01 The GENIUS Act and Stablecoins
On the afternoon of June 17, Eastern Time, the U.S. Senate passed the landmark cryptocurrency legislation, the GENIUS Act, with 68 votes in favor and 30 votes against. After the GENIUS Act passed the threshold of the Senate, the road ahead was smooth. This was a historic lobbying victory for digital asset companies in the Senate's first vote on comprehensive cryptocurrency regulatory reform.
Tether (USDT), currently the world's largest stablecoin issuer, may become the first and largest "victim" of the GENIUS Act.
Currently, only about 85% of USDT is backed by cash and cash equivalents, which does not meet the mandatory requirement of 1:1 cash and cash equivalents. Its auditing agency BDO Italia does not meet the standards of the US Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB), making it even more difficult to be recruited by the US system.
At the same time, Tether's headquarters has moved to El Salvador, seeking political asylum from the cryptocurrency-friendly President of El Salvador. Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino once hinted that the original USDT may no longer enter the US market directly, but will launch a settlement stablecoin branch that complies with the GENIUS Act system. However, in markets other than the United States, the originally dominant USDT business cannot be easily abandoned.
Therefore, the impact of the GENIUS Act is currently more focused on the United States, and its greater role is to set a benchmark in the field of crypto regulation. The traditional stablecoin market will not disappear immediately. However, with the evolution of compliance, compliant stablecoins will surely become mainstream in the future. The 600% increase in Circle's 10 days after its listing may just be the beginning of the stablecoin blue ocean.
However, on the other side of the Pacific, a narrative about the future of stablecoins is unfolding in a completely different form.
On the other hand, the industry giants are cautiously deploying. The recent upsurge of stablecoins in the mainland has also continued to rise. Pan Gongsheng, governor of the People's Bank of China, mentioned stablecoins for the first time at the 2025 Lujiazui Forum, saying that emerging technologies such as blockchain and distributed ledgers have promoted the vigorous development of central bank digital currencies and stablecoins, realizing payment and settlement, reshaping the traditional payment system from the bottom up, and greatly shortening the cross-border payment chain. At the same time, it has also posed huge challenges to financial supervision. In Hong Kong, China, the "Stablecoin Act" has been confirmed to take effect on August 1. On the eve of Hong Kong's licensing, many banking institutions, technology giants, and financial technology companies are also accelerating their efforts to seize the crypto market, and have repeatedly expressed their plans to apply for stablecoin licenses.
According to a report by Delphi Digital, the supply of stablecoins exceeded $250 billion for the first time. Among them, yield-based stablecoins have grown rapidly, with Ethena reaching nearly $6 billion since its launch; Tether and Circle still dominate the market, accounting for a total of 86% of the circulating supply; the diversity of issuers has increased, with more than 10 stablecoins in circulation exceeding $100 million; more than $120 billion of U.S. Treasury bonds are locked in stablecoins, forming a liquidity pool outside the traditional market.
02 Pump.fun Official Twitter banned
Following the massive account ban incident on X platform last week, the official account of Pumpfun, the most popular and profitable meme launch platform in 2024-2025, and the account of its founder Alon were also banned. For a time, the whole network was full of different opinions, and the fake news of photoshopped images quickly spread virally on X. Recommended articles:
However, in the face of this massive FUD, there was a voice on X: "Once Pump.fun collapses, the bull market will begin."
According to Onchain Lens, Pump.fun has transferred a total of 2.344 million SOL to the Kraken exchange since 2025, with a cumulative value of approximately US$384 million. The strong correlation between Pump.fun's transfer and the short-term decline of Sol has aroused widespread doubts in the industry about its crazy selling for profit.
Since its launch in the first quarter of 2024, Pump.fun has accumulated $700 million in revenue with a 1% transaction fee and a tying curve mechanism, becoming one of the most profitable projects in the crypto economy. Recently, it announced a $1 billion financing for TGE. However, the losses of ordinary investors in Pump.fun are becoming increasingly serious, and systemic risks such as market manipulation robots and insider trading are becoming more and more inflated; the original simple community culture has been alienated into a complex "Meme coin industry chain." All of this has caused the current Meme speculation craze to no longer be the same.
According to various media reports citing people familiar with the matter, Pump.fun is preparing to sell 25% of its PUMP tokens at a valuation of $4 billion to raise $1 billion. Sunny Shi of Messari built a valuation model for PUMP, and the results showed that its FDV (fully circulated market value) could reach $7 billion.
Our valuation methodology uses a top-down model that assumes overall crypto market volume, Solana’s share, launch platform share, and PumpSwap market share. These assumptions and models are only available to enterprise clients, but I will share the main conclusions.
In our base case, we believe Memecoins will occupy a niche within the broader cryptoeconomy as they are more suitable for speculative use than NFTs.
Of course, the Solana ecosystem will undoubtedly diversify into new asset pairs as it matures, but this is also likely to be true.
We believe that even if Pump.fun’s share of the Solana ecosystem declines slightly, the Pump project is still expected to generate approximately $675 million in revenue over the next two years as PumpSwap continues to grow.
Based on a 10x valuation multiple, the corresponding FDV is approximately US$7 billion.
However, the key premise is this: if the project chooses an opaque token/equity structure that distributes most of the revenue to insiders rather than token holders, then we believe the market has become sufficiently cautious to not ignore this poor way to accumulate value.
X is rapidly transforming into a super application platform that integrates social media, finance, and AI. On June 19, X CEO Linda Yaccarino said in an interview with the Financial Times that "users will soon be able to invest and trade directly on X. X credit or debit cards are also being explored and may be launched this year."
With the upcoming launch of investment and trading functions, X's super application blueprint is becoming clearer:
– All-round social platform - a center for information and interaction: using instant news and social discussions to become one of the preferred sources of information for investors.
-X Chat: X has launched the X Chat Beta feature to some users, supporting encrypted messages, message self-destruction, and the ability to send files of any type, and adding support for audio and video calls. This is a completely new architecture built on Rust with (Bitcoin-style) encryption.
-X Money financial services ecosystem: peer-to-peer payment, investment, trading, Grok smart investment advisory support, deep integration of prediction markets and credit/debit cards may also be included in this X Money. Visa is the first partner of X Money Account, which will allow X users to transfer funds between traditional bank accounts and digital wallets and make instant peer-to-peer payments. It is worth mentioning that X Payments LLC has been licensed in 43 states in the United States.
-AI-driven intelligent experience: Grok is integrated into X. Through deep integration with the X platform, it supports users to obtain real-time news, market dynamics or social media trends and analysis.
03 Airdrop Project Inventory
2025 has quietly come to the middle of the year. As the prologue of the second half of the year is about to begin, Foresight News has once again sorted out 60+ potential projects to help you more efficiently screen potential airdrop opportunities that suit you. Recommended articles:
-L1/L2: Pharos, Aztec, Abstract, Ink, Polymer, Monad, MegaETH, N1, Camp Network, ZERϴ Network, Hemi, Cytonic, Fogo
-AI/Computing Power/DePIN: Ritual, Gradient Network, Nexus, Yupp, Nous Research, Newton, DAWN, Prime Intellect, Arcium, Inco, Gensyn
-DeFi: (Solana ecosystem) Perena, RateX, Fragmetric, Exponent; (Monad ecosystem) aPriori, Kintsu, Kuru, Perpl, Curvance, Opinion Labs, Nad.fun; (MegaETH ecosystem) CAP, GTE; (Others) Infinex, Aster, Noble, Mezo, Perennial, Paradex, Avantis, Reservoir, Momentum, HyperLend, Hyperdrive, HyperSwap, HypurrFi
– Wallets: MetaMask, Phantom, Zerion, Rabby, Rainbow
– Information: Nansen, Irys
-CEX: BackPack
– Social/ Reputation/ Attention/ Prediction: Polymarket, Farcaster, Ethos, time.fun, Towns, Noise
-NFT: OpenSea
– Others: Espresso Systems, Succinct, RISC Zero, DoubleZero, Union
04 The extension of geopolitical conflicts to the digital battlefield
As the full-scale conflict between Israel and Iran continues to escalate, the cyber battle line has quietly extended to the encryption field.
On the afternoon of June 18, the chain detective ZachXBT released the "Iranian encrypted trading platform Nobitex theft" incident on his personal channel, indicating that the current suspicious capital outflow has increased from the previous 48.65 million US dollars to approximately 81.7 million US dollars. Capital outflows have been found on Tron, Bitcoin, DOGE Chain and EVM chains, involving multiple wallets related to the trading platform.
05 Industry Observation
While Ethereum Layer2 and Solana are working hard to expand capacity, MEV robots are grabbing more than 50% of block space with junk transactions, causing user fees to soar and the expansion bonus to be lost. This article analyzes this market failure phenomenon, uses data to show its impact, and proposes a new MEV auction mechanism to solve this problem. Recommended articles:
When grouping the data by profitable address, market concentration becomes particularly significant:
The results are obvious. Just two institutions dominate more than 80% of the junk transactions on Base. This extreme centralization shows that there are obvious barriers to entry in the market, and the current "junk transaction auction" is not a truly competitive market. The lack of competition further weakens the price discovery mechanism, resulting in the public chain being unable to capture the true value of the extracted MEV, and having to bear the negative externalities brought about by junk transactions.
French magazine Point of View interviewed Pavel Durov, co-founder and CEO of encrypted communication app Telegram, in the longest interview he has ever given, an interview about politics, power and democracy.
In this interview, Pavel Durov tells about what it was like to be interrogated in France, reveals information about several state power and intelligence agencies, including the FBI and the French Directorate-General for External Security (DGSE), expresses his fight for free speech and concerns about the future of democracy, his firm refusal to sell Telegram, and his deep feelings for France. He also shares his views on Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and ChatGPT founder Sam Altman.
Pavel Durov also revealed that he had made a will at the age of 40, and his wealth would be "equally" distributed to his six biological children and more than 100 children born from sperm donation, and he required his children not to inherit his property within 30 years. His "maintenance secret" to look so young is to stay away from all possible addictions, not drinking alcohol, coffee or tea, not smoking, staying away from sugar, and doing 300 push-ups every morning without interruption, followed by 300 squats.
Pavel Durov said that Telegram is a source of expenditure for him, not a source of income, and his liquid assets are much less, and they do not come from Telegram, but from his investment in Bitcoin in 2013. His view on AI is that the current large model is not smart, and his brother Nikolai is developing truly "smart" AI.
Historically, financial capital has been the dominant perspective through which we measure and exchange value. But value in today’s economic system is no longer limited to the financial level.
Some platforms operate entirely based on attention capital, such as:
Pump.fun is built entirely around viral reflexes, and its token appeal relies on short-term memes, influencer pushes, and cultural hot spots. It is a pure attention market with high liquidity, high hype sensitivity, and reflexivity. The recent Loud! experiment is an extreme case.
Arthur Hayes' article analyzes the evolution of the stablecoin market, warns investors not to short Circle, and reveals the logic of industry survival. Recommended articles:
Even though every large traditional bank has people like them in senior positions, the bank organism does not want to change because it means the death of many cells (i.e. employees). Tether has no more than 100 employees, but can perform key functions of the entire global banking system by leveraging blockchain technology expansion suite. In contrast, JPMorgan Chase, the world's best-run commercial bank, employs slightly more than 300,000 people.
Banks face a critical juncture: adapt or perish. But what’s holding them back from slimming down their bloated workforces and delivering the products needed in a global digital economy is prescriptive regulation about how many people must be employed to perform certain functions.
