Your favorite Friday ritual, the HODL FM Digest, brings you the must-know news from the crypto world.
Let's start with the best and worst performers of the week. Raydium and Pudgy Penguins swapped roles; one turned into a winner, the other into a loser.
Top Gainers and Losers of the Week
- Dogwifhat is up by 44.74%, now trading at $1.05 per token.
- Raydium pleased its investors this week by helping them recover last week's losses. It gained 20%, bringing the price to $3.41.
- Kaspa rose by 17.11%, valued at $0.1214.
- Dexe dropped by 12.91%, reaching a price of $12.84.
- Pudgy Penguins, after soaring 44.6%, fell by 11.27%. It's a significant drop, but not so much to make investors panic. The new price is $0.0136.
- Brett (Based) fell 11.07%, bringing the price down to $0.07207.
Armed Attackers Attempt to Kidnap Family Members of Crypto CEO
The targets were the daughter and grandson of the CEO and co-founder of Paymium, a French cryptocurrency exchange platform.
Three masked men attacked a couple and their child in the 11th district of Paris. All three suffered light injuries and were taken to the hospital.
According to video footage, three masked men jumped out of a van and tried to force the woman and her child into the vehicle. They beat the woman's partner, who tried to intervene. The woman resisted, grabbing one of the attackers' handguns and throwing it away, police said, and the screams of the victims eventually attracted passers-by. The attackers fled in a van, which was found close by.
It's not the only case of kidnapping attempts of people connected to crypto. In January, French crypto boss David Balland and his partner were abducted. The kidnappers demanded a "large ransom in cryptocurrency", prosecutors said.
In May, attackers kidnapped a man to force his crypto-millionaire son to pay a ransom. Police arrested seven people after a raid to free the man.
Kazakhstan is becoming Central Asia's Crypto Hub
In a recent op-ed for the Kazakhstanskaya Pravda newspaper, Kanysh Tuleushin, the country's first vice minister of digital development, innovation, and aerospace industry, said that broader legalization and taxation in the cryptocurrency sector could add hundreds of billions of the country's tenge currency to the national budget.
Like the United States, miners in Kazakhstan could help balance the power grid by consuming surplus energy. Through the 70/30 energy initiative, foreign investors fund thermal power upgrades, with 70% of the generated capacity going to the national grid and 30% allocated to miners.
Tuleushin also proposed utilizing associated petroleum gas from oil fields to power data centers, reducing emissions while generating revenue for oil producers.
Kazakhstan's crypto mining sector has already contributed $34.6 million in taxes over the past three years. As of 2023, the government registered 415,000 mining machines, issued 84 licenses, and accredited five mining pools.
The state struggles with unregulated crypto trades. Despite progress, crypto transactions remain largely unregulated outside the Astana International Financial Centre (AIFC), with an estimated $4.1 billion in turnover in 2023, 91.5% of which took place beyond government oversight.
Authorities shut down 36 illegal exchanges in 2024, freezing $4.8 million in assets and disrupting two Ponzi schemes.
The country is also building an in-house central bank digital currency (CBDC), the digital tenge. Development began in February 2023, with an initial launch set for 2025.
US privacy activists are alarmed by Sam Altman's new project
World, formerly known as Worldcoin, is a crypto and digital identity project founded by Sam Altman of OpenAI. It uses iris scans to create a "World ID" for verifying humanness online.
On April 30, Altman announced that World would set up in "key innovation hubs" in five states in the US: Atlanta, Austin, Los Angeles, Miami, Nashville, and San Francisco. But an uncertain regulatory landscape could put users off.
Globally, World is under investigation or partially banned in countries including India, South Korea, Italy, Argentina, and Kenya. Hong Kong and Spain have outright halted their operations.
The Spanish Data Protection Agency previously claimed that Orb operators provided "insufficient information, collected data from minors, and even failed to allow withdrawal of consent."
Not everyone is convinced of privacy concerns. Tomasz Stańczak, co-executive director at the Ethereum Foundation, said he has spent "over 100 hours" analyzing World, which is building on the Ethereum network. He added that it "looked very promising and much more robust and privacy-focused than my initial intuition."
World is building on Ethereum. I spent over 100 hours last Jan / Feb analyzing the design of World, reading through all their blogposts, launching various code components locally. It looked very promising and much more robust and privacy focused than my initial intuition. I think… https://t.co/VE5J1p0FgQ
— Tomasz K. Stańczak (@tkstanczak) April 5, 2025
Despite protestations in various countries, the ID system is making inroads. In Japan, World is a part of dating online.
Spencer Rascoff, CEO of Match Group, which includes dating app Tinder in its portfolio, announced on May 1 that Tinder would be trialing the World's ID system on Tinder in Japan, "giving users a privacy-first way to prove they're real humans."
Joined @alexblania and @sama today to announce @MatchGroup’s collaboration with @worldcoin ID.
— Spencer Rascoff (@spencerrascoff) May 1, 2025
We’re piloting it first on @Tinder in Japan — giving users a privacy-first way to prove they’re real humans. Excited for what’s ahead.#WorldID #MatchGroup #AI #TrustAndSafety pic.twitter.com/hayPyz7yQn
Fed Advisory Council Warns about Stablecoins' Influence on Banks
On April 10, during a meeting, members of the Federal Reserve's Community Depository Institutions Advisory Council (CDIAC) raised concerns that nonbank-issued stablecoins could accelerate deposit outflows from traditional banks. This could potentially reduce credit availability to local communities.
They compared the threat of deposit migration from banks to stablecoin platforms to a once-historical exodus of funds to money market mutual funds that happened in the late 20th century.
CBDCs and privately issued stablecoins introduce competition for traditional bank deposits, they are still not subject to equivalent regulatory oversight or traditional liquidity requirements, which is a problem.
It could reduce banks lending capacity, particularly for small businesses and community borrowers, and the only way to potentially prevent that, due to The Council typical advice, is to establish an appropriate regulatory system.
Abimbola Adu
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