The OM crash plot thickens

Plus: What do SBF and Al Capone have in common?

GM. The only thing getting squeezed harder than this lemon is that poor altcoin down 40%.

📰 Updates on the OM crash situation.

🍋 News drops: SBF gets transferred, Coinbase addresses memecoin issues + more

🍍 Market flavor today

Fed Chair Jerome Powell spoke yesterday – and when he does, markets usually pay attention.

Crypto ain’t no different – Bitcoin started looking like it might make a run at $86K… until Powell opened his mouth.

What did he say? Nothing much. And that’s the problem.

He said that the new tariffs announced by Trump were way larger than anticipated, and warned that the uncertainty surrounding them could cause long-term harm to the economy.

That’s because they’re setting us up for a tough combo:

• Slower growth,

• Rising unemployment,

• And faster inflation.

All happening at the same time. That’s a mix the Fed hasn’t had to deal with in about fifty years.

This matters because the Fed has two main goals: keeping inflation low and helping the job market stay strong. Tariffs are now threatening both.

And while the US economy looks pretty okay for the moment, Powell said they’re gonna wait to see how things play out before doing anything.

Translation: interest rates are likely to stay high for now

This means crypto won’t be getting much help from monetary policy unless inflation really starts to fall – and that prolly won’t happen before summer.

On a separate note, we also got new data on US retail sales – in March, they rose more than they have in over two years.

That kind of news should be good for crypto. When people are spending, it usually means they’ve got extra cash and feel confident = bullish.

But this time, it wasn’t about confidence – it was about panic. People were buying stuff like cars and electronics before tariffs send prices through the roof.

And as Comerica Bank’s chief economist Bill Adams said, “It’s hard to feel good about Americans panic buying cars as consumer confidence craters” – because once the panic fades, demand will probably drop.

So yeah, the economy’s in a weird place – consumers are panic shopping, tariffs are creating uncertainty, Powell’s on standby, and the crypto market is…

Confused.

🥝 Memecoin harvest

Shitposting their way to the top:

Data as of 05:00 AM EST.

Check out these memecoins and plenty more here.

On Monday, we covered the wild story of Mantra DAO’s OM token crashing by 90%.

(If you didn’t read that edition 🤨 or weren’t subscribed to us yet 🤨 – go catch up here.)

Now for the sequel: the Mantra team issued a statement yesterday.

TL;DR: “We’re still here, we’re still building, and no, we didn’t do it.”

They also said they didn’t sell a single OM during the whole thing and blamed the collapse on a wave of forced liquidations. The theory: some big OM holders on centralized exchanges got wiped out when the price dropped too low for their borrowed positions to stay open.

The team also announced their plans moving forward:

• Ask exchanges to help explain wtf happened;

• Release a public dashboard showing real-time balances of all the major token allocations (basically to prove they’re not secretly selling);

• Buy back and burn some OM tokens (and FYI: token burns = supply goes down = price goes up maybe).

Now, this statement came after Mullin had a chat with YouTuber and crypto investigator Coffeezilla.

And, this post pretty much sums it up:

Mullin doubled down: the team didn’t sell during the crash, and they weren’t liquidated either.

But.

He did admit they had previously sold $25M – $30M worth of OM tokens – just not on the open market.

Instead, they did what’s called an OTC (over-the-counter) sale – that’s when you sell tokens directly to investors or institutions. Usually, there’s a “lock-up” period, meaning those buyers can’t sell the tokens right away.

If those buyers had dumped their tokens, that could’ve crashed the price. But Mullin insists the tokens are still locked, so that couldn’t have been the cause.

Oh, and Mullin also said they used about $10M from that OTC money to buy OM tokens back from the market.

Coffeezilla was then like… “umm, so you were pumping the price?” But Mullin denied that.

Anyways, the problem now is that those OTC tokens will unlock eventually. And when they do, we might see more selling pressure.

Mullin was asked what happens then – like, what if those investors decide to dump everything?

His answer: “We’ll continue to build out the ecosystem and support as much as we can so that people have a reason to stake, hold it, and continue to see it as an asset.”

Overall, there are still a ton of open questions – including the biggest one: what actually caused the crash in the first place?

But at least now, we’ve got a few more pieces on the table.

🍋 News drops

🚚 Sam Bankman-Fried got a new prison address – he’s now at Terminal Island in LA. Fun fact: this is the same place where Al Capone and Charles Manson did time.

😬 Coinbase says it had nothing to do with the “Base is for everyone memecoin” that blew up to $17M and then crashed 90% in 20 minutes. They clarified that Base only posted on Zora – a platform that turns posts into tokens – but the coin wasn’t official, and they didn’t create or sell it.

💰 DWF Labs invested $25M in World Liberty Financial (WLFI), a DeFi project backed by Donald Trump and his sons. The Dubai-based market maker says it plans to join WLFI’s governance.

⏸ A US judge paused a lawsuit from 18 state attorneys general and the DeFi Education Fund against the SEC. That’s because the case might become pointless when the SEC gets new leadership, since the original beef was about them going way overboard with lawsuits against crypto companies.

🚀 Bitwise dropped four new crypto ETPs on the London Stock Exchange, covering Bitcoin and Ethereum. One even lets you earn rewards by staking ETH.

🍌 Juicy memes