🕵️ Discovering alpha

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Whew, there has been a slew of legal headlines the past few days. Unicoin, which we’ll get to in a bit, Genesis v. DCG, and now Bancor’s case against Uniswap…

Uniswap CEO Hayden Adams was a bit dismissive of it and said he just wants to hear from his lawyers when Uniswap wins. 

The TL;DR is that Bprotocol Foundation, the nonprofit supporting Bancor Protocol, is alleging that it created and patented the CPAMM model way back in 2016, which had a mechanism to allow permissionless onchain trades through smart contracts. Uniswap’s OG protocol, the lawsuit claims, is using its CPAMM design…and didn’t ask for permission to do so. Uniswap’s protocol has been around since 2018, to give you a sense of timelines.

So now the two get to argue it out in front of a judge. Woohoo. 

Meanwhile:

• Bitcoin topped $106,000 this morning, a slight increase over the past day.

• AVAX is up 2.8% to $22.77. 

• DeFi TVL is up 31% in the past week to $117 billion, per Blockworks Research.

🗞️ Extra! Extra!

VanEck is planning to launch the VanEck PurposeBuilt fund next month, which will focus specifically on Avalanche.

The goal is to have a dedicated fund that can focus on projects building on Avalanche, and it’ll be managed by VanEck’s Digital Assets Alpha Fund. 

I asked Pranav Kanade, portfolio manager for the Alpha fund, why the firm decided to focus on Avalanche: “Increasingly, the best builders want to own the full stack with minimal value leakage, and Avalanche’s L1 architecture makes that possible. The Avalanche team has also backed this with strong business development efforts that are delivering results,” he explained.

“At the same time, earlier-stage teams looking to test for product-market fit can launch on the C-Chain, which is competitive with the best high-throughput EVM chains. The Avalanche ecosystem offers solutions for builders across their entire lifecycle.”

The team doesn’t plan to launch any other funds with another ecosystem at the moment, Kanade added. 

The fund will invest in liquid tokens and projects backed by venture capital, which could include a variety of sectors, including gaming, financial services, payments and AI. 

It’ll aim to invest typically “around or after a Token Generation Event, with a fundamentals-first strategy focused on long-term outcomes.”

Any unused capital will be deployed onchain through real-world asset products on Avalanche, which could include tokenized money markets to ensure liquidity is maintained, a press release said. 

As for how the fund itself came about, Kanade explained that the Avalanche team “liked our investment strategy.”

“We brainstormed a structure that would work well for both sides. Today’s best founders in the token space often face a “discovery” problem — it's easy to get drowned out by the speculative noise around memecoins and vaporware,” he added. “We wanted to support a more mature approach to capital allocation, and Avalanche shared that vision. With many of the strongest founders already building in Avalanche, this was a natural direction for us.”

The team isn’t confirming the size of the fund at this time. But the announcement overall is just yet another sign of the times, as we continue to see a trend of capital going towards builders who are focused on other opportunities outside of infrastructure.

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• Hong Kong passed its own stablecoin bill, and stablecoin issuers will now need to obtain a license from Hong Kong’s Monetary Authority. 

• Theta Capital raised over $175 million for investments in crypto funds. 

• Argentine president Javier Milei shuttered the task force investigating his role in promoting the Libra stablecoin.

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

In this new era of crypto, the SEC’s been pretty clear: Regulation by enforcement’s out, but that doesn’t mean it’ll idly stand by if it thinks crimes are being committed.

Last night, the SEC announced it was suing Unicoin and its executives, alleging that the team violated securities laws in its $100 million token raise. Specifically, the SEC named CEO Alexander Konanykhin, general counsel Richard Devlin and former CIO Alejandro Dominguez, as well as former board chair Maria Moschini, in the suit.

In the 77-page lawsuit, the SEC says that Unicoin and its executives made “false and misleading statements and material omissions” on various public forums. 

The team, the SEC claimed, told investors that its token would be backed by real-world assets, but the defendants “never actually intended for Unicoin tokens to be backed by any assets.”

Konanykhin, in the documents, is accused of selling his Unicoin Rights Certificates “months after receiving them from the company,” for more than $2.6 million. 

In April, Unicoin said, in a letter to investors, that it rejected a settlement attempt by the SEC after being made aware of the regulatory agency’s probe. The letter claimed that the investigation has racked up “multi-billion dollar damages” to both investors and token holders.

Konanykhin told Decrypt in April that he plans to fight the allegations. There are still a lot of legal processes to go through, but so far it looks like Konanykhin might get his day in court.