💻 Crypto's AWS moment

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A filing with the Maine Attorney General’s office shows that the Coinbase data breach impacted over 69,000 folks.

Michael Arrington warned that the data stolen in the breach, which includes personal information such as home addresses, puts people at risk. 

“The human cost, denominated in misery, is much larger than the $400m or so they think it will actually cost the company to reimburse people,” he said. 

It’s a stark warning and not one to be taken lightly. 

Perhaps not the cheeriest kickoff for this morning, but stay safe out there. 

Meanwhile:

• Bitcoin’s up 4.2% this morning to $110,000 after carving out multiple new all-time highs yesterday. 

• CETUS, the token for the DEX on Sui, is down nearly 15% to $0.1733 after the team said it detected an “incident” and paused the smart contract temporarily. 

• Bitcoin’s boost has helped the overall crypto market cap, which is up to $3.44 trillion, a 2.3% increase over the past 24 hours, per Blockworks Research.

👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 Mass adoption

Yesterday, I had the opportunity to moderate a panel for American Banker’s virtual stablecoin summit.

Obviously, the audience that the panel catered to was more TradFi than crypto, but my panelists included a16z Crypto’s Sam Broner, EY’s Paul Brody, Halliday’s Griffin Dunaif and Superstate’s Robert Leshner, which meant we could cover a wide variety of topics. 

Anecdotally, one of my takeaways was that there’s a lot of interest and appetite for stablecoins. And the base level of knowledge is pretty high for folks who are presumably not crypto-native. One of the highlights for me was the infra talk, even if it’s not necessarily the most attractive topic.

But back to the panel itself: Brody, who’s EY’s global blockchain leader, told me that they’ve estimated that if they moved all of EY’s payments from the traditional systems to crypto rails, it would save them a $100 million a year. (He added that they can’t do that, because of regulations.) 

Even for EY, $100 million isn’t a small amount. 

Dunaif, at one point, also brought up that “the stablecoin moment” opens the door for “the Amazon Web Services moment” in finance. 

“I think one of the most exciting properties of a blockchain is that we’re making our commercial systems, our finance systems, look a lot more like data systems and traditional [software as a service] systems. So what that means is that value suddenly becomes a programming primitive, right? It’s in the runtime itself,” he explained.

So there’s the potential for a bank or a FinTech to offer a service akin to what AWS does for the cloud. 

“There’s probably not a whole lot of margins in just the stablecoin itself, but in the services you could add on top,” he added.

While I think the overall thought has been that stablecoin rails could clean up and simplify the preexisting system, Brody noted that the infrastructure may look “just as complicated” as what was there previously, but “it might be much more contestable, much more open, much more competitive.”

Don’t get too excited, though. Broner still thinks we’re a few years out, even with the uptick in demand and regulatory potential. He believes the adoption will be slow, but it’s coming. It’s not just the EYs of the world that are looking to be more efficient and save money; there are plenty of smaller firms that would love to save money on things like international money transfers. 

And that’s your vibe check this wonderful Thursday.

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• Braden Karony, SafeMoon’s CEO, now faces up to 45 years in prison after being found guilty of all counts.

• A wallet tied to the phishing campaigns on Coinbase not only laundered funds but also appeared to taunt crypto sleuth ZachXBT. 

• Tron’s Justin Sun claims to be the biggest TRUMP memecoin holder with a nearly $22 million stake, which means he’ll be at the dinner hosted by the President for the top 220 holders.

The Most Talent-Dense 72 Hours in Crypto

DeFi’s evolving. Real-world assets, capital formation, talent reshoring — it’s all in play.

Consumer apps are hitting mainnet — mobile-native, sticky, and finally usable.

AI is going onchain: agents, GPUs, verifiable training…

And the people building all of it? They’ll be in Brooklyn for 3 days.

• Sreeram Kannan from Eigenlayer

• Ali Yahya from a16z

• Aasey Caruso from Topology

• Danny Ryan from ETH core

• Founders and leaders from MegaETH, Helus, Jito, Supra, Anza, and more

📆 June 24-26 | Brooklyn

Sam Altman’s Worldcoin raised $135 million from a16z and Bain Capital. 

Here’s the deal: World Foundation subsidiary, World Assets, sold WLD tokens worth $135 million to both firms. The token sales took place at market prices, per the press release.

“This funding opportunity is in service to the long-term mission of World and is backed by the builders who believed in World from the beginning. It is anticipated that World Network will become one of the first self-sustaining protocols,” the release said.

First of all: Kudos to the honesty in the press release and breaking down how the money was raised. We love to see it. Secondly, World’s ready to rock and roll in its US expansion. Having just announced earlier this month that it’s heading stateside, World is preparing to open up Orbs in Austin, Atlanta, Miami, Nashville and Los Angeles (to name a few cities). 

The firm previously raised $115 million in a Series C back in 2023. Blockchain Capital led the round, with Bain, a16z and Distributed Capital also participating.