Winklevoss Twins Say They Each Gave $1 Million to Trump’s U.S. Presidential Campaign

The Winklevoss donations to Trump 47 join similar maxed-out contributions from Jeffrey Sprecher, the founder, chairman, and CEO of Intercontinental Exchange, and his wife Kelly Lynn Loeffler, a former U.S. senator and CEO of Bakkt; Joe Ricketts, the founder and former CEO of TD Ameritrade; and Robert Bigelow, who owns Budget Suites of America and founded the now-defunct Bigelow Aerospace. Source

California Judge Breaks With New York Counterpart, Sends Ripple Securities Lawsuit to Trial

“The court declines to find as a matter of law that a reasonable investor would have derived any expectation of profit from general cryptocurrency market trends, as opposed to Ripple’s efforts to facilitate XRP’s use in cross-border payments, among other things,” Hamilton wrote. “Accordingly, the [court] cannot find as a matter of law that Ripple’s conduct would not have led a reasonable investor to have an expectation of profit due to the efforts of others.” Source

Canada’s 3iQ Files to List Solana ETP in Toronto

“Our goal is to continue pushing the envelope and maintaining Canada as an innovation hub. The Solana ETP will have staking enabled, similar to our Ether ETPs, allowing us to pass through the yield to investors,” Christopher Matta, a Strategic Advisor to 3iQ, told CoinDesk in a phone interview. Source

Mexican Cartels Using BTC, ETH, USDT, Other Tokens to Buy Fentanyl Precursors: U.S. Treasury

The cartels “are increasingly purchasing fentanyl precursor chemicals and manufacturing equipment” from China-based suppliers and paying in tokens including bitcoin (BTC), ether (ETH), monero (XMR), and tether (USDT) “among others,” according to an updated FinCEN advisory to alert U.S. financial firms about the network of criminal organizations producing the dangerous narcotic. Source

Insights from 2023 and Expectations for 2024

It’s important to note the latest survey only spans May 30, 2023, to Oct. 6, 2023, missing a critical year-end period during which bitcoin rose from approximately $28,000 to $42,300, driven largely by anticipation of the SEC’s approval of spot bitcoin ETFs which occurred later, in January of 2024. Perceptions have likely evolved meaningfully since the start of 2024 following crypto’s market capitalization climbing above $2.5 trillion, Bitcoin surging to nearly $74,000, and the SEC’s approval of bitcoin and soon Ether spot ETFs. Source

Telegram Is Crypto’s Adoption Machine

Recently, it became more than that for on-chain traders. A new generation of Telegram trading bots changed crypto UX forever, and perhaps changed on-chain trading forever. Buying/selling, setting limit orders, scanning new projects, sniping new launches, and copy trading “smart money,” all became simple with a single command. Source

Farworld, Building Gaming on Farcaster, Raises $1.75M

June 20: Farworld Labs, the Farcaster-native gaming company, has closed its $1.75 million pre-seed funding round, co-led by Lemniscap and Variant. According to the team: “The funding will enable Farworld Labs to expedite the rollout of upcoming Q3 releases, including the highly anticipated launch of the Farcade platform in conjunction with top-tier studios and developers. Built on decentralized social media protocols, the Farcade is a platform and suite of tools for developers to build crypto-native games that integrate with onchain social, making games instantly playable within social media feeds with…

Crypto Custody Firm Fireblocks Adds ‘One-Click’ Audits, Tax Reporting

“When you’re sitting at a board meeting and the CEO says, ‘I’ve got this idea we should tokenize assets, or we should get into crypto and payments in USDC,’ the first person to knock on the table during that board meeting was a CFO saying they don’t know how to handle these kind of assets,” Zackon said in an interview. “Well now it’s easy for them. Everything they are used to from the Web2 world exists exactly like it’s built for the CFO that maybe doesn’t even have any connection…