Crypto: 29th April 2025

• Donald Trump's meme coin $TRUMP surged by 70% after he offered a private dinner to top holders, raising concerns about conflicts of interest while creating a lucrative crypto empire.

• Nike faces a class action lawsuit from NFT buyers alleging they invested in unregistered securities, while over 19,000 NFTs from Nike's CloneX collection vanished due to a Cloudflare downgrade, highlighting digital asset fragility.

• MagicBlock secured $7.5M to enhance decentralized application performance on Solana using ephemeral rollups, while Nous Research raised $50M for decentralized AI training via Solana blockchain.

• Ubisoft and Immutable announced Might & Magic Fates, a Web3 strategy card game featuring innovative mechanics and collectible cards.

• Astar's Yoki Legacy will relaunch on Sony's Soneium blockchain with streamlined gameplay and a new token called OMASTR.

• B3 partnered with Reach Labs to launch a user acquisition platform and GameChain, providing developers with tools for marketing, analytics, and rewards in Web3 gaming.

• Ready Gibraltar won a legal battle against Ready Makers Inc., lifting a global freeze on its PLAY tokens, highlighting ongoing challenges in blockchain gaming legality.

• Fintech startups raised over $50M in Q1 2025, with global funding reaching $10.3 billion and renewed investor interest in crypto and various financial sectors.

Pectra Mainnet Announcement (blog.ethereum.org, 2025-04-23). The Pectra network upgrade for Ethereum, activating on May 7, 2025, enhances account abstraction (EIP-7702), validator experience with new EIPs, and doubles blob scaling throughput (EIP-7691) for improved L2 performance

Richard Heart Triumphs in Court After SEC Case Dismissed in Full (medium.datadriveninvestor.com, 2025-04-24). Richard Heart's legal victory against the SEC results in the dismissal of all claims related to his projects HEX, PulseChain, and PulseX, affirming their status as compliant with regulatory standards for cryptocurrency

Tokenization as a SaaS Liquidity Option (tomtunguz.com, 2025-04-23). Tokenization enables daily interest payments and instant transactions for assets like Treasuries. BlackRock's BUIDL is leading the charge, potentially revolutionizing the market with blockchain's efficiency and enabling global access for investors

Evaluating Precog Subnet 55 Forecast Performance via Simulated Trading (coinmetrics.io, 2025-04-22). Coin Metrics analyzes the performance of Precog Subnet 55 forecasts, highlighting positive returns and lower risk compared to buy-and-hold strategies via Bitcoin simulations in a recent State of the Network report

Yield Bearing Stablecoin Evaluation Framework (1/2) (medium.com/@kido.kim, 2025-04-26). This evaluation framework assesses yield-bearing stablecoins based on collateral safety, operational transparency, yield level, and consistency, focusing on projects like Syrup Finance with institutional lending and diverse revenue streams

How Democrats Failed on Crypto (stephendiehl.com, 2025-04-25). Democrats failed to regulate cryptocurrency, leading to a surge in corruption and extremist funding, with internal divisions preventing cohesive policy action amidst rising concerns about risks like money laundering and consumer fraud

Base May Not Be for Me (stevedylan.dev, 2025-04-24). Steve Simkins reflects on his journey with Base, a Layer 2 blockchain on Ethereum, expressing concerns over its centralization, token narratives, and the need for credible neutrality in blockchain development

Cryptocurrency Thefts Get Physical (schneier.com, 2025-04-25). A $250 million cryptocurrency theft led to a violent kidnapping, highlighting the intersection of cybercrime and physical security threats in the evolving landscape of cryptocurrency-related misconduct

Note on Money Stuff: The Stock Market Loves Bitcoin via Matt Levine (joshbeckman.org, 2025-04-24). Traditional finance mocks crypto, yet the stock market significantly values Bitcoin, often paying more than the crypto market. This paradox highlights crypto's unique influence on stock valuations and speculative trends

<a href="https://idiomdrottning.org/halving">Their halving vs our sharing</a> (idiomdrottning.org, 2025-04-22). The critique of Bitcoin's 'Halving' reveals how its energy-intensive mining system creates scarcity, while contrasting it with digital sharing through platforms like Debian and GNU to emphasize the need for sustainable resource distribution

Status Quo (paragraph.com, 2025-04-24). The crypto industry is experiencing a vibe shift, moving from ideals of decentralization and privacy to more convenient platform models, risking the foundational values that inspired innovation in the first place

The Triumph of Triumphalism (eod.com, 2025-04-22). The triumph of triumphalism highlights society's blind confidence in technologies like AI, crypto, and NFTs, questioning the arrogance behind insisting these are the only paths forward despite potential pitfalls and ethical concerns

Finding North Korean IT Workers On GitHub (nkinternet.wordpress.com, 2025-04-24). North Korean IT workers are utilizing GitHub, often creating accounts that appear older. They follow similar naming conventions and share AI-generated profile images, with repositories focusing on blockchain and MERN stack development

LEAGAN: A Decentralized Version-Control Framework for Upgradeable Smart Contracts (eprint.iacr.org, 2025-04-27). LEAGAN introduces a decentralized framework for upgradeable smart contracts that utilizes Incremental Hash and Revision Control System for efficient version control, achieving better space utilization and reduced gas consumption in Ethereum Virtual Machine environments

Is self-hosting a decentralized blog possible? (seriousaboutech.com, 2025-04-28). Exploration of self-hosting decentralized blogs using smartphones and laptops, leveraging technologies like NOSTR, Webtorrent, and various peer-to-peer solutions to facilitate seamless, community-driven hosting

Advancing zkVMs with Formal Verification (leastauthority.com, 2025-04-28). Least Authority receives a grant from the Ethereum Foundation to create Lean blueprints for the STIR and WHIR cryptographic protocols, advancing formal verification in zero-knowledge Virtual Machines (zkVMs) for decentralized applications

Accelerating ZK Proving with WebGPU: Techniques and Challenges (blog.zksecurity.xyz, 2025-04-25). WebGPU enhances client-side ZK proving by leveraging GPU capabilities, addressing time and space constraints with techniques like IVC, recursion, and NTT, resulting in significant performance improvements

Why Does My Transaction Fail? A First Look at Failed Transactions on the Solana Blockchain (arxiv:cs, 2025-04-25). Solana's blockchain faces challenges from bot spamming, leading to failed transactions. A study analyzed over 1.5 billion failed transactions, identifying initiators, error messages, and patterns in transaction costs and block positions

DTVM: Revolutionizing Smart Contract Execution with Determinism and Compatibility (arxiv:cs, 2025-04-23). DTVM Stack enhances smart contract execution with deterministic performance, EVM ABI compatibility, and multi-language support, utilizing hybrid lazy-JIT compilation and AI-driven tools for improved efficiency and reduced latency

Automated Vulnerability Injection in Solidity Smart Contracts: A Mutation-Based Approach for Benchmark Development (arxiv:cs, 2025-04-22). MuSe automatically injects vulnerabilities into Solidity smart contracts using pattern-based mutation operators, aiming to improve benchmark generation and enhance detection rates of tools like Slither for evaluating security vulnerabilities

Trusted Compute Units: A Framework for Chained Verifiable Computations (arxiv:cs, 2025-04-22). The Trusted Compute Unit (TCU) framework enables composable verifiable computations across TEEs and zkVMs, improving decentralized applications' performance and scalability through secure off-chain interactions and proof of correctness with confidentiality

A Line Graph-Based Framework for Identifying Optimal Routing Paths in Decentralized Exchanges (arxiv:cs, 2025-04-22). A novel line-graph-based algorithm (LG) efficiently discovers optimal trading paths across decentralized exchanges like Uniswap and SushiSwap, outperforming Depth-First Search in profitability while maintaining comparable gas costs

Trustworthy Decentralized Autonomous Machines: A New Paradigm in Automation Economy (arxiv:cs, 2025-04-22). Decentralized Autonomous Machines integrate AI, blockchain, and IoT, enabling self-governing economic agents that decentralize ownership and optimize resource allocation in a post-labor economy, addressing centralized system inefficiencies

Formal Verification of Blockchain Nonforking in DAG-Based BFT Consensus with Dynamic Stake (arxiv:cs, 2025-04-23). A formal model of a DAG-based BFT protocol with dynamic stake shows that blockchains never fork, with proofs verified in the ACL2 theorem prover, addressing fixed participant assumptions and allowing arbitrarily long executions

A Novel Hybrid Approach Using an Attention-Based Transformer + GRU Model for Predicting Cryptocurrency Prices (arxiv:stat, 2025-04-23). A hybrid model combining attention-based Transformer and GRU architectures predicts Bitcoin and Ethereum prices, outperforming traditional machine learning models in accuracy using metrics like MSE, RMSE, and MAE for financial forecasting

Microstructure and Manipulation: Quantifying Pump-and-Dump Dynamics in Cryptocurrency Markets (arxiv:q-fin, 2025-04-22). A minute-level analysis of 1021 tokens reveals 70% of pump-and-dump volume occurs within an hour, yielding median returns over 100% and exposing detection insights through social-media verification and pump structure categorization