In a move that shocked exactly no one who's been paying attention, President Trump just pardoned Binance founder Changpeng Zhao.

CZ had pleaded guilty in November 2023 to violating the Bank Secrecy Act by failing to implement proper anti-money laundering controls at Binance. He served four months in jail and stepped down as CEO as part of a $4.3 billion settlement with the Justice Department.

The White House didn't mince words about why: "The Biden Administration's war on crypto is over," said Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt.

She emphasized that prosecutors wanted three years for CZ, which was a sentence "so outside Sentencing Guidelines that even the Judge said he had never heard of this in his 30-year career." The judge ended up giving him four months instead.

The timing is... interesting. The Wall Street Journal reported two months ago that Trump's family crypto venture (which has generated about $4.5 billion since the 2024 election) has benefited from "a partnership with an under-the-radar trading platform quietly administered by Binance."

Look, we're not saying the pardon and the business relationship are connected. But we're also not saying they're not connected. Draw your own conclusions.

What's clear: crypto companies have a very different relationship with the federal government than they did a year ago… whether that's good for the industry long-term or just good for certain well-connected players remains to be seen.

Forget the perp DEX wars. We're now in the crypto credit card wars.

Coinbase just launched the Coinbase One Card with American Express. The new card offers up to 4% back in Bitcoin on every purchase. No foreign transaction fees, and you can pay your bill with either a linked bank account or crypto held on Coinbase.

The catch? It requires a Coinbase One membership at $49.99 per year.

You can apply here if you’re interested (not sponsored).

The card's design is etched with raw data from Bitcoin's Genesis Block (the first block Satoshi Nakamoto mined on January 3, 2009). The whole pitch is centered on bitcoin-first identity and rewards paid exclusively in BTC.

Two days before Coinbase's launch, Gemini announced a Solana edition of their credit card with different incentives:

Gemini's card has no annual fee and offers rewards in multiple cryptocurrencies, not just one.

The strategic difference is clear: Coinbase wants Bitcoin maxis who'll pay for the privilege. Gemini wants everyone else with a category-based rewards structure and no membership fee.

Both have no foreign transaction fees, and both are betting that crypto rewards will eventually compete with traditional cashback cards.

The real winner? Consumers, who now have actual choices for earning crypto on everyday spending without jumping through ridiculous hoops 👍

Nothing says "decentralized future of finance" quite like your entire blockchain going offline because Amazon's AWS US-East-1 servers crashed.

On the morning of October 20, Amazon Web Services experienced a major outage. Within hours, several of crypto's most prominent companies and networks went dark:

The crypto community immediately roasted everyone involved. Ben Schiller from Miden put it bluntly: "If your blockchain is down because of the AWS outage, you're not sufficiently decentralized."

Here's the deal: most crypto companies use centralized cloud infrastructure (AWS, Google Cloud, etc.) because it's faster, cheaper, and easier than running truly distributed systems. The infrastructure that wallets and apps use to connect to blockchains like Infura's JSON-RPC and WebSocket APIs often runs on these centralized services.

This isn't even the first time this has happened. AWS suffered another massive disruption in April 2025 that knocked crypto exchanges and infrastructure providers offline.

The problem is that true decentralization is expensive and technically complex. So companies take shortcuts. And then when AWS sneezes, the entire "decentralized" crypto ecosystem catches a cold (or goes into a coma).

If you're building on crypto infrastructure that depends entirely on one cloud provider staying online, you're not building a decentralized system. It’s the perennial question of crypto: centralization + fast or decentralization + slow?

In perhaps the most bull market move of the year, Coinbase just paid $25 million for an NFT that forces the UpOnly podcast to restart.

Yes, you read that correctly. $25 million. For a podcast NFT.

UpOnly was wildly popular during the 2021 bull run, featuring interviews with crypto's biggest names. It was notably sponsored by FTX before... well, you know. The last episode dropped in December 2022, shortly after FTX collapsed.

In May, host Jordan Fish (aka "Cobie") minted an NFT with a clever mechanic: "When the NFT is burned, the podcast will restart." He listed it on OpenSea, where the highest bid was 4.7 ETH (about $18,500).

Fast forward five months: Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong confirmed the purchase, and onchain data shows Coinbase sent $25 million USDC to Cobie's wallet. This now ranks as the fifth most expensive NFT sale in crypto history.

Did Coinbase vastly overpay? Absolutely. But that's not really the point. The real play here is that Coinbase acquired Cobie’s company Echo for $375M. Echo is a platform that connects crypto projects and creators with investors on the blockchain itself.

So if I had to evaluate the situation… the $25M NFT purchase is 1) a genius marketing play by Cobie and 2) a genius marketing play by Coinbase in the middle of an acquisition that it already wanted anyway.

Of course, memecoins with UPONLY and COBIE tickers immediately pumped thousands of percent before dumping. Because of course they did.

We really appreciate you reading our newsletter, and we’d love to hear your feedback.

This week perfectly captured where crypto is in 2025: simultaneously more mainstream and more absurd than ever.

The uncomfortable truth is that crypto is growing up, and it's growing up messy. Real adoption means real compromises. Centralized infrastructure (that actually works). Regulatory oversight that protects consumers and enables innovation, but removes some of the “wild west” feel. Political relationships that benefit some players more than others.

Is that what we signed up for when we read the Bitcoin whitepaper? Probably not. But it's where we are.

That being said, there’s still plenty of innovation happening, and THEY CAN’T CONTROL BITCOIN no matter what they do!!!

Same time next week? You know it.

Until next time,
- The Chain Team