The Crime of Privacy

Sponsor: Mantle — Mass adoption of decentralized & token-governed technologies.

This is a sad day for The Netherlands. It's a sad day for the founding principles of open societies and Western liberal democracies.

Today, crypto privacy developer Alexey Pertsev was sentenced to 5 years in prison by a Dutch court for developing an open-source tool that allows people to keep their crypto transactions private.

Today, they made privacy illegal in an EU country. You think I'm overstating this.

Then tell me, what is the legal way to keep peer-to-peer crypto transactions private? We have HTTPS for email and internet messages – what's the equivalent for crypto, and who's building it?

It doesn't exist because they're putting our devs in jail.

One judge called Tornado Cash a tool intended for criminals. How far we've fallen when our courts assume anyone using privacy tools is a criminal.

Your courtrooms should be celebrating cryptographers as the stewards of the hard-fought democratic freedoms passed down to us from the enlightenment – instead, you jail these patriots and strip the people of the only tools powerful enough to hold back a dystopic feudal age digital panopticon.

If your free society bans privacy and jails developers, then you no longer live in a free society.

The Netherlands has fallen. The EU is slipping.

Will America hold? All eyes are on Roman Storm's case.

1. 🌪️ Tornado Cash's Alexey Pertsev Sentenced to 5+ Years in Prison. The crypto privacy developer was convicted on money laundering charges by Dutch courts.
   Read more on Bankless.
2. 🇺🇸 Wisconsin Apes Into Bitcoin ETFs. Wisconsin's Investment Board is loading its bags with IBIT and GBTC.
   Read more on Bankless.
3. 🗳️ Polymarket Raises $45M in Series B Funding. The predictions market banked new funding from Peter Thiel's Founders Fund and Vitalik Buterin.
   Read more on Bankless.

📊 Bracing for denial? ETH’s relative value to BTC has been walloped throughout the month of May. Why can’t Ether catch a bid, and what impact could the looming spot ETH ETF final decision next week have on your bags?

	Crypto $2.25T	↘ 2.4%	↘ 3.4%
	BTC $61,573	↘ 2.5%	↘ 2.4%
	ETH $2,893	↘ 2.0%	↘ 5.2%

Friend.tech's much-anticipated token launch and product revamp both had rocky debuts last week. 

The community faced issues with a buggy token airdrop process, non-functional new features, and a multi-step claim process requiring people to interact with the protocol’s new features. Now the token is trading around $1.66 with a market cap just above $155 million. On Crypto Twitter, the debate is still raging over whether FRIEND remains undervalued, with strong calls and cases made from both sides. 

Here are the Bull and Bear cases for FRIEND 👇

Mass adoption of token-governed technologies. With Mantle Network – an Ethereum rollup, Mantle Treasury, and a token holder governed roadmap for products and initiatives.

Thousands of Bankless Citizens scored an average of $3,500 worth of tokens after Ether.fi's airdrop. Did you miss out again?

Ether.fi was in the Bankless Airdrop Hunter, and you could have gotten into the latest drop by following our quests! There are nearly 100 other crypto protocols in Airdrop Hunter waiting for you.