🚘 Coming Thru

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Yesterday, CoinDesk’s Sam Kessler broke news about Movement Labs, a firm we’ve also reported on. 

It’s a well-reported story, and worth your time if you haven’t read it in full. But the reason I bring it up is because it brings to light a lot of these shady deals that circulate as gossip and rumors around group chats and conferences. 

If crypto’s going to mature and be taken seriously, these types of deals need to be named and shamed. Regulation helps, of course, but it’s also on folks to hold themselves accountable. And when they can’t, lean on journalists. 

The media’s gotten a bad rep, but reporters are here to ensure that the truth comes out. Investigations and scoops aren’t just meant to drive negative attention, they’re also to ensure that projects — and the people who are running them — are held accountable. 

With that said, you can always find me at @bykatherineross on Telegram and all social platforms, Signal, or on Proton at [email protected]. 

Meanwhile:

• Bitcoin’s hovering around $96,000, a 1.1% increase over the past day.

• WLD’s up 1.9% to $1.09, per Coingecko. 

• DEX volume’s up 30% in the past week to $17.6 billion, per Blockworks Research.

🦌 Bucking the trend

It’s been a busy week for VC raises, and some of the projects have caught heat around social media for being infra plays. 

Like Unto, for example. 

“We definitely got bucketed into the whole ‘another L1, oh no’ [discourse]. We felt a little sad about that, but we’ll just have to prove it. Because, in some ways, it’s true,” cofounder Will Yoo told me. 

But both Yoo and cofounder Liam Heeger said they’re up to the challenge because they’ve both “done this before,” whereas other teams haven’t “built systems that are supposed to perform at extremely high levels of scale.” 

“We love Solana and we think they’re going to be an incredible competitor. We’d be honored to compete with them,” Yoo said. They’ll be “ripping” out the Solana virtual machine with Thru, and they argue that they won’t be competing with Jump’s Solana client — something that’s literally held up in court. 

Heeger is ex-Jump Crypto, but he didn’t leave without making some waves. Jump filed a suit against Heeger after he departed Firedancer to start Unto with Yoo. The case was dismissed in February, and the two told me that they had a term sheet from Electric Capital, which led their seed round, the next day.

They wouldn’t comment further on the litigation.

The $14.4 million rounds are a combined pre-seed and seed raises. Framework Ventures led their pre-seed. 

The capital will go towards building out the core infrastructure on Thru, and the ecosystem around it, which they expect to be “capital intensive, but because [Thru’s] going first-party rather than third-party, we believe we can be capital-efficient.”

The two, in Thru’s manifesto, argued that blockchains “have lost their way.”

“Thru's consensus scales through competition, not accumulation. Operators earn their spot with uptime, throughput, and by relentlessly pushing fees toward zero, not by how much stake they can attract,” it said. The goal is to not only compete with other web3 projects, but also to compete with web2. 

Lofty ambitions, right? 

I asked Yoo and Heeger where they think they’ll be in a year, and they told me they want to “spend the amount of time necessary to create something incredible.”

So it may take some time, but the two think they can stand out in the long term.

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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.

• Ripple wanted to buy stablecoin issuer Circle, and offered up to $5 billion, but Circle reportedly said no thanks.

• Kraken launched crypto derivatives trading for professional clients in the UK.

• At Token2049, Eric Trump said that World Liberty’s USD1 stablecoin is going to be used for MGX’s multi-billion dollar investment in Binance and will integrate with Tron.

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🎟️ Buy Your Tickets 
📅 June 24–26 | Brooklyn

Oh, we’re so back.

And so is Worldcoin — on US soil, at least. 

Last night, Tools for Humanity — the company behind Worldcoin — launched six hubs across the US where people can verify their World ID. Afterwards, they can download the World App and claim their WLD token airdrop. 

To put this in perspective: two years ago, Worldcoin said it was preventing US citizens from being able to “use, purchase or access” WLD. All of that’s changed now.

Folks visiting the hubs to get their irises scanned will receive 16 WLD, and those who have downloaded and registered with the World app are eligible to get 150 WLD.

(Has anyone checked on Gary Gensler?)

But in all seriousness, the US really is open for business, and the blog post announcing the move made that pretty clear: “The United States of America stands at the forefront of artificial intelligence innovation. Now, it's time for the world's AI hub to embrace the essential counterpart: proof of human.”