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OVERVIEW

One In Four Americans Now Owns Crypto – And the Buyer Has Changed 🤯

Here’s What’s Happening 👇️

Today’s top trending tickers: Zcash, Hyperliquid, Bonfida, Degen, and UFO Gaming

Biggest winners: $ZEC ( ▲ 16.6% ) , $ONDO ( ▲ 9.3% ) , $HYPE ( ▲ 17.29% ) , $ASTER ( ▲ 7.07% ) , and $TAO ( ▲ 7.55% )

Biggest losers: $MEMECOIN ( ▼ 2.83% ) , $ETC ( ▲ 1.76% ) , $USDE ( ▼ 0.02% ) , $USDT ( ▼ 0.0% ) , and $RLUSD ( ▼ 0.01% )  

Before we dive in, here’s the total crypto market cap and altcoin market cap charts:

Source: TradingView

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NEWS
While Crypto Panicked, Securitize Printed 🖨️

While the majority of the crypto space in Q1 either panicked or in a dour, ‘meh’ state (which, to be honest, that hasn’t changed much), Securitize turned in the highest-revenue quarter in company history. 

So… Those Are Pretty Good Numbers

• Total revenue: $19.5M, up 39% YoY – a company record

• Asset Servicing revenue: $8.3M, up 201%

• AUM: $3.4B at quarter-end, with $4B+ reached in April

• Aggregated Transaction Volume: $1.9B

• AUA: $24.9B

• 650 active funds serviced by Securitize Fund Services

Securitize Is Now Everyone’s BFF

• Named design partner and first digital transfer agent for the NYSE-affiliated Digital Trading Platform, with Securitize Markets as the first broker-dealer connected to the NYSE Digital ATS

• Integrated BlackRock’s BUIDL with Uniswap Labs via UniswapX.

• Tapped to tokenize loan interests tied to the Trump International Hotel & Resort Maldives.

• Post-quarter, locked in Computershare – the world’s largest transfer agent – as the partner for issuer-sponsored tokenized securities

Also: The Cantor Equity Partners II merger (ticker: SECZ) is expected to close in the first half of this year.

Good to see someone in the space winning and winning big.

NEWS
37% of Crypto Holders Plan to Pay Employees in Crypto Next Year 😱

I went into the NCA’s 2026 State of Crypto Holders Report ready to roll my eyes at another industry-commissioned victory lap. What I found was a set of demographic shifts that made me do more than couple double takes:

• The U.S. added 12 million crypto holders in a single year, bringing the total to 67 million, or one in four adults.

• The newer wave skews older and more female than the legacy base. 28% of buyers in the past year are 55 or older and 42% of recent purchasers identify as women versus 34% among earlier adopters. The age distribution is widening at both ends.

• Then there’s the industry mix. People in tech careers holding crypto are down to 11% of new holders from 18%, while construction and manufacturing workers now make up 21% of the total holder base.

• Manufacturing workers in particular over-index on actually using crypto for purchases, not just holding it.

• Sending crypto to friends and family rose from 31% to 41% in a year, gaming climbed from 20% to 28%, and active usage went from 80% to 87% of holders.

• NFTs and crypto art each ticked down 2%.

And there’s some good stuff on future trends/behaviors from those polled:

90% of holders plan to buy more in the next year, 72% plan to spend, and 37% plan to send crypto to employees.

The payroll intent number seems like a big deal because it implies a demand profile that looks more like real use and utility than pure speculation and investing. In fact, that’s what most of this report looks like: a holder base that looks pretty close to the actual American population, using crypto for ordinary reasons.

That’s a more durable foundation than the cycle-to-cycle narrative most of us are used to working with. Not mainstream yet, but it looks like we’re closer than at any other point in crypto history.

DEFI
Oh Look, Another Bridge Exploit 😲

Today, MAP Protocol’s Butter Bridge V3.1 added itself to crypto’s ever-expanding graveyard of cross-chain infrastructure that absolutely, definitely, this time would be different.

An attacker forged a cross-chain message, bypassed validation, and minted 1,000,000,000,000,000 MAPO tokens – roughly 4.8 million times the legitimate circulating supply.

Twitter tweet

PeckShield flagged the alert. MAP Protocol has yet to comment.

The attacker, saved from himself by the same thin liquidity that capped Hyperbridge’s April disaster in the low six figures, walked away with roughly $290,000 in ETH and Uniswap liquidity.

This is the second major bridge exploit this week, following Verus losing $11.58 million on Sunday. PeckShield’s mid-May tally already sits at $328.6 million across eight incidents.

NEWS
Tether Buys Out SoftBank At A $288M Loss, Calls It A Deepening Of Commitment 🫂

Tether International announced today it had acquired $SFTBY ( ▲ 2.84% ) ’s stake in $XXI ( ▲ 2.23% ) , which is Bitcoin treasury vehicle the two firms co-founded alongside Cantor Fitzgerald and Bitfinex barely twelve months ago.

SoftBank paid $999.3 million for 89.1 million shares in June 2025. Those shares are now (at the time of writing) $700ish million, leaving SoftBank’s eleven-month adventure in Bitcoin treasury investing about $288 million in the red. The stock itself has fallen 84% since the SPAC merger was announced.

Ouch. Ouch. And More Ouch.

The cap table change is uglier than the press release implies. SoftBank held 25% of XXI’s Class A stock and 29.2% of the high-vote Class B shares. The Class B shares were not transferred to Tether – they were canceled.

Voting power extinguished. SoftBank’s board designees resigned on the spot, leaving XXI temporarily non-compliant with NYSE governance rules. A newly-public company is now operating outside listing standards because its anchor backer walked.

Whale Hello Fren

Tether is now pushing proposed mergers folding Jack Mallers’ Strike and Bitcoin miner Elektron Energy into XXI, building toward a vertically integrated mining-payments-treasury conglomerate.

I’m just gonna guess that SoftBank didn’t want to be diluted into a roll-up – or possibly just did not want to remain associated with one trading 84% below its debut.

XXI currently holds 43,514 BTC worth roughly $3.4 billion. That’s the asset. The equity around the asset is what lost the money, which is exactly what BTC treasury haters have been pointing at since $MSTR ( ▲ 0.72% ) copy cats started multiplying.

Owning Bitcoin through a publicly-traded vehicle is not the same as owning Bitcoin, and that shows up most clearly when the vehicle’s largest non-controlling shareholder decides $288 million is a fair price to leave the room.

NEWS
Ethereum Foundation Reorganizes Into Smaller, More Anime Research Hub 🥷

There is, as the kids say, a situation unfolding at the Ethereum Foundation, and Ryan Berckmans gave all of us a wall of text on X late last night in an attempt to explain that everything is fine.

The eight senior departures in five months are part of a deliberate plan, and the bizarre anime PDF the Foundation published in March has nothing to do with anyone leaving. Probably.

It’s easy to forget because of all the other crypto shenanigans that happen, but the Ethereum Foundation has had somewhat of a brain drain going on.

Co-executive director Tomasz Stańczak resigned in February, less than a year into the role. Then in March, the EF board signed off on its new “CROPS Mandate” – a 34-page illustrated document reportedly featuring lingerie-clad anime archers.

Oh, and references to Vitalik’s beloved Milady NFTs, a cartoon character invoking “death by suicide” as a pledge penalty, and the cover question “Ever dream this girl?” Not sharing the link, you can Google yourself.

Since then:

• Josh Stark out

• Tim Beiko (the hard fork coordinator) out

• Barnabé Monnot out

• Trent Van Epps out to the Protocol Guild

• Alex Stokes on indefinite ‘sabbatical’

• Carl Beekhuizen out by May 29

• Julian Ma out.

At least eight senior departures in five months.

Enter Berckmans’ clarification post. TL;DR version: the EF and Vitalik do care about ETH’s price, they just care about it in ‘long term structural ways that are incomprehensible to many of us,’ like quantum computer dominance and being the economic hub of “thousands of L2s across a hundred countries.”

ETH is down. Morale, reportedly, also down. But hope, Berckman wrote, is up.

OLD NEWS
Crypto Stuff That Happened Today, But A Long Time Ago 📜

Here’s what was happening in the newsletter a year ago today:

• Coinbase was still drenched in drama – the big question was whether it updated user terms on April 12 before fully disclosing the breach mess that surfaced by May 14-15.

• Bitcoin was getting close to its first golden cross since October 28, 2024, and names like TAO, CRV, QNT, and SUI were setting up for their own.

• A poll claimed 80% of Americans wanted the U.S. to swap some gold for Bitcoin – which would certainly upset Peter Schiff enough to power a small city.

Here’s what was happening in the newsletter two years ago today:

• Bloomberg analysts floated a 75% approval chance and crypto immediately started acting like it heard wedding bells.

• Grayscale was changing CEOs – Michael Sonnenshein out, Goldman’s Peter Mintzberg in starting August 15.

• Web3 gaming was getting louder – Draftables sold out Founder Pass NFTs in under 10 minutes, FAIRY TAIL collectibles were headed to Quidd, and Magic Square was tossing around $200K in tokens for startups.

OLD NEWS
Other Stuff That Happened Today, But A Long Ass Time Ago ⌛️

May 20

• 325 – The First Council of Nicaea opens.

• 1498 – Vasco da Gama or Portugal discovers a sea route to India.

• 1813 – Napoleon Bonaparte defeats the combined forces of Prussia and Russia at the Battle of Bautzen.

• 1861 – American Civil War – Kentucky proclaims neutrality, North Carolina secedes, the last State to do so.

• 1873 – Levi Strauss receives a patent for blue jeans.

• 1875 – The International System of Units is established by the signing of the Metre Convention.

• 1949 – The predecessor to the National Security Agency, the Armed Forces Security Agency, is created.

• 1951 – Korean War – US Air Force Captain James Jabara becomes the first jet air ace in history.

• 2006 – The Three Gorges Dam is officially opened.

• 2015 – David Letterman steps down as host of the Late Show.

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Author Disclosure: The author of this newsletter holds positions in AVAX, ADA, PUDGY, WLD, NEAR, INJ, LTC, LINK, ZEC, XLM, and FET. 📋