TRUMP, the memecoin tied to U.S. President Donald Trump, gained more than 9% in the past 24 hours following a $320 million token unlock. The price now sits around $8.40, still down more than 88% from its peak above $71 on Jan. 18.

The recent unlock may spell further trouble for investors, who are estimated to have lost a total of $2 billion after purchasing the token earlier this year.

Token unlocks typically flood the market with new supply and tend to depress prices. But in this case, the market appears to have priced in the release beforehand, potentially explaining the price uptick. Still, the $320 million unlock raises the risk of a large sell-off, especially given TRUMP’s thin liquidity.

Data from CoinMarketCap shows that just $1.3 million could move the token’s price by 2% on major exchanges. The move also comes during the Easter holiday weekend, when trading volumes are subdued and price swings can be more pronounced.

On social media, rumors are swirling about a possible event for large token holders, supposedly being organized by Trump himself. These claims remain unverified and highly speculative.

Data from Dune analytics shows there are currently 636,000 TRUMP token holders on-chain, with just 12,285 wallets having more than $1,000 worth of the cryptocurrency.

Slovenia’s finance ministry has proposed a 25% tax on capital gains from cryptocurrency starting in 2026, under a draft law aimed at closing a gap in the country’s tax system.

The tax will apply to profit made when individuals sell crypto for fiat currency or spend it on goods and services. However, swapping one cryptocurrency for another will remain tax-free, and any gains made before January 1, 2026, will not be taxed, according to the finance ministry’s proposal.

The measure is meant to treat crypto gains more like other capital investments, such as stocks or bonds, which are already taxed.

Under the law, individuals would calculate their profit as the difference between the value at acquisition and at sale, adjusted for transaction fees. Losses can be carried forward to offset future gains. Taxpayers would need to file an annual return by March 31 and make payment within 15 days.

The tax could generate between €2.5 million and €25 million annually, according to preliminary government estimates. The country’s Ministry of Finance is soliciting public feedback on the proposal, which would come into effect next year.

The proposal comes as data from the European Central Bank’s ‘Survey on Consumer Payment Attitudes in the Euro Area’ shows Slovenia has the highest share of cryptocurrency owners in the euro area, with 15% of adults holding digital currencies last year, up from 8% in 2022.

Disclaimer: Information collected for this article was translated with the use of artificial intelligence.

Earlier this month, the Department of Justice disbanded its National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team and said it would no longer pursue what Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche described as “regulation by prosecution.”

You’re reading State of Crypto, a CoinDesk newsletter looking at the intersection of cryptocurrency and government. Click here to sign up for future editions.

‘Regulation by prosecution’

The narrative

The U.S. Department of Justice “will no longer pursue litigation or enforcement actions that have the effect of superimposing regulatory frameworks on digital assets” in lieu of regulatory agencies putting together their own frameworks for overseeing the sector, a 4-page memo signed by Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche on April 7 said. In other words, the DOJ will no longer pursue “regulation by prosecution,” the memo said.

Why it matters

The DOJ’s memo raised concerns that it may mean criminal activities in the crypto sector would not be prosecuted, or at least prosecuted as heavily as it was under the past several years — both by disbanding the National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team (NCET) and by shifting the entity’s priorities.

Breaking it down

At a practical level, the memo itself is internal guidance but may not be a binding document. Multiple attorneys told CoinDesk they interpreted the guidance to indicate that the DOJ would still bring fraud or other criminal cases involving crypto, but would try to avoid any cases where the DOJ itself had to determine if a digital asset was a security or a commodity.

“Fraud is still fraud,” said Josh Naftalis, a partner at Pallas Partners LLP and a former prosecutor with the U.S. Attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York. “This memo does not seem to say the DOJ is not going to prosecute fraud in the crypto space.”

Still, the memo raised alarms for prominent Democrats who questioned whether the DOJ was suggesting it would let criminal conduct occur. Senators Elizabeth Warren, Mazie Hirono, Richard Durbin, Sheldon Whitehouse, Christopher Coons and Richard Blumenthal wrote a letter to Blanche, saying his “decision to give a free pass to cryptocurrency money launderers” and shut down the NCET were “grave mistakes that will support sanctions evasion, drug trafficking, scams and child sexual exploitation.”

“Specifically, the Department will no longer target virtual currency exchanges, mixing and tumbling services and offline wallets for the acts of their end users or unwitting violations of regulations — except to the extent the investigation is consistent with the priorities articulated in the following paragraphs,” the DOJ memo said, a passage the Senators’ letter referenced.

New York Attorney General Letitia James wrote an open letter to Senate leaders in the same week asking them to advance legislation to address cryptocurrency risks. She did not specifically reference Blanche’s memo but detailed possible ways to better police the sector through legislation.

Katherine Reilly, a partner at Pryor Cashman and a former prosecutor with the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, told CoinDesk that most of the major crypto cases brought by the DOJ in recent years would not have been affected had this guidance been in effect.

The BitMEX case in 2020, when the DOJ and Commodity Futures Trading Commission brought unregistered trading and other charges against the platform, is “probably closest to the line” of being a case that may not have been brought under this guidance, she said.

Trump pardoned BitMEX, its founders and a senior employee in late March, barely two weeks before the DOJ memo was shared.

“I think that it’s clear that the Justice Department wants to limit the DOJ’s role in regulating the crypto industry … looking beyond its role in other crimes, fraud, laundering proceeds from narcotics trafficking, things like that, and sort of take a step back from the role of trying to bring order and fairness to the crypto industry as a whole,” Reilly said.

That’s “probably the intent behind the BitMEX pardons too,” she said.

Naftalis said the DOJ will continue to pursue drug, terrorism or other illicit financing charges even under the memo.

“I think that the headline for the industry is to the extent that there are legal uses of crypto, they’re not going to set the guard rail by criminal enforcement,” he said. “That’s for Congress.”

One section of the memo tells prosecutors not to charge Bank Secrecy Act violations, unregistered securities offering violations, unregistered broker-dealer violations or other Commodity Exchange Act registration violations “unless there is evidence that the defendant knew of the licensing or registration requirement at issue and violated such a requirement willfully.”

Carla Reyes, an Associate Professor of Law at SMU Dedman School of Law, told CoinDesk that this may be referencing recent cases where developers build tools under the impression that they were not committing unlicensed money transmitting activities under existing guidance but may get charged anyway.

“Most criminal statutes require some level of knowledge to define your intention, and knowledge that you’re committing a crime when you do it,” she said. “The further away you get from that, the lesser the charge, but the more willful [and] intentional it is, the higher the charge.”

What the memo seems to want to explicitly move away from is any suggestion that federal prosecutors would interpret how securities or commodities laws might apply to digital assets.

“Prosecutors should not charge violations of the Securities Act of 1933, the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, the Commodity Exchange Act, or the regulations promulgated pursuant to these Acts, in cases where (a) the charge would require the Justice Department to litigate whether a digital asset is a ‘security’ or ‘commodity,’ and (b) there is an adequate alternative criminal charge available, such as mail or wire fraud,” the memo said.

A popular critique leveled against former SEC Chair Gary Gensler by the crypto industry was that he was “regulating by enforcement,” rather than focusing on developing guidance for the industry to know what was or wasn’t acceptable. Blanche seems to be referring to a similar critique in the memo, Naftalis said, in that one-off enforcement decisions by the SEC or DOJ should not define the guardrails for the industry.

Steve Segal, a shareholder at Buchalter, said that some of the DOJ’s past cases would charge trading venues for failing to police their own customers. The memo now seems to suggest that if a crypto exchange’s executives were running a clean platform, and customers were laundering funds derived from criminal activities, the executives would not be charged. This is in contrast with, for example, FTX, where the executives were charged and convicted of (or pled guilty to) fraud charges.

“Of course, a lot of the big crypto cases we’ve seen over the last few years are sort of pure investor fraud, things like FTX. And one of the more interesting things about this memo is it talks about crypto investors and really prioritizing cases where crypto investors are being victimized,” Reilly said. “And so I don’t think we should conclude that this memo means we’re going to see a lot fewer cases in the crypto space, or that crypto companies can sort of breathe a sigh of relief that the DOJ is out of the picture for a few years.”

The DOJ’s future cases may appear a bit different in terms of the specific allegations made, but “it’s much too soon to say that everybody can assume the DOJ is out of the crypto business,” she said.

Many of the attorneys speaking to CoinDesk agreed that the memo itself did not clarify all of the different issues that may come up with a criminal case, nor was it an end-all/be-all document.

The memo announced prosecutorial discretion but it isn’t itself a law, Reyes said, adding that it may guide internal decision-making about which cases to pursue the most heavily, as well as the strategies that guide those prosecutions.

A lot of details about how this memo ties together with Trump’s executive order on the strategic bitcoin reserve still need to be spelled out, Segal said. Sections on victim compensation and how seized funds should be handled in the memo do not explain how the DOJ might handle situations where seized funds are turned over to bankruptcy estates, such as what happened with FTX or other similar scenarios.

“I think we’ll really have to see how it plays out, because this guidance, I do think, leaves prosecutors a lot of room to bring cases even of these kinds of violations that are being cast as more regulatory,” Reilly said. “So even if that’s the intent, I think the devil is in the details on what cases we see going forward.”

Stories you may have missed

• U.S. Crypto Lobbyists Flooding the Zone, But Are There Too Many?: Jesse Hamilton took a look at the number of Washington, D.C.-based crypto lobbyist groups now active.
• Feds Mistakenly Order Estonian HashFlare Fraudsters to Self-Deport Ahead of Sentencing: Ivan Turogin and Sergei Potapenko, who were extradited from Estonia to the U.S. on charges tied to the HashFlare Ponzi scheme, await sentencing after pleading guilty to one conspiracy charge each earlier this year. Though they’re under a court order to not travel before their sentencing, they received an email from the Department of Homeland Security telling them to self-deport, seemingly by mistake.
• Kraken Sheds ‘Hundreds’ of Jobs to Streamline Business Ahead of IPO, Sources Say: Kraken cut 400 roles last October, which at the time was about 15% of its workforce. It’s since continued shedding jobs, Ian Allison reports.
• Republican States Pause Lawsuit Against SEC Over Crypto Authority: A group of Republican Attorneys General have filed to pause a lawsuit against the Securities and Exchange Commission alleging its crypto enforcement actions intruded into state regulators’ remits.
• Crypto Casino Founder Richard Kim Arrested After Gambling Away Investor Funds: Zero Edge founder Richard Kim was arrested this week on wire and securities fraud charges after allegedly losing “nearly all” of the $7 million he raised from his investors. Kim told CoinDesk last year that he had gambled over $3.6 million of his investors’ funds away.

This week

Monday

• The Securities and Exchange Commission and Binance were set to file a joint status report on their discussions after a judge paused the regulator’s case against the exchange and its affiliated entities and executives in February. Last Friday, the parties asked for an extension of this deadline, and the judge overseeing the case signed off on Monday, giving the parties until mid-June to file a follow-up.

Elsewhere:

• (The Wall Street Journal) Binance executives met with U.S. Treasury Department officials in March about potentially “loosening U.S. government oversight” of the exchange following Binance’s November 2023 guilty plea, the Journal reported. Binance agreed to a court-appointed monitor as part of the plea. At the same time as last month’s discussions, Binance was in talks with the Trump-backed World Liberty Financial to develop a dollar-pegged stablecoin.
• (Fortune) Fortune spoke to and profiled Bo Hines, the executive director of U.S. President Donald Trump’s digital assets advisory council.
• (CNBC) U.S. importers are seeing more “canceled sailings” due to a drop in demand as a result of tariffs, CNBC reports.
• (The Verge) ICERAID claims to be a protocol on Solana where people can crowdsource images of “criminal illegal alien activity” in exchange for tokens, but it does not appear to have any connection to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), The Verge reports.
• (NPR) The Department of Homeland Security is revoking parole for a number of migrants, telling them to self-deport from the U.S. U.S. citizens, born within the U.S., are also receiving these emails.
• (The New York Times) Acting IRS Commissioner Gary Shapley has been replaced after just three days on the job, after Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent reportedly complained to President Donald Trump that he was not consulted on Shapley’s promotion, which was pushed by Elon Musk.

If you’ve got thoughts or questions on what I should discuss next week or any other feedback you’d like to share, feel free to email me at nik@coindesk.com or find me on Bluesky @nikhileshde.bsky.social.

You can also join the group conversation on Telegram.

See ya’ll next week!

Canary Capital is looking to launch an exchange-traded fund (ETF) tracking the price of Tron’s native token, TRX, according to a filing.

The hedge fund submitted a Form S-1 for the Canary Staked TRX ETF with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Friday. As the name suggests, the fund — if approved — would stake portions of its holdings.

This would be done through third-party providers, with BitGo acting as custodian for the assets. The fund would track TRX’s spot price using CoinDesk Indices calculations.

A proposed ticker as well as the management fee for the product have not been shared yet.

Issuers had initially filed applications for spot ethereum (ETH) ETFs with the staking feature included but removed them in an amended filing later in order to receive approval from the SEC on their proposals.

While the SEC under former Chair Gary Gensler was strictly against staking, issuers have grown more hopeful that they will be able to add the feature to their spot ether funds, among others, with the appointment of crypto-friendly Chair Paul Atkins.

A decision on a February request from Grayscale to allow staking in the Grayscale Ethereum Trust ETF (ETHE) and the Grayscale Ethereum Mini Trust ETF (ETH) was postponed by the regulator just a few days ago.

Just four months ahead of their criminal sentencing for operating a $577 million cryptocurrency mining Ponzi scheme, the two Estonian founders of HashFlare were seemingly mistakenly ordered to self-deport by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) — an instruction that directly contradicted a court order for the men to remain in Washington state until they are sentenced in August.

In a joint letter to the court last week, lawyers for Sergei Potapenko and Ivan Turogin told District Judge Robert Lasnik of the Western District of Washington that both men had received “disturbing communications” from DHS ordering them to leave the country immediately.

“It is time for you to leave the United States,” an email to Potapenko and Turogin dated April 11 read. “DHS is terminating your parole. Do not attempt to remain in the United States – the federal government will find you. Please depart the United States immediately.”

The email, included with the letter filed last week, threatened both men with “criminal prosecution, civil fines, and penalties and any other lawful options available to the federal government” if they stayed in the country. It resembles emails that undocumented immigrants and U.S. citizens alike have received over the past few days.

Ironically, Potapenko and Turogin are not in the U.S. of their own volition — they were extradited from their native Estonia at the request of the U.S. Department of Justice in 2022 on an 18-count indictment tied to their HashFlare scheme. Though they initially pleaded not guilty to all charges, in February they both pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison, and agreed to forfeit over $400 million in assets. They have both been in the Seattle area on bond since last July.

“Although there is nothing Ivan and Sergei would want more than to immediately go home, they understood that they are also under Court order to remain in King County,” wrote Mark Bini, a partner at Reed Smith LLP and lead counsel for Potenko, wrote in the pair’s joint letter to the court. Bini did not respond to CoinDesk’s request for comment.

In his letter, Bini said DHS’s emails had caused both Potapenko and Turogin “significant anxiety.”

“We and our clients have all seen recent news. Immigration authorities make mistakes, and individuals who should not be in custody end up in custody, sometimes even deported to places where they should not be deported,” Bini wrote.

Six days after Bini’s letter to the judge, the DOJ filed its own letter with the court saying that prosecutors had coordinated with DHS’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) division and secured a year-long deferral to the self-deportation order.

“This should provide ample time for the sentencing to take place,” the prosecution’s letter said.

DHS did not respond to CoinDesk’s request for comment.

Potapenko and Turogin are slated to be sentenced on August 14 in Seattle. Their lawyers have said that they will request to be sentenced to time served, meaning no additional time in prison, and to be sent home to Estonia “immediately.”

Following last week’s tariff-caused drama, this was a relatively quiet week in crypto. Bitcoin remained stable around $84k. The CoinDesk 20, which tracks about 80% of the market, was up about 4% in the last seven days — i.e. nothing historic.

Still, plenty happened. On Tuesday, much of crypto went offline because of a tech issue at AWS, showing how the decentralized economy isn’t always that decentralized. Shaurya Malwa reported the news early. Bitcoin and other major cryptos slipped on bad news for Nvidia, Omkar Godbole reported.

Mantra, a project focused on real world assets, lost 90% of its value. Explanations varied (the company said it was due to “force liquidations” exchanges).

Meanwhile, EigenLayer, a restaking leader, rolled out a “slashing” feature meant to address security concerns (Sam Kessler reported). OKX, a major exchange, announced plans to set up in California following a $500 million settlement with the SEC over claims it operated previously in the U.S. without a money transmitter license. Cheyenne Ligon had that story.

In less good news, Kraken laid off “hundreds” of staff ahead of an expected IPO. And Coinbase became embroiled in a “front running controversy” linked to a curiously named token on its Base L2. Privacy advocates reacted with alarm to rumors that Binance was about to delist Zcash following a long decline in the value of privacy coins.

In D.C. news, Jesse Hamilton reported on a new wave of crypto lobbyists flooding the capital. Some asked if there are now too many trade groups and whether they really all could be effective.

Friends With Benefits, a buzzy social club for creative technologists, launched a new program to build Web3 products for music, film, publishing and other fun activities. (I wrote that one.)

Of course, there was plenty happening in the economy and markets (Trump’s disgust for Fed chair Powell fed into the unease). But, in crypto, it was pretty much business as usual. Fortunes won, fortunes lost, fortunes deferred.

Who truly controls your AI assistant? That’s a question most people haven’t asked yet. Today, millions rely on digital assistants, from voice-controlled devices to smart bots embedded in tools like Google Workspace or ChatGPT. These systems help us write, organize, search, and even think. However, the vast majority of them are rented. We don’t own the intelligence we depend on. That means someone else gets to control it.

If your digital assistant disappears tomorrow, can you do anything about it? What if the company behind it changes the terms, restricts functionality, or monetizes your data in ways you didn’t expect? These are not theoretical concerns. They’re already happening, and they point to a future we should actively shape.

David Minarsch is a speaker at Consensus 2025 in Toronto May 14-16.

As these agents become embedded in everything from our finances to our workflows and homes, the stakes around ownership become much higher. Renting is probably fine for low-stakes tasks, like a language model that helps you write emails. However, when your AI acts for you, makes decisions with your money, or manages critical parts of your life, ownership isn’t optional. It’s essential.

What Today’s AI Business Model Implies for Users

AI as we know it is built on a rental economy. You pay for access, monthly subscriptions, or pay-per-use APIs, and in exchange, you get the “illusion” of control. However, behind the scenes, platform providers hold all the power. They choose what AI model to serve, what your AI can do, how it responds, and whether you get to keep using it.

Let’s take a common example: a business team using an AI-powered assistant to automate tasks or generate insights. That assistant might live inside a centralized SaaS tool. It might be powered by a closed model hosted on someone else’s server — and running on their GPUs. It might even be trained on your company’s own data — data you no longer fully own once uploaded.

Now, imagine that the provider begins prioritizing monetization, like Google Search does with its advertising-driven results. Just as search results are heavily influenced by paid placements and commercial interests, the same will likely happen with large language models (LLMs). The assistant you relied on changes, skewing responses to benefit the provider’s business model, and there’s nothing you can do. You never had true control to begin with.

This isn’t just a business risk; it’s a personal one, too. In Italy, ChatGPT was temporarily banned in 2023 due to privacy concerns. That left thousands without access overnight. In a world where people are building increasingly personal workflows around AI, this weakness is unacceptable.

On the issue of privacy, when you rent an AI, you often upload sensitive data, sometimes unknowingly. That data can be logged, used for retraining, or even monetized. Centralized AI is opaque by design, and with geopolitical tensions rising and regulations shifting fast, depending entirely on someone else’s infrastructure is a growing liability.

What It Means to Truly Own Your Agent

Unlike passive AI models, agents are dynamic systems that can take independent actions. Ownership means controlling an agent’s core logic, decision-making parameters, and data processing. Imagine an agent that can autonomously manage resources, track expenses, set budgets, and make financial decisions on your behalf.

This naturally leads us to explore advanced infrastructures like Web3 and neobanking systems, which offer programmable ways to manage digital assets. An owned agent can operate independently within clear, user-defined boundaries, transforming AI from a responsive tool to a proactive, personalized system that truly works for you.

With true ownership, you know exactly what model you’re using and can change the underlying model if needed. You can upgrade or customize your agent without waiting on a provider. You can pause it, duplicate it, or transfer it to another device. And, most importantly, you can use it without leaking data or relying on a single centralized gatekeeper.

At Olas, we’ve been building toward this future with Pearl, an AI agent app store realised as a desktop app that allows users to run autonomous AI agents with just one click while retaining full ownership. Today, Pearl contains a number of use cases targeting primarily Web3 users to abstract the complexity of crypto interactions, with an increasing focus on Web2 use cases. Agents in Pearls hold their own wallets, operate using open-source AI models, and act independently on the user’s behalf.

When you launch Pearl, it’s like entering an app store for agents. You can pick one to manage your DeFi portfolio. You can run another that handles research or content generation. These agents don’t need constant prompting; they’re autonomous and yours. Go from paying for the agent you rent to earning from the agent you own.

We designed Pearl for crypto-native users who already understand the importance of owning their keys. However, the idea of taking self-custody of not just your funds but also your AI scales far beyond DeFi. Imagine an agent that controls your home automation, complements your social interactions, or coordinates multiple tools at work. If those agents are rented, you don’t fully control them. If you don’t fully control them, you’re increasingly outsourcing core parts of your life.

This movement is not just about tools; it’s about agency. If we fail to shift toward open, user-owned AI, we risk re-centralizing power in the hands of a few dominant players. But if we succeed, we unlock a new kind of freedom, where intelligence is not rented but truly yours, with each human complemented by an “army” of software agents.

It’s not just idealism. It’s good security. Open-source AI is auditable and peer-reviewed. Closed models are black boxes. If a humanoid robot is living in your home one day, do you want the code running it to be proprietary and controlled by a foreign cloud provider? Or do you want to be able to know exactly what it’s doing?

We have a choice: We can keep renting, trusting, and hoping nothing breaks, or we can take ownership of our tools, data, decisions, and futures.

User-owned AI isn’t just the better option. It’s the only one that respects the intelligence of the person using it.

READ MORE: Olas’ Mech Marketplace Enables AI Agents to Hire Each Other for Help

Crypto exchange Kraken has launched FX perpetual futures, expanding into traditional markets with round-the-clock trading for major forex pairs, the company said in a blog post Friday.

The first contracts, EUR/USD and GBP/USD, are now live on Kraken Pro, with more to follow.

Unlike standard forex products, FX perps have no expiry and operate 24/7, mirroring crypto futures.

With FX perps, Kraken is doubling down on serving institutional and professional traders looking for deeper exposure to fiat markets through a crypto-native platform, the company said.

Crypto and traditional financial markets are increasingly converging.

Kraken recently launched commission-free trading for U.S.-listed stocks and exchange-traded funds (ETFs), opening access to traditional financial markets from within the same platform it uses for cryptocurrencies and positioning itself to compete more directly with trading platforms like Robinhood (HOOD).

“Investors increasingly expect a unified trading experience that spans crypto, FX, and equities. With our recent U.S. equities launch and the addition of FX perpetuals, Kraken is delivering a comprehensive platform designed for today’s multi-asset trader,” said Alexia Theodorou, head of derivatives at Kraken, in emailed comments.

Kraken clients traded $5.4B in FX spot volume in 2024, with $3.5B of it in EUR/USD and GBP/USD.

The exchange is teaming up with Mastercard to let crypto holders in the U.K. and Europe spend their digital assets at more than 150 million merchants worldwide, Mastercard said earlier this month

Read more: Kraken Teams Up With Mastercard to Introduce Crypto Debit Cards

Disclaimer: Parts of this article were generated with the assistance from AI tools and reviewed by our editorial team to ensure accuracy and adherence to our standards. For more information, see CoinDesk’s full AI Policy.

When Friends With Benefits burst into crypto consciousness in 2020, it was the kind of FOMO-inducing project that immediately had people talking. With a wink-wink, sexy name and members including musicians Erykah Badu and Azealia Banks, it was a club that many wanted to be a part of.

Emerging at a time when everyone was locked down and hankering for connection, it filled a void and showed that crypto could bring people together for real. About 6,000 bought into the token (becoming members) and chapters sprouted up all over the world, centering on hipster-tech hubs like LA and NYC.

The New York Times, as it tends to do with crypto, gently mocked the idea. A 2022 profile opened with an anecdote about members developing a “flavored, sparkling yerba maté” with a coffee company. “It makes your soda $6 instead of $2,” said one member. The inference was clear: this was crypto kids with ideas, disposable income, plenty of time on their hands and not much to show for it.

Still, the New York Times hit on what was definitely new about FWB. It called the group — which was mostly formed on Discord — a “decentralized Soho House” and “a V.I.P. lounge for crypto’s creative class.” It was tokenizing a community (with a DAO) in a way that proved that you could create something valuable IRL as much as online. The NYT said the group had raised $10 million from investors and that, after a funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz, it was valued at $100 million.

It wasn’t clear what FWB did exactly. Sure, it was good at organizing cool events around the world. It was good at building community, generating FOMO through the media and boosting its token price. But after that? TBD.

“The original model was just a group chat with a token. The benefits at that time were just alpha,” CEO Greg Bresnitz said in an interview.

Fast forward to 2025, following FTX and The Crash, FWB looks like a more serious outfit. Today, it’s focused on building products that people actually want to use and has hopes to broaden Web3 beyond specialized financial products. Less yerba maté, more in-the-weeds innovation in music, film and culture.

“This is a good inflection point for the industry. We have the opportunity to encourage a new wave of builders to the space. Making that vision and the pie bigger is incredibly important,” said Bresnitz. “We’ve done really well in the physical world. Now we’re focused on the revitalisation of the online world and bringing that value back.”

This week, FWB announced Friends With Builders, a cohort-based building program that’s partnered with AWS, Alchemy, ThirdWeb, QuickNode, Akave, Filecoin, Base, World and several others. The idea is to invite creative technologists to work collectively quarter-by-quarter on early-stage projects, using tools provided by the partners. The first cohort (application deadline: April 28) will be focused on developing products around AI agents.

Bresnitz stresses that Friends With Builders is definitely not a hackathon.

“The general model of the hackathon doesn’t work. You get eight hours at a conference, 48 hours to build it and then get the prize money. That only speaks to a certain type of builder who can work intensively over 48 hours,” Bresnitz said.

With Friends With Builders, the reward is the developed product, not the prize and gong given out by the hackathon organizers. It’s also focused on products where the Web 3 technology is under the hood, rather than the thing itself.

“Someone could come in and build the 700th DeFi platform and we’re not going to stop them. They totally can. That’s great. But, for me, personally, what I believe the industry needs is to bundle all this up into something that feels totally normal,” Bresnitz said.

He points to projects like Blackbird, the restaurant loyalty app, as an example of the type of product Friends With Builders wants to incubate. Blackbird is useful and has mainstream appeal, and the crypto element (it has a cryptocurrency called FLY) is de-emphasized. The point is utility, not that it’s crypto.

“We need a new type of person in this space,” Bresnitz said. “The persona of FWB has always been creative technologist. These are people who understand what people want and they’re looking for technology to support that. That’s different from what we see oftentimes [in crypto], which is ‘we built a hammer that’s also a screwdriver, who wants it?’”

Bresnitz argues that crypto has created great tooling infrastructure for builders. Now it needs to develop products that de-emphasize the technology. Builders in his program will have access to founders at the partner groups via Discord and meetups. They’ll receive developer credits and be able to tap extensive DevRel (developer support).

Friends With Builders will run in quarters 1, 2 and 4. Quarter 3 will be left for FWB’s annual FEST gathering in California, where the builders will showcase their work. Base, a key FWB partner, holds its annual get-together, Base Camp, at the same location (near Idyllwild) shortly before FEST begins.

As a pilot for the new program, FWB recently organized a cohort with World (previously Worldcoin). FWB/World received 140 applications and the participating builders created 40 new mini-apps. The builders flew to Buenos Aires to take part in Crecimiento, and now some will take part in a demo day in New York on May 21. Two of those projects already have term sheets from investors.

Bresnitz is a strong advocate for his initiative. But he also displays a humility toward crypto that isn’t always evident in conversations with other founders. He believes Web3 has yet to show what it can really do for the world.

“We haven’t cracked the code yet. This to me is about saying ‘can we try something different?’”

Bitcoin (BTC) is likely headed for a period of heightened volatility as 170,000 BTC — worth over $14 billion at its current price of $84,500 — have moved from wallets held for three to six months, a cohort often linked to market turning points, CryptoQuant warned in a post.

On-chain behavior from this group has historically served as an early signal for major price action, according to the post. Mid-term holders are typically considered to be traders that hold a cryptocurrency for anywhere between three to 12 months.

They tend to be more reactive to market conditions than long-term holders but less impulsive than short-term traders, making their movements especially telling during transitional periods.

When large amounts of bitcoin shift out of this cohort, it can indicate growing uncertainty or strategic positioning ahead of an anticipated market event. In either case, analysts view this as a sign that a sharp move is coming, though the direction remains unclear.

A similar pattern emerged ahead of previous surges and corrections, including during 2021’s bull run and 2022’s capitulation.

Bitcoin has been trading between $75,000 and $87,000 over the past months as tensions between the U.S. and other countries as a result of U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariff policies have caused anxiety in markets.

Disclaimer: Parts of this article were generated with the assistance from AI tools and reviewed by our editorial team to ensure accuracy and adherence to our standards. For more information, see CoinDesk’s full AI Policy.