Crypto news

This week, the crypto industry experienced several tectonic shifts: from the ambitious plans of the convicted FTX founder to Tether's strategic maneuver bypassing European regulations. We also witnessed the collapse of meme coins, attempts by traditional exchanges to maintain their monopoly, and a global crackdown on privacy. Let's analyze each event from a professional perspective.

Sam Bankman-Fried: From Prison to Startup?

The founder of FTX, serving a 25-year sentence for the largest financial fraud in history, is already making plans for life after release. According to sources close to him, SBF told a cellmate that to "make serious money," he would need $50–100 million in startup capital and hinted at a new crypto project that "everyone will flock to." Simultaneously, he appealed to Donald Trump for a presidential pardon, and his parents hired lobbyists. Notably, FTX's venture investments (stakes in SpaceX, Anthropic, Solana) were worth $114 billion at their peak, but bankruptcy administrators sold them for an amount orders of magnitude smaller. Despite SBF's potential genius as an investor, his actions in illegally using client funds make restoring trust in him virtually impossible.

Tether vs. MiCA: A Strategy of Indirect Presence

The European regulator ESMA announced that by July 1, 2025, all crypto platforms must obtain a license under the MiCA regulation or leave the EU. Tether deliberately refused a license, citing the risky requirement to hold 60% of reserves in European banks. Instead, the company chose a workaround: investing in partners that already have legal status, who will issue fully legitimate stablecoins. Thus, Tether will indirectly maintain its presence in the European Union without submitting to local regulators. However, the forced delisting of USDT will hit market makers, complicating cross-exchange arbitrage and widening spreads.

US Bans Digital Dollar Until 2030

American lawmakers embedded a provision banning the issuance of a CBDC (central bank digital currency) until the end of 2030 into an affordable housing bill. This bypassed the opposition that had stalled a separate anti-CBDC document. Key concerns of lawmakers include total surveillance of transactions, control over spending (as seen with the digital yuan), and the displacement of commercial banks. Private stablecoins are exempt from this ban, effectively removing the US from the global CBDC race and cementing stablecoins as a tolerated alternative.

The Collapse of Pump.fun: Meme Coins Lose Hype

Revenue on the Pump.fun platform has dropped by over 70%. The platform allowed anyone to launch a 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 less than $500. To prevent a crash, developers announced the burning of tokens worth $370 million (36% of the supply). We are witnessing a massive capital outflow from unregulated instruments, which major players view as gambling. The practice of buying assets with no fundamental value has stopped working, forcing traders to return to basic rules and seek digital assets with real-world applications.

CME Group Defends Monopoly Through Court

The operator of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, CME Group, will sue regulator CFTC over its permission for the Kalshi platform to launch perpetual futures. CME CEO Terrence Duffy formally cites investor protection, comparing high leverage to the 2008 mortgage crisis. However, the essence of the lawsuit is defending a monopoly: CME holds exclusive licenses for all major benchmarks, and new instruments based on these indices, according to Duffy's logic, must be traded on his platform. A similar pattern is observed with ICE, demanding "equal rules" due to the growth of the Hyperliquid platform.

Global Crackdown on Privacy

The UK is preparing a law that completely bans social media for citizens under 16, while in the EU and France, an initiative to mass-scan personal messages before sending is advancing. As Pavel Durov noted, a forced abandonment of end-to-end encryption will not stop real criminals—they can easily create their own closed applications. Ultimately, ordinary citizens will be affected, and weakening encryption will make corporate networks of banks and funds vulnerable to hacker attacks.

My Analysis: This week showed that the crypto industry is entering a phase of maturity: speculative bubbles are bursting, regulators are tightening control, and giants like CME and Tether are fighting for survival and influence. Investors should forget about easy money and focus on assets with fundamental value.