Weekly Recap: Trust, Don't Verify

gm, Defiers!

Tether cleared the first full audit in its 12-year history this week, then published neither the statements nor the opinion letter.

The pattern repeated all week. Robinhood Chain's first NFT sellout moved 44,444 tokens in under an hour through a contract Blockscout still lists as unverified. ENS tokenholders handed a $65 million endowment to a foundation whose spending limits, a co-founder pointed out, exist in the proposal's prose and nowhere in the executable. And Bitcoin's BIP editors removed Luke Dashjr from the repository two days after his fork stalled, by a process BIP 3 does not describe.

In Washington, SEC staff cleared Franklin Templeton to use its onchain money fund as collateral inside registered funds. The price of admission was 12 conditions and a transfer agent that can freeze any wallet.

Enjoy!

WATCH

Inside Bitcoin's Worst Security Stretch in Years

Camila Russo talks to Foundation CEO Zach Herbert, whose Lightning node was swept in the BTCPay Server attack, and Casa CEO Nick Neuman about three weeks that ran from a 2021 Coldcard firmware bug through Boltz shutting down to merchant nodes being drained overnight.

Top Stories This Week

Tether Clears Its First Full Audit and Publishes None of It

KPMG US issued an unqualified opinion on the 2025 accounts of Tether International, S.A. de C.V., the El Salvador entity that issues USDT, the first full financial-statement audit in the company's history. The work was performed to AICPA standards; the GENIUS Act sets PCAOB standards for licensed US issuers. Tether has released neither the statements nor the opinion letter, so the audit's existence is the only fact in evidence. A full audit was the longest-running demand on the company, and Tether met it on the softer standard with the documents withheld.

Robinhood Chain Built Almost All of Crypto's Launchpad Growth

Launchpads collected $75.39 million in fees over the 30 days to Aug. 11, against $42.53 million the month before, and Robinhood Chain produced $33.49 million of it, up 236% from its own first month. Pump.fun's share of the category fell to 26.7% in the week to July 14, then recovered above half four weeks later on its largest weekly haul in 90 days. The chain also took its first NFT sellout: ousted Pudgy Penguins co-founder Cole Villemain moved 44,444 Spritehood tokens in 54 minutes for $1.28 million, through an ERC-721 whose source code the buyers still cannot read. None of it reached prices. The memecoin sector sat 83% below its December 2024 peak.

Bitcoin's Fork Died, Then Its Editors Removed Luke Dashjr

The chain enforcing BIP-110 has not produced a block since Aug. 8, two blocks past the split, after the only crew mining it walked away. Signaling peaked at 2.53% of a retarget period against the 55% the proposal needed, and every one of those 51 blocks came from Ocean. Two days later Bitcoin's BIP editors revoked Luke Dashjr's repository access, about 26 hours after Mark “Murch” Erhardt filed a motion citing conflict of interest and minimal contribution. BIP 3 sets out no procedure for removing an editor, so the change was a one-line deletion and a permissions revoke. Dashjr called the accusations false and took a sabbatical as Ocean's chairman and CTO.

Vitalik Puts Quantum Defense and Privacy at the Center of Ethereum's Roadmap

Vitalik Buterin laid his 2023 roadmap diagram over the Ethereum Foundation's current draft plan and listed seven items with no 2023 antecedent, privacy and post-quantum cryptography among them. The strawmap now lays out seven network upgrades by 2029 and five long-range targets, including 10,000 transactions per second on the base chain and shielded transfers. Verkle trees and state expiry, the two projects that anchored the 2023 diagram, were replaced outright. Buterin named STARKs and AI-accelerated formal verification as the two things “we are okay betting the technical future of Ethereum on.” The base layer collected $8.3 million in fees in July, down 79% from a year earlier.

SEC Staff Clears a Tokenized Money Fund as Collateral Inside Registered Funds

The SEC's Division of Investment Management said it would not recommend enforcement action if Franklin Templeton's US registered funds hold shares of its onchain money market fund, including as securities-lending collateral. The relief runs on 12 conditions spanning account segregation, daily reconciliation, annual board review and three independent verifications each fiscal year, two of them unannounced. Franklin's transfer agent keeps the official ownership record in an internal book-entry system linked in real time to Stellar, secures the private keys, and keeps the ability to freeze wallet records and reverse unauthorized transactions. FOBXX, whose shares are recorded as BENJI, held about $726.6 million as of Aug. 12.

Other Stories

ENS Tokenholders Hand Endowment Control to a Staffed Foundation — tokenholders voted 1,269,420 to 480,690 to give the ENS Foundation a full-time executive director, a five-seat board and onchain control of a roughly $65 million endowment. Co-founder Alex Van de Sande voted no after decoding the calldata: the draw limits and budget bounds exist in prose only.

Two Prediction Markets Shut Down Hours Apart as Kalshi and Polymarket Take 93% of Volume — Trepa and Fireplace announced wind-downs 90 minutes apart, both giving users until Sept. 30 to withdraw, as the two leaders took $13.87 billion of the $14.87 billion traded across 40 venues over 30 days.

Solana Community Argues Over Whether Its Foundation Should Pick Winners — Flash.Trade founder Anas Khader named the Foundation among three reasons for shutting his perps exchange, and president Lily Liu answered that “‘King making’ is short sighted and self limiting,” while conceding the Foundation's socials have understated the range of teams it supports.

Harmony Patches Pre-Staking Quorum and Receipt-Replay Flaws After ONE Mint Claim — the release fixes a quorum check an all-zero signer bitmap could satisfy and a cross-shard receipt path that let an applied receipt be resubmitted. An onchain account claimed four billion ONE was created; the patch leaves the balances already minted standing.

Neutrl Pauses Minting and Redemptions While Assessing Reserve Impact — the protocol froze minting, redemptions and related functions over what it called circumstances affecting reserves, and Strata froze its Neutrl-market contracts, whose two tranche tokens showed more than $1.7 million in onchain value. The protocol has published neither a loss figure nor a timeline.

Boltz Founders Exit as Unnamed Bitcoin Group Agrees to Take Over Suspended Swap Service — the bootstrapped five-person team behind Lightning and Liquid swap rails for Aqua Wallet, Bull Bitcoin Mobile, Klever and Misty Breez left effective immediately, handing the service to “veteran Bitcoiners” it declined to name after months of AI-assisted attacks.

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.

Trending on The Defiant

• Marinade Says 28.83% of Solana Stake Went Delinquent, Nearing Finality Halt
• Trezor Shipping-Provider Breach Exposes Data of 13,689 Customers
• Standard Chartered Says Its $100 UNI Target May Be Too Low After Robinhood Chain Burns
• Securitize's Tokenized Assets Hit $4.3 Billion as Revenue Falls
• Uniswap Founder Says Team Renounced Creator Fees From Employee Testing

That's it for today — have a great weekend! If you enjoyed this newsletter, tell your friends!