WhiteboardCrypto Newsletter - Feb 15

Welcome back to this week's edition of our WhiteboardCrypto Newsletter!

Another government memes… maybe

The Central African Republic President’s X account announced an official memecoin with the intent to boost national development. A video was released on the token’s website, but two different AI deepfake detectors flagged the video as suspicious. Notablky, two other AI models did not flag it as suspicious. Despite the uncertainty around its origin, the CAR memecoin saw over $500m of inflows through Solana’s Pump.fun site. Scammers have been hacking important accounts lately in an attempt to get people to buy fake memecoins - including the DEX aggregator Jupiter, and the former Malaysian prime minister.

Folks, if you don’t have two-factor authentication (2FA) on, you really ought to. 2FA, or multifactor authentication, is not an absolute guarantee of safety, and we don’t know if a lack of 2FA is the cause of these hacks, but it has been the cause of prior hacks and it’s always better to use than not.

Learn more here.

Unichain mainnet goes live

From the creators of Uniswap, a new layer 2 called Unichain is live. It’s one of the fastest L2s with 1-second block times and the intent to make that even faster as updates roll out. As an L2, they also have very small fees. For the first few months, Uniswap Labs will actually cover all swap fees to encourage new users and more liquidity. Unichain focuses on interoperability—i.e. the ability to trade seamlessly between chains that have adopted the ERC-7683 standard.

Learn more here.

Trump nopes on crypto council?

Not all things in government are as easy as signing an executive order. Instead of forming a permanent “crypto council”, it sounds like there will be a variety of “summits” with crypto leaders that will help inform policy. While this might encourage a larger variety of opinions and perspectives, it also doesn’t guarantee that any of the advice will actually be implemented as these summits will have no authority.

Learn more here.

Arweave launches AO mainnet

Another mainnet launch this week! Arweave is a decentralized storage network that uses a unique blockchain-like structure to enable permanent, low-cost data storage with a one-time fee. They’ve just launched AO, a decentralized computing platform that enables parallel execution of smart contracts, which allows it to compute very large datasets, such as those needed by Large Language Models (LLMs). It uses Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) for security and will store the data on Arweave’s network.

Learn more here.

Berachain token gets bearish

The Berachain launched last week with a unique consensus mechanism called proof of liquidity that uses a multi-token model (Bankless released an interview with the co-founder explaining what it’s all about—and how we don’t actually know if it will succeed or not yet). The primary utility token, BERA, gained 71% within hours after the airdrop but crashed 63% soon after. Why? Primarily due to concern of the token allocation. About 15% of the token supply was airdropped, with the rest still locked up.

Their tokenomics model follows a “low float, high FDV approach”—only a small percentage of tokens circulate initially, while the total valuation appears high on paper. This can drive up prices due to perceived scarcity but raises concerns about liquidity and future sell pressure when tokens unlock. Since the chain is still in its early stages, the outcome remains uncertain, making this an important factor to consider before investing.

Learn more here.

Thanks for reading and I hope you learned something!

- Theodore