecoins.

Democrats Push New Bill to Block Trump’s Crypto Dealings

Just hours before U.S. President Donald Trump hosted an exclusive dinner for the top holders of his TRUMP memecoin at his Virginia golf club, House Democrats introduced new legislation aimed at curbing the president’s involvement in digital assets.

Rep. Maxine Waters of the House Financial Services Committee introduced the Stop TRUMP in Crypto Act of 2025, which would bar top White House officials from issuing or promoting digital assets, earning profits from crypto ventures, and trading digital assets based on non-public, government-derived information.

Waters and other Democrats argue that Trump’s growing crypto activity, controlled by entities tied to his family business, opens the door for foreign actors to buy influence and for the president to profit from his office.

The top 220 holders of the president’s TRUMP memecoin who attended the private gala dinner collectively spent nearly $400 million on the token.

Jupiter Unveils New Lending Protocol With Fluid

Jupiter, the top decentralized exchange aggregator on Solana, announced the launch of a new lending protocol at the Solana Accelerate conference on Thursday.

The protocol, named Jupiter Lend, will provide loan-to-value ratios of up to 90%, higher than the 75% typically offered on other crypto lending platforms. 

It was built in collaboration with Fluid, a DeFi innovator originally established on Ethereum.

The lending protocol will offer a one-click feature for deposits and a “vault protocol” to enable users to borrow at competitive rates. Fees are expected to be as low as 0.1%, allowing users to borrow more with less collateral and pay less for access to liquidity.

Jupiter currently handles about 95% of Solana’s DEX aggregator volume, making it a cornerstone of the ecosystem. 

The DEX’s native token, JUP, rallied 12% to $0.58 following the news.

Animoca Could Be Crypto’s Next U.S. Public Offering. Is It a Strong GameFi Bet?

Crypto is riding high once again. Bitcoin just reached a new all-time high of $111,814, Coinbase became the first crypto company in the S&P 500, and a growing pipeline of industry firms are looking to go public in the suddenly frothy crypto market.

Add to the list Animoca Brands, a Hong Kong-based Web3 company whose shares trade on private markets, and which has its tentacles in everything from NFTs and crypto gaming to an investment platform that includes more than 500 companies, including crypto exchange Kraken and Ethereum development studio ConsenSys.

But as GameFi stumbles and NFTs’ relevance continues to decline, will Animoca’s pivot to financial infrastructure be enough to win over U.S. public market investors?

• 👥 About 100 protesters confronted guests at U.S. President Donald Trump’s memecoin holder dinner as Trump used the event to double down on crypto support, sparking concerns over conflicts of interest and crypto-political entanglements.

• ⚽ FIFA is abandoning Algorand and Polygon to launch its FIFA Collect platform on a custom Avalanche layer 1 blockchain, aiming to boost digital fan engagement with a scalable, wallet-friendly NFT infrastructure tailored to future expansion.

• 🧾 Strategy plans to raise $2.1 billion by offering its STRF preferred stock, yielding 10% annually with payout escalation if dividends lapse, at market price on the Nasdaq, aiming to attract cautious institutional investors while expanding its multi-pronged $44 billion capital raise strategy.

• ❄️ Russia is encouraging Bitcoin miners to relocate to its northern and Volga regions by offering access to underused energy infrastructure from depleted oil fields following a mining ban in 10 of the country’s southern regions due to power shortages.

• 🌍 Kraken plans to offer tokenized trading of more than 50 stocks and ETFs, including Apple and Nvidia, to customers outside the U.S. as part of its global expansion and belief that tokenized equities will eventually outpace the stablecoin market.

• 💸 Bitcoin miner MARA is deploying 500 BTC to broker Two Prime for yield generation, expanding an existing partnership centered on bitcoin-backed loans as public miners face liquidity stress, having sold 115% of April production.

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