GeckoPulse: Battle of the Bridges!

Wormhole Ups the Stakes

Wormhole has started a bidding war for the Stargate platform.

In a recent thread on X from the Wormhole Foundation, the platform announced its intent to submit a bid higher than LayerZero's current $110M offer.

The team claimed that LayerZero is undervaluing Stargate, without accounting for their strong metrics and protocol growth.

As such, the Wormhole team has requested a 5-day delay for the ongoing Snapshot vote.

LayerZero's acquisition offer has already reached a quorum of over 600%, with under 95% of STG holders voting in favor.

Since Wormhole announced its intent to bid, the price of its native W token spiked by 3.8% from $0.079 to $0.082, but has retraced the move.

Stargate's STG token also surged by 7% from $0.168 to $0.18, but is now trading at $0.17.

Editor's Note:
Regardless of Wormhole's offer, veSTG holders will ultimately decide the best course of action for Stargate's future. With that said, just over 10% of veSTG holders have participated in the vote, and the largest holders are more likely to choose the path that benefits them the most.

Bitcoin Staking Comes to Starknet

The Starknet community has officially approved SNIP-31, bringing Bitcoin staking to the Ethereum Layer-2.

Based on the approved parameters, the staking weight of Bitcoin will be set to 0.25, giving stakers only 25% influence in determining consensus, while the balance remains in control of the L2’s native STRK token.

The community had originally approved the implementation of wrapped Bitcoin, and have included new governance rules for integrating new BTC wrappers.

The staking upgrade is expected to go live in the coming weeks.

Once it is complete, users will be able to stake and delegate their wrapped Bitcoin to earn a share of network rewards.

Not So Yeezy

In a surprising turn of events, rapper Kanye West, who officially goes by 'Ye', launched his YZY token earlier today.

In several posts on X, West posted the contract address to the token and a new website for Yeezy Money, describing the project as 'a new economy, built on-chain'.

The website claims that YZY will be the main currency within the Yeezy Money ecosystem, which includes the 'Ye Pay' payment services and the 'YZY Card'.

Within 40 minutes of the launch, YZY reached a peak market cap of $3B but quickly retraced to $1.1B as of this writing.

However, the sudden launch of the token quickly drew suspicion from crypto sleuths over insider trading.

Coinbase director Conor Grogan noted that over 94% of the token supply was held by insiders, while Lookonchain pointed out that the developers only added single-sided YZY liquidity.

Interestingly, YZY was announced shortly after the team behind Javier Milei's LIBRA token regained access to their funds.

Despite the dubious circumstances surrounding the token launch, several popular crypto influencers such as James Wynn and Arthur Hayes claimed to have purchased the token.

All Out of Second Winds

Windtree Therapeutics has been delisted from the Nasdaq exchange, just a month after the company pivoted into a BNB treasury firm.

According to a recent SEC filing, trading of the company’s shares will be suspended today after the company failed to comply with the exchange’s requirement of a minimum bid price of $1 per share.

The stock, listed under the ticker WINT, has fallen by over 99% in 2025 from $17 to just $0.11 as of the previous trading session.

Remarkably, BNB has maintained its momentum despite the news, reaching an all-time high of $881 earlier today, but has pulled back to $851.

Wilder World’s native WILD token recently spiked to $0.54 upon its listing on Binance Alpha, but has retraced by 20.4% to $0.43 today.

In Other News…

Unlucky Timing for Roman Storm. The US DOJ announced on Thursday that it will no longer charge decentralized software developers under a law that prohibits unlicensed money transfers. This same law was used to successfully convict Tornado Cash developer Roman Storm to potentially 5 years in jail earlier this month.

No Whale Too Safe. A Bitcoin investor has just lost $91M in Bitcoin to a social engineering scam according to crypto investigator ZachXBT. The stolen funds were then routed to Wasabi Wallet, a privacy-focused Bitcoin mixer where it further splits into multiple different wallet addresses.

The Consequences of Tariffs. Early buyers of the SuiPlay0X1 handheld crypto gaming devices are now faced with delays, due to unexpected import duties potentially amounting to hundreds of dollars each. These duties are the result of Trump’s “reciprocal tariffs”.

Ripple to Rollout RLUSD in Japan. Ripple announced on Friday that it expects to distribute its RLUSD stablecoin in Japan through a partnership with SBI holdings by Q1 2026. 

South Park Does it Again. US President Donald Trump is once more at the center of another South Park episode. This time, the satirical comedy animation mocks Trump’s acceptance of gifts where they depicted crypto czar David Sacks lining up to present him a Bitcoin gift to curry favor.

MetaMask Stablecoin Official Announcement. Crypto wallet Metamask has officially announced their upcoming native stablecoin, mUSD. This launch was previously leaked weeks ago by a deleted AAVE governance proposal.

$57M From the LIBRA Scandal Unfrozen. A judge has ordered $57.6M in USDC to be unfrozen following the defendant’s compliance with legal proceedings thus far. The case involving defendants, Hayden Davis and Ben Chow from Meteora is still ongoing.

xStocks Expands to Tron. Stock tokenization platform xStocks has expanded their services to the L1, Tron network. xStocks initially launched on Solana, generating over $500M in on-chain trading volume.

DBS Expands Crypto Offerings. Singapore’s largest bank, DBS announced that it will begin to offer structured notes tokenized on Ethereum. Besides crypto-linked notes, DBS will also tokenize equity-linked notes and credit-linked notes. Structured notes are debt securities that are geared towards institutional or sophisticated investors.

DeFi Uses the TradFi Playbook. The trend of crypto token buybacks continues as new tracking data reveal over $40M in weekly buybacks across various crypto projects. Hyperliquid leads the token buyback rankings with over $24M in HYPE while Pump.fun followed second with $10M in PUMP.

Governor Speech Leads to $200M of USD1 Minted. The Trump-linked World Liberty Financial crypto project minted more than $200M worth of its USD1 stablecoin after a speech by Federal Reserve Governor Christopher Waller praised stablecoins.