👑 Game of Crypto Thrones

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Are you ready for ETH’s bull case?

If you’re looking at the chart, maybe this week’s episode of Empire can make you feel a bit better about everything. 

Varys Capital Head of Venture Tom Dunleavy and Ethereum community member Ryan Berckmans joined Empire co-hosts Jason Yanowitz and Santiago Santos to make their bull cases for ETH. 

The two present a compelling argument for ETH and manage to hit on the topic of the moment during a discussion around L1 valuations. I won’t spoil too much, but it’s worth a listen this week. 

Meanwhile:

• Bitcoin’s at $102,000, a 1.2% decline over the past day.

• ETH’s down to $2,390, a 5.2% decline over the past week.

• DEX volume’s up 9.6% in the past 24 hours to $13.4 billion, per Blockworks Research.

👩‍❤️‍💋‍👨 M&A Monday

You know what’s better than big, splashy M&A deals? 

A bunch of smaller ones that show the appetite isn’t just isolated to the top. 

Take, for example, three M&A deals announced last week: Alchemy acquiring DexterLab, 0x buying up Flood, and Gnosis buying HQ.xyz. 

That means that, so far in May, we’ve already seen a handful of acquisitions. Just last week, we had announcements from Robinhood, Alchemy, 0x, Anchorage and Gnosis.

We certainly fared better last year than we did the year prior, but we’re already on track to surpass 2021 levels, thanks to the mega-deals we’ve seen from the likes of Coinbase and Kraken. 

The majority of deals tend to fall in the “Finance” category, per Blockworks Research, which isn’t necessarily a surprise given that companies are looking to add to their toolboxes as crypto sees wider adoption and activity picks up.

Both Robinhood and Anchorage’s respective deals last week gave some insight into how the firms are looking to develop their offerings: Robinhood gained a Canadian foothold, while Anchorage widened its stablecoin exposure (although it won’t continue Mountain’s yield-bearing stablecoin USDM). 

The Gnosis acquisition looks like a further foray into stablecoin payments, a la Anchorage. HQ.xyz, now Gnosis HQ, gives Gnosis the ability to offer stablecoin offramps, treasury oversight controls and accounting tool integrations. 

“If Gnosis Pay represents our commitment to empowering everyday consumers with self-custodial financial tools, Gnosis HQ completes that vision on the enterprise side: offering crypto-native teams and traditional businesses alike the tools they need to operate with autonomy, compliance, and clarity,” the team said.

Meanwhile, 0x is taking another step to stay competitive in the DEX aggregation space by acquiring Flood. This acquisition was of particular interest to me because it involves a firm buying up a competitor, and it speaks further to some activity I think we’ll see down the line as crypto really heats up. 

The terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, but 0x said it’s “consolidating our leadership in aggregation infrastructure, bringing together elite technical talent and pioneering routing architecture to accelerate the evolution of decentralized trading.”

But Alchemy’s acquisition of DexterLab is a bit of a different story. At first glance, my read is that Alchemy is acknowledging that firms want to build on Solana, and this acquisition gives them exposure to that play. 

Per CoinDesk’s report, the team said DexterLab will help the development of Web3 applications on Solana, which will help organizational demand. 

At this point, I might have to rethink calling it “M&A season” and instead call it crypto’s M&A year… But maybe I’m getting ahead of myself. 

Either way, these deals show that firms have the appetite to grow or consolidate their offerings, which is a very healthy sign for crypto.

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• Vitalik Buterin suggested implementing ‘partially stateless nodes’ to help scale Ethereum.

• We might see the stablecoin bill clearing the Senate as soon as this week. 

• The hacker who falsely posted that the bitcoin ETFs were approved from the SEC’s X account received 14 months in prison.

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

The Coinbase story isn’t over yet. 

Not only are folks filing lawsuits against Coinbase after it disclosed last week that attackers were able to bribe some customer service reps into handing over sensitive customer data, but now it looks like Coinbase hasn’t been the only target. 

Bloomberg reported that Kraken and Binance have faced similar attacks, but neither have had customer data stolen. The main reason? Both firms have different policies and technologies that allegedly prevented the same type of attack. 

I’m going to leave the post-mortem of what happened to security experts who are far more capable than I to discuss such things, but I think the whole situation should be examined. Not only the “who, what, how” of it all, but also: “Why weren’t there more precautions in place to prevent folks like customer service reps from seemingly being able to readily access customer service information?”

I think we can simultaneously acknowledge that it’s unsurprising that attackers are trying to make these types of attacks, and that there should be a higher level of security to protect customers. 

Coinbase is a vital player for crypto, and they have earned the trust of some pretty big names. But they also have to ensure that even the smallest customers can rely on them.