Decentral Block Post

Why did Fantom reinvent itself as Sonic?

Fantom was one of the pioneers of the directed acyclic graph (DAG) design for distributed ledgers. It featured fast finality and transaction fees of a fraction of a cent. However, Fantom relied on the Ethereum-derived account storage model and the EVM, which led to bloated storage and slow execution times.

To address these bottlenecks and implement numerous other updates, the team behind Fantom rolled out Sonic, a fully independent new blockchain network. A new report by HTX  explores Sonic's technological background, its new tokenomics model and the innovations it brings to DeFi.  

Download a full version of the report for free here

Sonic’s technical architecture

Sonic runs on the proprietary SonicVM execution engine, which dynamically translates EVM bytecode into a faster internal format for speedier execution. It also optimizes heavy computations to prevent repeated work and pre-analyzes contract code to cache valid jump destinations. The SonicVM is fully compatible with the EVM, meaning that Fantom smart contracts can run seamlessly on the new blockchain.

To address the issue of hefty onchain data storage and slow node synchronization, Sonic uses a new database design called SonicDB. SonicDB separates the blockchain state into two databases. It uses the LiveDB for fast access to the current state and execution, and the ArchiveDB for storing full historical data. This separation allows consensus nodes to cut data storage requirements by up to 90% and thus significantly reduces hardware requirements and synchronization time.

Ethereum Merge architect Justin Drake told Cointelegraph that he believes it would be cheaper to launch a 51% attack on Bitcoin than on Ethereum.

Drake said it would be “much cheaper to 51% attack Bitcoin” and that it would cost “on the order of $10 billion.”

Drake led work on Ethereum’s proof-of-stake (PoS) implementation and was a principal architect in the Merge (the full PoS transition event). His remarks echo a May 14 X post by Grant Hummer, the co-founder of Ethereum-focused marketing and product company Etherealize.

In the post, Hummer said that Bitcoin “is completely screwed because of its security budget.”

Hummer claimed it would cost $8 billion to run a successful 51% attack, and he expects a successful attack to be “virtually certain” when the cost slips to $2 billion. A 51% attack occurs when a single entity or group controls over 50% of a blockchain network’s mining or staking power, gaining power over the network. Hummer added:

Key takeaways:

XRP price is forming a bullish V-shaped recovery pattern targeting $3.40.

A 53% surge in open interest to $5.06 billion signals bullish sentiment.

XRP (XRP) price shows positive signs as a bullish technical pattern emerges on its weekly chart, coinciding with increasing open interest.

Increasing OI backs XRP upside

XRP price is down 2% over the last 24 hours to trade above $2.40 on May 16, but has gained 13% over the past two weeks as the broader cryptocurrency market recovered and XRP open interest (OI) surged.

A fake Eric Trump-themed memecoin launched on Solana’s memecoin launchpad Pump.fun, rose more than 6,200% in the past 24 hours, raising red flags among blockchain analysts who warned of a potential rug pull.

A newly-created Eric Trump (ERICTRUMP) memecoin with the token address “jv7d” surpassed $140 million in market capitalization within a day since its launch on May 16, CoinMarketCap data shows.

ERICTRUMP/USD, all-time chart. Source: CoinMarketCap 

The memecoin’s distribution raises significant red flags that point to a rug pull “in the making,” warned blockchain data platform Bubblemaps in a May 16 X post.

Source: Bubblemaps

A rug pull typically refers to the sudden removal of liquidity or mass sell-off by token insiders, often resulting in a steep price collapse that leaves retail holders with worthless tokens.

Looking at Bubblemaps’ token clusters for the 250 largest holders, the majority of these tokens are held across 10 token clusters, founded by 10 main crypto addresses.

Key takeaways:

Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway earned $250 million from its complete exit from crypto-friendly Nubank.

The decision to divest didn’t appear to be performance-based; Nu Holdings posted record profits in 2024 and Q1 2025.

Buffett’s exit aligns with Berkshire’s broader financial sector pullback and growing cash reserve strategy.

Warren Buffett, the legendary investor long known for his skepticism toward cryptocurrencies, has fully exited his position in one of Latin America’s most crypto-friendly banks, Nubank, before his departure from Berkshire Hathaway.

Mainland China, one of the world’s most restrictive countries toward cryptocurrency, may be inching closer to adoption as a locally operating brand announced a Bitcoin reserve strategy.

DDC Enterprise, also known as DayDayCook, a US consumer brand with Hong Kong roots and operations in mainland China, is adopting a Bitcoin (BTC) reserve strategy, CEO Norma Chu announced in a shareholder letter on May 15.

As part of the strategy, DDC has acquired 100 BTC for about $10.4 million and plans to accumulate 5,000 BTC in the next 36 months, with 500 BTC targeted by the end of 2025.

Chu’s Bitcoin reserve announcement came after the firm posted a 33% revenue increase in 2024, with total revenue amounting to 273.3 million Chinese yuan ($37.4 million), according to its Form 20-F filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on May 15.

DDC’s Bitcoin plans missing in SEC records

Despite the public announcement, DDC’s latest SEC filings do not explicitly mention the company’s Bitcoin holdings or a Bitcoin reserve strategy.

Update May 16, 11:24 am UTC: This article has been updated to add comments from Ran Goldi, senior vice president of payments and network at Fireblocks.

A report from enterprise-grade digital assets platform Fireblocks shows that 90% of institutional players are using or exploring the use of stablecoins in their operations.

The report, published May 15, surveyed 295 executives across traditional banks, financial institutions, fintech companies and payment gateways. Almost half of the respondents (49%) said they already use stablecoins in payments, while 23% are conducting pilot tests and another 18% are in the planning stage.

Only 10% of institutions surveyed said they were undecided about stablecoin adoption.

“The stablecoin race has become a matter of avoiding obsolescence as customer demand accelerates and use cases mature,” Fireblocks wrote.

Central banks are experimenting with smart contracts to implement monetary policy in tokenized environments, signaling a growing interest in integrating blockchain technology into traditional finance (TradFi).

According to a joint research study by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Innovation Center and the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) Innovation Hub Swiss Centre, smart contracts could offer central banks flexible, rapid-response tools in a tokenized financial system.

The study, dubbed Project Pine, tested a prototype “generic customizable monetary policy tokenized toolkit” for further research by central banks, according to a BIS report published May 15.

“The smart contract toolkit was fast and flexible,” the BIS wrote. “In hypothetical scenarios, the central bank was able to add and change tools instantly.”

The report emphasized that if tokenization becomes widely adopted for money and securities, smart contracts could play a central role in how monetary policy is executed.

Key takeaways:

Bitcoin price consolidates as resistance at $105,000 prevents a rally to new all-time highs.

Traders are slightly bearish, but historical data suggests a sudden bullish move should not be ruled out.

Bitcoin (BTC) price has been consolidating within a roughly $3,500 range over the past seven days as the $105,000 level remains the overhead resistance to break.

BTC/USD weekly chart. Cointelegraph/TradingView

Bitcoin unable to crack $105,000

Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and Bitstamp shows that BTC’s price has been oscillating between its resistance level at $105,000 and $101,500, where it has found support.

Bringing student loans onchain would increase the total value locked (TVL) in decentralized finance (DeFi) by more than four times, supercharging the industry, according to Yat Siu, chairman of Animoca Brands.

Speaking at Consensus 2025 in Toronto, Siu pointed to the $3 trillion global student loan market as an untapped opportunity for the crypto industry. He said moving even 10% of that market onchain could significantly boost DeFi’s growth.

“You basically more than quadruple TVL in all of DeFi,” he said, underscoring how the industry is still in its early stages. 

Consensus chairman Michael Lau (left) with Animoca Brands chairman Yat Siu (right) at the Consensus mainstage in Toronto, Canada. Source: Cointelegraph

Web3-based education tools to drive crypto adoption

Siu said that Web3-based financial tools for the education sector could drive mass crypto adoption, especially among the young and unbanked.

“The first unbanked are the kids,” he said. “If a student receives a loan onchain and pays it back onchain — which is regulated, better, faster, cheaper — they become onboarded for crypto for life.” 

Key points:

New Bitcoin price targets leverage interplay with gold to deliver $200,000 and higher this year.

Bitcoin price cycles remain in focus as part of the BTC price “power curve” model.

Eating gold’s market cap could propel BTC/USD to nearly $1 million by the decade’s end.

Bitcoin (BTC) has a “decent chance” of hitting $250,000 or more in 2025 as attention turns to gold copycat moves.

Blockchain gaming user activity dipped and funding slowed in April, but the overall ecosystem is healthier and maturing, according to blockchain analytics platform DappRadar.

User activity dropped 10% over April, with blockchain gaming reaching a 2025 low of 4.8 million daily Unique Active Wallets, DappRadar analyst Sara Gherghelas said in the platform’s April Games Report.

Gaming dominance over the decentralized app industry also fell and is now tied with decentralized finance at 21%. 

Gherghelas said it’s clear user attention is shifting away from gaming, but under the surface, new infrastructure went live, major publishers doubled down, and high-quality games edged closer to launch.

Source: DappRadar

“The blockchain gaming industry isn’t dead — it’s evolving. It’s moving from noise to signal,” she said.

Ethereum layer-2 scaling platform Starknet has reached a decentralization milestone laid out by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin and is now the largest zero-knowledge rollup-based network by total value locked.

Starknet said in a press release shared with Cointelegraph that it has hit “Stage 1” decentralization, according to a framework Buterin laid out in 2022, which means the network operates with limited oversight or “training wheels.”

Starknet added that the framework was the “gold standard onchain tool for analyzing Ethereum scaling solutions,” and said it achieved the milestone through changes such as creating a security council and censorship-avoidance mechanisms. 

While the system still allows intervention from a security council, it has implemented a fully functional validity proof system governed by smart contracts.

Starknet is now the only layer-2 ZK-rollup network to have reached Stage 1 and has grown to be the largest ZK-rollup blockchain with a total value locked of $629 million, just ahead of ZKsync’s $610 million, according to L2beat. 

The Pacific US territory of the Northern Mariana Islands has passed a bill allowing its small constituent island of Tinian to launch a stablecoin, overriding an earlier veto by the territory’s governor.

The 20-member Northern Mariana Islands House voted 14-2 to undo Governor Arnold Palacios’ April 11 veto of the bill, which allows the Tinian local government to issue licenses to internet casinos and includes a provision for the Tinian treasurer to issue, manage and redeem a “Tinian Stable Token.” 

The territory’s nine-member Senate had revived the bill on May 9, voting 7-1 in a two-thirds majority to override the veto, which then needed a two-thirds majority in the House to pass.

Representative Marissa Flores (top left) had urged for “thoughtful deliberation” on the internet gaming and stablecoin bill. Source: YouTube

Originally, a four-member Tinian delegation to the Marianas legislature had unanimously passed the bill to Governor Palacios on March 12.

It may put the Tinian government in the lead to be the first US public entity to issue a stablecoin, which it must do before July if it’s to beat the state of Wyoming government, which is aiming to issue a stablecoin by then.

Jason Guthrie, head of product at asset manager WisdomTree, says he’s optimistic despite a noticeable lack of hype that typically comes along with a crypto bull run. 

There hasn't been a “really frothy use case that has typically driven these market cycles previously,” such as initial coin offerings (ICOs), non-fungible tokens (NFTs), or DeFi lending, Guthrie told Cointelegraph at Consensus.

“This time, we’ve continued to see the asset class gathering value, we’ve continued to see the companies that are built on this technology, growing revenue, growing client bases, continuing to innovate without really hanging their hat on one of these frankly less than useful use cases,” he said.

WisdomTree founder Jonathan Steinberg (left), Jason Guthrie, head of product (middle) and head of digital assets Will Peck (right). Source: Jason Guthrie

The ICO boom kicked off in 2017 with an estimated $4.9 billion raised. By 2018, this figure had jumped to $33.4 billion. By 2019, it had dropped to just over $370 million and has never returned to its previous highs.

NFTs also had their day, and saw a massive surge of popularity in 2020 and continued to grow until hitting a peak in 2022, with trading volumes reaching $57.2 billion and the market’s sales count hitting 121.7 million. The market has since cooled as well. 

Another 12 people have been charged for their involvement in a $263 million crypto crime spree that stole 4,100 Bitcoin from a Genesis creditor last August, along with a string of break-ins and money laundering. 

The 12 new names, included in a superseding indictment, add to charges originally brought against the main defendant in the case, Malone Lam, on Sept. 19, 2024, the Department of Justice noted in a May 15 statement.

Jeandiel Serrano was named a defendant in the initial indictment but was not included in the superseding one.

The DOJ said several defendants have been arrested, while two others are believed to be living in Dubai.

Many of the suspects, with aliases like “Goth Ferrrari” and “The Accountant,” come from California, mostly aged between 18 and 22. 

The group allegedly began operating in October 2023, evolving from friends while playing online games to what the DOJ describes as participating in a “cyber-enabled racketeering conspiracy.”

Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence firm xAI has blamed an “unauthorized modification” to the Grok chatbot’s response, causing it to generate responses mentioning political and racial tensions in South Africa. 

On May 16, xAI provided an update on the Grok AI chatbot’s inflammatory responses, stating that on May 14, “an unauthorized modification was made to the Grok response bot’s prompt on X.”

“This change, which directed Grok to provide a specific response on a political topic, violated xAI’s internal policies and core values,” it added.

The firm stated that it had conducted a thorough investigation and is implementing measures to enhance the AI chatbot’s transparency and reliability.

Grok generated responses on May 14, mentioning a “white genocide” conspiracy theory in South Africa when answering completely unrelated questions about topics like baseball, enterprise software, and construction. 

Coinbase stock dipped after news broke of a cyberattack that exposed customer data and an ongoing Securities and Exchange Commission investigation over misstated user numbers in 2021.

The double whammy of bad news rattled investors as company stock (COIN) slid 7% in a fall to $244 in after-hours trading on May 15, according to Google Finance.  

Coinbase stock 24 hours. Source: Google Finance 

Coinbase has since confirmed the report from The New York Times, which stated the SEC has been investigating whether Coinbase misstated its user numbers in past disclosures, an inquiry that began during the Biden administration and has continued under the Trump administration.

“This is a hold-over investigation from the prior administration about a metric we stopped reporting two and a half years ago, which was fully disclosed to the public,” confirmed Coinbase chief legal officer Paul Grewal to Cointelegraph. 

“We also disclosed – and continue to disclose – the more relevant metric of ‘monthly transacting users’ – the number of people who use our platform in a given month,” he said before adding: 

Méliuz’s executive chairman says his fintech firm has become Brazil’s first publicly-traded Bitcoin treasury company following shareholder approval, with the firm also announcing it bought $28.4 million worth of Bitcoin to add to its existing stack.

“Historic day! Our shareholders have approved, by a wide majority, the transformation of Méliuz into the first Bitcoin Treasury Company listed in Brazil,” Israel Salmen posted to X on May 15.

Salmen said the firm snapped up 274.52 Bitcoin (BTC) for an average purchase price of $103,604, achieving a BTC yield of 600%. 

Méliuz now holds 320.3 Bitcoin, worth a little over $33 million, with the latest purchase adding to the Brazilian fintech firm’s first purchase of 45.73 Bitcoin on March 6.

Details of Méliuz’s latest Bitcoin purchase. Source: Israel Salmen

In a May 15 statement, Méliuz said it would accumulate Bitcoin in an “accretive way” for shareholders using a range of financial instruments.

Deepfake-assisted hackers are now targeting US federal and state officials by masquerading as senior US officials in the latest brazen phishing campaign to steal sensitive data. 

The bad actors have been operating since April, using deepfake voice messages and text messages to masquerade as senior government officials and establish rapport with victims, the FBI said in a May 15 warning. 

“If you receive a message claiming to be from a senior US official, do not assume it is authentic,” the agency said.  

If US officials’ accounts are compromised, the scam could become far worse because hackers can then “target other government officials, or their associates and contacts, by using the trusted contact information they obtain,” the FBI said. 

As part of these scams, the FBI says the hackers are trying to access victims’ accounts through malicious links and directing them to hacker-controlled platforms or websites that steal sensitive data like passwords. 

US federal prosecutors are pressing ahead with their case against Tornado Cash founder Roman Storm, but will drop a small part of their indictment after the Department of Justice rolled back its crypto enforcement last month.

Jay Clayton, the acting US Attorney for Manhattan, told federal court judge Katherine Polk Failla in a May 15 letter that the charges against Storm still stand, bar one part of a conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business charge.

“After review of this case, this Office and the Office of the Deputy Attorney General have determined that this prosecution is consistent with the letter and spirit of the April 7, 2025 Memorandum from the Deputy Attorney General,” Clayton wrote.

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche’s April memo said the Justice Department would end the so-called “regulation by prosecution” of crypto, and added that the agency wouldn’t prosecute crypto mixers like Tornado Cash “for the acts of their end users or unwitting violations of regulations.”

A highlighted excerpt of Blanche’s memo stating that the Department of Justice was rolling back its crypto enforcement. Source: US Department of Justice

Clayton added that the indictment against Storm will cut the accusation that he failed to comply with money transmitting business registration requirements.

The State of Wisconsin Investment Board (SWIB), which oversees the state’s retirement funds, unloaded its shares in BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF (IBIT) during the first quarter, filings show.

The Wisconsin Investment Board reported no spot Bitcoin ETF positions in its 13F filing to the US Securities and Exchange Commission on May 15, liquidating all 6,060,351 IBIT shares it reported holding from the previous quarter. 

The more than 6 million IBIT shares are worth around $355.6 million at current prices.

SWIB was one of the first state investment funds to provide Bitcoin exposure to US retirees when it bought $164 million worth of Bitcoin ETFs in Q1 2024 — the same quarter the Bitcoin products launched.

Source: Julian Fahrer

The mass sell-off comes only a quarter after SWIB reported additional purchases of IBIT shares in Q4, while reallocating all 1 million shares held in the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC) to IBIT.

Global foreign exchange and payments platforms are lobbying hard against stablecoins, which stand to significantly disrupt their business models, investor Kevin O’Leary said during a keynote address at Consensus 2025.

Legacy forex and payments platforms often extract large fees for servicing cross-border cash transfers and stand to lose out on revenue if regulated stablecoins become accepted as a cheaper, faster alternative, O’Leary said at the Toronto conference. 

“Currency trading is a multi-trillion dollar market — and it’s old and ugly and inefficient,” O’Leary said, adding that “[ t]he biggest threat to that monopoly or oligopoly is a regulated stablecoin.” 

“Once that’s approved, the multi-trillion dollar FX market becomes efficient, transparent, and inexpensive,” he said. 

Kevin O’Leary speaking at Consensus. Source: Cointelegraph

Stablecoin legislation

US lawmakers are working on legislation that stands to accelerate global stablecoin adoption, O’Leary added. 

US Senators are aiming to pass the so-called Genius Act — a framework for regulating stablecoins — before the end of May. “As soon as the SEC approves the stablecoin act, every regulator in the US’s circle — Abu Dhabi, Switzerland, England — will follow,” O’Leary said.

Coinbase chief legal officer Paul Grewal addressed some of the concerns raised by US lawmakers and industry leaders around President Donald Trump’s crypto ventures, and how they may affect related legislation.

Speaking at the Consensus conference in Toronto on May 15, Grewal said there had been “hiccups” in Congress since the Senate Banking Committee voted to advance the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for US Stablecoins, or GENIUS Act, in March. Though Grewal said there were disputes over “substantial issues that need to be addressed” in the bill, he hinted that Trump’s involvement in the industry was a “complicating factor.” 

“The discussion around the president's support for a certain memecoin or two and other efforts does add a certain level of challenge to the effort to get Democrats and Republicans aligned on the right way to regulate the [spot market], but I have confidence that the Senate and the House are going to sort all that out,” said Grewal.

Paul Grewal (right) on stage at Consensus in Toronto on May 15. Source: Cointelegraph.

Democrats including Senator Elizabeth Warren explicitly called out the Trump family’s crypto venture, World Liberty Financial, and its USD1 stablecoin in opposing the GENIUS Act. However, some of the bill’s supporters, like Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, who proposed an earlier version of the legislation, said they would remove language specifically targeting the president’s crypto ventures.

Related: Democrats seek suspicious activity reports linked to Trump crypto ventures

There is an ongoing race across the world for Bitcoin accumulation, according to Eric Trump, the second-eldest son of US President Donald Trump. Speaking at a crypto conference in Toronto on May 15, Trump said that from families to government funds, “everybody in the world is trying to hoard Bitcoin right now.”

The remarks came during a panel at Consensus 2025. Sharing the stage with Asher Genoot, the CEO of Bitcoin (BTC) mining company Hut 8, Trump said Bitcoin adoption has been incredible.

“I'm traveling. I'm on a plane. Everybody in the world is trying to hoard Bitcoin right now. Everybody. I hear it from sovereign wealth funds. I hear it from the wealthiest families. I hear from the biggest companies.”Asher Genoot and Eric Trump at Consensus 2025. Source: Cointelegraph

Trump described what he sees as “two races in Bitcoin”: the accumulation race — currently led by Michael Saylor, he says — and the mining race, which marks his own involvement in the crypto space.

President Trump's third child is co-founder of American Bitcoin, a Hut8 subsidiary. On May 12, the companies announced American Bitcoin would merge with Gryphon Digital Mining in a stock-for-stock transaction that will result with a public listing on the Nasdaq.

Related: Bitcoin bulls aim for new all-time highs by next week as capital inflows soar

Key takeaway:

Bitcoin’s struggles to overtake the $105,000 level as US macroeconomic headwinds remain a challenge.

Steady inflows from institutional investors and the strength of the $100,000 support point to growing confidence in Bitcoin.

Bitcoin (BTC) has struggled to break above $105,000 since May 10, leading traders to question whether the bullish momentum has faded. Although BTC managed to reclaim the $104,000 level, demand for leveraged long positions has dropped sharply, as indicated by the decline in the Bitcoin futures premium.

 

Asset tokenization is set to accelerate the movement of capital across traditional markets, according to Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov. Speaking with Cointelegraph at Consensus 2025 in Toronto, Nazarov said the shift will boost capital velocity in asset classes such as treasuries, equities, private credit, commercial debt, and real estate.

"I think that there are two sides to this equation. One is the asset, and the other one is the payment. So, you need more high-quality assets onchain, but you also need more frictionless payments that existing institutions can use easily," Nazarov said on May 14.

The remarks came on the same day Chainlink announced a partnership with Kinexys, a blockchain network for institutional-grade tokenized assets by JP Morgan, and digital asset firm Ondo Finance. Together, the companies will develop payment rails for institutions trading tokenized real-world assets onchain.

The partnership tested the exchange of Ondo's US Government Treasuries Fund (OUSG), a tokenized short-term US debt fund, with Kinexys, using Chainlink's Runtime Environment — a framework for connecting legacy financial systems to blockchains in a unified environment.

"What Chainlink is trying to do is kick off a virtuous cycle that triggers kind of a runaway success for the industry as a whole. We want more assets onchain, Nazarov added. "We want more payment systems onchain," he continued.

Bitdeer Technologies Group reported a 41% year-over-year drop in revenue to $70.1 million for the first quarter of 2025, the Bitcoin miner said on May 15. 

The Singaporean company clocked an operating loss of $3.2 million for the quarter, down from a $34.1 million profit during the same period last year, its earnings release said. 

However, Bitdeer reported a Q1 net income of more than $400 million, largely driven by gains on convertible notes and warrants issued to stablecoin issuer Tether in 2024.

Bitdeer’s revenue declines come as miners increasingly expand beyond Bitcoin (BTC) mining and pivot toward supplying high-performance computing (HPC) for artificial intelligence applications. 

“As we scale self-mining and execute on our ASIC [mining hardware] roadmap, we are also advancing plans for U.S.-based HPC and AI infrastructure,” Matt Kong, Bitdeer’s chief business officer, said in a statement.