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WLFI Asks Insiders to Burn or Stay Locked

WLFI Asks Insiders to Burn or Stay Locked

Plus: Plus: ₿ Bitcoin devs debate a quantum tripwire | ⚛️ Tron bets it can beat everyone to quantum safety | 🏦 Warren calls X Money a national security risk

David Okoya
April 16, 2026

Hi! In today’s edition:

🔥 WLFI is asking insiders to pay to unlock their tokens
₿ Bitcoin devs want a quantum attacker to show their hand first
⚛️ While Bitcoin debates and Ethereum committees meet, Justin Sun says Tron is actually building quantum resistance
🏦 Sen. Elizabeth Warren sends Musk a letter demanding answers about X Money

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WLFI Asks Insiders to Burn Tokens or Stay Locked Forever

World Liberty Financial, the Trump family's DeFi project, put a governance vote to its community this week that would place 62.3 billion WLFI tokens under new vesting schedules and require insiders to permanently destroy 10% of their holdings as the price of any future liquidity.

Founders and team members face a two-year cliff and three-year vest if they opt in, or indefinite lockup if they refuse. Early supporters get slightly better terms with no burn. WLFI traded near $0.079, down roughly 48% from the project's own buyback average.

The proposal arrived less than two weeks after CoinDesk revealed WLFI had pledged 5 billion of its own tokens as collateral to borrow $75 million in stablecoins on the Dolomite lending platform, sending the token to record lows and triggering a public feud with major backer Justin Sun. WLFI has threatened to sue Sun over his accusations of hidden blacklist functions and misuse of investor funds.

Bitcoin Devs Want a Quantum Attacker to Prove the Threat First

A new proposal circulating among Bitcoin developers takes a contrarian position in the growing quantum computing debate: don't freeze any coins unless an attacker first proves quantum capability exists on-chain.

BitMEX Research published a "canary fund" design this week that places a small bounty into a special address only a quantum-capable machine could drain. If those funds ever move, the network treats the spend as automatic proof that Bitcoin's ECDSA signature scheme has been broken, triggering a broader freeze of older vulnerable wallets.

Supporters argue the design avoids the "authoritarian" pre-scheduled freeze proposed in BIP-361 by developer Jameson Lopp, which would give holders roughly five years to migrate before coins become permanently unspendable. Critics warn the canary plan bets on a rational quantum attacker claiming a bounty rather than quietly draining the estimated $490 billion in vulnerable coins. A recent Google research paper estimated a powerful enough machine could emerge sooner than many expect.

Justin Sun Says Tron Will Beat Bitcoin to Quantum Safety

While Bitcoin developers are still debating whether to freeze quantum-vulnerable coins, Tron founder Justin Sun says his network has already decided: build first, argue later.

Sun announced on April 14 that Tron is launching a post-quantum upgrade initiative and plans to be the first major public blockchain to deploy NIST-standardized post-quantum cryptographic signatures on mainnet. The move would protect the network's more than $86.7 billion in stablecoins, primarily Tether's USDT. In a pointed comparison to rivals, Sun wrote that while Bitcoin debates coin freezes and Ethereum forms research committees, Tron is building.

However, technical details remain limited. No formal governance proposal or technical roadmap had been released as of April 15. Post-quantum signatures can be 10 to 121 times larger than current ECDSA signatures, a real bandwidth and throughput challenge for a high-volume chain. TRX traded near $0.33 following the announcement.

Warren Says Musk's X Money Is a National Security Risk

Sen. Elizabeth Warren sent Elon Musk a letter this week demanding answers about the imminent launch of X Money, accusing him of engineering the regulatory vacuum that now surrounds it.

Warren, the top Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee, argued that Musk helped dismantle the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) — the agency that would have had direct jurisdiction over X Money — while simultaneously developing the platform.

Warren also raised national security concerns saying X had a track record of allowing sanctioned individuals to operate on the platform, and questioned whether Musk or DOGE employees accessed confidential CFPB data on competitors to X Money. She also pressed Musk on whether X Money will issue a stablecoin, pointing to the GENIUS Act's carveout allowing private companies to do so without approvals required of public banks.

X Money launched in limited beta last year through a Visa partnership, with deposits held by Cross River Bank, a lender subject to FDIC enforcement action in 2023. Warren set a deadline of April 21 for Musk to respond.

🟡 Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire called yuan-backed stablecoins a "tremendous opportunity," predicting China could launch one within three to five years as part of its push to internationalize the RMB. Allaire, speaking in Hong Kong, framed the race as technological competition between currencies.
⚖️ Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger signed HB 798 into law, requiring that dormant digital assets be held in their native form for at least one year before the state can liquidate them. The bill passed the House 96-2 and Senate 40-0, and takes effect July 1, 2026.
🏛️ Cantor Fitzgerald, now run by the sons of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, donated $10 million to the Fellowship PAC, a pro-crypto super PAC chaired by Tether government affairs head Jesse Spiro. The PAC has already routed more than $1 million in advertising through Nxum Group, a firm co-founded by Tether US CEO Bo Hines, the former White House crypto adviser.
🏛️ A Solana Policy Institute-backed super PAC called Sentinel Action Fund pledged $8 million to support Republican Sen. Jon Husted against former Sen. Sherrod Brown in Ohio's special Senate election. The Solana Institute contributed $750,000 and Multicoin Capital added $250,000; recent polls show the race as a statistical tie.
📈 Bitwise launched the Bitwise Avalanche ETF (NYSE: BAVA) with a 0.34% sponsor fee, waived for the first month on the first $500 million in assets. Bitwise plans to stake approximately 70% of the fund's AVAX holdings through its in-house Bitwise Onchain Solutions division, targeting the network's average staking reward of 5.4%.
📈 21Shares filed a second amendment to its Hyperliquid ETF registration with the SEC, seeking to list the fund under ticker THYP on the Nasdaq. The filing includes plans to stake a portion of the fund's HYPE holdings through third-party providers including Figment.
🟡 Tether added $70 million in bitcoin to its reserves, pushing its disclosed holdings above 97,000 BTC. The purchase continues a pattern of the stablecoin issuer backing its treasury with bitcoin alongside U.S. Treasuries.
💻 Ether.fi completed its migration of $220 million in TVL, 70,000 active cards, and 300,000 accounts to OP Mainnet, which the Optimism network called the largest single TVL event in its history. The team completed the transfer in three days with zero service downtime, moving from Scroll to take advantage of $0.00001 median transaction fees and sub-250-millisecond finality.
💸 eToro agreed to acquire self-custodial wallet provider Zengo for $70 million, adding the startup's MPC cryptography-based keyless wallet to its platform. Zengo, founded in 2018 and backed by Tether and Insight Partners, claims no user wallet has ever been hacked.
📉 Professor Jiang Xueqin, a Beijing-based educator whose Iran-war forecast went viral, renewed crypto pushback after a clip from the Jack Neel Podcast resurfaced his theory that Bitcoin was built by the CIA as a surveillance tool. Critics pointed to the open-source 2008 white paper and the absence of any documentary evidence linking Satoshi Nakamoto to U.S. intelligence agencies.

🇵🇰 Pakistan's State Bank lifted its 2018 ban on crypto services for banks, allowing financial institutions to open accounts for licensed virtual asset service providers. Banks remain barred from trading or holding crypto assets directly, and must comply with AML and KYC rules under the 2026 Virtual Assets Act.
🏦 Societe Generale-FORGE partnered with Consensys to integrate its MiCA-compliant USD CoinVertible stablecoin directly into the MetaMask wallet, giving the platform's users access to a regulated stablecoin issued by a major European bank. The integration covers on/off ramping, trading, DeFi access, and gas fee payments through MetaMask's Gas Station feature.
🌐 Ripple and South Korea's Kyobo Life Insurance announced a partnership to enable tokenized government bond settlement on blockchain using Ripple Custody, compressing the typical two-day settlement cycle to near real-time. The deal marks what both companies called Korea's first tokenized government bond settlement by a major insurer.
🇧🇹 Bhutan's Royal Government moved another 250 BTC worth roughly $18.46 million to a newly created wallet, bringing 2026 outflows to 3,247 BTC totaling $240.4 million, per Arkham data. The country's holdings now stand at 3,524 BTC, down 73% from a peak of nearly 13,000 BTC in October 2024.

💰 Brix, a tokenization startup targeting emerging markets, raised $5.5 million in a round led by Circle Ventures, with participation from Yapi Kredi's venture arm, Is Asset Management, ConsenSys, and Borderless Capital. The company plans to launch its first product, iTRY, a Turkish lira money market fund-backed token targeting roughly 45% APY, on the MegaETH network on April 20.
💰 Tether Investments participated in a $134 million private placement for publicly traded Stablecoin Development Corporation (NYSE American: SDEV), alongside R01 Fund LP and Framework Ventures. The funds were used to acquire SKY tokens; Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino framed the investment as support for the infrastructure layer that makes stablecoins usable at scale.

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