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4/ @ethena_labs' USDe USDe nears $5B supply. 40% staked ($2.1B), down from 70% in Jan. $633M (12%) on CEXs. Hashed’s dashboard tracked the Bybit hack outflow in Feb — and measures multi-chain growth, peg stability & more.

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Bitcoin was down on Friday, Apr. 11 by more than 25% from its historic record high price of $109,000 at the time of Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20th. But MN Fund founder and manager Michaël van de Poppe recently compared the situation with BTC prices to the global financial dump and pump during the worst of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020. “The markets kind of remind me of the COVID crash,” van de Poppe wrote in an X post timestamped Apr. 8. “Massive dump and after that we’ve actually been quickly jumping back up with #Bitcoin, resulting into an 18-month bull market,’ he added. A commenter in the reply thread agreed, remarking, “The parallels are striking. After a sharp correction, Bitcoin’s resilience could set the stage for another significant bull run.” In addition, van de Poppe wrote, “It’s not at [sic] matter of speculation where the markets will be at tomorrow. It’s rather a case of 6 months from now and build your investment thesis around it.” Bitcoin prices exhibit a strong historical trend of appreciating over many 6-month periods and delivering markedly higher returns on investment than average US stock returns. “If this correction is comparable to March ’20, then we’re about to witness a strong upwards run on #Bitcoin and #Altcoins,” the crypto fund manager added. A day earlier, van de Poppe spotted a channel upward for BTC, writing: “Bitcoin attacking $80,000 is a strong sign.” He added: “I don’t know whether we’ll be having another drop or whether we’ve seen it all. However, with the amount of liquidity being added, 6 & 12 months from now prices will be substantially higher.” With Bitcoin’s price trading back above $83,000 within 48 hours of this note on Apr. 11, and finding support on retests at the $78,700 and $79,000 levels on Apr. 10, these remarks are beginning to ring true.

President Donald Trump made history when he pardoned a corporation, the Mahe, Seychelles-based BitMEX. The crypto exchange has been operating since 2014. In addition to pardoning it of its money laundering conviction following a guilty plea in July 2024, the president added its three founders and a senior employee. Trump signed the pardons without publicizing them, so the BitMEX pardons were not as widely anticipated as that of Ross Ulbricht in January. While campaigning for reelection, the president pledged at the Libertarian Convention in May 2024 to pardon the Silk Road founder. Now crypto communities are wondering if the president will grant some other founders clemency. They include some big names like FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried and Binance founder Changpeng Zhao. Here are four cryptocurrency founders Trump just pardoned in March and three more that might follow soon. BitMEX pled guilty to violating the Bank Secrecy Act of 1970 by failing to police its exchange for money laundering properly. As a result, the US Dept. of Justice announced a $100 million fine for BitMEX on Jan. 15. Furthermore, the DOJ put the exchange’s parent company on two years of probation. U.S. Attorney Matthew Podolsky said the fine sends a message that consequences for violating anti-money laundering policies will be severe. In addition to BitMEX’s conviction, the US government previously found its founder, Arthur Hayes, guilty of his company’s violations. After starting his exchange, Hayes became the youngest African American billionaire in history. In May 2022, the government sentenced Hayes to six months in supervised home detention and two years of probation. Following his pardon in March, Hayes thanked the president in a post on X. Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson congratulated the Bitcoin exchange founder. In his first blog update since the pardon, Hayes wrote a lengthy and technical critique of Trump’s trade wars using tariffs on imports. After the pardons, BitMEX co-founder Benjamin Delo released a note stating the DOJ “wrongfully targeted BitMEX and its co-founders.” Delo also thanked Trump for the pardons: “This full and unconditional pardon by President Trump is a vindication of the position we have always held – that BitMEX, my co-founders and I should never have been charged with a criminal offense through an obscure, antiquated law.” Delo asserted regulators pressed the case against his exchange for political reasons: “As the most successful crypto exchange of its kind, we were wrongfully made to serve as an example, sacrificed for political reasons and used to send inconsistent regulatory signals.” A British national, Delo is giving away half of his crypto fortune to charitable causes: “A legal wrong has been righted today and despite the distress I have been through over the past few years I’m pleased to have cleared my name and to be able to continue my life and philanthropic work without the burden of an unfounded conviction.” BitMEX CTO Samuel Reed also got a pardon from Mr. Trump. He pled guilty along with his business partners to violating anti-money laundering and Know Your Customer regulations in Mar. 2022. As a result, he got slapped with a $10 million fine while facing down the possibility of five years in prison. He wound up getting 18 months of probation instead. In addition, the exchange’s former Head of Business Development, Gregory Dwyer, received a pardon for his Bank Secrecy Act conviction along with the others. He agreed to pay a fine of $150,000. BitMEX has stayed busy in the meantime, building its extraordinary reputation for security. Last November, the exchange marked ten years as the crypto exchange with the longest streak of losing zero customers’ funds to hacks. This month, BitMEX boosted staking rewards for BMEX by 50%. The pardons prompted CNBC’s Jim Cramer to wonder out loud if Trump might spring Sam Bankman-Fried from a 25-year prison sentence. His financial news site, TheStreet, reported : “As Trump’s pardons stir debate across the crypto world, speculation grows over who could be next — with names like SBF, CZ, and Roger Ver dividing the prediction markets.” Ross Ulbricht founded the legendary Silk Road exchange under the screen name Dread Pirate Roberts in 2011. The “dark web” exchange allowed users to buy and sell illegal items and services like scheduled drugs and assassin services and pay vendors using Bitcoin. While serving a life sentence for criminal enterprise, drug trafficking, money laundering, and computer hacking, Trump pardoned him with overwhelming support for the move from the cryptocurrency community. The day Trump pardoned him , the odds on PolyMarket rose to 93%. At his sentencing hearing, Ulbricht said, “I wanted to empower people to make choices in their lives and have privacy and anonymity.” He’s set to share his story in a new documentary. The FTX exchange founder, known online as SBF, is serving a 25-year sentence for wire fraud and financial fraud that surfaced during the crypto market crash in 2022. In January, Bloomberg reported that SBF’s parents are seeking a pardon from the president. Once a big donor to the Democratic Party, SBF has made a hard right pivot. He bashed SDNY Judge Kaplan in a February New York Sun interview by telephone, the judge who handed Trump a loss in a salacious civil trial. Then turned around in March and gave a bombshell prison interview to Tucker Carlson that the jail administrators did not authorize. Ultra-early Bitcoin (BTC) and Bitcoin Cash (BCH) investor Roger Ver has been in detention in Spain since Apr. 2024, fighting extradition to the US on charges of tax evasion. Because of his status as a very early Bitcoin and crypto promoter, the media nicknamed Ver Bitcoin Jesus. In Feb. 2024, a grand jury in California indicted Ver for “three counts of mail fraud, two counts of tax evasion, and three counts of subscription to a false tax return.” He reached out in January to President Trump for a pardon, posting on X: “Mr. President, I am an American, and I need your help. Only you, with your commitment to justice, can save me @realDonaldTrump.” Ross Ulbricht came to his defense in February in an X post suggesting he should just be allowed to pay any taxes owed and be free again. CZ, the software engineer and business mastermind behind the globally class-leading crypto exchange Binance, is already out of jail after a four-month stint in California last year. He has denied rumors of any business involvement with the Trump crypto enterprises. But the BitMEX pardons added fuel to the fire of rumors that Trump may pardon Zhao next. That would allow him to get back to a leadership role at Binance.

XRP is the top-performing major cryptocurrency over the past 90 days, according to Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse. The rally coincides with Ripple ( XRP ) agreeing to pay $50 million to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission as part of a settlement. Recall how the SEC sued Ripple in December 2020, claiming it sold XRP as an unregistered security. The legal battle became one of the crypto industry’s most closely watched cases. In a key 2023 ruling, the court gave Ripple a partial win: institutional sales were legal, but XRP sales on public exchanges did violate securities laws. Ripple originally set aside $125 million in escrow for potential penalties. “We’re actually taking most of that back, including the interest that had been earned along the way,” Garlinghouse said in a Fox Business interview . “I think it’s just evidence that the former [Gary] Gensler SEC was on the wrong side of the law. And thanks to the new leadership at the SEC and in the White House.” Like other crypto companies (i.e., Coinbase , Gemini , Uniswap ), Ripple benefited from supporting President Donald Trump. Last year, the company reportedly donated millions to his presidential campaign and at least $5 million in XRP tokens to the inauguration on Jan. 20. The Trump administration’s SEC promptly dropped numerous lawsuits and investigations against crypto companies as a thank-you. While Trump allies say this underscores a willingness to create a more transparent regulatory framework, critics argue it’s a form of crypto-crony capitalism. With the regulatory cloud lifting, Ripple plans to expand its business. The company recently completed its largest acquisition to date, purchasing prime broker Hidden Road for $1.25 billion. Garlinghouse emphasized that such a move “would have made no sense a year ago” under what he perceived to be a hostile regulatory environment under former SEC chair Gary Gensler. “This allows even larger institutions like BlackRock, like the biggest Wall Street financial institutions, to come into this market in a way they understand with a safer prime broker to help clear transactions and a bigger balance sheet to do that,” he explained. The Hidden Road acquisition brings Ripple’s employee count to approximately 1,100 people, with Garlinghouse noting that for years, the company was forced to focus on hiring outside the United States due to regulatory uncertainty. “As a U.S. citizen, I grew up in Kansas. I’d like to hire people here. We have some of the best talent in the world here. But it made no sense to invest in a market where we couldn’t sign customers,” he said. Ripple has recently increased its product offerings by launching a stablecoin with a New York trust license from the New York Department of Financial Services. Looking ahead, Garlinghouse expects regulatory clarity to continue improving in two key areas: stablecoin legislation and market structure bills. He expressed confidence that federal stablecoin legislation would move forward “sooner rather than later.” When asked about Bitcoin ( BTC ) price predictions, Garlinghouse suggested that $200,000 by year-end was “not unreasonable.” He mentioned that it is slightly higher than his previous forecast of $175,000. He attributed his bullish outlook to the shift in the U.S. regulatory approach: “People underestimate how the largest economy in the world, the U.S., went from headwinds, hostility to tailwinds.” XRP has been on an upward trajectory over the past year. A rally occurred following Donald Trump’s re-election in Novemeber. See below.