Crypto news

This week, the crypto industry once again demonstrates its paradoxical nature: while FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, serving a 25-year sentence for financial fraud, is planning a startup with up to $100 million in capital after his release, Tether is inventing an elegant way to circumvent European MiCA regulation, and the U.S. is preparing to legislatively ban the digital dollar until 2030. Let's break down the key events shaping the new order.

Sam Bankman-Fried's Ambitions: A Prison Startup

Sam Bankman-Fried, serving time for multi-billion dollar fraud, is not wasting any time. He told fellow inmates that for "serious earnings," he would need startup capital between $50 and $100 million, and mentioned some cryptocurrency project that, he claims, will attract mass attention. Simultaneously, he has appealed to Donald Trump for a presidential pardon, and his parents have hired lobbyists.

The community has once again brought up the painful topic of FTX's venture investments — stakes in SpaceX, Anthropic, and Solana, which were worth $114 billion at their peak but were liquidated by bankruptcy administrators for a fraction of that amount. Most commentators agree: SBF may be a genius investor, but his crimes — the illegal use of client funds — make restoring trust virtually impossible. Even if his plans are not a joke, trust in him is unlikely to be rebuilt.

Tether vs. MiCA: A Circumvention Strategy

The European authority ESMA has issued an ultimatum: by July 1, all crypto platforms must obtain a license under the new MiCA regulation, or else cease servicing clients from the EU. Tether, however, deliberately refused the license, deeming the requirement to hold 60% of reserves in European banks as risky for financial stability.

Instead, the company chose a strategy of indirect presence: investments in partners who already have legal status. Through them, fully legitimate stablecoins compliant with MiCA will be issued. Thus, Tether will maintain access to the European market without directly submitting to local officials. However, the forced delisting of USDT in Europe will hit professional participants: market makers will have to split liquidity pools, cross-exchange arbitrage will become more complicated, and spreads will widen.

Ban on the Digital Dollar in the U.S.

The U.S. is moving toward a legislative ban on the digital dollar (CBDC) at least until the end of 2030. The provision prohibiting the Fed from issuing a CBDC is embedded in an affordable housing bill — such packaging allowed overcoming the resistance that had stalled a separate anti-CBDC document.

American lawmakers fear total real-time surveillance of every transaction, control over spending (programmable money with the ability to freeze without trial, as in the digital yuan), and the displacement of commercial banks. Private stablecoins are explicitly excluded from the ban. For the global CBDC race, this means the world's largest economy is officially dropping out, and stablecoins are designated as an alternative that the state is willing to tolerate.

Consequences of the Memecoin Hype

Revenues of the Pump.fun platform have collapsed by more than 70%. The platform allowed anyone to issue their own token for a few dollars, leading to an explosive increase in the number of new coins, but nearly 96% of traders either lost money or earned no more than $500. To prevent a price drop, developers announced the burning of tokens worth about $370 million (36% of the supply).

The situation reflects a large-scale process of capital redistribution: investors are massively booking losses, withdrawing liquidity from unregulated instruments that major players consider gambling, and returning funds to TradFi. The practice of buying assets without fundamental value has stopped working; traders have to return to basic rules and seek digital assets with real practical applications.

CME Group Defends Its Monopoly

The operator of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, CME Group, will sue regulator CFTC over permission for the Kalshi platform to launch perpetual futures. CME head Terrence Duffy formally appeals to investor protection (comparing high leverage to the 2008 mortgage crisis) and the Dodd-Frank Act.

At the same time, CME holds exclusive licenses for all major benchmarks on which futures contracts are built. Duffy combined concern for investors with the defense of the monopoly in the lawsuit. The logic goes something like this: we control the benchmarks, so new instruments on these indices must be traded with us. A similar pattern is observed with ICE, demanding "equal rules" due to the growth of the Hyperliquid platform.

Destruction of Correspondence Privacy

The UK government is preparing a law that will completely ban the use of social networks (Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube) for citizens under 16, while in France and the EU, an initiative is being pushed for mass scanning of personal messages on smartphones before they are sent.

A global trend is emerging: under the pretext of fighting terrorism or protecting children, governments are forcing citizens to give up the basic right to privacy. As Pavel Durov noted, the forced abandonment of end-to-end encryption technology (embedding backdoors) will not stop real criminals at all, as they can easily write their own closed applications. Ultimately, ordinary law-abiding citizens will be affected. Furthermore, weakening encryption systems makes corporate networks of banks and funds vulnerable to hacker attacks and database theft, and users will have to switch to decentralized services to maintain privacy.

My analysis: These events are not a coincidence but a systemic shift. While SBF dreams of a revival, Tether and CME demonstrate that market dominance is ensured not by innovation but by legal and infrastructural power. The ban on CBDCs in the U.S. and attacks on privacy are a signal: traditional institutions are willing to tolerate cryptocurrencies only in controlled forms. Investors should prepare for a period when regulatory risks become more important than technological breakthroughs.