Robinhood Chain's First Mint Sold Out in an Hour

gm, Defiers!

These were the biggest crypto and DeFi stories today:

• Cole Villemain sells out a 44,444-piece mint on Robinhood Chain in 54 minutes
• ENS tokenholders hand endowment control to a staffed foundation
• Luke Dashjr loses his BIP editor seat two days after his fork stalled
• Coinbase wins an Abu Dhabi license for its tokenized securities hub
• MoneyGram takes its cash-to-crypto ramps native on Solana

Cole Villemain opened the mint at 2:18 a.m. ET and called it sold out 57 minutes later. 44,444 tokens, roughly $1.28 million, on a chain that was three weeks old in July. Pudgy Penguins holders voted him out of the project he co-founded in January 2022.

Spritehood is the first NFT sellout of any size on Robinhood Chain, and it lands on a network that has spent a month setting records. Transactions, total value locked and stablecoin supply all peaked while DEX volume fell 72%. Uniswap Labs opened a memecoin launchpad there that out-launched the incumbent on day one, and Robinhood's head of product put the chain at 200 million transactions in 30 days.

That’s defintiely a Robinhood Chain boom. Whether the mint also points to an NFT renaissance is the harder question. Secondary volumes have been flat for two years, and what cleared here in under an hour was speed and a founder's name (albeit a controversial one), sold through a contract Blockscout still lists as unverified. The 44,444 buyers have no published code for the mechanics that priced and distributed their tokens. Robinhood Chain has the profile Solana had in 2021: cheap blocks, a retail funnel and a launch culture that pays for being early.

Read more below!

PARTNER

Own and Earn From NVIDIA's Most Powerful AI Hardware | Viktoriya Hying, B3-IQDefiant Voices: B3-IQ's Viktoriya Hying on tokenizing GPU capacity and what owning a share of AI hardware pays out.▶ Watch on YouTube

NFTS & WEB3

Ousted Pudgy Penguins Co-Founder Sells Out 44,444-Piece NFT Mint on Robinhood Chain

Cole Villemain, who posts as ColeThereum, sold out Spritehood in under an hour early Tuesday. An onchain count by the analyst 0xlaplaced puts the paid sale at 53 minutes and 48 seconds: 37,430 tokens at $17 and 5,526 at $117, or $1,282,852, with 1,488 more issued free by the deployer beforehand. The $755,000 figures that circulated during the mint were snapshots taken while it was still running. Blockscout lists the Spritehood Wisp ERC-721 at 0xd6577124F96394faee65AfD2408f2ffA88445f63 with 44,444 supply and unverified source. Villemain teased the drop in July as being “delusional enough to believe I can drop the #1 NFT on Robinhood Chain,” and pitched a giveaway as “running back one of the oldest tricks in the book of 2021 NFT projects.” Pudgy Penguins holders voted the founding team out in January 2022 over treasury allegations that were never charged.

Ousted Pudgy Penguins Co-Founder Sells Out 44,444-Piece NFT Mint on Robinhood ChainAn onchain tally of the mint events puts the take at $1,282,852 — well above the $755,000 figures that circulated during the sale — while the Spritehood contract's source code remains unverified.thedefiant.io

Why this matters: Robinhood Chain now has a launch culture, and its first NFT sellout ran through a contract whose source code the 44,444 buyers still cannot read.

DEFI

ENS Tokenholders Hand Endowment Control to a Staffed Foundation

ENS tokenholders executed a proposal on Tuesday that gives the ENS Foundation a full-time executive director, a five-seat board and onchain control of the roughly $65 million endowment, passing 1,269,420 to 480,690. The executable swapped the Endowment Safe's owner for a timelock whose only proposer is the Foundation's 3-of-5 multisig, with the Security Council able to cancel on 5-of-8 until August 2028. Co-founder Alex Van de Sande voted no after decoding the calldata: “The draw limits, budget bounds, and the $500k standup cap exist in prose only — the executable enforces none of them.” Incoming executive director Alexander Urbelis conceded the addresses should have been named in the proposal text. ENS registration fees brought in $228,329 over the past 30 days.

Why this matters: The DAO handed custody of a $65 million endowment to a foundation it can no longer propose transactions from, and the watchdog seat expires in 2028.

BLOCKCHAINS

Bitcoin's BIP Editors Remove Luke Dashjr Two Days After BIP-110 Fork Stalled

Bitcoin's BIP editors revoked Luke Dashjr's repository access on Monday, about 26 hours after Mark “Murch” Erhardt filed a motion on the developer mailing list citing conflict of interest, minimal contribution and his championing of a contentious fork. Erhardt said Dashjr assigned BIP-110 a number on X before the proposal reached the mailing list and merged a pull request on it within minutes, and that he had left fewer than 1% of editor comments since April 2024. Dashjr replied in five sentences: “These are false accusations. I have followed the BIP process consistently for years.” BIP 3 sets out no procedure for removing an editor; the change was a one-line deletion and a permissions revoke. Four minutes before the removal was confirmed, Dashjr said he is taking a sabbatical as chairman and CTO of Ocean, the only pool that signaled for the fork.

Why this matters: Bitcoin's proposal process has no written rule for firing an editor, so five people removed a sixth by consensus in a mailing list thread and a GitHub permissions change.

TRADFI

Coinbase Wins Abu Dhabi License for Tokenized Securities Hub

Coinbase received a Financial Services Permission from ADGM's regulator covering arranging deals in investments and custody, clearing it to run what it calls an international tokenization hub. Tokens will be backed by the underlying shares under FSRA supervision, buyers need a wallet rather than a brokerage account, and Coinbase said it can freeze or seize assets at the wallet level. The footnotes narrow it: only “Vested Holders” can vote the underlying shares or redeem, dividends are reinvested rather than paid out, and redemption still requires a bank or brokerage account. No launch date, no named equities, and the product page reads “coming soon.” Tokenized public equities are a $2.49 billion market with 1.13 million holders, per rwa.xyz.

Why this matters: The pitch is shareholder rights without a broker, and the fine print puts voting and redemption behind a vesting tier most token buyers will not be in.

TRADFI

MoneyGram Brings Cash-To-Crypto Ramps To Solana

MoneyGram extended Ramps, its cash-to-crypto API, to Solana on Tuesday, ending a run in which the product supported USDC on Stellar only and Solana wallets had to bridge through Allbridge Core or Bridge.xyz to reach the retail cash network. Rift, a self-custody trading app backed by a16z, Sequoia and Pantera, is the first Solana wallet to integrate it. Cash deposits work in more than 25 countries and withdrawals in more than 170, across nearly 500,000 retail locations. The launch follows MoneyGram's June 22 move to run a Solana validator and join the Solana Developer Platform alongside Mastercard, Worldpay and Western Union. MGUSD, the Bridge-issued stablecoin MoneyGram launched in June, stays on Stellar.

Why this matters: Solana wallets can now reach 500,000 cash counters without a bridge, and Solana holds $15.73 billion in stablecoins waiting for an exit into paper money.

Other Stories Worth Your Time

Riot Signs $9.1B, 20-Year AI Data Center Lease at Its Texas Bitcoin Mine — 191 megawatts at Rockdale go to an unnamed frontier AI lab through June 2048, averaging $457 million a year, while Riot's fully costed mining ran at 126.5% of what its bitcoin was worth last quarter.

CFTC Sues Goliath Ventures Over Alleged $397M DeFi Liquidity Pool Ponzi — the complaint says the Florida company took bitcoin and ether from roughly 1,600 customers to put in DEX liquidity pools and never deployed a dollar to one, with $48 million going to the CEO's homes, vehicles and jewelry.

eToro to Buy US Brokerage TradeZero for Up to $231M as Crypto Revenue Shrinks — eToro's third acquisition signed this year is not expected to close until the first half of 2027, and it needs approvals for a broker-dealer whose chief executive settled SEC charges in 2022.

Stablecoin Card Issuer Rain Buys Merchant Wallet Startup Ansa — Ansa builds branded prepaid wallets holding dollar balances for merchants, with no stablecoin leg at all. Founder Sophia Goldberg joins Rain as head of payments and terms were not disclosed.

Trending on The Defiant

Vitalik Buterin's Ethereum Roadmap Prioritizes Quantum Readiness and Privacy · BLOCKCHAINS

Two Prediction Markets Shut Down Hours Apart as Kalshi and Polymarket Take 93% of Volume · DEFI

BIP-110 Bitcoin Fork Stalls at Two Blocks as Its Only Miner Quits · BLOCKCHAINS

Ether Products Lead $600M Crypto ETP Flow Rebound in July · TRADFI