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Here's a quick preview of today’s content: Trump appoints a former SEC chairman Jay Clayton to be Wall Street’s top cop, RFK Jr. notes that he has most of his net worth in Bitcoin, Goldman owns almost a billion in bitcoin ETFs, and more

Let’s dive in.

Market Snapshot

Headline Roundup
^{_{The major headlines driving crypto markets}}

• Trump named former SEC Chair Jay Clayton, who has advised a number of crypto firms since leaving the SEC in 2020, to be his U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York (CD)

• Goldman Sachs holds $710M of Bitcoin ETFs (DC)

• Wyoming Senator Cynthia Lummis is advocating for the US Treasury Department to convert a portion of its gold holdings into Bitcoin (CT)

• StarkWare CEO Eli Ben Sasson expects transaction speed on the firm’s Ethereum layer 2 Starknet to increase four-fold while fees fall “5x” over the next three month (CT)

• VC a16z’s $350M flagship crypto fund lost 40% in the first six months of 2022 (BW)

• Pennsylvania house representatives introduced a bill that would allow the state’s treasury to hold Bitcoin on its balance sheet (TD)

• Floki’s play-to-earn gaming platform, Valhalla, is teaming up with the KICK F1 Sim Racing Team (DC)

• XRP price at 3-year high as futures open interest jumps to new record (DC)

• The KARRAT Foundation revealed plans to develop ‘Studio Chain’, a blockchain aimed at enhancing the capabilities of Web3-native entertainment (DC)

• RFK Jr. says “I put most of my wealth in Bitcoin, so I am fully committed” (WG)

• CryptoPunks reestablished a floor price of $100,000 this past week (DC)

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M&A Announcements

• Crypto.com acquired Fintek Securities, a brokerage firm with an Australian Financial Services License (BT)

Launches

• Hyperliquid, a Layer 1 blockchain and perpetuals decentralized exchange platform, is gearing up for its Genesis Event token launch (TD)

Venture Capital

• Singapore-based Blockchain Founders Fund raised $75M for a new fund focused on backing blockchain, Web3 and metaverse startups (BW) 

• Folks Finance, a cross-chain decentralized finance platform, has raised $3.2M in a Series A round led by Borderless Capital (TB)

• Torram, pioneering institutional-grade decentralized finance (DeFi) infrastructure on Bitcoin, announced a strategic investment from Tim Draper’s VC firm (GW)

Cybersecurity

• Decentralized finance firm Thala Labs recovered $25.5M of liquidity pool tokens stolen from one of its farming contracts by a hacker (CT)

Extra Reads

• Everything you need to know about D.O.G.E. you can find here

Chart of the Day

Solana did 7 TIMES more volume than Ethereum in the last 24 hours.

Meme Dump

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