Welcome to the US Morning Crypto News Briefing—your essential rundown of the most important developments in crypto for the day ahead.
Grab a coffee to see what experts think about the Ripple price given the growing approval odds for XRP ETF (exchange-traded funds) in the US. These financial instruments offer investors indirect exposure to crypto and progressively draw institutional players to the digital assets space.
Meanwhile, ETF analyst Eric Balchunas has appealed to Paul Atkins for hints about when the US SEC will approve the first spot XRP ETF, among other altcoin-based financial instruments.
He and his colleague, ETF analyst James Seyffart, remain optimistic that approving additional altcoin-related ETFs beyond Ethereum is only a matter of time.
“Would love to hear directly from Atkins, but all good chance of happening,” Balchunas posed.
Specifically, for them, XRP ETF holds an 85% chance of approval, placing it among the frontrunners for regulatory approval in 2025. Balchunas also shared a list outlining the approval probabilities for various spot crypto ETFs.
Bloomberg XRP ETF approval odds in 2025. Source: Balchunas on X
Meanwhile, Seyffart notes that delays in approval should not come as a surprise. He urges crypto market participants to hold out hope beyond October 2025 and year-end in the worst-case scenario.
“…Final deadlines for most of this stuff is in October 2025 or later,” Seyffart stated.
However, Balchunas acknowledges that Paul Atkins’s confirmation as the new SEC chair has set the ball rolling.
“…nothing was going to get approved until Atkins was confirmed…he just got confirmed and they’ve been taking outside meetings with people. Probably coming up with a strategy. After that, likely approvals,” Balchunas opined.
Crypto traders and investors would surely welcome more altcoin-based exchange-traded funds beyond the Ethereum ETF. Such financial instruments would give crypto more legitimacy, open the playing field for institutional participation, and, hence, increase liquidity.
A recent US Crypto News publication indicated growing adoption for BTC over gold, ascribing the traction to Bitcoin ETF inflows surging against lagging gold ETPs (exchange-traded products).
Despite the false claims, the approval of ProShares’ XRP futures ETF sparked optimism. Experts now predict that a spot XRP ETF could follow, potentially attracting $100 billion to the payments token.
“A spot XRP ETF could be next, unlocking real demand and sending prices soaring. $100 billion+ could soon flood into XRP,” wrote industry expert Armando Pantoja.
Wirex, a global Web3 leader and award-winning money app, has officially selected Italy as the strategic base for its cryptocurrency business in the European Economic Area (EEA). The move marks a key milestone in the company’s rapid growth journey and reinforces its long-term commitment to delivering regulated, innovative crypto services across Europe.
With over 6 million users globally and a decade of proven success, Wirex continues to lead the way in bridging the worlds of traditional finance and digital assets. Headquartered in London, Wirex holds multiple licences across the UK, EEA, Asia-Pacific, and beyond, operating as a trusted, compliant provider in some of the world’s most regulated financial markets.
Wirex’s decision to establish its European crypto operations in Italy comes as the region prepares for the implementation of the Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) regulation.
The company is already registered as a Virtual Asset Service Provider (VASP) in the Italian Register held by the Organismo Agenti e Mediatori (OAM), with Registration No. PSV108. It is currently in the process of applying for a MiCA licence and aims to use its Italian base to deepen relationships with regulators, expand local partnerships, reinforce its trust with clients, and continue to offer them crypto products and services while scaling its presence across Europe.
As part of this strategic initiative, Wirex is pleased to announce the appointment of two senior executives in Italy:
Alessandro Bruno-Bossio,Regional Managing Director for Italy and Chief Customer Strategy & Retention Officer, brings extensive experience in scaling fintech and payments operations, with previous leadership roles at Paysafe, Nexi and PayRetailers.
Francesco Marotta, Non-Executive Legal Director, has over 12 years of expertise in banking and financial services law, compliance, and anti-money laundering. He will play a vital role in supporting Wirex’s regulatory and legal strategy in Italy and the wider EEA region.
“Choosing Italy as our EEA crypto hub reflects our deep commitment to Europe and our belief in its regulatory clarity and innovation potential,” said Pavel Matveev, Co-Founder of Wirex. “With strong leadership from Alessandro and Francesco, we’re well-positioned to strengthen our presence in the region and continue building one of the most trusted, compliant crypto platforms in the world.”
Wirex’s Italian office will focus on product development, customer experience, and regulatory engagement, positioning the company to thrive in a maturing and regulated European crypto market.
Alessandro Bruno-Bossio, Regional Managing Director for Italy and Chief Customer Strategy & Retention Officer at Wirex, commented: “I’m thrilled to join Wirex at such a pivotal moment in its European expansion. Italy has the potential to become a leading hub for digital assets, and Wirex is uniquely positioned to drive that transformation. In my dual role, I’m particularly focused on ensuring that customer experience remains at the heart of everything we do. The crypto space still places too much effort on the end user, and we’re determined to change that. By building a strong local presence and fostering regulatory trust, we aim to deliver not only innovative solutions but also seamless, user-first experiences that set new standards in the industry.”
With a global footprint and a reputation for innovation, Wirex has earned more than 20 industry awards, including recent recognition as a finalist at the ICA Compliance Awards Europe 2025 for excellence in regulatory compliance. The company’s growth is underpinned by a decade of operational excellence and an unwavering commitment to responsible innovation in financial services.
About Wirex
Wirex is a prominent UK-based digital payments platform with over 6 million customers spread across 130 countries. It offers secure accounts, making it easy for users to store, purchase, and exchange multiple currencies seamlessly. As a principal member of both Visa and Mastercard, Wirex goes beyond traditional services, embracing the evolving trends of Web3 to provide mainstream access to digital finance and wealth management. Having processed transactions totalling $20 billion, Wirex aims to contribute to the adoption of a cashless society by facilitating straightforward transactions in various currencies worldwide. Wirex is simplifying digital payments, making it more accessible and convenient for people across the globe.
Following weeks of hype in the run-up to the airdrop and the associated centralized exchange (CEX) listings, sentiment indicators for Zora tokens have dropped, suggesting this was a short-term trend.
Zora marked the advent of content coins, a controversial trend that bore the support of Base creator Jesse Powell.
Zora Token Sentiment Drops Post-Airdrop: Was It Just Hype?
According to data on CoinGecko, the ZORA token price is down by 11.5% in the last 24 hours. As of this writing, it was trading for $0.01244.
According to data on LunarCrash, engagement and mentions have dwindled since April 23, when the Zora airdrop happened.
Specifically, engagement is down by 98%, from over 12.2 million to around 142,000 as of this writing. Meanwhile, Zora mentions are down 58% since April 23. Further, creators on the Zora app have reduced by 57.6% since April 23, whereas sentiment is down by a modest 6%.
Meanwhile, data on SimilarWeb shows platform traffic on Zora.co has dropped from 500,000 to 300,000 over the past three months. Data on Dune also indicates that users on the Zora Network have decreased by 90% since the peak in early April 2024.
A look at the “Coin It” indicator reveals the same sentiment, showing a sharp decline in the frequency of Jesse Pollak’s phrase “coin this” or “coin it” on social media. After peaking at 15 mentions on April 15, this metric is down to 1 after the Zora airdrop. This suggests a decline in engagement with content coins post-airdrop.
Jesse Pollak admitted in a thread that he had received feedback about being too aggressive in communication earlier, leading to some missteps in messaging. He said he has since adjusted by slowing things down.
“…I got feedback on being too loud, and to be direct I made some mistakes in my messaging, so I’ve taken that feedback and slowed down,” Pollak stated.
Nevertheless, this decision does not mean he stopped believing in content coins and on-chain social platforms like Zora. Pollak is committed to helping builders push boundaries on Base toward realizing on-chain’s full potential.
In a recent interview with BeInCrypto, Pollak distinguished between meme coins and content coins. He emphasized the latter’s potential to empower creators without reliance on speculative communities.
Pollak also articulated Base’s vision to expand the on-chain creator ecosystem. To do this, they would foster virality and creativity while lowering the barrier for non-crypto users to engage with blockchain technology.
“We’re working to bring a billion people on-chain, and we know we can’t do that alone. I have a lot of respect for the Solana team – they have done a lot to onboard people into crypto, and I’m glad to see that. We’re looking to grow the pie, not just compete for the existing pie. And we see content coins on Base as one way to grow that pie,” Pollack told BeInCrypto.
However, the charts above imply a potential lack of sustained interest, aligning with criticisms questioning the long-term viability of such experiments on platforms like Zora.
The metrics used to measure outcomes can be misleading when evaluating blockchain performance. As more blockchain networks emerge, the public needs clear, efficiency-focused metrics, rather than exaggerated claims, to differentiate between them.
In a conversation with BeInCrypto, Taraxa Co-Founder Steven Pu explained that it’s becoming increasingly difficult to compare blockchain performance accurately because many reported metrics rely on overly optimistic assumptions rather than evidence-based results. To combat this wave of misrepresentation, Pu proposes a new metric, which he calls TPS/$.
Why Does the Industry Lack Reliable Benchmarks?
The need for clear differentiation is growing with the increasing number of Layer-1 blockchain networks. As various developers promote the speed and efficiency of their blockchains, relying on metrics that distinguish their performance becomes indispensable.
However, the industry still lacks reliable benchmarks for real-world efficiency, instead relying on sporadic sentimental waves of hype-driven popularity. According to Pu, misleading performance figures currently saturate the market, obscuring true capabilities.
“It’s easy for opportunists to take advantage by driving up over-simplified and exaggerated narratives to profit themselves. Every single conceivable technical concept and metric has at one time or another been used to hype up many projects that don’t really deserve them: TPS, finality latency, modularity, network node count, execution speed, parallelization, bandwidth utilization, EVM-compatibility, EVM-incompatibility, etc.,” Pu told BeInCrypto.
Pu focused on how some projects exploit TPS metrics, using them as marketing tactics to make blockchain performance sound more appealing than it might be under real-world conditions.
Examining the Misleading Nature of TPS
Transactions per second, more commonly known as TPS, is a metric that refers to the average or sustained number of transactions that a blockchain network can process and finalize per second under normal operating conditions.
However, it often misleadingly hypes projects, offering a skewed view of overall performance.
“Decentralized networks are complex systems that need to be considered as a whole, and in the context of their use cases. But the market has this horrible habit of over-simplifying and over-selling one specific metric or aspect of a project, while ignoring the whole. Perhaps a highly centralized, high-TPS network does have its uses in the right scenarios with specific trust models, but the market really has no appetite for such nuanced descriptions,” Pu explained.
Pu indicates that blockchain projects with extreme claims on single metrics like TPS may have compromised decentralization, security, and accuracy.
“Take TPS, for example. This one metric masks numerous other aspects of the network, for example, how was the TPS achieved? What was sacrificed in the process? If I have 1 node, running a WASM JIT VM, call that a network, that gets you a few hundred thousand TPS right off the bat. I then make 1000 copies of that machine and call it sharding, now you start to get into the hundreds of millions of ‘TPS’. Add in unrealistic assumptions such as non-conflict, and you assume you can parallelize all transactions, then you can get “TPS” into the billions. It’s not that TPS is a bad metric, you just can’t look at any metric in isolation because there’s so much hidden information behind the numbers,” he added.
The Taraxa Co-founder revealed the extent of these inflated metrics in a recent report.
The Significant Discrepancy Between Theoretical and Real-World TPS
Pu sought to prove his point by determining the difference between the maximum historical TPS realized on a blockchain’s mainnet and the maximum theoretical TPS.
Of the 22 permissionless and single-shard networks observed, Pu found that, on average, there was a 20-fold gap between theory and reality. In other words, the theoretical metric was 20 times higher than the maximum observed mainnet TPS.
Taraxa Co-founder finds 20x difference between the Theoretical TPS and the Max Observed Mainnet TPS. Source: Taraxa.
“Metric overestimations (such as in the case of TPS) are a response to the highly speculative and narrative-driven crypto market. Everyone wants to position their project and technologies in the best possible light, so they come up with theoretical estimates, or conduct tests with wildly unrealistic assumptions, to arrive at inflated metrics. It’s dishonest advertising. Nothing more, nothing less,” Pu told BeInCrypto.
Looking to counter these exaggerated metrics, Pu developed his own performance measure.
Introducing TPS/$: A More Balanced Metric?
Pu and his team developed the following: TPS realized on mainnet / monthly $ cost of a single validator node, or TPS/$ for short, to fulfill the need for better performance metrics.
This metric assesses performance based on verifiable TPS achieved on a network’s live mainnet while also considering hardware efficiency.
The significant 20-fold gap between theoretical and actual throughput convinced Pu to exclude metrics based solely on assumptions or lab conditions. He also aimed to illustrate how some blockchain projects inflate performance metrics by relying on costly infrastructure.
“Published network performance claims are often inflated by extremely expensive hardware. This is especially true for networks with highly centralized consensus mechanisms, where the throughput bottleneck shifts away from networking latency and into single-machine hardware performance. Requiring extremely expensive hardware for validators not only betrays a centralized consensus algorithm and inefficient engineering, it also prevents the vast majority of the world from potentially participating in consensus by pricing them out,” Pu explained.
Pu’s team located each network’s minimum validator hardware requirements to determine the cost per validator node. They later estimated their monthly cost, paying particular attention to their relative sizing when used to compute the TPS per dollar ratios.
“So the TPS/$ metric tries to correct two of the perhaps most egregious categories of misinformation, by forcing the TPS performance to be on mainnet, and revealing the inherent tradeoffs of extremely expensive hardware,” Pu added.
Pu stressed considering two simple, identifiable characteristics: whether a network is permissionless and single-sharded.
Permissioned vs. Permissionless Networks: Which Fosters Decentralization?
A blockchain’s degree of security can be unveiled by whether it operates under a permissioned or permissionless network.
Permissioned blockchains refer to closed networks where access and participation are restricted to a predefined group of users, requiring permission from a central authority or trusted group to join. In permissionless blockchains, anyone is allowed to participate.
According to Pu, the former model is at odds with the philosophy of decentralization.
“A permissioned network, where network validation membership is controlled by a single entity, or if there is just a single entity (every Layer-2s), is another excellent metric. This tells you whether or not the network is indeed decentralized. A hallmark of decentralization is its ability to bridge trust gaps. Take decentralization away, then the network is nothing more than a cloud service,” Pu told BeInCrypto.
Attention to these metrics will prove vital over time, as networks with centralized authorities tend to be more vulnerable to certain weaknesses.
“In the long term, what we really need is a battery of standardized attack vectors for L1 infrastructure that can help to reveal weaknesses and tradeoffs for any given architectural design. Much of the problems in today’s mainstream L1 are that they make unreasonable sacrifices in security and decentralization. These characteristics are invisible and extremely hard to observe, until a disaster strikes. My hope is that as the industry matures, such a battery of tests will begin to organically emerge into an industry-wide standard,” Pu added.
Meanwhile, understanding whether a network employs state-sharding versus maintaining a single, sharded state reveals how unified its data management is.
State-Sharding vs. Single-State: Understanding Data Unity
In blockchain performance, latency refers to the time delay between submitting a transaction to the network, confirming it, and including it in a block on the blockchain. It measures how long it takes for a transaction to be processed and become a permanent part of the distributed ledger.
Identifying whether a network employs state-sharding or a single-sharded state can reveal much about its latency efficiency.
State-sharded networks divide the blockchain’s data into multiple independent parts called shards. Each shard operates somewhat independently and doesn’t have direct, real-time access to the complete state of the entire network.
By contrast, a non-state-sharded network has a single, shared state across the entire network. All nodes can access and process the same complete data set in this case.
Pu noted that state-sharded networks aim to increase storage and transaction capacity. However, they often face longer finality latencies due to a need to process transactions across multiple independent shards.
He added that many projects adopting a sharding approach inflate throughput by simply replicating their network rather than building a truly integrated and scalable architecture.
“A state-sharded network that doesn’t share state, is simply making unconnected copies of a network. If I take a L1 network and just make 1000 copies of it running independently, it’s clearly dishonest to claim that I can add up all the throughput across the copies together and represent it as a single network. There are architectures that actually synchronize the states as well as shuffle the validators across shards, but more often than not, projects making outlandish claims on throughput are just making independent copies,” Pu said.
Based on his research into the efficiency of blockchain metrics, Pu highlighted the need for fundamental shifts in how projects are evaluated, funded, and ultimately succeed.
What Fundamental Shifts Does Blockchain Evaluation Need?
Pu’s insights present a notable alternative in a Layer-1 blockchain space where misleading performance metrics increasingly compete for attention. Reliable and effective benchmarks are essential to counter these false representations.
“You only know what you can measure, and right now in crypto, the numbers look more like hype-narratives than objective measurements. Having standardized, transparent measurements allows simple comparisons across product options so developers and users understand what it is they’re using, and what tradeoffs they’re making. This is a hallmark of any mature industry, and we still have a long way to go in crypto,” Pu concluded.
Adopting standardized and transparent benchmarks will foster informed decision-making and drive genuine progress beyond merely promotional claims as the industry matures.
