Degens Beat Uniswap to Its Own Memecoin Launchpad
gm, Defiers!
These were the biggest crypto and DeFi stories today:
- Uniswap ships a memecoin launchpad, and a frog got there six days early
- Aave and ether.fi founders line up against Ethereum's staking yield burn
- Circle names BlackRock, Visa, ICE and DTCC among Arc's founding validators
- CLARITY Act odds slide into 2027 after Thune skips a cloture filing
- Shaw Walters: ai16z is 'dead' after settling the Burwick Law class action
FRONG went from a July 30 mint to a $12.1 million fully diluted valuation and $60.96 million in cumulative volume. The launchpad it was built for did not open until Aug. 5.
Uniswap Labs opened Pools, a memecoin launchpad on Robinhood Chain, shortly after 5 p.m. ET Wednesday, four hours and 39 minutes past its own countdown. FRONG, named after the frog video Uniswap used to tease the launch, was minted six days earlier by the same contracts and traded at $0.0121, up 31.9% on the day, across 12,141 holders. Two sibling tokens carry the same pre-launch date: pools.trade, up 2,468.3%, and Unicorn Pegasus, up 3,781.5%.
Memecoin traders are active again, and Robinhood Chain is where they went. The network overtook Base on daily active users three weeks after launch on memecoin trading, and Flap passed Pump.fun on daily revenue this week. Buying a contract before the product that explains it is a DeFi summer habit, when traders pulled pool addresses off block explorers and took positions before any front end shipped. Uniswap calls buying in the creation block sniping mitigation by design, and says Pools is "intended for memecoins: speculative, highly volatile assets that can go to zero."
Read more below!
WATCH
The $114 Trillion Question: How DTCC Is Tokenizing the Entire U.S. Market
DTCC settles $114 trillion in assets. Camila Russo breaks down the July 15 test that ran tokenized versions of those assets through production systems and converted them back, and what the result says about how quickly U.S. markets actually move onchain.
DEFI
Uniswap Ships A Memecoin Launchpad On Robinhood Chain, Topped By $FRONG Token Minted Six Days Early
Uniswap Labs opened Pools, a memecoin launchpad on Robinhood Chain, shortly after 5 p.m. ET Wednesday, four hours and 39 minutes after its own public countdown expired. The highest-valued token on it is FRONG, minted July 30 by the same contracts, five days before Uniswap posted the frog video it used to tease the launch. FRONG traded at $0.0121, up 31.9% on the day, at a $12.1 million fully diluted valuation on $20.6 million of 24-hour volume across 12,141 holders. Uniswap charges no launchpad fee and takes a 0.25% LP fee that autocompounds into a protocol-held position the creator cannot withdraw, against what it calls the roughly 1% standard elsewhere. The announcement says Pools "is built by Uniswap Labs" and that the firm "has not independently reviewed or verified any token or project displayed."
Why this matters: The largest DEX now runs a memecoin venue on a chain built for tokenized stocks, and its first hit token predates the product announcement by six days.
BLOCKCHAINS
Aave And ether.fi Founders Lead Opposition To Ethereum's Staking Yield Burn
Aave founder Stani Kulechov and ether.fi chief executive Mike Silagadze have come out against the proposal to burn a rising share of Ethereum validator rewards, joining solo stakers, DeFi founders and researchers who have spent two days arguing against it on X and on the Ethereum Magicians forum. The proposal, renumbered EIP-8363 after an editor flagged that 8361 was already allocated, would burn a fraction of validator rewards that climbs with the staking ratio, reaching 100% at a saturation balance of 60.25 million ETH. Kulechov puts the cut to all-in validator income at 48% and flagged a tax exposure created by the transition itself: doubling BASE_REWARD_FACTOR to 128 doubles a home validator's taxable receipts in jurisdictions that tax staking rewards on receipt. Marc Zeller of the Aave Chan Initiative called on Lido, ether.fi and Aave to refuse the upgrade outright. Jerome de Tychey, one of the six authors, has asked for three minutes on All Core Devs — Consensus call #184 at 14:00 UTC Thursday.
Why this matters: Ethereum's staking businesses hold the revenue the burn would cut, and they are the loudest voices in the thread. Thursday's call decides whether core developers entertain it at all.
BLOCKCHAINS
Circle Names BlackRock, Visa, ICE and DTCC Among 11 Founding Arc Validators
Circle named the founding validator cohort for Arc on Wednesday: BlackRock, DTCC, Galaxy, Global Payments, ICE, Mastercard, MoneyGram, SBI Group, Standard Chartered, Sumitomo Corporation and Visa, alongside Circle itself, ahead of a Sept. 16 public mainnet. Circle's own disclaimer calls Arc an open L1 "operated by a permissioned validator set" and states it has not been reviewed by the New York State Department of Financial Services or any other regulatory authority, while the company describes the architecture as "designed to be open and permissionless at its core." BlackRock is expected to deploy BUIDL on Arc using the network's native USDC integration, and the DTCC work — tokenizing assets custodied at The Depository Trust Company — starts in the second half of 2027. Aave, Morpho, Uniswap and Kraken sit on a separate day-one applications list. Circle raised $222 million in an Arc presale at a $3 billion fully diluted valuation.
Why this matters: Eleven named institutions securing the chain is a governance model, and Circle has not said when validator participation opens beyond that cohort. The DTCC connection lands in 2027.
REGULATION
Traders Push CLARITY Act Odds Into 2027 After Thune Skips Cloture Filing
Prediction-market traders cut the odds that the CLARITY Act becomes law this year after Senate Majority Leader John Thune declined to file cloture on the motion to proceed Tuesday night, then filed Wednesday morning on a college sports bill and the nomination of Todd Blanche. Kalshi's contract on a crypto market structure bill becoming law before Jan. 1, 2027 last traded at 22 cents, down from 30. Polymarket's 2026 market priced Yes at 15.5 cents, off 8.5 points on the day and 32.5 over the month, on $4.76 million of total volume. Money moved down the calendar: the before-October 2027 contract rose to 58 cents from 55 and the before-January 2028 contract to 65 from 64, which implies about 43 cents of probability on enactment during 2027. Thune told reporters he still wants a procedural vote and would gauge cooperation over the next day or two.
Why this matters: The bill needs seven Democratic votes and still has no bipartisan agreement behind it. Traders have moved the money to 2027 strikes and left this year at 22 cents.
TOKENS
Eliza Labs' Shaw Walters Says ai16z Token Is 'Dead' After Settling Burwick Law Class Action
Eliza Labs founder Shaw Walters said the ai16z token is "dead. Completely." and that the foundation behind it is winding down, after settling a Burwick Law class action by handing over "the rest of the treasury and all the money we had." The token traded at about $0.000277 on Wednesday for a market capitalization near $305,000 and 24-hour volume of roughly $4,080, about 99.99% below the $2.47 all-time high set on Jan. 1, 2025. Burwick filed Doe v. Walters in the Southern District of New York on April 16, naming nine defendants including Walters, Eliza Labs, the AI16Z DAO and DAOs.fun, and alleging that "Marc AIndreessen," the AI agent presented as running the project's venture fund, was a facade. The complaint also alleges a September 2025 migration routed 40% of newly created supply, about 4.4 billion tokens, to defendant-controlled entities. Walters said he never sold, once held $25 million in his wallet, and is "never letting a token come close to Eliza again."
Why this matters: A $2.5 billion market capitalization settled for whatever was left in the treasury. The AI agent trade of early 2025 now has a legal template attached to it.
Other Stories Worth Your Time
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Mastercard Extends Crypto Credential to Cross-Border Stablecoin Payments in Borderless.xyz Pilot — the pilot starts with Infinia, Walapay and Koywe, and tests whether a compliance check run once at origination can be relied on across Borderless.xyz's network of stablecoin payment providers.
Pirate Nation Studio Proof of Play Shuts Down, Open-Sources Code and Art — the studio put the Pirate Nation Unity app and its smart contracts on GitHub and released the artwork, IP and Founder Pirates NFTs into the public domain under a CC0 license.
Can LP Agents Outrun Their Own Debt? Inside Ratehopper's Self-Repaying Loan Competition (Partner) — Ratehopper's Range Hunter competition sets self-repaying loan agents against their own borrowing costs, with contest onboarding open now.
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