OVERVIEW

Altcoins Saw Green And Immediately Made It Weird 😐️

Here’s What’s Happening 👇️

The only thing in the top 50 market cap for crypto making anything resembling activity is $ZEC ( ▲ 6.32% ) , and that’s because… well you’ll have to read about it below. It’s the first story. So not far.

Everything else is just… existing. Nothing is screaming higher and nothing is tanking. Very much a ‘meh’ kind of day.

Before we dive in, here’s today’s crypto crypto’s total market and altcoin market cap charts:

PRIVACY
Privacy Coin That Was Supposed To Die In 2018 Now On The Same App Your Mom Uses 🏹

$HOOD ( ▼ 5.53% ) flipped the switch on $ZEC ( ▲ 6.32% ) trading this morning, which means the same app that turned $GME ( ▼ 2.53% ) into a religious experience will now let Todd from HR buy a crypto specifically engineered to make his transactions none of the IRS's business. 🛑

Robinhood spent years offering Zcash… but just the data feed - which is corporate speak for "look, but no touch" That era ended today.

The Shielded Pool Didn't Wait For Permission

While Robinhood was workshopping its compliance memos, Orchard (the shielded ZEC pool) was eating. The pool held 942,191 ZEC in January 2025. By April, 1.88 million. July, 2.31 million. December, 4.17 million. Today, 4.54 million. Total shielded supply now sits at 5.17 million ZEC - a 4x expansion in 15 months.

A meaningful slice of the 21 million ZEC cap is now parked in addresses blockchain forensics firms cannot see into. Exchange float keeps shrinking.

I've said it for months. Privacy isn't a feature. The shielded pool figured that out a long time ago. Robinhood's customers are about to find out. 😱

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NEWS
DeFi Protocol Hailed As Hero For Not Stealing From Users After Users Get Stolen From 🤗 

In what industry observers are calling a groundbreaking display of basic ethics, DeFi protocol Volo announced it would absorb $3.5 million in losses after hackers drained three of its vaults, rather than the industry-standard move of shrugging and blaming users. 👏

"We will do our best not to pass this to our users," the team posted, to thunderous applause. Volo has since frozen $2M of stolen funds by politely asking centralized exchanges to please not let the hacker cash out.

The attacker was reportedly surprised that DeFi has customer service now. 🫢

NEWS
Japanese Banks Announce Plan To Do Same Thing They Already Do, But On Blockchain 👀

Nomura, and a cast of acronym-heavy co-conspirators announced a joint proof-of-concept to move Japanese government bonds onto a blockchain, a breakthrough that will let them do exactly what they already do, but slower at first and then eventually faster. ⏩️

The PoC will "verify, from both legal and practical perspectives," whether updating a spreadsheet qualifies as innovation. Officials cited 24/7 availability as a key benefit, apparently unaware the bond market has been closed on weekends for centuries for a reason. 🤦

CHAINLINK
Chainlink Tokenizes Arizona Rocks Into $11 Billion Of Securities, Promises To Dig Them Up Later ⚒️ 

Bridgetower announced it has tokenized $11 billion of an Arizona copper-gold project using $LINK ( ▼ 1.07% ) , a milestone the company is pitching as a major step forward in converting holes in the ground into digital securities before anyone mines them. 🪨

The platform is using all of Chainlink’s fun sounding tools (CCIP, Proof of Reserve, NAVLink, and CRE) - a stack of acronyms designed to verify that yes, the rocks are still there.

Institutional buyers can now fund speculative mineral extraction through stablecoin rails, a convenience previously available only through the slower process of buying mining stocks.

Chainlink's business chief called it what tokenized assets look like as "core institutional infrastructure." 🧠

TRON
Justin Sun, Lifelong Scholar Of Ethics, Shocked To Discover Crypto Project He Backed Might Be Sketchy 😶

Justin Sun, the guy who started $TRX ( ▼ 0.1% ) and spent $6.2 million to buy a banana duct taped to a wall (and then ate it) has filed a federal lawsuit alleging that a crypto project he invested in may have been less than entirely honest. 🧑‍⚖️

Sun, widely regarded as crypto's foremost authority on being investigated, claims $WLFI ( ▼ 0.91% ) locked his $75 million in tokens and threatened to report him to law enforcement. Users on Stocktwits and X believe this may mark the first known instance of Sun being the victim of a crypto scam rather than the sponsor. 😆

RWA
DeFi Protocol Solves Gold's Longstanding Problem Of Not Being A Riskier Version Of Itself

Aurise Foundation announced XAUE, a new DeFi protocol that transforms gold - a 5,000-year-old asset famous for not blowing up - into a "productive on-chain asset" with yield generated through "quantitative strategies and institutional lending," which is finance-speak for "we'll figure it out." 🪙

The protocol fractionalizes each gold token 1,000-to-1. Hodlers earn compounding returns measured in gold, a breakthrough previously available only to anyone who held gold and waited.

Access is restricted to whitelisted institutions, for everyone's safety. 🏥 

ON-CHAIN ANALYSIS
MetaMask Cofounder Executes Rarest Crypto Maneuver Of All: A Graceful Exit That Doesn't Involve Stealing Anything 🫡 

MetaMask cofounder Dan Finlay announced last night that he is leaving Consensys after a decade, citing burnout and a desire to spend time with his family - a reason so pedestrian it made me wonder if it was fake. 🤸‍♂️ 

Finlay's departure marks the first recorded instance of a crypto founder exiting a project without simultaneously draining the treasury, blaming an unidentified "hacker," or retreating to a jurisdiction with no extradition treaty (kidding, but lately, it feels like that).

Tributes poured in from across the ecosystem. Paradigm CTO Georgios Konstantopoulos wrote that "words can't describe" the run. Scalar Capital's Linda Xie called it the "end of an era." The DAO cofounder Christoph Jentzsch - a man who knows a thing or two about notable Ethereum exits - thanked Finlay for his contributions.

Even embattled Tornado Cash cofounder Roman Storm chimed in from legal purgatory to praise Finlay's final feature launch as "extremely important," presumably between court dates. 👛 

NEWS
Tether Becomes First Stablecoin To Have More Cops On Speed Dial Than Actual Customer Service Reps 🤣

Tether announced Thursday it has frozen another $344 million in $USDT ( ▲ 0.02% ) at the request of U.S. authorities, bringing its lifetime total of voluntarily frozen assets to a breezy $4.4 billion across 2,300 cases - a cooperation record most sovereign nations would envy.

CEO Paolo Ardoino declared that "USD₮ is not a safe haven for illicit activity," a sentiment immediately ratified by the company's 340 law enforcement partners across 65 countries. Tether touted its "zero-tolerance policy" and real-time monitoring capabilities, presumably powered by the same reserves nobody has fully audited.

The company added that public blockchains give investigators "a visible trail" - a feature some Bitcoin maxis previously marketed as a bug. 🪲

OLD NEWS
Crypto Stuff That Happened Today, But A Long Time Ago 📜

Here’s what was happening in the newsletter a year ago today:

• Bitcoin flipped silver.

• Cantor Fitzgerald unveiled a $3B crypto vehicle - backed by Tether, SoftBank, and Bitfinex.

• Ethereum looked absurdly washed out on-chain.

• Crypto scams got industrialized again - the Medusa drainer writeup was basically a reminder that theft now comes with a business model.

Here’s what was happening in the newsletter two years ago today:

• BONK and FLOKI stole the show - both ripped hard after the halving.

• Ripple basically mocked the SEC with a $10M counteroffer - against the SEC’s $2B ask. Petty, but memorable.

• Bitcoin ETFs saw strong inflows post-halving.

• Mythical Games ditched Ethereum for Polkadot.

OLD NEWS
Other Stuff That Happened Today, But A Long Ass Time Ago ⌛️

April 23

• 599 - The city state of Palenque is sacked in southern Mexico.

• 1014 - The King of Ireland, Brian Boru, defeats the Vikings.

• 1348 - The Order of the Garter is founded, the first English order of knighthood.

• 1516 - German Beer Purity Law is made… law.

• 1616 - William Shakespeare dies.

• 1661 - Charles II of England is crowned king.

• 1920 - Turkey’s Grand National Assembly of Turkey founded. Sultan Mehmed VI denounced.

• 1969 - Sirhan Sirhan sentenced to death.

• 1984 - AIDS virus identified as HTLV-III.

• 1985 - New Coke comes out. It sucks.

• 2005 - The first YouTube video is upload, ‘Me at the zoo.’ One year later 100 million videos are uploaded.

• 2007 - Boris Yeltsin dies.

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Author Disclosure: The author of this newsletter holds positions in AVAX, ADA, PUDGY, WLD, NEAR, INJ, LTC, LINK, ZEC, XLM, and FET. 📋