🌱 Big growth energy

Brought to you by:

Crypto investigations and cases are dropping like flies. 

Which may mean good news is on the horizon for the co-founders of Samourai Wallet, who are facing up to 25 years in prison. 

A filing from earlier this week shows that both parties — prosecutors and the legal teams for Keonne Rodriguez and William Lonergan Hill — are mulling a decision to drop the case. 

The two asked for an extension to let prosecutors determine their position after Lonergan Hill and Rodriguz sought to dismiss the case. The two used the DOJ’s disbandment of its crypto enforcement team in the dismissal request. 

Meanwhile:

• Bitcoin’s holding at $95,000 flat on the day so far.

• Total stablecoin value is up to $231 billion, a 1.6% increase over the past month, per rwa.xyz. 

• DeFi TVL is at $100 billion exactly, per Blockworks Research, a slight decrease over the past 24 hours.

🐣 Growing up

One of the biggest narratives we’ve discussed a lot here on Empire is the rise of institutional adoption. 

Sygnum, the digital asset banking group, is no stranger to the shift and announced yesterday that it’s seen a 400% increase in its average annual growth in trading volumes since 2020. 

“What we have seen over the past year and a half is a significant number of traditional institutional trading counterparties coming into the industry and gaining interest in using our solutions to delve into the space,” Sygnum’s head of corporate clients, Nestor Palao, told me.

“We talk about brokerage firms, prime brokers, investment funds and family offices that see, in Sygnum, a regulated gateway into this industry. And this, I would say, indeed, is something that we have seen growing.”

But the change — and overall growth in the industry — has led to crypto projects themselves evolving. 

Specifically, Palao noted that startups have been approaching Sygnum more and more. In the past, they’d just seek out a bank account so that they could pay employees or contractors, since traditional banks were, well, not so welcoming. 

But over the last few years, projects have come to Sygnum and “professionalized themselves significantly.” Palao explained that these projects now have a finance department, not just a founding team, and “professionalize the management of their capital.”

“We see projects daily that launch a project; they manage to raise a significant amount of capital, or their token gains a lot of attention, and they end up sitting on a very significant balance of treasury assets,” he explained. 

“In the beginning, it was purely to ‘Give me a bank account so I can pay my employees.’ Now, it’s still that, but it’s also a lot more about, ‘How can I properly manage my treasury of tokens? How can I hedge my exposure? How can I generate yield on my holdings?’”

What Palao told us lines up with what we’ve seen in other segments around crypto, too. Back in February, PitchBook’s Robert Le noted that the rebound in venture capital activity was pretty focused on “established” teams. 

Oh, how time flies…

Brought to you by:

Arkham is a crypto exchange and a blockchain analytics platform that lets you look inside the wallets of the best crypto traders — and then act on that information.

Arkham’s Intel Platform has a suite of features including real-time alerts, customizable dashboards, a transaction visualization tool, and advanced transaction filtering — all of which is accessible on all major blockchain networks, and completely free.

Arkham’s main product is the exchange, where users can express their trade ideas against the market.

• The SEC dropped its investigation into PayPal’s stablecoin, PYUSD. 

• A Texas judge says that Tornado Cash can’t be sanctioned again. 

• The UK is introducing draft rules to regulate the crypto industry.

Not Just Online. Onchain.

From NFTs to prediction markets, loyalty engines to mobile-native wallets — Permissionless IV is where real users meet real products.

And if you’re on the AI frontier? Onchain agents, decentralized GPUs, verifiable training — it’s all here, and it’s all moving fast.

Crypto’s next big unlock isn’t technical. It’s usable. Come build it.

🎟️ Buy Your Tickets 
📅 June 24–26 | Brooklyn

On my mind: Trump Media

Katherine: So Trump Media, in an investor letter, teased that it was “exploring” a utility token. 

That’s it. No further details other than that there could also be a Truth digital wallet released and that the token could “initially” be used to pay for a Truth+ subscription. 

While I’m a big fan of being honest and upfront, the issue with this type of announcement is that everyone runs with the headline, but there’s not a whole lot to go on otherwise. What does the utility token really look like? Can or will it be used for things outside of a Truth+ subscription? How much thought’s been put into it?

When I’m left with more questions than answers, I become skeptical. 

To be fair, they also teased non-crypto moves they’re thinking of making, like how to monetize Truth+, so the utility token isn’t a complete one-off. And it’s pretty par for the course to drum up excitement in a letter like this. 

Crypto just tends to see a headline, or part of a headline, and get super excited about it. This, however, is more of a slow burn. We need to see how this develops before anyone gets too excited.