The crypto market has erased this year’s gains, after a three-day selloff fueled by strength in the dollar, and as the U.S. government was cleared to sell some of its own bitcoin holdings.  

Bitcoin dipped below $92,000 on crypto exchange Binance on Thursday, setting a new low for the year and putting the price further away from December’s record high around $108,000. 

The retreat contributed to a pullback in digital assets that had jumped in price in recent weeks, including memecoins and other tokens associated with artificial intelligence-powered chatbots and platforms.  

AI agent token AI16Z and the freshly airdropped HYPE have seen the sharpest drawdowns among the top 100 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization, each dropping around 10% in the last 24 hours, market data from CoinGecko shows. 

Tokens involving AI agents are dominating crypto mindshare – a quantitative metric produced by AI startup Kaito – while memecoins have been the best-performing sector in the past year. 

Spot BTC and ETH exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in the U.S. also saw their second-largest daily withdrawals of all-time on Wednesday with U.S. spot bitcoin ETFs seeing $582.9 million in outflows, while the figure for spot Ethereum ETFs stood at $159.3 million, according to SoSoValue.

Read More: Crypto-Friendly Summer Mersinger Is Now the Top Contender for CFTC Chair

The recent selloff comes as the U.S. Dollar Index (DXY) is trading above 109, a two-year high. 

The index tracks the greenback’s strength relative to a basket of foreign currencies. The price of bitcoin and crypto markets tend to have an inverse correlation with DXY. 

“It’s remarkable that bitcoin is holding near $100,000 and crypto is holding up well with the dollar at its highest level in over two years,” Seth Ginns, managing partner and head of liquid investments at CoinFund, told Unchained.

Ginns said he expects the administration of President-elect Donald Trump to look to contain further gains in the dollar. 

“They probably won’t want the dollar to break out to a new high, which means we’re likely going to see an end to this constant move higher in the dollar, which should be a new tailwind for crypto,” Ginns added.  

DB News also reported late Wednesday that the Department of Justice was cleared to sell $6.5 billion worth of bitcoin seized from Silk Road. According to a Dec. 30 court filing, Richard Seeborg, chief U.S. district judge for the Northern District of California, denied a motion to block the forfeiture of 69,370 bitcoins from Silk Road, effectively giving the go-ahead for the government to offload BTC. 

Traders are speculating on the tension between the current administration and the upcoming one, considering that Trump has pledged support of the U.S. government stockpiling BTC. 

The U.S. government currently holds about 198,109 bitcoins. 

According to Reuters, crypto lobbyists are encouraging Trump to issue an executive order in his first 100 days to establish a strategic reserve of bitcoin, provide banking services for crypto firms, and build an advisory committee focused on the crypto space. 

Users on prediction-betting platform Polymarket place odds at a 27% probability that Trump will create a Bitcoin reserve in his first 100 days. 

“Until the inauguration, we’re probably in a holding pattern,” Ginns further wrote over Telegram. “So there could be some chop in the near-term.”

The post Bitcoin Slides for 3rd Day, Erasing Year’s Gains appeared first on Unchained.

Sitting CFTC Commissioner Summer Mersinger is now the leading contender to chair the CFTC, according to five sources close to the deliberations. 

In the new year, Mersinger has gained an edge over the former favorite, a16z crypto Head of Policy Brian Quintenz, as she is seen as a choice who could help Trump curry favor with a Senate led by South Dakota Republican John Thune. 

Though the CFTC, which oversees commodities markets, often receives less attention than the SEC, which oversees securities, it could become the primary agency overseeing crypto within the next CFTC chair’s tenure. Previous iterations of a crypto market structure bill have made the CFTC crypto’s primary regulator, and policy advocates speculate that a similar bill could be passed before the midterm elections in two years.

Watch: Kristin Smith on Why This Is Crypto’s Time to ‘Get Policy Done’

Why Mersinger’s Name Has Risen to the Top

Mersinger has gained interest because of her ties to Senate Majority Leader John Thune, for whom she was a staffer from 2004 to 2016. 

Several of Trump’s cabinet nominees are facing tough confirmations in the Senate, sources explained, and appointing Mersinger could help Trump stay in Thune’s good graces. 

Additionally, because Mersinger is already a commissioner, she can simply be appointed to the interim chair position on January 20th, rather than needing to first go through the Senate confirmation process like Quintenz would as a private citizen. To become the permanent chair, however, she will need the Senate’s consent. 

Why Quintenz’s Fortunes Are Flagging 

Quintenz had been seen as the top contender before the holidays, largely because of his even closer ties to the industry due to his work at a16z crypto as well as his membership on the board of directors at prediction market Kalshi, a competitor to Polymarket. 

Read More: Who Will Be Trump’s CFTC Chair? There’s a New Top Contender for the Role

Sources who spoke with Unchained also assumed Quintenz had the backing of his boss Marc Andreessen, co-founder of the venture firm Andreessen Horowitz, of which a16z crypto is a part. Andreessen told The Free Press in December that he was spending about half of his time at Mar-a-Lago to help the incoming presidential administration. After Unchained first reported that Quintenz was the top contender, several other industry leaders supportive of Trump like Brian Armstrong and Chris Giancarlo said Quintenz would be a good choice for the industry. 

However, excitement around Quintenz has diminished, according to the same five sources who said Mersinger was in the lead. A 2018 speech by Quintenz has gained some attention from crypto advocates, in which Quintenz argued that even back-end developers of DeFi protocols could be held liable for CFTC violations if it was reasonably foreseeable at the time of their writing the code that the tools they were creating could be misused. 

Quintenz walked back the comments a few months later in a Coin Center blog post, and again clarified his stance in September 2023 on X. “This speech did not contain my best thinking or most thought through arguments,” Quintenz explained. “I quickly revisited what I had said, admitted I was wrong, and published a new take that made it clear writing code should not be an offense.” 

Two sources also indicated that because another Andreessen pick, Sriram Krishnan, was given a position in the administration to oversee AI policy, the Trump transition team was less inclined to nominate another Silicon Valley favorite. 

Read More: Trump Announces Team Working With AI & Crypto Czar: What We Know

Mersinger’s Pro-Crypto History 

Mersinger, along with fellow conservative CFTC Commissioner Caroline Pham, has become known in the crypto industry for her dissents to crypto enforcement actions that were seen as excessive or unfair. In September, Mersinger, for example, called the CFTC’s fine on Uniswap for illegal digital asset derivatives trading “regulation through enforcement” in September, criticizing the agency for failing to first provide clarity for DeFi protocols. 

She also issued a dissent on the CFTC’s charges against Opyn, ZeroEx, and Deridex for failing to register with the agency and illegally offering retail commodity transactions and digital assets the year prior for similar reasons, arguing that the CFTC’s aggressive posture halted innovation and pushed crypto offshore.  

At the Solidus-run Digital Asset Compliance and Market Integrity Summit (DACOM) conference in September, Mersinger told the audience that when crypto settlements come across her desk, she’s often “lost the opportunity to have any influence,” and is “left with no other choice but to dissent.” 

The commissioner has been seen at several crypto conferences over the past year, including Consensus, DACOM, and, most recently, the Blockchain Association Policy Summit. The appearances signal that Mersinger stays in close conversation with industry executives and lobbyists. Several such executives and lobbyists who have met Mersinger at such events told Unchained that they considered Mersinger knowledgeable about blockchain technology and aligned with industry priorities.

Read More: Crypto Industry Braces for Wave of SEC, CFTC Actions as Fiscal Year Draws to a Close

Several other former CFTC officials, such as former commissioner Jill Sommers, former director of the market participants division Josh Sterling, and former Office of the General Counsel Neal Kumar, have also been vetted. Kraken Chief Legal Officer Marco Santori is also in the mix, according to three sources. CFTC Commissioner Pham is also in contention, though three sources indicate that she is also vying for a separate position at Treasury — an interesting twist that could leave an additional conservative slot on the commission vacant. 

Sommers and representatives for the Trump-Vance transition team did not respond to a request for comment. Quintenz, Kumar, Sterling, and representatives for Pham, Andreessen, Santori, and Mersinger declined to comment. 

The post Crypto-Friendly Summer Mersinger Is Now the Top Contender for CFTC Chair appeared first on Unchained.

More than six months after the Arbitrum DAO approved the use of 225 million ARB tokens worth roughly $190 million to grow the network’s gaming ecosystem, the “Gaming Catalyst Program” is ready to start investing and providing grants to gaming projects. 

GCP contributors not only created an initial entity structure to support investment mandates but also formed a corresponding structure enabling GCP staffing and compensation frameworks, per the program’s first transparency report published on Wednesday. 

Unchained was not able to identify the name of the legal entity formed by GCP contributors. 

Arbitrum’s gaming program has already incurred a cost of nearly $1.2 million, with 93.5% of costs dedicated to legal fees to set up various entities and expenses for general administration which includes salaries for team members. 

In Q1 of 2025, the program contributors will begin funding gaming projects and continue expanding the team to shore up operational capabilities. While those steering the gaming catalyst program have not made any investments or grants, the goal is to fund 100 total projects within a three-year window, according to the report.

Read More: Arbitrum Reaches Record TVL at $21 Billion as Its Incentive Programs Draw Scrutiny

“As of December 29th, 2024, we have 64 projects in the pipeline and a highly active funnel of interest from game builders through our new website and submission form,” wrote Dan Peng, who is on the operating team for the program, in Arbitrum’s governance forum earlier this week. 

“It is exciting to see this momentum building, and while it’s early days, things are clearly coming together,” wrote Arbitrum community member Joseph Axisa who goes by @ImmutableLawyer early Friday.

Arbitrum currently has 60 games in its ecosystem, ranging from third-person shooter games to ones focused on baseball strategy, according to Arbitrum Portal, a resource hub showcasing projects on the network. 

ARB – the native governance token for Arbitrum – has increased by more than 8% in the last 24 hours, but has decreased roughly 58% in the past year to trade at 83.5 cents, giving the cryptocurrency a market cap of $3.5 billion, data from CoinGecko shows.

The post Arbitrum’s $190 Million Gaming Catalyst Program Is Ready to Start Providing Grants appeared first on Unchained.

Ethena, a fast-growing crypto project with a “synthetic dollar” token positioned as an alternative to leading stablecoins like Tether’s USDT, saw its token jump Friday in digital-asset markets after founder Guy Young detailed plans for a new offering geared toward traditional financial institutions.

There’s also a planned integration with the messaging platform Telegram and the expected buildout of a dedicated Ethena network.

After Young shared a long-form blog post detailing the protocol’s 2025 roadmap, the governance token ENA’s price jumped 16% to $1.23, giving the cryptocurrency a market cap of $3.6 billion, according to CoinGecko. 

The roadmap calls for Ethena’s entrance into the traditional financial industry with a new product offering called iUSDe, slated to roll out next month. The new product would be a variation on Ethena’s staked stablecoin sUSDe, except that iUSDe will include a wrapper contract that enforces transfer restrictions at the token level. The extra mechanism would purportedly allow traditional finance entities to use iUSDe. 

“In this context Ethena will perform the role of an interest rate arbitrage vehicle which forces the convergence between capital flows and interest rate markets across DeFi, CeFi and TradFi,” wrote Young. DeFi is the industry shorthand for decentralized finance, CeFi stands for centralized crypto finance and TradFi represents traditional finance.

Read More: DeFi Tokens Jump on Hopes That Trump Will Provide Crypto Regulatory Clarity

Plans for 2025 include integrating sUSDe within popular messaging platform Telegram, which has over 900 million users internationally. According to Young, having sUSDe within Telegram could effectively serve as a mobile neobank for users to transfer, spend, and save. Through Apple Pay, Telegram users could move from sUSDe to direct mobile tap payments on their phones. Neobanks provide online banking services without physical branches.

Ethena’s expectations for the new year also include evolving from a protocol that issues a single asset – namely, its flagship stablecoin – to an operational network.

The network mimics a similar token model to Binance’s BNB token in which ecosystem applications set aside portions of their token supply to be airdropped to those who have staked their ENA tokens. 

Young pointed out two applications already building on the Ethena network. The first is Ethereal a decentralized trading platform that runs its orderbook with sUSDe and relies on Ethena for liquidity. The second is Derive, an onchain options protocol building financial derivatives where sUSDe is the core collateral asset for the system. Ethereal is expected to launch its testnet next month and Derive is set to roll out its token in the next two weeks, per Young. 

Ethena’s USDe stablecoin has garnered a market cap of more than $5.8 billion, enough to rank it as the third largest stablecoin after Circle’s USDC and Tether’s USDT.  

Wallet addresses identified as belonging to BlockTower Capital, Delphi Venture, CMT Digital, and Galaxy Digital are among the top holders of ENA, data from blockchain analytics firm Nansen shows.

The post Ethena’s Token Jumps on Plans for TradFi, Telegram Expansion appeared first on Unchained.

The 119th Congressional session begins today. Politicians have promised clarity on regulatory requirements for stablecoins, a framework for deciding whether crypto firms are mostly overseen by the CFTC or SEC, even the establishment of a bitcoin national reserve. 

Spiking cryptocurrency prices indicate that investors expect regulatory clarity faster than the government may be able to provide it. Policy advocates are thinking in terms of what can be passed in the next two years; while Congress may lean pro-crypto, getting a bill to the president’s desk will take time. 

“We should contextualize ‘quickly,’” explained Marta Belcher, president and chair of the Filecoin Foundation, which facilitates governance for the decentralized storage network Filecoin. “Quickly is quickly for Congress, which is not quickly for what anyone in the industry would think of.” 

Market Structure and Stablecoins 

Two bills – on stablecoins and general market structure – occupied most of the crypto-related attention during the last Congressional session. Rep. French Hill, who leads the House Financial Services Committee, has promised to pass both bills through committee in the first 100 legislative days. Senate Banking Committee Chair Tim Scott, House Agriculture Committee Chair Glenn “GT” Thompson, and Senate Agriculture Chair John Boozman also have expressed support for getting bills passed. Legislation would likely originate in these committees before going to floor votes. The House committees took the lead drafting legislation last session, and are expected to do so again. 

Read More: Crypto-Savvy Rep. French Hill Will Chair House Financial Services Committee

Most policy advocates expect stablecoin legislation to come first, given that Republicans and Democrats on the House Financial Services Committee nearly reached a compromise last year. The biggest contention is whether stablecoins have to be one-to-one backed by U.S. dollars, Belcher said, arguing that this requirement would be “above and beyond” what is asked of other sectors. 

Market structure legislation, meanwhile, is significantly more complex. While the Financial Innovation and Technology for the 21st Century Act (FIT21), which would likely be used as a starting draft for a bill introduced this year, Republicans seem eager to use their newfound majority in the Senate as a reason to pass a bill that is more ambitious. And while FIT21 received bipartisan support in the House and Senate, three sources told Unchained last year that key Democrats like Senate minority leader (majority leader at the time) Chuck Schumer only voted “yes” on FIT21 because they knew president Biden would veto it — essentially, wanting to appear “pro crypto” without actually making the bill law. This raises questions as to whether Democrats would show more resistance to a bill under a Trump presidency. 

Bitcoin Reserve

Legal experts are divided on whether Trump needs the support of Congress for the Treasury to hold Bitcoin as a national reserve currency. 

The odds that Trump signs an executive order to accrue additional Bitcoin or convert existing Bitcoin holdings into Treasury reserves are currently less than 50%, according to Dennis Porter, who founded the Satoshi Action Fund, which advocates for pro-Bitcoin policy at the state and federal level. Things could change by inauguration day – scheduled for Jan. 20 – if a state approves a reserve before then, Porter said. 

Read More: Trump Taps Hedge Fund Manager Scott Bessent to Be Treasury Secretary

Optimism that a bitcoin national reserve bill will get passed and approved by Congress, however, is tepid at best. Trump’s own speech at the Bitcoin 2024 conference in Nashville indicated that his goal was to have the government hold bitcoin it already has in its possession, not buy more. Last year, Wyoming Senator Cynthia Lummis’ Bitcoin Reserve Legislation, which called for the Treasury to buy 200,000 bitcoins per year for the next five years, failed to gain traction. 

Castle Island Ventures General Partner Nic Carter told Bloomberg last month that he did not think enough members of Congress were on board for such a bill to get passed. Digital Chamber founder and CEO Perianne Boring told Reuters that she thought such a bill could pass, albeit not within the first 100 days. All in all, it seems that if national reserve legislation is approved by Congress, it won’t be anytime soon. 

The Political Calculus

With each of these bills, there’s political pressure on members of Congress to get something done before the midterm elections in 2026, according to Dave Grimaldi, executive vice president of government relations at Blockchain Association. 

The crypto industry’s donations to political campaigns had an outsized impact on electoral outcomes in November, and the industry’s largest Political Action Committee, Fairshake, has already raised millions for the midterms. Nobody who will be running for a competitive seat can afford to appear anti-crypto. 

“The New Republican majority in the Senate and returning Republican majority in the House want to work with Democrats to make this an easy and quick process,” Grimaldi explained. 

Before the midterms, however, members of Congress don’t face any hard deadlines. It’s also safe to say that the Senate will be busy debating confirmations for controversial presidential political appointees over the first couple of months. Congress as a whole will be busy with Trump campaign priorities like border control and tax policy. 

Read More: Who Will Be Trump’s CFTC Chair? There’s a New Top Contender for the Role

As CoinDesk’s Jesse Hamilton pointed out in the State of Crypto newsletter, it could take over a year for some of the changes articulated in crypto legislation to become reality. 

If the CFTC is given authority to oversee crypto in market structure legislation, for example, it could take months to design and implement a new set of rules, even if someone who has experience in the agency, like former commissioner Brian Quintenz or current commissioner Summer Mersinger, is chosen as chair. Blockchain Association CEO Kristin Smith told Unchained last month that the rulemaking process takes about 18 months. 

All of this means that when it comes to laws covering the crypto industry, change could take more than a year, if not several years, to become reality. And though that’s fast for government, it’s likely a pace the crypto markets will need some adjusting to. 

The post Crypto Might Get Reality Check from Friendly U.S. Congress appeared first on Unchained.

Base – the L2 network incubated by dominant U.S. crypto exchange Coinbase – started the new year achieving new milestones in onchain activity, strengthening its competition with Solana.

The number of daily active addresses on Base climbed from under 70,000 in January 2024 to a new all-time high of three million on Wednesday, while the network’s daily transactions reached 13.4 million, representing a roughly 3,521% increase in the past year from under 375,000 transactions, data from blockchain analytics firm Artemis shows. 

Part of Base’s increased onchain activity stems from the popularity of tokens related to artificial intelligence agents stemming from Virtuals, a protocol that enables users to create AI agents and roll out a corresponding cryptocurrency. 

AI agents refer to artificial intelligence systems that can operate semi-autonomously to perform various tasks such as digesting online information, posting on social media and even trading crypto. 

The protocol’s native token VIRTUAL and AIXBT, the cryptocurrency associated with the largest AI agent from Virtuals by market cap, are among the most traded coins on Aerodrome, a widely used decentralized exchange native to Base. On Thursday, VIRTUAL climbed to an all-time high in price at $5.07, for a market cap of $5 billion, and on Wednesday, AIXBT reached its record mark, crossing a market cap of more than $650 million, per CoinGecko.

Read More: GOAT, How AI Agents Talking Turned Into a $268 Million Memecoin ‘Religion’

The price increases of VIRTUAL and AIXBT coincide with substantial interest in the intersection of artificial intelligence and blockchain technology. According to AI startup Kaito, artificial intelligence makes up more than 57% of the crypto users’ total mindshare.

Even though Base is seeing its address and transaction count grow, its figures are still comparatively less than Solana’s activity metrics. As of Wednesday, Solana’s daily active address stands above five million, 70% more than Base’s three million, while Solana’s daily transaction count was 56.8 million, more than quadruple Base’s figures for the same day, per Artemis.

Network Leaders Stirring Controversy

On New Year’s Day, Base creator Jesse Pollak asked on X (formerly Twitter), “If you were me, how would you onboard @solana traders to making their first money on @base?”  His inquiry on how to help Solana users transition to Base sparked strong criticism, highlighting a tension between those in the Base and Solana ecosystems. 

Chase Barker, who was head of developer ecosystem for the Solana Foundation until December, said on X, “There’s a reason Base is literally begging for Solana users. They are a corporate bank with no soul, pulling out every trick in the corporate playbook.” 

Kevin Sekniqi, the co-founder of Ava Labs, argued that Coinbase shouldn’t focus on trying to take users away from Solana, but instead focus on expanding the industry overall. 

Pollak’s inquiry about onboarding Solana traders to Base comes roughly a week after Solana Foundation president Lily Liu said on the Unchained podcast that Base cannot compete with Solana in the long term, sparking a firestorm on X.

Read More: Are L2s ‘Parasitic’? Analysis Shows Ethereum Only Gets a Tiny Percentage of Fees

Liu argued that L2 networks, namely ones created by corporations such as Coinbase, are “far worse” than being parasitic to the Ethereum parent chain. “It’s cannibalistic,” said Liu, saying she believes  L2s siphon value from Ethereum’s base layer since assets are bridged onto corporate L2 chains, such as Base. 

Her comments generated strong pushback from multiple Ethereum community members, such as Luke Youngblood of Moonwell, who said, “she is also conveniently ignoring some key factors that make Ethereum more likely to succeed than Solana.”

The post As Solana Rivalry Heats Up, Coinbase’s L2 Sets New Records for Addresses and Transactions appeared first on Unchained.

Crypto markets are already dashing doubts that the intersection of blockchain and AI technologies could end up being one of 2025’s most explosive investment narratives.

Tokens associated with AI tools and related memes are leading gains in the new year, pushing to record prices and market capitalizations. 

Cryptocurrencies inspired by AI-powered agents or associated with AI tooling technologies have increased 19.3% in the past 24 hours to a total market cap of $10.4 billion, market data from CoinGecko shows. 

FARTCOIN, inspired by an unfiltered conversation between artificial intelligence models Truth Terminal and Opus Tutor, is one of the best 24-hour performers,  jumping 45% to a new all-time high of $1.45 on Thursday before settling at $1.31 at presstime.

The native token for ai16z – a decentralized autonomous organization focused on making investments using artificial intelligence decision-making – climbed to a record high price of $2.47, for a market cap of $2.7 billion. Two weeks ago, Eliza Labs, the firm behind ai16z, announced a research collaboration with Stanford University’s Future of Digital Currency Initiative, focusing on how AI agents can interact in digital economies.

Read More: GOAT, How AI Agents Talking Turned Into a Memecoin ‘Religion’

ZEREBRO, a Solana-based token launched on memecoin incubator Pump.Fun, has risen to new heights, reaching a $783 million market cap on Thursday. The corresponding AI agent, Zerebro, is a “schizo artist,” according to its X biography. In December, Zerebro released a music album on various streaming platforms such as Apple Music and Spotify.

ZEREBRO, FARTCOIN, and AI16Z have a cumulative market cap of nearly $4.5 billion, representing about 40% of the AI meme category, per CoinGecko. 

Nicolai Sondergaard, a research analyst at blockchain analytics firm Nansen, told Unchained that these AI meme tokens are garnering mindshare because they were the first movers in the fast-emerging category. 

“Their particular mindshare and price currently coincide,” Sondergaard wrote over Telegram. “I think AI infra is going to have a positive future long term even if it currently is somewhat frothy.”

The post AI Meme Tokens Like FARTCOIN Dominate Crypto Markets, Suggesting Powerful 2025 Trend appeared first on Unchained.

Those in the crypto ecosystem have witnessed an extraordinary level of wealth creation since Satoshi Nakamoto first introduced Bitcoin in 2009; just this year, the overall capitalization of digital assets has soared to $3.5 trillion from under $1.8 trillion at the start of the year. On the flip side, there are a lot of ways to lose.

In 2024, crypto users have seen a loss of roughly $1.5 billion, according to a report published by blockchain security firm Immunefi. 

Instead of providing examples of how people have pocketed money, this article goes straight for the safety-first approach, or rather the learn-from-the-mistakes-of-others strategy — highlighting the countless ways people have seen funds leave their wallets and not return. Striving to be comprehensive, we enumerated 39 here. There’s probably way more. 

1. Accosted at Gunpoint

A number of people, especially public figures and in-person conference attendees, have been the target of malicious actors wielding guns and seeking to steal crypto. In September, Nick Drakon, founder of crypto research platform Revelo Intel, shared on X how a “highly sophisticated group” targeted, surveilled, and robbed him of his crypto assets. “I was forced, at gunpoint, to log into a number of crypto accounts and transfer funds out,” Drakon wrote on Sept. 5. 

2. Honeypot Scams

A honeypot scam exploits a crypto user’s greed by enticing people with either substantial returns or a pot of tokens. A scammer deploys a smart contract, loaded with large amounts of valuable tokens. The scammer pretends to be a newbie and inexperienced, asking their intended victim for help in cashing out tokens from the smart contract, promising a portion of them in exchange for assistance. 

In order to cash out, scammers request that the unwitting users transfer funds into the smart contract to cover transaction costs. The users become victims when their assets are deposited into the smart contract, typically designed to prevent the users from withdrawing the tokens. Exploiters have coded the smart contract in a way where only the scammer can transfer out the tokens, leaving the victim empty-handed.

3. SIM Swap 

A SIM swap occurs when a scammer manages to take control of a crypto user’s phone number by tricking their mobile service provider. The scammer gathers personal information through methods like phishing emails, data breaches, or social engineering. They then impersonate the victim and request a SIM card replacement from the mobile provider, often claiming their phone has been damaged, but insisting on keeping the same number. 

Once the number is acquired, the scammers can access text messages and bypass two-factor authentication setups on various accounts, including financial applications such as Coinbase and Wells Fargo. 

SIM swapping is a powerful technique because the acquisition of another’s phone number without their consent or knowledge yields many financial opportunities, such as private information and social media content.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin shared on Farcaster one year ago his SIM swap experience, saying one of his main takeaways was how “a phone number is sufficient to password reset a Twitter account.” Often, a scammer trained in SIM swapping will use a phone number to gain access to a person’s X account and post scam projects that end with victims empty-handed. Scammers have posted blockchain links with promises of a digital asset, such as memecoins and non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

Exploiters who use SIM hijacking also use crypto as their method of payment. Five years ago, one now-deleted user posted to the subreddit r/btc titled, “$30M BCH sim hack.” ZachXBT connected the BCH SIM hacker to the SWAPD username @antihero, who, in order to attract customers, said in one post that crypto is the only form of payment for his services of unlocking verified and normal Twitter accounts. 

A SIM card is a physical chip that operates within a phone that allows the mobile device to connect to a cellular network. On Amazon, a T-Mobile prepaid SIM card with unlimited talk, text, and data in the U.S. for 30 days fetches nearly $26. 

4. Rug Pulls

Rug pulls are a prevalent scam in the crypto ecosystem, where developers of a project suddenly withdraw all liquidity, often including substantial investor funds. This causes the project’s token value to plummet, making it impossible for investors to sell their tokens without heavy losses. 

A notable example occurred with the Squid Game Token in 2021. A content creator who goes by @SimonZawa on X livestreamed on Twitch the real-time rug pull of the Squid Game Token, where the cryptocurrency had gained more than 230,000% in a week to reach $2,963 per coin. Shortly after, the token’s price collapsed to $0.007, leaving holders with scant value. 

In a poll conducted by X user @DrNickA in 2022 asking, “How many times have you been rugged?” some 21.8% of 840 participating votes said “loads of times,” while 28.7% said two to five times. 

5. North Korean Exploits

According to a study from the United Nations Security Council published in March, North Korea has taken roughly $3 billion from crypto-related companies, “which reportedly help to fund the country’s development of weapons of mass destruction.” 

Per the study, North Korean “actors posed as employers to lure software developers, many linked to the cryptocurrency industry, into installing malware hosted on a GitHub repository through a job interview process.”

“Do you work in the crypto industry? If so, you are a target of North Korean actors who use convincing, personalized social engineering tactics to access networks and steal company crypto,” the FBI wrote on X in September. 

One “unironically best practice” for technical folk who have suspicions about an online identity being North Korean is asking the suspicious person to say something negative about Kim Jong Un, the supreme leader of North Korea, according to Laurence Day, an advisor at Euler Finance. 

6. Reentrancy Attacks

A reentrancy attack is a type of vulnerability that has led to long-outstanding impacts throughout the crypto space, specifically the Ethereum community. The attack occurs when a malicious party exploits a system’s code logic by making several requests such as withdrawing tokens before the smart contract properly updates its internal state to reflect the first request. 

This lag in record upkeeping allows an exploiter to continuously drain a smart contract’s tokens because the contract doesn’t update and reflect changes from token withdrawals. 

As a result, the exploiter can make another withdrawal request until fixes are implemented. Perhaps the most famous reentrancy attack was the one that led to the DAO Hack in 2016, which caused philosophical debates about whether Ethereum should hard fork and split into two chains. The attacker responsible at one point was siphoning off anywhere between $12.6 million to $19.8 million from the DAO per hour. 

7. Government Seizure

Another way to lose money in crypto is through government seizure. According to a November 2022 press release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of New York, law enforcement officers seized more than 50,676 bitcoins, worth nearly $2.9 billion at current prices from James Zhong, who pled guilty to committing wire fraud in 2012 for stealing about 50,000 BTC tokens from Silk Road, the dark web internet marketplace. In 2024, the German police also confiscated roughly 50,000 bitcoins from the now-shuttered film privacy platform Movie2K. 

8. Buying High, Selling Low

A frequent way crypto users lose money stems from adopting an unprofitable trading strategy, namely buying a token on the open market and selling it at a lower price. One address (0xD21) had accumulated SHIB from Binance around October and November 2021 when the memecoin’s market cap was around $35 billion, but then offloaded its SHIB holdings in August and October 2022, after its market cap dropped to roughly $6 billion, data from blockchain explorer Etherscan shows. 

The memecoin trader, who is still a token millionaire, had lost $2.55 million in SHIB, per crypto analytics firm Lookonchain. 

9. Buying a Token Where Transfers Are Disabled

Also unprofitable is buying a token that has transfers disabled. In this scam, fraudsters deploy a token and enable people to purchase the token, but they conceal how the smart contract prohibits token transfers. While unwitting users can purchase the tokens, they cannot sell or trade them, creating a one-sided marketplace where only buy orders exist. Once the scammer decides they acquired enough funds from token sales, they’ll disappear with invested funds. 

10. Fat-Fingering

Often a joke among crypto natives, fat-fingering refers to a user introducing a typing error during the transaction process, sometimes affecting the destination address, the amount of money to transfer out, the selling price of a digital asset, or the parameters that determine how much gas one needs to pay. Unchained reported in August how an anonymous Ethereum user spent $88,000 in fees to send a transaction worth $2,200, 40 times less than the cost. 

11. Dying Without a Transfer Plan

A problem every crypto user faces is adopting an inheritance plan for their self-custodied crypto when they die. Wallets could be lost for good, or there might be an opportunity for scammers to get hold of assets. The family of Ripple billionaire Matthew Mellon, who died in 2018, has yet to gain access to his crypto holdings, estimated to be roughly $500 million.

Read More: What Happens To Your Crypto When You Die? Casa Inheritance Has a New Solution 

12. Losing Seedphrase/Private Key

A seedphrase is a sequence of random words that acts as a recovery phrase to give a person access to a wallet’s private key, which is then used to sign and authorize transactions. If a person’s hardware device is damaged or lost, they can use their seed phrases to generate their private key and regain control over funds. But losing a seed phrase could mean permanently losing access to the private key of a wallet. Osmosis Labs co-founder Sunny Aggarwal indicated most crypto losses stemmed from losing these seed phrases. 

13. Holding a Stablecoin That Loses Its Peg

This is a variation on the buy-high, sell-low method of losing. “By the magnitude of money loss, the people in my network, I think the maximum was from Terra,” Aggarwal told Unchained. Holders of UST, the now-defunct stablecoin from the Terra project, saw their worth plummet as a result of UST dropping from its supposed stable value of $1 in May 2022. “If you’re buying high [and] selling low, you know you’re trading risky assets. I think Terra was especially bad because people were holding their life savings and non-risk assets in UST and then they lost that,” Aggarwal said.

14. Sandwich Attacks

Sandwich attacks, which tend to occur in DeFi markets, refer to people and bots manipulating the price of an asset, though bots are more likely to conduct such attacks by virtue of the speed needed to carry out such a strategy. The exploit typically involves three transactions. An exploiter places one transaction before and another after a target transaction, creating a sandwich composed of three transactions. The profit generated from manipulating the order of transactions is often referred to as maximum extractive value.

Read More: MEV Sandwich Attacks Made $1 Million in Single Day Profit

An attacker can place a buy order on an asset in an effort to increase the price before the middle transaction, leading to the victim paying an inflated price. Immediately afterward, the attacker can place a sell order at this higher price, allowing them to profit the difference between the two transactions, while the victim receives less than what they would have gotten if they weren’t sandwiched.  

All of this is done in tiny increments of time, typically by automated trading bots, and the practice is sometimes compared with Wall Street front-running. 

15. Liquidations

Liquidations occur when a crypto user on a trading platform does not have enough collateral to meet margin calls on a leveraged trading bet. The platform forcibly closes a trader’s position in the market by selling a user’s assets, to protect the exchange from accruing more losses. “Getting liquidated onchain is painful. They don’t even tell you that your position is liquidated. It just disappears lol,” wrote one X user who goes by @icebergy_ in 2022. 

16. SEC Penalties

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has been responsible for some firms losing money. For example, the SEC announced on Sept. 3 settled charges against crypto investment Galois Capital, which agreed to pay a civil penalty of $225,000. According to the press release, however, the civil penalty will be distributed to the fund’s harmed investors. 

Read More: Trump Officially Nominates Paul Atkins for SEC Chair

In August 2024, District Judge Analisa Torres granted in part the SEC’s request for a civil monetary penalty against Ripple Labs. Per the court filing, the Court imposed a penalty of more than $125 million. In this case, the financial loss might be seen as recompense for a risky regulatory strategy. 

17. CFTC Penalties 

The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission is another government agency that has played a role in some firms seeing money leaving their pockets. On Sept. 4, “as part of its continuing enforcement focus in the digital asset decentralized finance (DeFi) space,” the CFTC announced it had settled charges against Uniswap Labs for offering illegal leveraged and margined commodities transactions. Uniswap Labs was ordered to pay a $175,000 civil monetary penalty. 

18. Lending to Untrustworthy Firms

Some crypto users want to earn yield on idle tokens, leading them to companies and protocols that advertise borrowing and lending services. While some survived, a number of these entities failed and went bankrupt. Customers could see their funds back eventually as a result of bankruptcy proceedings, but the process often takes years. Even if recovery is an option, creditors don’t always receive 100% of their deposits — and maybe not in the cryptocurrencies they originally held. 

For instance, 250,000 people had their assets frozen on Celsius, a lending firm that went bankrupt in 2022. More than two years ago, some 251,000 creditors received their payouts from Celsius’ bankruptcy administrator, according to a court filing from Aug. 26. 

19.  Hacked Bridges

Bridges, channels by which crypto users can move assets between various blockchains, have been targeted because of their role in facilitating cross-chain transactions, where a lot of money is moving around and often parked in vault-like smart contracts. To bridge, users usually send their assets to the protocol where those assets are locked in a smart contract. In return, users receive an equivalent amount of another asset on a different network representing the initial principal. As such, hackers can attack either of the two points, potentially causing users of the bridging service to lose money.

Bridge attacks made up 69% of total stolen funds in 2022, making these types of vulnerabilities a top security risk, according to Chainalysis. Wormhole, a popular protocol known for its bridging services, suffered an exploit in 2022 when a hacker minted 120,000 wrapped ETH worth about $320 million at that time on Solana without sending the Wormhole the necessary collateral of ETH first. 

“If users think their crypto could be unbacked after a hack, we could see something akin to a bank run, creating major price declines and possibly causing protocols to become insolvent, all of which could affect the other interconnected protocols,” according to a 2022 Chainalysis blog post. 

20. Transacting Based on Compromised Social Accounts

Hackers often take control over the social media accounts of public figures and large entities, such as an X profile or Discord chatroom. When in control, hackers post malicious links intended to deceive those paying attention. By taking advantage of the trust held between followers and high-profile accounts, scammers use these links to lead their victims to sites that reveal sensitive information or distribute malware. The ultimate goal in taking control of a social media account is to steal funds from a person’s crypto wallet.

We have regained access and secured the Polygon community discord server.

All external bots and integrations have been disabled while we perform a security review of each of them to avoid this from happening again. Some features may be limited for a while, but you are free to… https://t.co/TuP9XOLWFf

— Polygon (※,※) (@0xPolygon) August 24, 2024

21. Compromised Private Keys

A multi-signature wallet requires multiple key signers to execute a single transaction, providing an added level of security. However, crypto users suffer from compromised private keys.

In 2020, Lazarus Group, a North Korean cybercriminal syndicate, stole about $275 million of cryptocurrencies from KuCoin “due to the leakage of the private key of KuCoin hot wallets,” said the exchange’s CEO Johnny Lyu in a livestream.

WazirX, a prominent crypto exchange based in India, saw $230 million worth of tokens drained from its platform in 2024. Mudit Gupta, the chief information security officer at Polygon Labs, said the hack came as a result of their multisig getting compromised. “The attackers likely compromised two out of four private keys directly, and the remaining two were signature phished via a UI/Wallet compromise,” wrote Gupta on X in July 2024. “It’s a very methodical and organized attack, pointing towards DPRK as the hacker.” DPRK refers to North Korea. 

“Private key compromises accounted for the largest share of stolen crypto in 2024, at 43.8% [out of $2.2 billion],” wrote blockchain tracing firm Chainalysis in a December 2024 report. “For centralized services, ensuring the security of private keys is critical, as they control access to users’ assets.”

22. Pig Butchering

Pig Butchering is a reference to the practice of getting a pig fat before slaughter. It’s a long con of the worst kind: The exploiter gains the trust of their victim — sometimes holding out the possibility of romantic interest or appealing to lonely people — to make increasingly bigger “investments” in hopes of lucrative returns. According to the Department of Financial Protection & Innovation (DFPI), its complainants, who have incurred losses, have identified pig butchering scams as part of fraudulent operations. 

One example is a California victim who was contacted on WhatsApp about a crypto asset trading opportunity connected with a platform called Pnecoin. The victim “after researching” Pnecoin sent an initial $300 and followed the platform’s provided trading advice. The victim believed the advice was generating profits and invested more capital. DFPI’s crypto scam tracker says the victim not only shared the opportunity with friends, who invested, but also took out a loan after the platform offered a new program for accounts holding $50,000. The victim can’t access their capital and the platform is not operational.

23. Impostor Websites 

Impostor websites are a common crypto scam. “The companies or websites listed may sound similar to the names of other companies or websites that also operate in the marketplace. When companies or websites (fake or not) have look- or sound-alike names, the potential confusion created for consumers is real,” states the DFPI’s crypto scams webpage. By exploiting this confusion, scammers can and have profited from unknowing users. 

In July, hackers hijacked the front-end domains of Compound Finance and Celer Network. For the former, when users visited the website, they were redirected to a dangerous site, which without Google’s red warning notification, looks like an interface of a crypto protocol. 

24. Flash Loan Attacks

Flash loans enable people, bots, and entities to borrow assets without putting up collateral as long as the loan is repaid within the same transaction. If the assets are not returned by the end of the transaction, both the loan and transaction are reversed. 

Flash loan attacks refer to when exploiters use flash loans to manipulate the prices of certain assets and various functions of a protocol as a means to profit and drain capital from a protocol’s smart contracts. 

While some praise flash loans as a financial innovation, some in the space have suffered such as Euler Finance, a protocol that became a victim of a flash loan attack in 2023, losing about $200 million. Attackers, who deploy flash loan attacks, can manipulate token prices by trading high volumes of tokens with thin supply levels, as did the Euler Finance exploiter, per Chainalysis in a blog post. 

“Flash loans aren’t inherently the problem, since all they do is provide a source of capital,” stated Chainlink’s Education Hub. “The real issue at hand is existing vulnerabilities in a protocol that may be revealed through a flash loan-funded attack.”

Whether the exploiter is to blame, or the protocol’s lack of security precautions, the users could end up getting the worst of it.

25. Memecoin Presale Scams

Memecoin presales typically entail an X account creating posts to build hype and excitement about an upcoming token launch. In these presales, token creators enable people to pre-purchase an allocation of the token’s supply before the rollout. 

However, an exploiter takes advantage of people’s fear of missing out by posting an address where people can send tokens with the expectation they’ll receive an allocation of the upcoming memecoin. 

In reality, victims either don’t receive tokens or the token’s team members disappear with the funds, ditching the project. Blockchain sleuth ZachXBT noted how 12 Solana presale memecoins “have been completely abandoned after raising >180,650 SOL ($26.7M).”

26. Phishing

Phishing involves scammers using deception to trick people into revealing sensitive information or downloading harmful software. As a result, phishing takes many forms, applying to emails, malicious advertisements, fake customer support representatives, and even QR codes. 

Sometimes scammers use low-effort phishing such as generic, mass-mailed emails that do not target specific individuals. On the other hand, phishing tactics can be extremely thoughtful and strategic where multiple people coordinate using advanced malware to compromise a system, steal data, and spy on a user’s activity. 

Read More: Phishing Ads Appear on Etherscan as Hackers Target ‘Trusted Institutions’

Examples of malware used by North Koreans include fake applications for virtual meetings, fake extensions that replace the front-end interface, and fake coding tests under the guise of a necessary step in the hiring process.

27. Address Poisoning

Another deceptive strategy scammers use to steal money is address poisoning. Scammers will identify wallet addresses and spoof the address by sending a small amount of tokens through many transactions from a different address that looks nearly identical to the target address. 

Often, the fraudulent address has the same beginning and end characters, making it similar to the victim’s address. Scammers exploit crypto users’ carelessness by increasing the probability that unwitting people copy the fraudulent address and send tokens to it.

28. Unauthorized Token Mints

One vulnerability that has led to people losing money is unauthorized token mints, such as the one that led to Gala Games’ $200 million exploit in May. Unauthorized token mints occur when a rogue party gains control over a smart contract and creates new tokens, bypassing the initial and intended minting pathways. The CEO of Gala, Eric Schiermeyer who goes by the screenname @Benefactor0101, attributed the mass mint exploit to a lapse in “internal controls.” 

“A compromised or rogue Gala Games admin address minted 5 billion $GALA ($200M [at the time]) and has been systematically selling the tokens for the past two hours,” wrote a developer who goes by @0xQuit on X, in May 2024. Onchain data from blockchain explorer Etherscan also reflects the transaction mint. 

29. Holding a Depegged Liquid Staking Token 

Liquid staking tokens (LSTs) represent a user’s initial amount of staked tokens in addition to accrued rewards for helping maintain a blockchain’s security. LSTs, such as stETH, are not expected to deviate dramatically from their base asset like ETH. 

However, stETH, which is redeemable 1:1 with ETH, depegged in mid-2022 in light of the various large holders selling the liquid staking token.

At press time, the price difference between ETH and stETH is about $7. People can lose money when an LST varies dramatically from their base asset because an LST’s depegging impacts liquidations and redemption processes. 

30. Drainers

Scammers, who use drainers, want unsuspecting users to connect their crypto wallet to their website and approve transactions that grant operating controls of a wallet to transfer out assets. The drainers can directly steal anything within the wallet, such as memecoins or NFTs, if their draining strategy is successful. 

Read More: Wallet Drainers Stole $58 Million Through Malicious Ads

31. Token Supply Inflation by Dilution

An asset’s price is a function of demand and supply. If the supply increases, but demand remains constant, the price of the asset tends to decrease. A token’s inflation rate directly corresponds to the token’s purchasing power, i.e. how many goods and services can be acquired through the token. As new tokens are minted or unlocked, causing the supply to increase, the value of each token is diluted — so the price drops.

32. Early-Stage Investing

Investing in early-stage crypto companies has proven to cause substantial financial loss. For example, venture firm Paradigm invested roughly $278 million into FTX, and according to the firm’s co-founder Matt Huang during Sam-Bankman-Fried’s criminal trial, Paradigm’s FTX investments have since been marked to zero. Of course, that’s sort of the whole point of early-stage investing — big rewards, with big risks. Losers would have a hard time complaining they were victims; with all startups, a lot can go wrong. 

33. Impermanent Loss

Impermanent loss refers to the difference between the dollar value of outright holding assets versus providing liquidity to a trading pool on a decentralized exchange. This means that the profit from providing liquidity is less than if a user were to hold the assets idly. 

Liquidity providers supply a pair of tokens into a trading pool, earning fees from each trade, but sometimes the price of the deposited assets moves. These price fluctuations change the ratio of the assets within a pool. As a result, when liquidity providers decide to withdraw their funds, the ratio change can lead to a situation where the withdrawn assets are worth less than the initial principal.

34. Oracle Price Manipulation

Oracle price manipulation occurs when a person or bot manipulates the data provided by oracles, services known for supplying external data from the real world to smart contracts living in blockchains. With distorted price data, smart contracts may execute actions leading to both serious financial losses and gains. 

Read More: What Are Blockchain Oracles?

One such example was the 2022 Mango Markets exploit. Crypto trader Avraham Eisenberg, who is now in prison, extracted around $110 million, according to a press release from the Office of Public Affairs for the U.S. Department of Justice “The Mango Markets exploit by Avi Eisenberg exposed critical Oracle vulnerabilities,” wrote Omer Goldberg the founder and CEO of risk management firm Chaos Labs, on X. “Weak pricing venue criteria and the absence of a risk engine—like price smoothing for thin liquidity markets—were weaponized, demonstrating that network reliability and simple price reporting are woefully insufficient,” Goldberg noted.

35. Governance Attacks

Holders of governance tokens make up the body of a decentralized autonomous organization and shape the direction of the associated crypto protocol. This is an attack vector, because if a single entity acquires a large percentage of tokens, this party gains outsized power during voting processes. A malicious entity with a large voting power can not only propose self-serving changes to the protocol but also push proposals that lead to unfair distribution of resources.

Crypto observers have noted that the lending protocol Compound was a recent victim of a governance attack in which a party with substantial voting power influenced the outcome of a proposal. In July, a proposal was passed to allocate $24 million worth of COMP from the protocol’s treasury and into a yield-bearing strategy run by a group called Golden Boys. 

Read More: DAO Delegate Group Accused of ‘Governance Attack’ on Compound Finance

Compound governance delegate and OpenZeppelin security solutions architect Michael Lewellen said, “Their attempt to push through a proposal to take a large chunk of the Compound treasury without adequate protections appears to be a malicious attempt to steal funds from the protocol.” 

By acquiring a substantial amount of voting power, an exploiter can manipulate governance votes for personal gain by transferring assets in the DAO’s treasury and into the exploiter’s wallet address. 

36. Sponsored Advertisements

Sometimes scammers are able to successfully have a malicious link get listed as a sponsored search result at the top of a Google search for a legit project. Exploiting people’s carelessness and confusion about what’s legitimate, scammers through sponsored listings get people to reveal sensitive information such as their passphrase. 

37. Pump-and-Dump Schemes

Pump-and-dump schemes refer to groups of people building hype around a project to increase both the demand and price for a token. These schemers build hype in a variety of ways such as paying influencers, sharing misinformation, and even buying physical billboards. After the token’s price goes up, these scammers sell their massive holdings and take profit, causing the shilled token’s price to crash. Those who bought the hype and tokens are now left with worthless cryptocurrencies.

One characteristic of a pump-and-dump scheme is whether the entity is both an active trading firm and a marketing service provider. These types of schemes are patently illegal in traditional markets such as U.S. stocks; in crypto, where regulations are murky and enforcement is uneven, any traders hoping for serious investor protection are likely to be disappointed.    

38. Cross-Site Scripting (XSS)

Cross-site scripting (XSS) is a type of security vulnerability that occurs when attackers inject malicious scripts into the input fields or URLs of web pages, which are later executed in the victim’s browser. The vulnerability can pretend to be the legitimate website’s frontend, propose transactions, and change what the user sees, Luna Tong, the co-founder and CEO of vulnerability research firm Zellic, told Unchained over Telegram. For example, an exploiter can use XSS to put a drainer on a website. 

In a blog post detailing its bug bounty program policy, Kraken has labeled cross-site scripting vulnerabilities as high and medium-severity issues. “High severity issues allow an attacker to read or modify highly sensitive data that they are not authorized to access,” the post states. 

Zellic looks at the likelihood of cross-site scripting in its audits on crypto projects. For example, Zellic published a security assessment of Bitcoin staking protocol Babylon in June 2024, noting that while the protocol had a small probability of a vulnerability from cross-site scripting, it is important to exercise caution in adding new code to front-end components because an XSS vulnerability could have severe consequences. 

“In the event of an XSS attack, an attacker could modify the API endpoint or pollute the transaction data, redirecting the user’s UTXO to their own address, conducting an arbitrary transfer of funds,” Zellic’s report stated. 

39. Remote Access

Exploiters can gain remote access to people’s computers in several ways such as placing viruses on websites, hiding malware in documents, and introducing spyware through software downloads. 

One crypto user who goes by the handle @Jef_Nft revealed on X in December 2024 how he lost $100,000 in cryptocurrencies and NFTs, because his computer had several viruses allowing the exploiter full control of the device. “Because of the nature of these viruses it was also possible to get them without even downloading anything,” @Jef_Nft wrote. 

In response to such threats, one crypto user @MetaVersig commented how they will take extra precautions and acquire a second laptop strictly for transacting, independent of applications and websites, exempting a few decentralized exchanges.

The post 39 Ways You Could Lose Money in Crypto: How to Keep Your Money Safe appeared first on Unchained.

BonkDAO is set to burn more than 1.6 trillion BONK tokens worth roughly $53.5 million, as part of the community’s holiday campaign to increase the memecoin’s scarcity.

BonkDAO’s holiday campaign, “BURNmas,” is a community-powered deflationary event with the goal of burning one trillion BONK tokens by Christmas. 

Burning tokens refers to reducing a cryptocurrency’s total supply by removing them from circulation and typically aids in price upswings for cryptocurrencies. The upcoming burn represents nearly 1.8% of BONK’s total supply of roughly 92.7 trillion tokens. 

During BURNmas, BONK supporters could do a number of activities to contribute to the total amount burned. For example, tweeting the hashtag #LetsBonk, following the memecoin’s accounts on various social media platforms, and placing wagers on BONKbets each resulted in the removal of tokens.

Read More: Crypto Degens Spin Up Betting Market on Whether Hyperliquid Blockchain Will Get Hacked

BURNmas started on Nov. 15 and ends on Tuesday at 7:01 p.m. EST, stated a tweet from the memecoin’s account. 

The end of BURNmas comes more than a month after BonkDAO conducted its previous burning event in November when $4 million worth of BONK was removed from the memecoin’s circulation. Following BONK’s November burn, the memecoin’s market cap jumped about 75% from $2.3 billion to over $4 billion in the span of a week, per trading platform DexTools. 

Despite slumping nearly 27% in the last 30 days to trade hands at $0.00003261, BONK has increased 6.1% in the past 24 hours to a market cap of almost $2.5 billion, market data from CoinGecko shows.

At current prices, BONK is the largest memecoin on Solana, ahead of dogwifhat (WIF) and is also the fourth largest memecoin across all blockchains, trailing DOGE, SHIB, and PEPE. 

The post 1.6 Trillion BONK Tokens Worth $53.5 Million to Be Burned as Part of BURNmas appeared first on Unchained.

President-elect Donald Trump named appointees for several White House advisory roles on Sunday, each of whom he said will work with the future AI & Crypto Czar David Sacks to lead the new administration’s technology policy. The roles, some of which existed prior to his election and some of which will be new, are mostly filled by Trump loyalists rather than well-known names in technology policy circles. 

Bo Hines will serve as executive director of the Presidential Council of Advisers for Digital Assets (abbreviated in the post as the “Crypto Council”)Trump did not name the members of council but described them as “luminaries from the Crypto industry.” 

“In his new role, Bo will work with David to foster innovation and growth in the digital assets space, while ensuring industry leaders have the resources they need to succeed,” Trump explained in a post on his social media platform, Truth Social. “Together, they will create an environment where this industry can flourish, and remain a cornerstone of our Nation’s technological advancement.”

Read More: David Sacks as A.I. & Crypto Czar? Why the Industry Was Surprised

The announcement, which stretched across two Truth Social posts, included the appointment of Sriram Krishnan as senior policy advisor for artificial intelligence, a new role at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Michael J.K. Kratsios will be director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and Lynne Parker was named to be executive director of the Presidential Council of Advisors for Science and Technology (PCAST), two offices which predate the Trump administration.

The announcements Sunday provide more details to the role of David Sacks, who has met with some members of the House of Representatives and has had a one-on-one meeting with French Hill, a representative from Arkansas and designated to be the next session’s Chair of the House Financial Services Committee, according to sources directly familiar with the matter. One representative who met with Sacks said he was thoroughly impressed with his detailed understanding of crypto and was under the impression that Sacks would be involved in the details of crypto regulation. According to the representative, Sacks used the meeting to explain his stance on the “value proposition” of Bitcoin. First, Sacks explained that Bitcoin is valuable because of its limited, algorithmically-controlled supply, according to the representative. Second, Sacks said that Bitcoin is valuable because it is not backed by any government and is not fiat — an explanation which sounds similar to that which could be made for an asset like gold. 

Hines ran against Wiley Nickel, a Democratic representative for North Carolina, in 2022, losing narrowly in a competitive swing state with 48.4% of the vote, according to Ballotpedia. Prior to politics Hines played college football as a wide receiver for North Carolina State and Yale. He received a law degree from Wake Forest University in 2022, and is 29 years old.

Read More: Who Will Be Trump’s CFTC Chair? There’s a New Top Contender for the Role

Two sources who spoke with Unchained conceded that Hines was not well-known in crypto policy circles but has been an outspoken Trump loyalist throughout his political career. One of them pointed out that Hines had the clean cut, preppy appearance and Ivy League pedigree Trump, who is reportedly concerned with how his cabinet looks on television, seems to prefer in his appointments.

Blockchain Association Head of Industry Affairs Dan Spuller posted on X that Hines had visited the association’s headquarters earlier this year and called Hines a “friend.” Spuller told Unchained that Hines met with the Blockchain Association as a candidate for Congress in the primary this year, and that he did not know that he was being considered for a role on the Crypto Council. As we first reported in November, crypto advisory groups were consulted about the nomination of Paul Atkins for SEC Chair, though sources have not said these groups have been consulted for other roles relevant to crypto. 

Hines’ social media shows strong support of crypto, though his posts on the topic pale in comparison to posts in support of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in recent months. A page on his Congressional campaign website also positions DeFi as core to Hines’ economic agenda. “Instead of restrictive measures, advocating for a pro-crypto stance fosters a vibrant ecosystem, driving socio-economic empowerment,” it reads. “Furthermore, the U.S. should adamantly resist the adoption of central bank digital currencies, preserving financial sovereignty and the principles of decentralization.” 

The post Trump Announces Team Working With AI & Crypto Czar: What We Know appeared first on Unchained.