GM!
Today’s top news:
Crypto majors fall after early week rally; BTC at $64.2k, ETH steady at $1,885 ETFs see more inflows with $108M for BTC and $54M for ETH Jesse Pollak hands Base App over to Cobie, says he was wrong about content coins Ostium exploited for $18M in DeFi’s latest attack Trump expected to meet with Senator today to talk Clarity Act ethics provisions Base Hands Its App to Cobie as Jesse Pollak Admits “I Was Wrong” on Social “hopefully we can shut up about content coins now. i was wrong and i’m sorry.” That apology echoes Brian Armstrong’s comments from earlier this week when he said Base “messed up” on content coins.
Base Creator Jesse Pollak Steps Back From App Leadership After Admitting Social Bet 'Was Wrong'
Pollak now wants to build Base into “the blockchain for global finance,” arguing that the combination of crypto, stablecoins, perps, prediction markets, and tokenization can bring a billion people onchain. He set trading, payments, and agents as Base’s three priorities for 2026.
As for Cobie, he will be responsible for trading products at Coinbase (CB app / Pro / Baseapp). And he’s got his work cut out for him. He faces competition on multiple fronts: 1) CEXs like Kraken, which are hungry for growth ahead of potential IPO, 2) memecoin apps like Pump Fun and Fomo who have hundreds of thousands of users, 3) Robinhood itself, which offers competing products and made a major splash onchain this past week, and 4) Kalshi, which is growing its prediction market into the perps space. He’s facing an uphill battle to say the least. But if anyone in crypto is capable, Cobie might be the single best bet…
Macro Crypto and Markets Crypto majors are mostly red in midweek pullback; BTC -1% at $64.2k; ETH +1% at $1,885; SOL -2% at $76; HYPE -3% at $65.85 ONDO (+16%), NIGHT (+4%) and UNI (+4%) led top movers Oil even at $80; Gold even at $4,035 Stock futures are mixed; DOW +0.2%, Nasdaq -0.7% Stripe bid $53 billion to acquire PayPal alongside Advent, a deal that would merge Stripe's Bridge and Tempo stablecoin rails with PayPal's PYUSD Strategy’s CEO said the company feels “very secure” until Bitcoin hits $8,000-$10,000 Trump is expected to attend a White House meeting later today to hash out the CLARITY Act’s contested ethics section Cantor Fitzgerald and Securitize are collaborating on blockchain-based IPOs, pushing tokenization from secondary trading into primary issuance South Korea will modify a 76-year-old law to classify crypto as national assets, a foundational step toward integrating it into the financial system Japan reclassified crypto as a financial asset, paving the way for a flat 20% capital-gains rate Chamath published a 73-page report on crypto privacy, evaluating the models of Monero and ZCash amongst others Corporate Treasuries & ETFs The Bitcoin ETFs saw $107M in net inflows on Wednesday; the ETH ETFs saw $54M in inflows Meme Coin Tracker Meme leaders were mostly red; DOGE -1%, SHIB -2%, PEPE -2%, PENGU +1%, TRUMP even, BONK -5% Robinhood chain tokens were led by Tendies (+400%) and Index (+20%) while Cashcat fell another 20% and Pons fell 35% Solana leaders included HBULL (+55%) and SOLdiers (+48x); ANSEM fell 25% to $170M
Token, Airdrop & Protocol Tracker Ostium suffered an $18M exploit, as the wave of oracle attacks hitting DeFi continued Noxa, the launchpad behind Robinhood Chain’s memecoin boom, abruptly shut down after earning ~$12 million in fees, halting token launches over spam concerns and redirecting all revenue to creators A Stanford study flagged manipulation in Polymarket's five-minute Bitcoin markets, finding 821 traders nudged the settlement price with last-second Binance orders to earn ~$8.2 million
What is happening in NFTs? NFT leaders were mostly flat; Punks even at 32.4 ETH, BAYC -1% at 8.9 ETH, Pudgy +1% at 4.42 ETH; Hypurr’s +8% at 188 HYPE Invisible Friends (+50%) and Mocaverse (+26%) led top movers; nameless dread (+30%) and beef brothko (+44%) big movers for diewithmostlikes following his auctions 
