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ETH Relief? 🙏
Plus, 🚧 Phantom Wallet outage, 🤯 ASIC miners seized, ⚠️ Stablecoin alert, and more!
Juan Aranovich
February 13, 2025
Hi! In today’s edition:
🏛️ Ether ETFs: High stakes
🛑 Biggest SOL wallet goes dark
🇺🇸 U.S. vs. China: Miners in the middle
🚨 Liquity users, look out
🏦 Trump’s crypto council: All hype?
🌶️ CPI came hotter than expected
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The Cboe BZX Exchange has filed a Form 19b-4 application to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to allow staking for the 21Shares Core Ethereum exchange-traded fund.
The proposal aims to amend the fund's structure to enable staking of its ether holdings while keeping the assets under the custodian's control. The staking process will use a "point-and-click" method, with the goal of minimizing risks such as theft during staking operations.
“I believe this is the first ETF to file with the SEC and request the ability to permit Staking [sic],” Bloomberg ETF analyst James Seyffart said on X.
The announcement triggered an ETH price surge of 6% that saw the second-biggest cryptocurrency reach an intraday high of $2,782 on Wednesday.
Phantom, a non-custodial crypto wallet used mainly on the Solana blockchain, suffered a temporary service outage on Wednesday, leaving some users briefly unable to access their assets.
Phantom acknowledged the issue on X and notified users that services had been fully restored an hour later.
Phantom has a history of occasional disruptions. Last November, an update glitch locked out some iOS users, and in October 2023, an "uptime incident" coincided with a Solana-based GRASS project airdrop.
Phantom made around $100 million in swap fees last month after the launch of Solana-based memecoin TRUMP, according to data shared by crypto entrepreneur and investor Luke Cannonon X.
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U.S. Customs and Border Protection has reportedly been seizing Bitcoin mining equipment at ports across the country since late last year.
The crackdown on imports of application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) mining rigs was reportedly requested by the Federal Communications Commission.
Initially, only ASIC miners made by Chinese manufacturer Bitmain were impounded, but more recently units made by fellow Chinese firms MicroBT and Canaan have also been seized.
Neither the FCC nor Customs has publicly disclosed reasons for impounding the units, but the crackdown may have something to do with their use of artificial intelligence chips made by companies blacklisted under measures designed to limit China’s access to advanced semiconductor technologies.
Liquity Protocol, a decentralized lending platform on Ethereum, on Wednesday urged users to close their positions in its V2 Stability Pools (“Earn”) due to an undisclosed problem that it placed under investigation.
The team assured users that the protocol's core functions remained unaffected, including the redeemability of its stablecoin, BOLD, collateral withdrawals by borrowers, and staked LQTY positions.
“Liquity V2 is fully permissionless, and the Liquity team does not maintain any administrative roles over the Liquity protocol,” the team said. “It is each user’s own responsibility to take appropriate actions when interacting with the Liquity protocol.”
The Trump administration may not launch a formal “crypto council” after all. Instead, the White House will likely gather a rotating group of crypto leaders for a series of “summits” on specific crypto policy issues, according to three sources familiar with the decision-making process.
It is unclear how many summits there may be or when they might occur. Initial meetings would likely focus on topics such as banking, payments, data centers, and bitcoin mining. Two sources confirmed that trade associations have been providing input on the different ideas.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Consumer Price Index (CPI), a measure of average consumer prices, rose 0.5% in January, higher than analyst predictions of 0.3%. The CPI increase was 3.0% year over year, also greater than the 2.9% year over year CPI increase in December.
Core CPI, a measure of the change in goods and services prices less food and energy, was two points higher than the month prior at 0.4%, versus 0.3% expectations and 0.2% in December. Core CPI year over year rose slightly to 3.3%, compared to analysts forecasts of 3.1% and 3.2% in December.
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🚀 Ripple and Galaxy executives loaned $160 million to MoonPay over a holiday weekend to cover liquidity needs for President Donald Trump’s memecoin after its market cap exploded from $200 million to $10 billion in two days.
💰 Trump-backed World Liberty Financial on Wednesday launched a token reserve to diversify its crypto holdings and attract TradFi investments, adding assets such as ETH, USDC, and Ondo tokens while focusing on DeFi growth.
📈 Trading platform Robinhood’s crypto trade volume skyrocketed 400% in Q4 last year to $70 billion, with crypto transactions making up more than half of its trading revenue as retail users surged back amid bitcoin’s rally and U.S. election-driven market speculation.
🏛️ U.S. state-led Bitcoin reserve proposals could inject $23 billion into BTC markets, with investment management firm VanEck estimating that bills introduced in states such as Texas, Pennsylvania, and Ohio could add 242,700 BTC to government holdings alongside President Donald Trump’s push for a national crypto stockpile.
🚀 Arbitrum’s new BoLD protocol eliminates permissioned validation, allowing anyone to verify transactions on its layer 2 chains, Arbitrum One and Nova, boosting decentralization and security while ensuring disputes are resolved in a fixed timeframe.
🔥 Franklin Templeton is expanding its $594 million money market fund to Solana.
🇧🇷 Plume Network and Mercado Bitcoin will tokenize $40 million worth of Brazilian assets, allowing global investors to access corporate debt, consumer credit, and securities from Latin America’s largest economy.
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