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⌐◪-◪ → The team behind Shiba Inu, one of the most popularly traded memecoins in the world, just closed a $12M funding round by selling an unreleased token TREAT to non-US VC firms including Animoca Brands, Polygon Ventures, Mechanism Capital, Big Brain Holdings, Shima Capital, and more.

TREAT will serve as the “utility and governance” token of their new privacy-focused Layer 3 blockchain. It will be the last non-stable token from the Shiba Inu ecosystem according to their lead (anon) dev Shytoshi Kusama.

The round’s valuation is still unconfirmed, but a source with direct knowledge of the deal said it was a tranched round with valuations of $75M, $100M, and $200M respectively.

Speaking of crazy memecoin moves, the Pepe community just bought the domain Pepe.com and 𝕏 username @pepe. The dankest meme now has the dankest domain and username.

⌐◪-◪ → Swiss Bitcoiners are launching a petition for the National Bank to add Bitcoin to its national reserves. Here’s why this makes a lot of sense.

By adding Bitcoin to its reserves, Switzerland would mark its independence from the European Central Bank, aligning with its longstanding policy of neutrality.

The petition hinges on securing 100,000 valid signatures from Swiss. Subsequently, all Swiss nationals would vote on the proposed constitutional amendment. For context, this process could take up to five years.

If the Swiss Bitcoiners succeeded, Switzerland would become one of the first major countries to embrace BTC as a national reserve asset, following in the footsteps of El Salvador.

It will be interesting to see how this slow and public process affects the price of Bitcoin as it inches closer to the finish line.

⌐◪-◪ → Bitcoin is experiencing a “DeFi summer” moment amid the 4/20 halving and launch of the new token protocol, Runes.

Bitcoin miners generated over $100M in rewards on April 20th, $80M (75%) of which were from transaction fees alone.

Just to put how crazy this is in context:

• Miners were earning $60-70M in daily subsidies and transaction fees leading up to the having.

• However, this spiked to $107.75M on 4/20 despite miners earning half the subsidy reward per block

While it’s nice to see the protocol generate revenue, I can’t help but feel bad for all the “regular” Bitcoin users who now have to deal with unprecedented transaction fees due to frankly, deeply speculative behavior. Especially those in 3rd world countries.

With that said, I think it’s moments like these that properly “stress test” the network and ultimately to real innovation, helping solve blockchain’s biggest problem → scaling.

Have the glass half-full mindset. Problems are good.

P.S. ViaBTC pool mined the 4th ever Epic Sat during the halving and transferred it 24 hours later to a fresh wallet with 40.75 BTC.

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