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The Crypto Minute
Your Weekly Guide to Surviving the Crypto Rollercoaster.
CoinBrain
May 12, 2025 • Reading Time: 11 minutes
👋 Hey frens, you made it to another Monday, and so did we, barely dodging rug pulls.
Whether you’re working hard or doom-scrolling from bed, we’re here to deliver your crypto fix in one tight minute (or two, if you’re multitasking) ⌛️
Let’s get into it 🧠💸
⤵️ Today’s Agenda:
We got crypto founders rising back from the dead 🧟
Degens are speculating on BTC and ETH's downfall with 40x leverage
Stripe finally integrates stablecoin payments 🥳
Ethereum Pectra upgrade is live, bringing a massive pump with it 📈
And more…
📊 Market Snapshot
| $104,400BTC+10.4% | $2,550ETH+40.3% | $3.33TCrypto Market Cap+14.7% | 73 (Greed)Fear & Greed Index+24 from last week |
📅 Crypto Events You don’t want to Miss
📌 Tuesday, May 13 - US Core CPI (12:30 PM UTC)
Inflation check incoming!
Core CPI (excludes food & energy) could shake markets.
⬆️ Hot numbers = bearish vibes for crypto 📉
⬇️ Cooler print? Bulls might party 📈
📌 Thursday, May 15 - Core PPI + 🎙️ Powell Speaks
PPI (Producer Price Index) hits first (12:30 PM), then Powell drops comments at 12:40 PM.
If producer prices increase ⬆️ customer prices usually follow ⬆️
Expect volatility; Powell’s tone often sets the day’s mood.
📌 Friday, May 16 - UoM Consumer Sentiment (2:00 PM UTC)
How’s the average American feeling in terms of finances? 🤔
The University of Michigan's early look at financial confidence (plus inflation expectations) can move markets more than you’d think.
⬇️ Lower-than-expected score is good for crypto 📈
🐋Smart Money Tracker
Tuesday, May 6th: BlackRock (iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF) has bought 41,452 $BTC($3.92B) over the past 2 weeks, bringing its total holdings to 614,639 $BTC ($58.07B).
Thursday, May 8th: Institutions are accumulating $ETH!
Abraxas Capital has withdrawn 49,644 $ETH ($92M) from Binance and Kraken today.
Friday, May 9th: While the market was pumping, Diddy launched a token called $DIDDY.
An insider made $989.6K in under 2 hours (What a surprise 🙄 )
The insider created a new wallet a day earlier and preloaded it with funds, then spent $349.9K to buy $DIDDY and sold for $1.4M, netting $989.6K in profit.
Friday, May 9th: This gambler just lost $4.77M shorting $ETH in under 8 hours.
They deposited $5.08M into Hyperliquid to short $ETH with max leverage (25x).
Now they are down to just $310K. Crazy! 🤯
Saturday, May 10th: James Wynn, the legendary trader who made $46.5M on Hyperliquid, has been actively trading since Mar 13th.
These are his current open positions:
40x long on $BTC: $5.4M unrealized profit
10x long on $PEPE: $23.8M unrealized profit
10x long on $TRUMP: $5.57M unrealized profit
5x long on $FARTCOIN: $5.15M unrealized profit
5x long on $HYPE. $31.4K unrealized profit
Sunday, May 11th: A whale withdrew 900 $BTC ($93.75M) from Binance on this day.
Monday, May 12th: Many gamblers are shorting $BTC with high leverage!
Wallet 0x51d9 opened a $93M short position on $BTC with 40x leverage, with a liquidation price of $105,690.
Wallet 0x5D2F opened a $44M short position on $BTC with 40x leverage, with a liquidation price of $112,660.
Source: Lookonchain
📰 News Recap (May 6 to 12)
🌍 Stripe Goes Stablecoin Mode
Stripe, yep, that Stripe, just rolled out stablecoin financial accounts 🤯
💲 Users in 100+ countries can now send and receive crypto (USDC & USDB) without ever touching a centralized exchange.
U.S. and EU, sadly, are excluded, at least for now (regulatory headaches, of course)
Nonetheless, Stripe’s trillion-dollar volume entering stablecoins is a huge validation moment for on-chain money.
😬 PumpFun = RugFun?
A jaw-dropping 99% of memecoins launched on Solana’s PumpFun are either pump-and-dumps or outright rug pulls, according to Solidus Labs.
Source: Solidus Labs
The typical scam might only steal a few thousand bucks, but with hundreds of thousands of tokens analyzed, the fraud adds up fast.
It’s a wild west of bonding curves and exit scams, so if you’re chasing meme magic, you better have a fast trigger finger and zero trust.
🚀 Unichain Steals the Spotlight on Uniswap V4
Unichain, the Uniswap-built L2, is absolutely dominating Uniswap v4 volume- over 76% of it!
Uniswap V4 volume share. Source: Dune
Thanks to slick incentives and a fresh Rollup-Boost upgrade, it’s faster, cheaper, and more MEV-friendly than the Ethereum mainnet.
Oh, and they’re not done: Flashblocks are coming soon, promising 200ms sub-blocks.
TradFi speed, meet DeFi composability.
🔧 Ethereum’s Pectra Upgrade Goes Live
The biggest Ethereum upgrade since The Merge is here: Pectra is officially live!
Combining 11 EIPs, it brings juicy features like account abstraction, validator UX boosts, and blob scaling.
Pectra EIP summary. Source: @uttam_singhk on X
It’s the third post-Merge upgrade and includes simultaneous changes to both execution and consensus layers.
ETH surged past $2,500 this week - clearly, the market approves 🚀
🌍️ Story of the Week
🧟 Back From The Dead: Crypto Founder's "Suicide" Turns Into Memecoin Drama
In what might be the crypto world's most bizarre exit strategy yet, 22-year-old Jeffy Yu, co-founder of the cryptocurrency Zerebro, appears to have staged his own death.
Only to be found days later hiding out at his parents' house in San Francisco.
📱 The "Death" & The Coin
Last Sunday, a video showed Yu apparently taking his own life. Almost immediately:
A flattering obituary appeared calling Yu "a visionary artist" and "tech prodigy"
A memorial coin called $LLJEFFY launched as his "final art piece"
The memecoin surged to over $100 million market cap
🕵️♀️ But the crypto detective community quickly got suspicious:
Online sleuths questioned the video's authenticity
The obituary mysteriously disappeared
Analysts discovered accounts linked to Yu moving $1.4 million after his "death"
The San Francisco Standard found Yu at his parents' home looking very much alive
When confronted, Yu was reportedly "agitated and shocked" at being discovered, complaining:
"I've been doxxed. I've been harassed. Now I have to move my parents out of here this week."
💰️ On-chain analysis showed accounts linked to Yu moving substantial volumes of the $LLJEFFY memecoin after his supposed death.
$LLJEFFY Price. Source: GeckoTerminal
Several accounts accused him of orchestrating an elaborate "pseudocide exit strategy" to cash out his holdings.
For context, Zerebro is a relatively obscure token with a market cap of around $44 million (compared to Bitcoin's $2 trillion).
Yu’s post on Mirror
The crypto space has seen its share of strange events, but faking one's death to pump a memecoin breaks new ground in questionable crypto stunts.
While the creativity is... notable... this behavior only adds to the reputation challenges facing the industry.
🔒 Major Token Unlocks of the Week
Games for a Living $GFAL - 1.1% of the total supply will enter circulation on May 13, 2025.
Breeder DAO $BREED - 1.4% of the total supply will enter circulation on May 15, 2025.
Iguverse $IGU - 1.4% of the total supply will enter circulation on May 16, 2025.
Ape Coin $APE - 2% of the total supply will enter circulation on May 17, 2025.
Explore more unlocks with full vesting details.
🗞️ From our Blog
💡 1 Minute Learning: Cross-Chain Bridges
A crypto bridge is like a digital highway connecting different blockchain islands! 🏝️➡️🏝️ It allows you to move your crypto assets from one blockchain to another without going through a centralized exchange.
How do Bridges Work 🔍
Crypto bridges operate through two primary architectures:
Lock-and-Mint: Assets are locked in smart contracts while wrapped versions are minted on the destination chain (custodial)
Burn-and-Mint: Original tokens are burned completely before equivalent tokens are minted elsewhere (trustless)
Well-known Examples 🌉
Axelar: Implements threshold cryptography with a decentralized validator network, allowing for secure General Message Passing (GMP) between chains
Wormhole: Uses Guardian nodes that reach consensus through a Guardians' quorum to verify and sign message attestations
Stargate (built on LayerZero): Combines native asset bridging with unified liquidity pools to eliminate the fragmentation issue of having separate pools on different chains
⚠️ Use with Caution
Bridges are key to DeFi’s multi-chain universe—but they’ve also been prime targets for hacks (👀 Ronin, Wormhole). Always DYOR and understand the trust assumptions before you cross the chain chasm.
And that’s a wrap! 🎉 Enjoyed this newsletter? Forward it to a friend, and let them know they can subscribe here.
Got any ideas or feedback? We’d love to hear from you! Drop us an email at [email protected].
DISCLAIMER: None of this is financial advice. This newsletter is strictly educational and not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or make financial decisions. Always do your own research and stay safe out there.