OVERVIEW

Well, At Least We’re Green 😶

Before we dive in, here’s today’s crypto market heatmap:

Source: finviz

And here’s a look at crypto’s total market and altcoin market cap charts:

Source: TradingView

PRIVACY
Zcash Gets A War Chest 🏴‍☠️

The Zcash Open Development Lab (ZODL) announced it has raised over $25 million in seed funding, backed by a who’s-who of crypto capital: Paradigm, a16z crypto, Winklevoss Capital, Coinbase Ventures, Maelstrom, Cypherpunk Technologies, Chapter One, and others. 👍️ 

ZODL was founded by Josh Swihart, the former CEO of Electric Coin Company, and brings along the entire ECC product team – the same people who built and maintained Zcash’s core systems for years.

When the team departed ECC earlier this year, the Zcash community had the predictable meltdown: eulogies were written, doom was declared, and the ecosystem’s obituary was being drafted in real time. Turns out that was premature.

Their flagship product is Zodl (formerly Zashi), a self-custodial wallet that’s been doing actual numbers since launch: the Zcash shielded pool has grown over 400% on its watch, and the app has processed more than $600 million in ZEC swaps since October 2025.

Source: zechub – Click to enlarge.

The mandate is pretty straightforward: expand Zodl as an open, self-custodial private financial platform, deepen ecosystem interoperability through partnerships, and keep pushing protocol development with the same team that built it. 🧱

How Jennifer Anniston’s LolaVie brand grew sales 40% with CTV ads

For its first CTV campaign, Jennifer Aniston’s DTC haircare brand LolaVie had a few non-negotiables. The campaign had to be simple. It had to demonstrate measurable impact. And it had to be full-funnel.

LolaVie used Roku Ads Manager to test and optimize creatives — reaching millions of potential customers at all stages of their purchase journeys. Roku Ads Manager helped the brand convey LolaVie’s playful voice while helping drive omnichannel sales across both ecommerce and retail touchpoints.

The campaign included an Action Ad overlay that let viewers shop directly from their TVs by clicking OK on their Roku remote. This guided them to the website to buy LolaVie products.

Discover how Roku Ads Manager helped LolaVie drive big sales and customer growth with self-serve TV ads.

The DTC beauty category is crowded. To break through, Jennifer Anniston’s brand LolaVie, worked with Roku Ads Manager to easily set up, test, and optimize CTV ad creatives. The campaign helped drive a big lift in sales and customer growth, helping LolaVie break through in the crowded beauty category.

Learn more.

NEWS
When the Jury Won’t Cooperate, Try a Different Jury 🤦 

Saw this gem of a rage inducing post on X last night. 👇️ 

Twitter tweet

Who is Roman Storm? Roman Storm is a software developer. In 2019, he co-created Tornado Cash, a privacy protocol built on Ethereum that makes crypto transactions difficult to trace. Financial privacy is a feature of every legacy banking system on earth, so this isn’t anything new.

But Tornado Cash is also useful to criminals. North Korea’s Lazarus Group uses it to launder hundreds of millions in stolen crypto. That’s not in dispute. What is in dispute is whether the man who wrote the code is criminally responsible for what others did with it.

In August 2023, the US government decided he was. Storm was arrested and charged with conspiracy to launder money, evade sanctions, and operate an unlicensed money-transmitting business. Combined maximum sentence: 45 years.

Last July, twelve Americans sat through four weeks of trial. They heard the government’s best evidence, its best lawyers, its best argument that writing open-source code is a federal crime.

They deadlocked on the two most serious charges. That’s how the system is supposed to work. Reasonable doubt exists for a reason.

SDNY’s response: find twelve different people.

Twitter tweet

The same week SDNY filed its retrial letter, the US Treasury published an official report to Congress stating that “lawful users of digital assets may leverage mixers to enable financial privacy.” Same government. Same month. Opposite positions.

Storm all but called what’s happening to him a form of jury shopping: “A jury already couldn’t agree this was criminal. But the SDNY prosecutors want to keep trying with the hope of getting a different answer.”

I’ll keep you updated as this develops.😡 

SPONSORED
Live From the New York Stock Exchange, it’s the 2026 Cashtag Awards Presented by Polymarket!! 🏛️

The biggest night in finance just got an upgrade.

On May 4th, Stocktwits is heading to the New York Stock Exchange to host the 2026 Cashtag Awards Presented by Polymarket. We’re honoring the creators, stocks, and innovators that defined the last year of trading.

This isn’t a “suit and tie” industry gala: this is powered by the 10 million+ investors who make the Stocktwits community the heartbeat of the market. From “Cashtag of the Year” to the “Best Retail IR Team,” the winners are chosen by you.

Nominations are officially OPEN. It’s time to give credit where it’s due and secure your spot at the most exclusive event in retail investing. 

TLDR : 🏆 The 2026 Cashtag Awards Presented by Polymarket are live! We’re taking over the NYSE on May 4th. Nominations are open now

A Special Thanks to Our Partners: Polymarket, Zenatech,Tradier, Voyager, Tradr ETFs, Fintech TV

*3rd Party Ad. Not an offer or recommendation by Stocktwits. See disclosure here.

NEWS
Zero Knowledge, Real Utility 🧠

You can prove your bank account clears a threshold without telling anyone your balance. You can verify a transaction is legitimate without revealing who sent it or who received it. You can demonstrate you’re not a sanctioned entity without handing over your identity. 🔒️ 

That’s zero knowledge proofs. And if that sounds like something cooked up to solve a problem that doesn’t exist, you haven’t spent time talking to institutional finance.

Blockchain’s core value proposition (the transparent, auditable, tamper-resistant ledger) is also the thing that makes it unusable for any institution that competes for a living. A major global bank told Stellar CEO Denelle Dixon exactly that: “Unless you can protect my information, I can’t do anything on the blockchain.”

To be clear, they’re not talking about customer data, but their own competitive intelligence. Deposit flows. Payment volumes. Counterparty exposure. Position-building. The stuff competitors would pay serious money to see.

Traditional finance buried this problem under layers of custodians and clearing houses. Expensive, slow, but effective. Nobody’s rival is watching their book build in real time. On a transparent ledger, that cover disappears.

Stellar researcher Marcelo Prates puts a finer point on it in a companion piece on Stellar’s blog. He calls it self-doxxing. The moment two institutions transact onchain, they hand each other their public addresses. From that point forward, both parties can see every transaction ever associated with that address… past and future.

ZK proofs are the exit ramp. Verify the transaction happened. Verify the amounts are real. Verify nobody is fabricating assets or moving dirty money. Do all of that without exposing who, how much, or with whom.

The base layer stays transparent. The application layer gets walls. Finally, institutions are finally at the table helping define what “private enough” actually means. 👍️ 

STOCKTWITS
Overnight Pricing now available on Stocktwits

Markets don’t stop moving when the closing bell rings.

With Overnight Pricing on Stocktwits, you can stay on the pulse of price action outside regular market hours — so you never miss a move.

Whether it’s late-night news, early morning momentum, or positioning before the open, you now have a continuous view of how prices move from: after hours → overnight → premarket → market open

What’s new

• Live overnight prices for supported symbols*: Track real-time price movement during the Overnight session when data is available.

• Charts that extend through overnight sessions: See the full story of price action — not just regular market hours.

• Clear session indicators: Instantly understand when price movement is happening.

• Optional overnight view: Overnight Pricing is enabled by default, so charts show overnight, premarket, and market hours together. If you prefer a simpler view, you can toggle Overnight Pricing off at any time to display market hours only. Just click the ⚙️gear icon under the chart and select your preference.

*Overnight pricing is currently available for select, highly traded U.S. equities that support overnight sessions. If overnight data isn’t available for a symbol, Stocktwits automatically shows the most recent session price.

Whether you’re checking positions before bed or preparing for the open, Stocktwits helps you stay connected to the market around the clock.

NEWS IN THREE SENTENCES
AI, Stablecoins, & Privacy News 🕵️

📱 Google Wants Every Android Developer’s Government ID, Even the Ones Who Never Touched the Play Store

Google is requiring all Android developers to register with a government-issued ID starting September 2026 – including the volunteers building privacy tools, Tor clients, and encrypted messengers for journalists in hostile environments who specifically chose not to use Google’s infrastructure. Brave, EFF, the Tor Project, and 40+ other organizations signed an open letter calling it what it is: a centralized identity database controlled by a single corporation that Google has no legitimate claim to require. Basic Attention Token.

📋 Virtuals and the Ethereum Foundation Built a Commerce Standard So AI Agents Can Pay Each Other Without Anyone Getting Robbed

ERC-8183 defines a “Job” primitive for AI agent commerce – client creates a job, funds go into escrow, provider does the work, an evaluator confirms it’s done, payment releases – like a freelance contract where the escrow is math instead of a platform’s terms of service. The evaluator can be another AI, a smart contract running a ZK verifier, or a multi-sig depending on what the job requires, and the standard doesn’t care which. Without something like this, agent-to-agent commerce is just a wire transfer with a prayer attached. Virtuals.

🤖 Your AI Agent Is Making Decisions It Can’t Explain

Speaking of Cylons: Most AI agent memory works like a goldfish with a highlighter – it pulls relevant chunks from a database and jams them into the prompt, with no record of where the information came from or whether it’s still accurate. OriginTrail says their Decentralized Knowledge Graph gives agents a verifiable context layer where every fact has a source, every decision has a trail, and outputs link back to the inputs that shaped them – the difference between an agent that remembers and one that can prove what it remembered. OriginTrail.

NEWS IN THREE SENTENCES
Real World Asset Tokenization (RWA) News 🪙

🏦 Solana Users Can Now Earn Yield From Real-World Lending

Plume’s Nest protocol is launching an RWA vault on Solana through Perena, Solana’s native stablebank, giving users exposure to institutional-grade assets like private credit funds – real-world lending markets, tokenized and piped directly into a Solana wallet. Perena’s USD stablecoin will allocate a portion of its backing to the vault, which means the digital dollar in your account is quietly earning from the same type of credit markets that normally require a minimum check size and a firm handshake. Plume Network.

NEWS IN THREE SENTENCES
Metaverse, NFT, & Gaming News 🎮️

🏠 Decentraland Worlds Are 3D Spaces You Actually Own

Decentraland Worlds give any NAME holder a private 3D space that lives on a decentralized network – host 100 concurrent visitors, lock it behind a password or wallet allowlist, build with drag-and-drop or full SDK, and unlike your Instagram profile, it doesn’t disappear if the company decides to shut down or change the rules. A NAME costs 100 MANA and comes with 100MB of storage, voting power in Decentraland governance, and a unique username – it’s one of the more complete value propositions for a single purchase in the space. The platform now explicitly suggests using Claude or Cursor for vibe-coded scene building if you don’t know how to code. Decentraland.

🏔️ Avalanche Is Paying Up to $40M to Builders Who Actually Have Users

Retro9000’s C-Chain Round is live – a retroactive grant program that ranks projects by how much AVAX their app burns through real transactions, like a leaderboard where your score is literally how many people used your product. Top 40 projects at round’s end split the pool, no committee, no subjective judging, just on-chain activity doing the talking. New projects get a 1.5x multiplier to compete against established ones, and you can earn up to $3,000 per referred project that gets funded. Avalanche.

NEWS IN THREE SENTENCES
DeFi, DEX, & Lending News 🏦

📊 Ondo RWA Trading Through 1inch Hit $2.5 Billion, Nvidia Tokens Leading the Way

Tokenized Nvidia exposure drove $354M in volume through the 1inch-Ondo integration since September 2025, with Tesla and Google not far behind – apparently the same stocks retail traders argue about on StockTwits are the ones they want onchain too. BNB Chain is handling the bulk of it, $2B of the $2.5B tota. Binance’s user base is just bigger. 1inch.

🩹 Flow and Binance Resolved That Token Counterfeiting Incident

In December 2025, an attacker exploited a Flow network vulnerability to counterfeit tokens – Flow halted the network within hours, patched the vulnerability, identified and destroyed all counterfeit tokens, and completed on-chain verification of the fixs. Binance ran an independent review, confirmed user protection was maintained throughout, and has fully restored FLOW deposits, withdrawals, and normal listing status. Flow.

LINKS
Links That Don’t Suck 🔗

⭕️ Circle’s Tokenized Money Fund USYC Surpasses $2B In Assets

🤖 Amazon To Address Recent Outages In ‘Deep-Dive’ Tech Meeting: Report

🥇 One of Bitcoin’s Earliest Billionaires Moved $130M In BTC To Hot Wallets, Sparking Sell Speculation

🎰 Polymarket Ropes In Palantir To Track Suspicious Sports Prediction Bets: Report

🐂 The Next Wall Street Vs Crypto Battle Is Brewing – And It Could End Up In Court: Report

Get In Touch 📬

Email me, Jonathan Morgan, feedback; I’d love to hear from you. 📧
Follow me on Stocktwits 🫂 And Sponsor this newsletter 😎 

Terms & Conditions 📝

Securities Disclaimer: STOCKTWITS IS NOT A TAX ADVISOR, BROKER, FINANCIAL ADVISOR OR INVESTMENT ADVISOR. THE SERVICE IS NOT INTENDED TO PROVIDE TAX, LEGAL, FINANCIAL OR INVESTMENT ADVICE, AND NOTHING ON THE SERVICE SHOULD BE CONSTRUED AS AN OFFER TO SELL, A SOLICITATION OF AN OFFER TO BUY, OR A RECOMMENDATION FOR ANY SECURITY. Trading in such securities can result in immediate and substantial losses of the capital invested. You should only invest risk capital, and not capital required for other purposes. You alone are solely responsible for determining whether any investment, security or strategy, or any other product or service, is appropriate or suitable for you based on your investment objectives and personal and financial situation. You should also consult an attorney or tax professional regarding your specific legal or tax situation. The Content is to be used for informational and entertainment purposes only and the Service does not provide investment advice for any individual. Stocktwits, its affiliates and partners specifically disclaim any and all liability or loss arising out of any action taken in reliance on Content, including but not limited to market value or other loss on the sale or purchase of any company, property, product, service, security, instrument, or any other matter. You understand that an investment in any security is subject to a number of risks, and that discussions of any security published on the Service will not contain a list or description of relevant risk factors. In addition, please note that some of the stocks about which Content is published on the Service have a low market capitalization and/or insufficient public float. Such stocks are subject to more risk than stocks of larger companies, including greater volatility, lower liquidity and less publicly available information. Read the full terms & conditions here. 🔍

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