DOJ recently arrested a soldier for insider trading.
A master sergeant who helped plan the classified op to capture Maduro bet $33k on Polymarket eight days before the raid and walked away with $409k. He’s now facing up to 20 years.
Somewhere, a TradFi insider trader is shaking his head at the sloppiness.
Here’s what we got today:
MegaETH Points Program. Everything you need to get started.
Why’s $PUMP bleeding after burning ~$370M? An analysis of the recent Pump.fun announcement.
Around the web. New Ostium update, Ondo is bringing stock voting onchain, Catalysis introduced Covered Vaults, and more.
Today’s email is brought to you by Katana — the DeFi-optimised chain.
Here’s your Edge 🗡️!
Opportunity
The MegaETH Farming Guide
Source: Terminal.MegaETH.com
The most interesting crypto ecosystem for retail just kicked off a points program.
MegaETH launched their token $MEGA, and the points program went live alongside it. The team hasn’t officially confirmed the airdrop allocation, but most people are citing 2.5% of the supply.
The points program 101:
8 weeks. Ends June 23, 2026.
KYC may be required before rewards are distributed.
Weekly cutoff: every Tuesday at 12 am UTC. That’s when the previous week’s points get updated.
At 2.5% of supply and a $1.8B FDV, that’s roughly $45M in rewards.
You earn points by using apps in the Terminal. The exact scoring rules aren’t public, and that’s deliberate. The team wants to reward real users, not bots.
On top of base activity, three multipliers stack:
Retroactive boosters. Rewards for past activity (Fluffle holders, Echo participants, partner NFTs, testnet users). You can’t earn these now. They’re for people who supported MegaETH early.
Rocket boost. Pick up to 3 apps per week to get amplified scoring. One swap allowed per week, then the slots lock.
Clan boosts. Pledge weekly to a clan. If your clan wins the week AND you hold one of its NFTs, you get the boost.
The official guide from MegaETH covers all this in more detail.
Go to terminal.megaeth.com and connect your wallet. (Use your ICO/Fluffles wallet if you have one. Retroactive boosters check wallet history.)
Set up your wallet cluster. The Terminal lets you pick a main wallet and add as many sub-wallets as you want. Cold wallet for retroactive eligibility, hot wallets for the daily grind.
If you hold an NFT from one of the 6 clans, pledge to it.
The weekly cycle (do before Tuesday, 12 am UTC):
Re-pledge to your clan.
Pick the 3 apps you’ll use most for rocket-boosting.
Use them throughout the week. Real activity, botting could be counter-productive.
The featured apps cover DEXs, perps, fantasy football, trading card games, and more. New apps will keep dropping in waves, so there’ll be plenty to experiment with.
If you don’t want to be hands-on daily, providing liquidity for the USDM/USDC pair is the lowest-effort farm. You earn passively while the season runs.
Earlier this week, I published a thread with the top apps on MegaETH.
Edgy – The DeFi Edge 🗡️
@thedefiedge
MegaETH’s TGE is tomorrow! 10 dapps had to clear 100k transactions and 25k wallets each. A yield-bearing stable. An onchain poker game. A stablecoin backed by Turkish money market funds. These are the 10 that did:
Use the cluster feature. It’ll give you more points.
For Rocket boost, pick 3 apps you’d actually use. Rocket boost only amplifies activity on the apps you choose.
Only farm with what you can afford to lose. Some of these apps are brand new. Exploit risk is real. And a few (perps, packs) are designed to extract money. Set a budget.
We’re in a brutal market right now. Not exactly ideal conditions for a token launch and pulling in retail. MegaETH went ahead anyway. That takes confidence.
And for crypto natives, this is the first thing in a while that’s got us feeling experimental again. Here’s hoping it brings some life back to the space.
If you’re trading perps, there’s a big opportunity worth knowing about.
Katana Perps is running a trading competition starting May 6th, 16:00 UTC, with a prize pool that scales from $25k to $100k based on volume.
Quick 80/20 on the venue: Katana Perps is the native perp platform of Katana, the Ethereum L2 that optimizes for DeFi at every level.
Vault Bridge is a good example of this DeFi-optimization. Assets bridged into Katana get deployed into low-risk strategies on Ethereum L1, generating a structural revenue source that Katana can route into trader incentives and maker rebates.
In fact, the $100k prize pool is powered by Vault Bridge yield!
And it’s not a risky, untested platform either. Katana acquired IDEX — the most active DEX on Ethereum back in 2019 — so the matching engine and execution have nearly a decade of refinement behind them. GSR, Selini Capital, and Auros are already market-making, which means deep books for you.
Most trading competitions get crowded fast. You’re hearing about this one before it’s even started.
The burn. Every $PUMP token they’d bought back over the past 9 months is gone. That’s around 12.8% of total supply, ~36% of circulating, and worth ~$370M!
The new mechanism. For a year, 50% of revenue from the bonding curve, PumpSwap, and Terminal will go to automated buyback-and-burn via a locked smart contract.
The other 50%. Retained by the team for operations, hiring, acquisitions, and other jazz.
On the surface, this reads like a holder-friendly upgrade.
And parts of it genuinely are. Two real wins worth highlighting before I get into math.
The bought-back tokens are gone forever. No risk of them returning as incentives or team grants.
Programmatic > discretionary. Buybacks now happen mechanically via a locked smart contract, not when the team feels like it.
So why isn’t the price reacting?
Reason 1: The deflationary rate just got cut by 40%
Before the update, $PUMP was running at a net deflationary rate of 14% annually — they were burning tokens faster than new ones were being minted, thanks to 100% of revenue going to buybacks.
After the update? Net deflation drops to 8.2% annually. That’s a 40% reduction in the rate at which supply is shrinking.
The headline is “$370M burned.” The buried lede is “we cut the buyback allocation in half.”
(If you want the full breakdown with the math behind the deflationary rate, our analyst Aeron ran the numbers in detail on TDE Pro.)
Reason 2: The entire memecoin sector is bleeding
Buybacks are downstream of revenue. Revenue is downstream of demand. And memecoin demand is in a graveyard.
Memecoin launchpad revenue peaked at ~$7M/day on Jan 23, 2025. Since then? Down only.
No one’s bidding the token of a memecoin platform when the entire sector is dying. Pump.fun could allocate 100% of revenue to buybacks forever, and the chart would still struggle, because the revenue itself is shrinking.
No mechanism will save you if the sector is dying.
Reason 3: July unlocks are coming
On top of cooling buyback pressure and a dying sector, there’s a fresh supply incoming.
Team and investor token unlocks hit in July.
Even ICO buyers — who entered around $4B FDV when the token now sits closer to $1.65B — seem to be selling despite being underwater.
Adding insider unlocks on top of that is not the setup for a clean recovery.
The $PUMP chart has already priced these in. It had a brief spike on announcement day, then right back to bleeding.
Programmatic buybacks are only as strong as the revenue behind them. And memecoin revenue? Not something you can bank on.
🚀 DeFi Catalysts
DeFi United, a coalition of ecosystem participants, has raised enough funds and released a plan to restore the rsETH backing.
Ostium released a new update to its platform. Through a hedging network of market makers onchain trades are now connected to offchain TradFi markets.
Ondo Finance has teamed up with Broadridge to give holders of tokenised stocks and ETFs the ability to participate in onchain proxy voting.
Pump.fun announced the burning of all $PUMP tokens they brought back. Next year, they’ll launch a programmatic buyback and burn scheme at 50% of revenue.
Catalysis went live on Ethereum and introduced “Covered Vaults”. They’ll provide onchain “risk coverage” with real delegated capital.
Lido shared updated plans for Lido Earn vaults, which had exposure to rsETH, the restaked token that was hacked last week.
Sky is discussing the overhaul of how its treasury allocates net revenue now that the founding phase of capital deployment has formally ended.
Trueo, a smaller prediction market, has teased the User Created Market feature. Market creators will receive fees as well.
Shutter Network introduced the Perpetual Endowment Network (PEN). It presented itself as an alternative for DAO.
Alchemix paused the planned v3 cap raises until the ongoing LayerZero/KelpDAO/Aave issue is resolved.
Privacy Cash has gone live on Base. They’ve already powered $340M+ in private transfers on Solana.
⧫ Rollup Radar
StarkNet has shipped the Shinobi upgrade. It has a privacy-enabling feature SNIP-36, which’ll allow transactions to reference offchain execution proofs.
Mantle has officially transitioned from Validium to a ZK Rollup, leveraging Ethereum for Data Availability.
ZKsync Lite will be fully deprecated on May 4. This was already announced, and if you still have funds there, you should withdraw.
Ronin has selected OP Stack for their upcoming transition into being an Ethereum L2. It’ll reduce the token inflation from 20% to <1%.
Polymarket is working on migrating its home chain. If they move away from Polygon, $POL will lose a lot of activity
📰 Industry News
Russia’s State Duma has passed a crypto bill that seeks to establish a framework for crypto circulation.
Tether launched the Mining Development Kit (MDK). It’s an open-source framework that gives mining operators control over their infrastructure.
Visa added the Polygon network to its global stablecoin settlement program. Visa partners can now settle stablecoin transactions on Polygon.
DISCLAIMER: I’m NOT a financial advisor. This content is for education and information purposes only. Crypto and DeFi are risky and speculative. Please do your research before investing.
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