Which Way Circle?

1️⃣ Circle Acquisition Rumors

According to a Fortune report released this week, stablecoin issuer Circle Internet Financial is entertaining informal acquisition talks with Coinbase and Ripple – discussions that could undermine its IPO ambitions.

In a comment to The Block, Circle, which filed an S-1 initial registration form with the Securities and Exchange Commission on April 1 to publicly list on the New York Stock Exchange, maintained that it “is not for sale.”

The stablecoin issuer is allegedly seeking to IPO at a $4-5B valuation and was rumored to have rejected a Ripple acquisition offer for $4-5B in late April, claiming the offer (which did not include any acquisition premium) was too low.

2️⃣ Top Sui DEX Hacked

Early Thursday morning, Cetus Protocol – formerly Sui’s largest decentralized exchange by total value locked – suffered a major exploit that resulted in attackers nabbing $220M in cryptocurrency.

Although Cetus had yet to provide a detailed post-mortem at the time of writing, it appears the attacker took advantage of broken Cetus flash loan smart contract logic, repeatedly adding near-zero liquidity for “spoof” tokens to manipulate LP pair pricing and swapping the valueless assets for SUI/USDC to drain valuable crypto reserves in the process.

The hack’s aftermath wreaked havoc on many Cetus-listed tokens, and SUI itself sold off as much as 8% amid the calamity. In response to the crisis, Cetus unilaterally froze its smart contracts and the Sui validator set moved to freeze all funds associated with exploiter wallets.  

Potentially in an attempt to gain market share, Suilend announced that it would deploy $1M in incentives to eligible applicants via its STEAMM exchange pools.

3️⃣ Milei Squashes Memecoin Investigation

Argentine President Javier Milei has dissolved a special task force established to investigate his LIBRA memecoin, which has crashed by over 99% since peaking on February 14, decreeing the group had “fulfilled its purpose.”

In lieu of the disbanded task force, local media outlet Clarín reports that opposition government officials are seeking to activate their own investigative commission.

Hayden Davis (the purported mastermind behind Milei’s memecoin) boasted in an interview that he extracted $100M of profit from LIBRA after a subsequently deleted Milei X promotion sent the token soaring to a stratospheric $4.5B market cap.

Last week, Argentine Judge María Servini froze assets of key LIBRA team members and lifted bank secrecy protections for Milei and his sister, enabling federal investigators to examine whether bribes were accepted in relation to the digital token’s promotion.

4️⃣ Anza Seeks Solana Shakeup

At the Solana Accelerate conference in New York on Monday, Solana Labs spin-out Anza presented “Alpenglow,” a revised consensus protocol that aims to achieve block finality in as little as 100 milliseconds.

Alpenglow introduces Votor, a new voting mechanism that replaces Solana’s traditional Byzantine Fault Tolerance communication scheme with a direct message-passing system, dramatically improving consensus efficiency.

The change would enable Solana to abandon its “optimistic confirmations,” which allow for sub-second transaction latency in spite of the network’s current 12.8 second block finality delay, and should make Solana competitive with centralized infrastructure, helping to empower real-time applications.

5️⃣ Peirce’s Crypto Comments

At the Practising Law Institute’s “SEC Speaks in 2025” event this week, Commissioner Hester Peirce presented an update on what the Crypto Task Force is doing and topics its members are discussing.

In her speech, Commissioner Peirce criticized the agency’s previous regulation by enforcement approach, committing to a return to rulemaking and highlighted the importance of crypto in financial markets, due in large part to growing experimentation with tokenization.

The line delineating when digital assets constitute securities remains blurry, but Commissioner Peirce contends that “most” crypto tokens – including network rewards tokens and NFTs with creator royalties – do not satisfy the definition and therefore cannot be regulated by the SEC.

Until further legal clarity on digital securities is developed through court decisions or the legislative process, however, Commissioner Peirce prescribes a “safe harbor” approach, which would enable investment contract token issuers who satisfy disclosure and investor protection requirements to obtain a limited-time exemption from securities registration requirements.