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⌐◪-◪ → The SEC just issued preliminary approval for the Grayscale Ethereum Mini Trust and the ProShares Ethereum ETF. Analysts expect spot ETH ETFs to begin trading on July 23rd.

SEC commissioner Hester Pierce chimed in and said both staking and in-kind creation for ETH and Bitcoin ETFs are open to reconsideration. Bullish.

The ETF fees range from 0.19% to 2.5%:

• Grayscale: 2.5%

• Blackrock: 0.25%

• Fidelity: 0.25%

• Vaneck: 0.20%

• Franklin: 0.19%

Grayscale still hasn’t learned its lesson, coming in with the highest fees by an entire order of magnitude. Wtf is their problem?

While this is certainly bullish news, I’m disappointed in the tickets (see Tweet above). Why couldn’t they go with something fun like Direxion’s recently announced tickers LMBO and REKT?

Whoever secured those tickets deserves a raise.

⌐◪-◪ → WazirX, an Indian crypto exchange, was hacked for over $235M. It’s basically a small-scale Indian Mt. Gox. RIP whoever held money in this exchange.

Hackers started running small test transactions in SHIB from WazirX’s multi-sig over 8 days ago and nobody noticed.

Arkham posted a $7.75k bounty for the hack, which was solved by our favorite on-chain sleuth ZachXBT.

Check out the full breakdown of the hack here, and remember kids: not your keys, not your crypto.

Want to improve your wallet security? Read about the three-address protocol (TAP).

⌐◪-◪ → Vitalik just dropped a new blog post urging voters not to choose their political allegiances solely based on whether a politician is pro-crypto or not.

He argues people should instead assess underlying values like freedom of speech, right to privacy, freedom of commerce, and uncensored access to information.

To drive his point home, he points to authoritarian regimes that are “pro-crypto” when it suits them — more specifically how Russia encourages crypto to avoid sanctions while restricting it when it prevents them from surveilling their citizens.

His post sparked debate in the crypto community, with prominent accounts like Yuga.eth (Sr. Engineer at Coinbase) and Autism Capital speaking out against him. Vitalik replied and ratioed the F out of Autism Capital though.

As for me, I agree with Vitalik. We can’t be fooled by politicians who only care about securing funding and/or votes. What matters is whether or not they align with the underlying web3 ethos: decentralized, permissionless, trustless.

Ultimately, it’s about separating money and state and restoring power to the people.