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The wild 2000s era of internet shock videos is making a return in crypto.
Some issuers of memecoins on Solana's runaway hit Pump.fun are streaming videos ranging from extreme dark humor to dark behavior, all to pump their tokens to a few million dollars in market capitalization.
There are streams and images of children tied up, a man locked up in his toilet continuously, killing of hens, fetish videos, and softcore porn. Live streaming on the platform was a feature added last week.
Some tokens even have images of a human slashing forearms or playing with fire (though these are quickly taken down). One person was allegedly firing a gun outside their window every time his token zoomed higher. This sort of shock factor can lead to viral content, drawing in more viewers and potential investors.
It isn’t all bad, however. Most of the streams are harmless or contain fun activities such as drawing an egg or talking to an audience. Users have to specifically switch on an “NSFW” tag to land up on questionable content.
Most of the dark tokens don’t have an X page, and their issuers have not publicly shared why they choose to engage in extreme behavior. Memecoins often thrive on internet culture, humor, cuteness, and virality — but such acts may cross a line for what’s considered a harmless act for a meme. Such activities can even draw negative attention from mainstream media.
X users are also reporting some dark streams, such as suicidal streams, death threats, and animal porn among others. (CoinDesk could not independently verify these posts, or if Pump.fun’s moderation team likely took them down.) |
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Trump's WLF Gets Sun Boost |
The Donald Trump-backed cryptocurrency platform World Liberty Financial got off to a sluggish start, with investors buying far fewer of its WLFI tokens than the project hoped for. But now, Chinese-born crypto billionaire Justin Sun has just given it a significant boost, buying $30 million worth of WLFI. World Liberty is a decentralized finance (DeFi) platform backed by the incoming U.S. president and all three of his sons. The project is run by a circle of Trump world insiders, crypto entrepreneurs and financial figures.
Sun, meanwhile, is best known for establishing TRON, a blockchain platform mostly popular in Asia. He is also affiliated with HTX, a popular crypto exchange formerly known as Huobi.
On Nov, 25, $30 million of WLFI tokens were purchased by a wallet tagged to Huobi by Etherscan, the Ethereum blockchain data service. A spokesperson for TRON declined to directly comment on whether the sale was tied to Sun, but sources familiar with the matter told CoinDesk that he was behind the purchase. |
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Bitcoin’s Pumping. Memes Are Minting Millionaires. The bear market’s snoozing, and the bull run is here.
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Kalshi Pays to Trash Polymarket Founder |
Kalshi may have tarnished its regulatory halo by slinging mud at a competitor.
Late Friday, Pirate Wires, a technology and culture publication owned by Founders Fund marketing executive Mike Solana, published a bombshell of a story. It documented how Kalshi, the U.S.-regulated prediction market, paid social media influencers to disparage crypto-based, offshore rival Polymarket and its CEO Shayne Coplan after the FBI raided Coplan's home this month.
Solana (no relation to the $120 billion cryptocurrency) disclosed up-front he had reasons to be biased and report what Kalshi allegedly did: Founder's Fund is an investor in Polymarket, and Pirate Wires has a paid partnership with Polymarket for ads, among other things. Nevertheless, Solana wrote, "receipts are receipts," and the screenshots in the Pirate Wires article paint a damning picture. One screenshot showed Kalshi employees asking former NFL wide receiver Antonio Brown to quote-tweet a post about Coplan with the comment, "this [n-word] seem[s] guilty." Brown obliged.
Another influencer, who regularly tweets Kalshi-related content, commented that Coplan's hairstyle resembled that of FTX's Sam Bankman-Fried, misleadingly implying that the former committed comparable crimes. (According to The New York Times, the raid was part of an ongoing investigation into whether Coplan ran an unlicensed commodities exchange; Bankman-Fried was convicted of fraud.)
Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour declined to comment when contacted by CoinDesk.
The Pirate Wires article caused an uproar on X. Jeff Park, head of alpha strategies at Bitwise Investments, accused Kalshi, which has long touted its status as a regulated entity, of "moral hypocrisy." |
1inch's Fusion+ Is the Future of Cross-Chain DeFi Fusion Cross-chain bridging has long been crypto's Achilles heel: According to DeFi security blog Rekt News, four of the five largest exploits by total value (about $2.15B) resulted from attacks on cross-chain infrastructure. Though exploits are a concern, security isn't the only reason DeFi traders avoid bridging. Long withdrawal times, a lack of transparency and an overall difficult user experience have prevented traders from accessing new markets and executing more advanced cross-chain trading strategies. To alleviate withdrawal delays and user experience issues, a new intent-based infrastructure has emerged to create more efficient trading across chains. Continue reading here. |
Axie Infinity Creator Cuts 21% |
Sky Mavis, the web3 gaming firm behind Axie Infinity, laid off 21% of its workforce last week. The Web3 firm’s co-founder and CEO Trung Nguyen said on X on Saturday that the layoffs were not related to the company’s budget or financial health. “Instead, it is a strategic move that allows for a sharper focus and positioning Sky Mavis for hyper growth in 2025 and beyond,” he said. According to Nguyen, the move came despite the year being “one of valuable growth and evolution”. Going forward the company will focus on its core products rather than trying to build products for all users, he said. The web3 creator will concentrate on its Ronin Wallet and Waypoint, Mavis Marketplace, Axie Infinity, Web3 game publishing, and expanding the Ronin Network for more builders. It is also working on a new Axie game. In 2023, co-founder Aleksander Larsen said in an interview with Finoverse that the company had 250 employees at its main base in Singapore and across its subsidiaries in Vietnam, the U.S. and Norway. Sky Mavis did not immediately respond to CoinDesk's request for total headcount or the number of people impacted.
Despite bitcoin hitting new all time highs over the past few weeks and the prospect of a more succinct regulatory regime for crypto in the U.S. following the re-election of Donald Trump, several crypto companies have announced layoffs over the past month. Cryptocurrency exchange Kraken laid off 400 people, or 30% of its staff, on Oct. 31, according to tech layoff tracker Layoffs.fyi.
DYDX also cut 25% of its staff at the end of last month, and Consensys laid off a further 20%, or 162 people. Cuts have also taken place this year at Matter Labs, Polygon, Fireblocks, Sorare, Moonpay, Paxos and several other companies. |
The Takeaway: Stop Sanctioning Mixers |
By Zack Smith, senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation Cryptocurrency transactions are often anonymous, but they’re not private. In fact, they’re quite public. Anyone with the right technical know-how can see every transaction ever made on most publicly accessible blockchains. This radical transparency and traceability has made it easier (contrary to popular belief) for law enforcement to track stolen and laundered cryptocurrency across various transactions. But it has also made it easier for criminal crypto actors to trace certain transactions, and — by collecting enough data points — recognize the real-world identity of crypto users who would otherwise remain anonymous. Dramatic stories abound about violent home invasions targeting those with large cryptocurrency holdings or hackers targeting those who donate to controversial causes. More mundanely, those who accept cryptocurrency as payment for goods or services might not want the person paying them to know their entire on-chain financial history with only a few clicks. Recognizing these realities, crypto-mixing services sprung to life. The technical details can differ dramatically, but essentially these services act as intermediaries, mixing together crypto transactions to make them more difficult, if not impossible, to track. Some mixing services actually take custody of the cryptocurrency, mix the funds together, and then distribute them to pre-determined places. Others rely instead on smart contracts (pre-written computer code) to do this for them. Created in 2019, popular crypto-mixing service Tornado Cash falls into this latter category. For the same reasons these services appeal to legitimate users (privacy and making transactions harder to track), they also appeal to criminals and hostile foreign state actors such as North Korea. Knowing this, the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) imposed sanctions that would prohibit “U.S. persons” from engaging in transactions with, or using, some of these mixing services, including Tornado Cash. But does OFAC have the authority to do this, particularly when it comes to smart-contract-based services such as Tornado Cash? In two similar lawsuits — one pending in the Fifth Circuit and one pending in the Eleventh Circuit — a series of plaintiffs are arguing that it does not, saying that OFAC’s decision involves “an unprecedented exercise of [its] authority.” To understand why, we need to back up and understand precisely what Congress has said. For starters, it makes sense that Americans wouldn’t want criminals or foreign adversaries using the U.S. financial system to accomplish their nefarious goals. So, Congress empowered the president to use a panoply of broad economic tools to stop them from doing so. The president in turn delegated his authority to impose and exercise these economic sanctions to the Secretary of the Treasury who in turn delegated much of the responsibility to OFAC for implementing them. As relevant here, Congress passed two laws that authorize the president and those to whom he has delegated authority, to act. The International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) empowers the chief executive (who has delegated his authority all the way down to OFAC) to block “any property in which any foreign country or a national thereof has any interest” when certain other specified conditions are met. Another act, the North Korea Sanctions and Policy Enhancement Act, allows the president to sanction the “property and interest in property” of “any person” who engaged in specified conduct. While national security concerns pervade the cases challenging OFAC’s actions, fundamentally the cases are about statutory interpretation. What do the terms “person,” “property,” and “interest in property” mean in plain English so that courts can decide whether Congress gave the President — and OFAC — the power to impose sanctions on Tornado Cash?
Read the whole thing. |
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