All Been Crypto — Week 2 May 2025
Was Token2049 week so will be a short one — Prices been bullish with BTC not close to 100k mark again at 97k up 4% Wow and ETH at 1850 also +5%. Biggest winner was XMR OG privacy coin though +20% more about in our weekly story. On the flipside MOVE down -20% as more details came out about wrongdoings and insider dealings allegations as well as Coinbase delisting. This week everyone was in Dubai and a lot of headlines, TON put on a big show with drones and had some fireworks announcements remember last year they unveiled USDT on the network. No flooding although liquidity still seemed abundant (excuse the pun) with hundreds of side events and high profile spending on drinks, entertainment and vibes/eyeballs. In the news there was a rumor that Ripple had bid 4–5bn for Circle but got turned down, European NeoBank Bunq teamed up with Kraken to offer crypto services, Nexo coming back to the US, Telegram tokenizing 500mm bonds and L2s are progressing. Enjoy reading!
Bat Tai Chi — btc21@mail.com
HEADLINES:
500m Telegram Bonds to be tokenized
TON Foundation and Libre announced plans to tokenize 500mm of the current ~2.3bn outstanding bonds from Telegram and bring it onchain to institutional Telegram users. They will set up a new vehicle called Telegram Bond Fund to the tune of 500mm and will issue tokens on TON that then can be used in DeFi ect. There’s also an angle to bring other funds that Libre already tokenized into the TON ecosystem and of course we all know the size of the Telegram userbase. But this will be (at least initially) only for institutional and accredited investors. Everyone wants in on the RWA narrative.
Moneros (XMR) role in recent crypto hack
We saw some suspicious behavior from an OG bitcoin wallet that has been dormant since 2017. According to ZachXBT it looks like it was a socially engineered hack but tbh we are just making guesses interfering form the outcome. The 3520 BTC were deposited to multiple exchanges and then swapped into XMR. Given Monero’s privacy features the coin has long been a thorn in the eyes of regulators and many exchanges have caved in with Binance and Kraken delisting it in many jurisdictions. So float is low meaning if you do a quick trade it will impact market price and that’s exactly what happened. Price shot up 30–40% within 24h suggesting this wasnt just someone who wanted his BTC going private. Even more suspicious was that open interest on XMR at exchanges was very elevated suggesting someone pre-positioned. So the hacker might have actually benefited more from the increase in his futures positions than he lost with the BTC/XMR swap. Regardless it opens the departed again on the use of privacy tools and traceability. As we are going more institutional and BTCs are being increasingly held as IOUs via ETFs the more hardcore cypherpunks are of course cheering for Monero with its surveillance resistant features.
Stage 1 completed by Scroll and Base
Two prominent Ethereum L2s have this week announced they progressed to Stage 1. A framework introduced by Vitalik to measure how decentralized and censorship resistant an L2 roll up is. L2Beat has a neat little page showing where different L2s are on their current road map to becoming Stage 2. It’s a big milestone for Base though as they implemented a decentralized security council and fault proofs seem to be working allowing for less control of Coinbase. Changes can still be made but take more stakeholders now to agree. The milestone is even greater for Scroll who’s the first zk-Rollup to archive Stage 1. Unlike optimistic rollups, zk-Rollups must generate a zk proof for every block. That proof is generated using a circuit — which has a fixed size limit and cannot prove arbitrary-length programs. If a forced transaction is too large it might exceed the prover’s capacity and halt finality of the entire network. A centralized sequencer can mitigate this by simulating the circuit before proposing the block, dropping oversized transactions if needed. Scroll used to do this with a system called the Circuit Capacity Checker (CCC). But this undermines decentralization — it lets a centralized actor decide what users are allowed to do. The solution is to break blocks into smaller segments that each fit into a circuit, and then stitch them together recursively using proof aggregation. They have now implemented that. You can read more into detail on their post but i think you get the message. It’s great to see progress on the decentralization part of L2s which when at Stage 2 are what was initially intended to be the permissionless censorship resistant scaling solution for Ethereum.
QUOTES:
Dubai rumor: A solid & legit Ethereum OG raising funds for an $ETH-focused Microstrategy play. Timely and impactful if executed and scaled well. Ethereum
Charles d’Haussy — CEO dYdX Foundation
America is back — and so is Nexo
Nexo Co-Founder Antoni Trenchev
A number of indicators support our view that Bitcoin is headed for the next leg higher. U.S. Treasury term premium (which has a close correlation to BTC) is at a 12-year high. Time-of-day analysis suggests that U.S.-based investors may be seeking non-U.S. assets. Meanwhile, Bitcoin accumulation by ‘whales’ (major holders) has been strong. Meanwhile, ETF flows in the past week suggest safe-haven reallocation from gold into BTC
Geoffrey Kendrick — Standard Chartered’s Global Head of Digital Assets Research
All Been Crypto — Week 2 May 2025 was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
