🇺🇸 Make DeFi Great Again

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Watch out, Strategy. 

After a Financial Times report came out, Cantor, Bitfinex, Tether and SoftBank were quick to publish a press release about their newest endeavor. 

Twenty One Capital will be helmed by Jack Mallers and will launch with $3.6B worth of bitcoin in its treasury — a far cry from the likes of Strategy, but notable considering how other companies have adopted the bitcoin strategy. 

The plan: Go public after merging with Cantor Equity Partners’ special purpose acquisition company. 

Twenty One Capital, beyond accumulating bitcoin, will support “financial products built with and on Bitcoin.”

Looks like we have a new company to keep an eye on.

Meanwhile:

• Bitcoin’s down slightly to $92,000. ETH’s tumbled 3.6% to $1,750 in the past day.

• K33 noted that CME futures exposure is up to 140,000 BTC, and premiums are over 9% for the first time since late January, a sign of improving sentiment.

• DeFi TVL is up to $95 billion, a slight increase over the past day, per Blockworks Research.

🧑‍🚀 Expand your horizons

A bank, but make it DeFi. 

Ether.fi is launching the first DeFi bank, a decentralized and non-custodial alternative to traditional banks. 

Basically, the project is expanding into a new category, “which is not a traditional bank, in the sense that it doesn’t take users’ deposits, but it really is a viable alternative to banks,” CEO Mike Silagadze told me.

“Our plan from the beginning was to build this larger platform that really became a bank alternative for users,” Silagadze noted. “I think over the next year…you [will] actually see…half a dozen companies launch something that starts looking a lot like this, where it’s basically like a Revolut or a Neobank…but built on DeFi crypto rails.”

As anyone who regularly uses DeFi knows, “there’s this...awful dance you have to go through, basically, where you put some stuff onchain, you do stuff there, hopefully you’re in some rewards or yields.” Then, Silagadze continued, “you have to get the money offchain,” so you go to an exchange and sell your crypto for fiat, and the fiat has to go somewhere… and yeah, you get the idea. It’s not an easy process.

Ether.fi’s goal is to onboard crypto natives that already use its other products, and then work to onboard the less-crypto-native folks who use centralized exchanges or are perhaps crypto-curious. 

Over the past year, the project has found success in its product launches and currently offers both Ether.fi Stake and Ether.fi Liquid. 

“Even for myself, I probably do 70% to 80% of my finances now on Ether.fi and...hopefully soon, adding a few features, I’ll really be able to move close to 100%, which is what we want to offer to people. So that’s kind of...the culmination of this vision we had from the early days,” Silagadze told me. 

But it’s also expanding to the US, with Silagadze noting that the country is “open for business for crypto companies” nowadays. 

“Specifically, the staking product is opening up, and then the cash product is going to be available for most states in the US. The reason for that is twofold. One is obviously the new SEC. They disbanded the unit that was going after crypto and prosecuting people for all kinds of silly reasons, and now they’re working on the stablecoin bill,” he explained. 

And the other reason is that the “licensing that we were able to get allows us to operate in the US.”

But this new move is something Silagadze and Ether.fi couldn’t have done six months ago. They were looking to launch new products, but he had thought the US was out of the question. Oh, how times have changed. 

Right now, Ether.fi has roughly 200,000 users. That said, Silagadze noted it’s hard to keep track because folks have different wallets, but they’ll be able to pin down more accurate numbers as folks make accounts for the DeFi bank. 

“Our internal goal is to get to about 100,000 cards by the end of this year. If we could get to that, we would feel pretty good about it,” he said.

I asked Silagadze if the expansion would require any further funding (the firm last raised in February of last year), but Silagadze told me they haven’t “touched the money.” 

“We've been profitable since almost day one. So in 2024, we did about $22 million in revenue, and we were profitable this year. It depends on a lot of factors, but we’ll probably do...$40 [million] to $90 million in revenue, and very likely [be] comfortably profitable,” he explained.

Brought to you by:

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.

• New fund alert: Securitize debuted a new fund in partnership with Mantle. 

• Pay-to-play? President Donald Trump’s TRUMP token jumped after announcing that top token holders will be invited to a private dinner with the president. 

• A relaxed regulatory environment isn’t deterring prosecutors from seeking an 8-year sentence for Mango Markets exploiter Avi Eisenberg.

👟 Find your footing

ICYMI: Arch Labs announced a $13 million raise with the goal of launching a bitcoin virtual machine. 

The Series A round was led by Pantera Capital.

“We’re at a pivotal moment—both for Arch and for Bitcoin. Bitcoin has seen massive growth and institutional acceptance, but the mempool tells a different story: Not enough on-chain activity is driving sustained fees for miners,” CEO Matt Mudano told me. “This raise allows us to scale engineering, grow our community and support a new wave of builders. Our focus is on creating a thriving, composable ecosystem of applications that bring real utility to Bitcoin and help secure its future.”

They plan to deploy the capital across three priorities, he added. Scaling the “core engineering team,” ecosystem growth, and “expanding developer adoption.”

Basically, the team is hyper-focused on infrastructure as it works toward mainnet launch. Arch Labs is also using “grants, developer tooling and community programs to help turn Arch into the home for Bitcoin’s programmable economy.”

The team also plans to launch a token, but Mudano told me that they can’t disclose details at this time. What he did say, though, was that a native token is important in the team’s eyes, given that it will be used for both gas and staking. It would also help secure the network through “aligned incentives.”

“We’re being thoughtful about timing and strategy, especially in a market that’s still finding its footing,” he told me.

It’s a builders market. It will always be a builders market. 

36 hours of pure output. The Permissionless Hackathon, powered by Cracked Labs, is where devs go heads down to ship.

Deployments. Not ideas — code in prod.

💻$100K+ in bounties

June 22–23 | Brooklyn

On our minds: CZ’s newest era

Katherine: If you had told me last year that former Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao would give government officials advice on how to regulate and approach digital assets, I probably would have scoffed. 

This time last year, Zhao was about to be sentenced to prison after pleading guilty to money laundering charges the previous November.

I know I said something similar in an earlier segment, but it’s genuinely wild how quickly things change. 

Now Zhao is traveling the world and being named as an advisor to countries like Pakistan and Kyrgyzstan. CZ’s education era is something he teased ahead of his sentencing last year, but it seems like Zhao’s educational focus is not just on Giggle Academy; he’s also ready and willing to lend an ear to governments. 

It certainly is a fascinating shift, and one I’ve been keeping an eye on.