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Plasma received $500 million in stablecoin deposits rather quickly yesterday, shocking some and affirming that the token sales appetite is back in full force. 



But let me back up for a second. Plasma, which raised $24 million from the likes of Framework Ventures, is gearing up for a sale of its XPL token. Plasma team member Googly was careful to clarify that the sale hasn’t yet happened. 




Just to be very clear here.The sale has not yet happened. Size will never change: it will be $50m, full stop.There was $500m deposits (initial $250m, raised at $500m to allow more people in) to get points giving you the option, not the obligation to participate in the sale.— Googly 👀 (@0xG00gly) June 9, 2025




Ahead of the deposits, Blockworks Research penned a subscriber-exclusive note from analyst and 0xResearch podcast host Boccaccio, which dropped before the deposits even went live. If you didn’t already know, Plasma is a stablecoin company building a Tether-focused blockchain.



“We expect Plasma to allow 3-4 rounds of deposits over the deposit phase, with the total deposit reaching $1.5B to $1.75B. At this level, if Plasma launched at $2B TGE, APR on deposits would range between 35-50% if the lock up was for 3 months, and range between 25-40% if the lock up was for 4 months,” Boccaccio wrote yesterday.



His tone in the piece was cautious yet optimistic, he noted that there are “uncertainties” but also told me that he likes Plasma “overall.”



“They are purpose-built and focused on stablecoins, particularly payments, with their zero-fees on payments model. There are a few other stablecoin chains launching, some similarly backed by Tether/Bitfinex/Paolo [Ardoino]. At this point, it's really a product, [business development] and [go-to-market] competition between these chains,” he said.



For me, Plasma also served as an example that pump[dot]fun’s

What Plasma's deposits say about overall demand

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Validator clients are the software that nodes run to participate in consensus and maintain the network. They validate and vote on blocks, process transactions, and generally just keep the network alive, handling both consensus and execution in a single piece of software.



Historically, Solana's entire ecosystem has relied on one implementation, a Rust-based client developed by Solana Labs, and now maintained by Anza under the name Agave. Today, however, the vast majority of stake (90%+) runs on Jito-Solana, a fork of the Agave client with added MEV infrastructure.



The centralization of that effort is a problem, though. If Jito-Solana were to fail, the network risks performance issues or even a chain halt.



Jump Crypto's Firedancer is the leading contender meant to break that monoculture, and it gets a heck of a lot of lip service in our community. This is not without good reason, of course. Once it's live, it'll be modular, wicked fast, and capable of handling over a million transactions per second.



But firepower aside, it's hardly Solana's only client in development. In fact, multiple teams are working on their own clients, with some already live and potentially capable of matching or even outmaneuvering Firedancer's ambitions.



Let's take a look at a few and compare.




Jito-Solana was an early breakaway from Agave and is now the dominant client by stake weight. It's not a ground-up rewrite but a fork of the original client with an MEV infrastructure. Jito introduced a bundle auction system that lets validators capture MEV more transparently, and share those rewards with stakers, not just slot leaders. By proving that validators would adopt client software offering new incentives, Jito opened the door for more experimentation and design specialization.





Sig is Syndica's answer to Solana's performance ceiling. Where Firedancer pushes raw throughput for

Inside Solana’s expanding client stack

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Representatives from the US and China kicked off a second round of trade talks in London today at 1 p.m. local time. National Economic Council director Kevin Hassett told CNBC this morning it should be a “short meeting with a big strong handshake.” 



Here’s hoping. 



President Trump sent his top dogs: Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and trade representative Jamieson Greer. 



China’s delegation includes vice premier He Lifeng. 



It’s the second US-China meeting on neutral ground in less than a month. Roughly three weeks ago in Geneva, representatives from both countries negotiated a temporary truce: a 90-day pause on retaliatory tariffs from both sides. 



The amicability was short-lived, though, and it quickly became clear that the joint pause came with strings attached. 



On May 30, Trump (via Truth Social) accused China of violating its half of the agreement. Greer later clarified on CNBC that China was “slow rolling” its compliance to the Geneva deal, specifically when it came to rolling back rare earth export restrictions. 



Since April 4 (two days after “Liberation Day”), China has suspended almost all exports of several rare earth metals and magnets. This matters, because China mines 60% of the global supply of rare earths and manufactures 90% of the global supply of the magnets. Rare earth elements are essential for technology; they’re in cell phones, cars, lights, batteries, you name it. 



The restrictions are poised to disrupt US supply chains, because the US doesn’t currently have much infrastructure to mine the metals domestically. Solvent extraction (the difficult process of separating rare earth minerals from one another) comes with bad impacts on the environment: high levels of toxic waste, water pollution, etc. The process was actually created in the US in the 1950s, but it’s

US and China reps meet on neutral ground for a second time

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Coinbase is taking action to reduce the number of users it’s locking out — and says its efforts are paying off.



“Account freezing has been a major issue at Coinbase for longer than is acceptable,” Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said. “I could list a bunch of the underlying reasons why it got so bad in the first place, but what's more important is that we've made it a priority to fix, and we have been making good progress.”



Dor Levi, Coinbase VP of Product, explained that he joined Coinbase recently with the goal of getting account-lock numbers down.



“Our restriction experience is not meeting my own bar,” Levi said.



Coinbase recently made some technical changes and improvements, including some to its infrastructure, teams, and machine learning models. They’ve been able to fine-tune said ML models to tackle the issue.



“Account freezes should be rare, limited to situations that warrant them, primarily when we're legally obligated (e.g. sanctions or court orders) or protecting users (e.g. from scams or account compromises),” Levi wrote.




I joined @coinbase 9 weeks ago with a vital goal: fixing unnecessary account restrictions.If you're on CT, you know how significant this issue has been for users. I myself am a Coinbase user and our restriction experience is not meeting my own bar.The goal is clear: Account… pic.twitter.com/zvGuM3QSZi— Dor (@dorvonlevi) June 6, 2025




Both Armstrong and Levi confirmed that account-lock occurrences are down roughly 82% within the past few months.



Coinbase often restricts user accounts when it’s concerned about what it detects as potentially suspicious activity. This means any activity that could be in possible violation of any nation’s laws, including fraud. Locked accounts can result in customers being forced to jump through various ID verification hoops and spend time speaking with support to try to

Coinbase says it’s reduced account lockouts by 82%

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Union just set a new record for zero-knowledge infrastructure. Its Groth16 trusted setup ceremony closed with 4,664 verified contributions — surpassing Manta Network’s 2023 record — and another 4,590 are still in the queue. This establishes the cryptographic foundation for validating consensus and cross-chain messages with succinct validity proofs.



Trusted setup ceremonies are crucial to zero-knowledge proving systems. Union enables it to act as a “blockchain of blockchains,” offering verifiable message passing and asset transfers across Ethereum, Cosmos, Arbitrum, Babylon and even Bitcoin L2s — all without relying on centralized actors.



Union Chief Technology Officer Cor Pruijs emphasized the significance: “Union's circuit having the largest Groth16 trusted setup ceremony ever means that it has the smallest honesty assumption of all.”



“Honesty assumption” refers to the minimum number of participants who must act honestly (i.e. not leak or reuse their private randomness) for the resulting cryptographic parameters to remain secure.



Ethereum’s KZG Ceremony for the Proto-Danksharding upgrade used to scale rollups holds the record for most participants in any trusted setup. However, that ceremony’s computational demands were far lower, making Union’s scale even more impressive.



Despite the complexity of such cryptographic pipelines, contributors needed only to queue up and complete the computation when their turn came, with each result verified and added sequentially to the setup.



While Ethereum’s KZG setup was limited to data availability for rollups, Union’s underpins full cross-chain consensus verification. The design bears modular features:




CometBLS, a modified CometBFT, is a data-light consensus mechanism that aggregates validator signatures for efficient onchain verification.



A permissionless prover network, Galois,

Union completes trusted setup to pave the way for trustless cross-chain DeFi

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There’s no questioning that Supply Shock is deep in the nostalgia business. Sometimes, it’s meant to be deeper than that.



Maybe you lived the first few years of Bitcoin, and get a kick out of revisiting the major narratives and forgotten side plots. Perhaps you missed out and are now living vicariously as an early adopter through our deep dives.



Today's throwback is more an expression of mourning than reminiscence: 



RIP, the age of Bitcoin idealism.



On This Day



Exactly 15 years ago, Andrew “teppy” Tepper started what would become a fateful thread: “A Heroin Store.”



Teppy wrote: “As a Libertarian, the thing I love most about the Bitcoin project is the chance that it could be truly disruptive. I think that drug prohibition is one of the most socially harmful things that the US has ever done, and so I would like to do a thought experiment about how a heroin store might operate, accepting Bitcoins, and ending drug prohibition in the process.”



It would work like this: A drug dealer sets up a website that accepts bitcoin for heroin. The buyer makes an order, sends BTC and supplies a physical address for shipping. The dealer then mails out the order to the buyer — and another order of the exact same size to a random address.



In that universe, because random packages of heroin would then be regularly arriving at addresses all across the US, simply receiving one would supposedly not imply that someone at the address had ordered the drugs in the first place. There would be plausible deniability.



Sure, the post office could spot a package and inform the police, who then might stake out your mailbox to see who collects the mail, then get a warrant to search the house to see if the package had been opened — confirming intent to buy.



Teppy thought of that: “It would be important for buyers to not open any package that they suspect may

This Bitcoin drugstore thought experiment quickly got out of hand

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We talked a whole lot about Circle last week, and I’ve already mentioned that the success of the IPO opened up doors for other firms (take a look at Gemini, for example, which announced it confidentially filed an S-1 with the SEC earlier this year). 



But while there’s a ton of appetite on the public markets, the question has to be asked: Who’s actually ready to premiere on a public stage?



Dragonfly’s Rob Hadick poured some cold water on the hopes and dreams of a crypto IPO season on this week’s Empire episode. He and Haun Ventures’ Diogo Monica noted that most crypto companies are a tad smaller than public markets typically prefer. 









To put that into perspective, we’d be talking about hundreds of millions raised in an IPO in comparison to the billion-dollar Circle debut. Hadick said that the IPO market is “definitely open.”



But that doesn’t mean that the firms are ready. Hadick expressed doubt that firms like Goldman Sachs or JP Morgan would be advising companies like Fireblocks to go public. 



“Fireblocks is not there. And that's true of Chainalysis, which is a great SaaS business. That's true of most of the other people we talked about. Kraken is a different story. And you know, I expect we'll see them [go] public. Maybe not this year, but maybe next year,” Hadick added. 



However, because of the appetite, there could be a slew of crypto IPOs that rush to the public markets before they’ve hit the typical maturity points. 



Hadick wouldn’t be surprised if firms talk to underwriters who promise to take them public through either a direct listing or go the more typical route like Circle and just aim to raise far lower (eyeing a $100 or $200 million raise versus billions). 



And, to be fair, crypto’s not a special snowflake when it comes to massive IPO success. Every industry that sees one company’s success has other players

What crypto firms could go public next?

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Earlier this week, Blockworks first reported that pump.fun has plans to raise $1 billion at a $4 billion valuation via a token sale. 



The potential b-nut would add to a likely already sizable war chest for the memecoin launchpad, which has generated over $700 million in revenue since launching last year. Some have speculated that the fresh funds could go toward the rollout of a pump.fun blockchain, which would capture some of the trading fees that currently go to Solana.  



In this week’s Lightspeed podcast roundup, Helius CEO Mert Mumtaz said launching a layer-1 without taking any other swings at growing pump’s business would do little else but increase the business’ take rate, which is another way of saying increase its profit margins. Mumtaz thinks this would be money poorly spent.



“​​Do you think that they would raise a billion dollars if what they cared about was increasing their margins from, let's say, 80% to 85%?,” Mumtaz mused. “If I'm their VC, I'm going to say, ‘What the fuck are you doing? That's extremely boring.’”



Rather, the Solana infrastructure CEO said, pump.fun’s fresh billion could de-risk new moonshot ideas to diversify the core business — which is lucrative but obviously quite captive to the whims of memecoin traders. (In fairness, a world does exist where pump.fun both develops new business lines and grows its margins on a new L1, but we’ll leave that aside for now).



That’s the big question for pump.fun: Can it find a second pitch? Pump could try to take the same path as Jupiter, which went on an acquisition spree, adding a memecoin frontend, NFTs, lending and more after coming to dominate the Solana swap market. 



“Historically, what you've seen in crypto M&A is that it has kind of lacked discipline,” Blockworks Research head of research Ryan Connor said on this point. “Seeing what pump does purchase

Pump.fun may have loftier goals than building an L1

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I was watching CNBC yesterday afternoon (and the French Open, don’t tell my boss) hoping to catch a glimpse of the NYSE exchange floor when Circle started trading, but a bigger story quickly dominated the news cycle. 



Fortunately for Circle shareholders, the political drama had seemingly no impact on shares of the newly-public stablecoin company. Trading under the ticker CRCL, the stock debuted more than 120% above IPO price. Demand was alive and well today, too, with more than 20 million shares traded before 11 a.m. ET. 



Back to that other big story, though. The biggest bromance in Washington is, apparently, imploding. 



Yesterday, when speaking to reporters in the Oval Office alongside German Chancellor Merz, President Trump revealed cracks in his relationship with Elon Musk. 



"Elon and I had a great relationship,” Trump said. “I don't know if we will anymore."



If Merz was upset that his meeting in Washington was completely overshadowed by a public feud, he didn’t show it. I’d imagine he’s just glad he isn’t on the other side of Trump’s wrath. 



Trump’s issues with Musk stem from the tech billionaire’s comments about the “one big beautiful bill” Act, the sweeping tax and budget legislative package Trump is trying to get through Congress. 



The bill is the heart of Trump’s platform, but Musk isn’t a fan for a few reasons: 




The bill cuts electric vehicle tax credits. 



The bill doesn’t do enough to curb government spending. 




On that first point, we’ll never know if Trump would have won without Musk’s support, but I think it’s safe to say it certainly didn’t hurt. In Musk’s opinion, he spent enough time and money to secure some EV credits. Trump says he doesn’t owe the billionaire a thing. 



Because it’s 2025, and because Trump and Musk are who they are, the venue for the fight was, of course,

Markets recover on jobs surprise amid political feud tensions

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World Network — known for its eye-scanning orb that verifies human accounts for its mobile super app — is launching the next phase of its developer incentive campaign.



World Network is managed by World Foundation and also involves corporate entities such as World Assets Limited and World Chain LLC. For-profit blockchain product developer Tools For Humanity is overseeing the development of the World app.



Collectively, World Foundation and TFH are working with crypto events DAO FWB to host their next event for builders, World Build 2.0, in July, according to a release Tools For Humanity shared exclusively with The Drop. Tools For Humanity Chief Product Officer Tiago Sada was one of the first edition’s judges.



The first World Build event ran for five months, from February until May this year. It included an online hackathon followed by an in-person build sprint and ended with a demo day, where builders pitched their apps to VCs and threw their hats in the ring for various grants. The second Build event is expected to have a similar format.



There are a number of different funding opportunities for mini app builders regardless of their participation in World Build. World Foundation is offering a Mini Apps Grants Program and Mini App Retroactive Rewards. 



TFH’s Dev Rewards Pilot has a total of $300,000 to give developers over a three-month period ending June 30. Rewards of $25,000 a week are split across multiple dev teams depending on mini app performance.



The World Foundation is also giving out $1 million worth of its WLD token to developers who’ve already shipped something for the World app and saw over 10,000 verified human users by May 16 as part of a retroactive funding effort. Devs have until June 9 to apply for that one-time WLD token gift.



There are already 300 mini apps so far available within the World mobile app with roughly $12 million in

World Foundation, Tools For Humanity unveil World Build 2.0

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Aave’s new Umbrella staking system went live yesterday, replacing the protocol’s once-theoretical insurance model with an onchain, automated safety net tied directly to individual assets. 



The USDC and USDT vaults currently have yields greater than 10% on offer. But for GHO — Aave’s bespoke stablecoin — a mismatched reward structure is creating an odd dynamic for GHO holders in search of yield.



Since 2020, Aave’s Safety Module (SM) has served as a kind of backstop — stkAAVE and AAVE-ETH LPs (stkABPT) could be slashed in theory, but governance votes and political incentives meant that slashing never occurred — even after bad debt events like the 2022 Curve exploit. With Umbrella, Aave introduces an autonomous mechanism that slashes stakers in real time once bad debt in a particular asset exceeds a preset threshold.



The goal: make Aave’s insurance fund more credible, capital-efficient and aligned with real user behavior.



How Umbrella works



Each Umbrella vault is an ERC-4626 strategy for staking yield-bearing assets like Aave-deposited USDC, USDT and ETH, or by staking GHO. Users stake their token and earn both the underlying lending APY and an additional “Safety Incentive” stream. Rewards follow an S-shaped curve, with peak emissions at the vault’s “Target Liquidity” and tapering off above or below.



If a shortfall occurs, the protocol automatically burns the same asset from its vault after a configurable “first-loss offset” (currently 100,000 units per asset). There is no governance vote, no auction and no delay.



Like the legacy module, staked tokens remain locked for 20 days once withdrawal is requested, with a two-day window to exit.



Migration: New names, new risks



The shift to Umbrella brings some changes for existing stakers:




stkAAVE and stkABPT remain active, but with slashing disabled. They now serve primarily

Umbrella reshapes Aave staking

Gemini announced that it filed a confidential draft S-1 with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday. 



The filing is one of the first steps for the crypto firm to go public through an initial public offering. 



The S-1, however, isn’t public yet, but Gemini said that it expects its IPO to move forward following the review process from the SEC. 



The move comes just a day after Circle debuted on the New York Stock Exchange in an IPO that was pretty successful. The stock was priced at $31 at an offering of 34 million shares, but started trading at $69 a share. It closed up over 160% at $83 a share on Thursday. 



Read more: Did Circle execute its IPO ‘perfectly’



Industry watchers noted that the success of an IPO as big as Circle could spur others to quickly follow in the stablecoins footsteps. 



“I suspect we’ll be seeing several crypto companies accelerating their IPO plans now that Circle has revealed Wall Street’s appetite,” GSR’s Carlos Guzman told Blockworks.



Empire co-host and Blockworks co-founder Jason Yanowitz said that he spoke to a couple of firms in crypto that were pulling their IPO timelines forward because of the stablecoin issuer. 




More true than everSpeaking with founders this week, the demand for Circle / $CRCL just pulled forward the IPO timeline for several other companies. https://t.co/HMbSC4434B— Yano 🟪 (@JasonYanowitz) June 5, 2025




Bloomberg reported in March that the Winklevoss-led firm was considering going public, saying that it could hit the public markets as soon as this year. 



Both Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss have been supporters of President Donald Trump’s pro-crypto administration, and were also in attendance at the Crypto Ball earlier this year. 



Gemini didn’t immediately return a request for comment.







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