Mantle, or MNT if you prefer, is chilling at $1.36, which is more than 11% up in one day and a staggering 35% since last week. The trading volume? Over half a billion dollars – because apparently, everyone suddenly remembered crypto exists. The wild ride happened even as most other tokens went on a holiday, thanks to some fancy US economic data that suggested risk is for suckers.
Bitcoin’s still sitting pretty, projected to hit between $150K and $200K within the next year. But hold onto your wallets, because it’s not just Bitcoin having all the fun anymore. The playground’s expanding! 🎢
The brochure now speaks of “strategic sectors for the 21st century”-a phrase so grandiose it practically arrives in a tuxedo. Translation: anything buzzy enough to make CNBC hyperventilate on live television. We are promised mergers with singular (for which read “solitary and possibly imaginary”) businesses in AI, DeFi, energy, and defense. One half expects fire-breathing unicorns and nuclear hamsters to appear on slide deck #37.
It was Davide Crapis, a fellow with more enthusiasm than a kid at the county fair, who introduced this new standard. He’s got plans-big plans, involving building on an old protocol called Agent-to-Agent or A2A, with a shiny new trust layer slapped onto it. Three tiny on-chain registries-Identity, Reputation, and Validation-like little paper notes pinned on a board, helping these agents find each other in the vast wilderness of Ethereum. All neat and tidy, leaving the rest of the logic to off-chain bits, because everyone knows the real magic happens where you can’t see it.
The outflows, totaling $196.7 million, were the second-largest ever recorded since the inception of Spot Ether (ETH) exchange-traded funds (ETFs). Only once before, on August 4th, had the market seen such a dramatic exodus, with a staggering $465 million leaving the funds, according to the wise sages at SoSoValue. 📊📉
Yep, thanks to President Trump and Executive Order 14178 (sounds like a bad Star Wars droid), the feds want “public input” on how to stop the crypto bad guys while still letting stablecoins like USDT and USDC frolic in the digital prairie. Because nothing says “cutting-edge finance” like filling out an online comment card, right? 🎰
This “Terrorizers 111 Group” – honestly, the name alone…- wanted five grand in crypto. Like, seriously? Five grand for a bit of digital mischief? Bit low effort, wouldn’t you say? They claimed to have planted pipe bombs and, get this, “advanced explosive devices.” Pretty dramatic. The police, thankfully, had a look around and discovered… absolutely nothing. A complete waste of everyone’s time. But hey, at least the cyber forensic teams have something to do, chasing digital ghosts.
The second attempt to garner consensus amongst these creditors, a process as tedious and fraught with uncertainty as a landowner negotiating with tax collectors, concluded on August 6th. A staggering, *almost* unanimous 95.7% of them, judging by the count of heads, and 94.6% if one measures by the value of their claims (which, naturally, is the more important metric), have declared their support. One almost feels pity for the small minority who dared to dissent; they likely sought a more… *robust* repayment plan, perhaps involving the confiscation of the hackers’ ill-gotten gains, a pursuit as likely to succeed as capturing smoke with a sieve. Of the nearly 150,000 souls who laid claim to a portion of the missing funds – amounting to a rather impressive $206.8 million, one wonders where such wealth resided before its digital disappearance – nearly 143,000, representing $195.7 million, have essentially resigned themselves to waiting, and hoping.
The IPO plan involves selling 25 million shares at $10 each under the ticker AEXA on the New York Stock Exchange. Chamath’s SPAC aims to merge with a business in his “historical areas of expertise,” which presumably includes making money, starting SPACs, and occasionally tweeting about Bitcoin. But this time, he’s pivoting to decentralized finance (DeFi), because apparently, Bitcoin is so 2021. According to Chamath, DeFi could be the key to maintaining US global leadership for the next century. Because nothing screams “leadership” like blockchain jargon and volatile crypto markets.
Earlier this month, the company whispered its secrets confidentially, joining a chorus of crypto firms eager to play market debutantes – all under the watchful eyes of a Trump administration that apparently thinks cryptocurrency is the new jazz. Meanwhile, the glorious Circle Internet Group amassed a fortune-because what’s more comforting than a stablecoin?-and the hopeful crypto world plotted its ascent like hopeful prom queens.
