🌚 Fake it 'til you make it

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Gm!

We once again made it to Friday. 

It’s been a very newsy week, but I have a fun story to close it out and some potentially promising data for you doomscrollers. 

We’ll see you bright and early Monday.

🫷 Can’t fool crypto

Picture the iconic Spider-Man meme with the various Spider-Men pointing at each other. 

Got it in your head? 

Kraken said yesterday that it turned the tables on a North Korean hacker who was trying to get a job at the exchange.

I spoke to Kraken’s chief security officer, Nick Percoco, who gave me some details that are, honestly, just perfect for a Friday edition. 

Percoco told me Kraken had received a list of email addresses tied to hackers. They, as one would expect, checked to see if any of those addresses would pop up around Kraken. One did. The person had applied for a job and was in a pool of candidates. 

Basically, he explained, the person’s resume wasn’t standout enough for the hiring team to otherwise pay attention. But the team decided to see what would happen if they proceeded with the hacker.

According to Percoco, given some red flags, the person wouldn’t have gotten very far in the job application process. For example, when the person joined a Zoom call, it was under a different name (not the name he’d used on the application), and then he quickly changed it. 

When Percoco virtually sat down with the individual for one of the cultural interviews, things got interesting. It was Halloween, so naturally, Percoco asked the individual what he was doing for Halloween. After an extensive conversation, he claims it was pretty clear the person didn’t understand the holiday. 

Then, when asked to pull out his phone and show his Google map location (to verify that he was in Houston, Texas), the individual struggled with that, too, Kraken said. It took him a few minutes of pretty obvious scrolling to find Texas on his Google Maps, per Percoco.

While this story is amusing now, it pulls back the curtain on a bigger problem in crypto. These bad actors are actively trying to infiltrate US crypto companies. 

Percoco warned that companies have to be more careful about who they’re hiring and how they verify them. In Kraken’s case, the individual had enough missteps that he wouldn’t have made it through the normal process. But hiring someone directly through Discord, for example, could leave a project at risk. 

His advice for screening a candidate that’s raising some red flags is to have them go to a place like a local Starbucks or McDonald’s and order something. That way — on a Zoom or virtual call — you can see where they are and it gives the interviewer insight into the location. For example, a McDonald’s in Germany would have German on the packaging instead of English, he said.

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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.

The birds are chirping, the sun is shining and open interest is on the path to recovery. 

After Bitcoin hit a low of $22.6 billion in open interest on April 13, it recovered to end the month. 

Meanwhile, Solana’s showing the potential for a more bullish recovery. 

“SOL’s OI surged dramatically to over $1.6 billion by the final week of April. This increase accompanied SOL’s impressive price rally, surging from around $120 on April 6 to surpass $152 on April 24, clearly signaling traders’ renewed risk appetite and strong conviction in the asset’s upward momentum,” Amberdata wrote.

Institutions seem to be re-engaging when looking at the open interest at exchanges, too.

“In April 2025, open interest across major crypto derivative exchanges saw a substantial rebound, highlighting renewed institutional confidence and trader participation,” Amberdata wrote. 

Binance led the pack, seeing open interest jump to $10.2 billion by the end of the month from $8.5 billion at the beginning. Reading between the lines, it suggests that traders have been busy rebuilding their leveraged positions, which would also account for bitcoin’s price action. 

So perhaps we’ll see a more bullish May, and — I’m trying not to get ahead of myself here — perhaps we’ll see a sentiment change as well.

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

Last week, I asked: If you had a fund to invest with, where would you put your money?

It was an even tie between “the intersection of crypto and TradFi” and “Infra.” Take that, Crypto Twitter!

There wasn’t a loser in last week’s poll, with the runner-ups also tying. Guess you all want a different piece of the crypto pie.

This week, I’m wondering: