Again, we’re at the finish of the week. The most important news is that half of summer has passed! Your task for the near future is not to lose the second one. But besides enjoying summer, don’t let crypto news pass you by. As whoever owns the information owns the world. And in our case, the capital.
First, let’s take a look at coins that made their investors happy and those that disappointed them.
Top Gainers and Losers
- Curve DAO Token (CRV) made an impressive move this week, jumping 64.94% and climbing to $1.03 per token.
- Stellar (XLM) continues to lead for the second week in a row. This time, it surged 63.44%, and brought the price to $0.496.
- Bonk (BONK) nearly doubled its value with a 55.90% uptick. The meme coin is now trading at $0.00003622.
- Pump.fun (PUMP), the native token of the Solana-based platform, lost an unfortunate 18.95%, bringing its price down to $0.005082.
- PI (PI) kept dropping for the second week, but not by much — down 9%, now priced at $0.4554.
- OKB (OKB), the utility token from the OKX Blockchain Foundation, also slipped a little this week. But no worries. It’s just a minor 0.61% dip, with the token now priced at $48.87.
Meme of the Week
Kraken Launches Futures Trading After Acquiring NinjaTrader
Crypto exchange Kraken has added a new function — futures trading. Before this, it only offered spot trading.
The exchange has launched a derivatives platform for US traders, which offers access to CME-listed cryptocurrency futures (types of derivatives). This became possible after acquiring NinjaTrader, a retail futures brokerage. The deal was valued at $1.5 billion, one of the largest mergers in crypto history.
The service is now available in several US states, including Vermont, West Virginia, North Dakota, Mississippi, and Washington, D.C.
Users can access the new service via Kraken Pro. With this new platform, they can trade futures and spot in one place. In this way, the system will meet US financial standards and become more suitable for both regular and institutional investors.
“Later this year, we plan to expand our offering to include commodity, fixed income, FX, and equity futures.”
By the way, rival exchanges also partner with financial companies to broaden their range of services. Coinbase acquired options trading marketplace FairX and launched perpetual-style futures regulated by the CFTC in the U.S. Meanwhile, digital trading platform Robinhood bought regulated crypto exchange Bitstamp.
Famous Trader Wynn Returns With $19M Long Bitcoin And $100K Pepe Bet After Several Liquidations
After two brutal liquidations, James Wynn, crypto multi-millionaire, returned with two new impressive positions. The first one is a 40x leveraged Bitcoin long position. It’s worth over $19.5 million, at around $67,000, with a liquidation price of nearly $65,750.
The second position is a 10x leveraged long on the popular Pepe memecoin, worth over $102,000 at $0.01201. The position’s liquidation price is unknown.
Wynn previously claimed that crypto market makers deliberately “hunted” his positions and tried to push Bitcoin’s price below his liquidation price.
At the end of May, his leveraged $100 million position was liquidated on May 30. Then on June 5, he lost nearly $25 million. James commented on the situation on X: “They’re coming for me again. Don’t let these evil bastards liquidate me.”
But now, like a gambling addict, he’s trying again. On Tuesday, he shared on X:
By the way, another popular trader, Qwatio, opened a 40x leveraged short worth over $2.3 million. Qwatio had already been liquidated eight times in a single week, losing a total of $12.5 million.
We’ll see who’s right.
Michigan Town Preemptively Sets Regulations For Crypto ATMs
In Grosse Pointe Farms, a town in Michigan, the city council just passed an ordinance regarding crypto ATMs, even before any are installed.
The move came after reports of scams in the nearby town of St. Clair Shores. One elderly Grosse Pointe Farms resident withdrew $20,000 in cash and sent that money to scammers via a cryptocurrency ATM located in St. Clair Shores. The scammers somehow convinced the man that if he'd send $20,000 in cash via the crypto ATM, he'd receive $50,000 in return.
Now, the Grosse Pointe Farms attorney Bill Burgess outlined four main rules for future crypto ATMs:
- Kiosks must be registered with the Department of Public Safety
- Operators must have a business license
- They must display mandatory fraud warnings and give written info about scam risks and irreversible transactions
- New users can send: a $1,000 daily cap and $5,000 total cap in the first 14 days. After that, limits are lifted.
Scammers use phone calls to trick victims into sending them money through crypto ATMs for various reasons. Elderly people are often the ones who fall for these scams.
In Michigan, it’s one of the first towns to officially pass crypto ATM regulations. For context, other U.S. states like Arizona, Nebraska, California, and Washington have already started cracking down on these machines this year.
Vitalik Buterin Clarifies Ethereum’s Layer-2 Vision
The triumphant Vitalik Buterin, whose coin Ether has reached a price of about $3,675, also made significant decisions about L2.
Previously, L1 systems were trying to create separate blockchains with separate structures and security. However, rather than competing with Ethereum, many of them are now choosing to integrate into its ecosystem as Layer-2s.
Jason Chaskin from the Ethereum Foundation noted that L1 chains like Celo are transitioning to become L2s on Ethereum. The move helps simplify network architecture, reduce inflation, and speed up performance, while also gaining access to Ethereum’s robust developer ecosystem and secure infrastructure.
*Reducing inflation means reducing the number of coins, which can help stabilize or increase their price.
In response, Buterin suggested not to rebuild what Ethereum already does well. Instead, he advised using Ethereum’s key strengths (strong security, decentralization, and reliable data) for Layer 2 design. And L2 solutions should have only two functions: order transactions (as a sequencer) and verify their validity (as a prover). This simple setup removes the extra complexity that many networks add.
“Now, with Ethereum L2s, you can achieve it,” he wrote. “We’ve already seen Ethereum’s L1 features protect users when L2s malfunction — that safety net is real.”
The Ethereum Foundation also shared its plan to fully add zkEVM technology. This major update will let Ethereum nodes verify transactions using zero-knowledge proofs (ZK-proofs), so they won’t have to run the same transactions again.
Alex Shepel
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