Scenius Sync (Issue # 206)

Trump Backs CFTC Over Prediction Markets, CME BTC Futures & Options Now Trade 24/7, MoonPay Lets Users Buy BTC in ChatGPT, Cash App Now Supports Stablecoins, & Samsung to Acquire $408M Stake in Dunamu

Scenius: The intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene. The communal form of the concept of genius.

Welcome to The Scenius Sync.

Our mission with this publication is the following:

1. Distribute thought leadership that made an impression on us this week

2. Share the essential stories driving the crypto industry and markets.

3. Highlight innovative applications and mainstream adoption of crypto and blockchain technology.

If you find this newsletter valuable, please subscribe and share The Scenius Sync with your network 💪

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Opinions & Alpha 📡 🧠

1. In Defense of the Ideological, Part II – Jeff Park

   Key Insight: “Tokenization if done correctly will enable tiered markets for onshore and offshore investors, allowing surgical price and supply discrimination with a transparency and precision that the current system cannot offer, making the US asset market structurally indomitable for global capital allocation. The thesis is not complicated to understand, for almost all of the greatest technological productivity gains of the postwar era came from the US because the system’s incentives produced them. Crypto extends that model into the next frontier.”

2. The House That Perps Built - Quinn Papworth, Apollo Crypto

   Key Insight: “The reason Hyperliquid is suddenly a political problem is that it works. In mid-May, CME Group and Intercontinental Exchange — between them, the operators of most of the world’s regulated commodities and equities derivatives — formally urged the CFTC and members of Congress to bring Hyperliquid under traditional financial-institution oversight. The stated concerns are real: anonymous round-the-clock trading on commodity contracts could, in principle, distort price discovery in markets where CME’s WTI and ICE’s Brent are the global benchmarks. State-linked actors operating through pseudonymous wallets could use the venue to evade sanctions. Insider coordination is harder to detect when there is no KYC layer to investigate.”

3. The Labor Market for Compute - Steven Waterhouse, Nazaré Ventures

   Key Insight: “One way to approach the situation is to treat compute as a simple commodity. Compute has a commodity-flavored dimension that can support exchanges and financial instruments like futures contracts: reserved capacity, GPU-seconds, spot pricing, and so on. At the Milken Institute Global Conference in early May, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink told the audience: “A new asset class will be buying futures of compute.” But futures exist largely to hedge price risk for known, interchangeable goods over time. (In most cases, traders don’t even accept delivery of the actual underlying commodity.) Compute, however, isn’t fungible at the bare metal: no two units of compute are interchangeable.

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Essential News 🗞

1. Trump Backs CFTC Over Prediction Markets, Calls State Officials ‘Scum’

   • U.S. President Donald Trump pressed Tuesday for federal regulators to keep control over prediction markets, calling it a “critically important” issue as states move to treat the fast-growing sector as gambling under their own laws. “We cannot have SCUM like Chris Christie, Letitia James, Tim Walz, and JB Pritzker setting the rules,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, adding that the CFTC’s “exclusive authority” should be maintained as other countries pursue what he called a new form of financial market. Prediction markets should “thrive” under federal “rules of the road,” Trump said, arguing that other countries are pursuing the market and tying the issue to his broader push to keep crypto activity in the U.S.

   • Other CFTC-related news: CFTC says it shouldn’t have sued Gemini, joins motion to vacate prior judgment

2. Hong Kong advances virtual asset advisory and management rulemaking

   • Hong Kong’s Financial Services and the Treasury Bureau (FSTB) and the Securities and Futures Commission (SFC) published consultation conclusions for licensing regimes governing virtual asset advisory and virtual asset management services under the Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorist Financing Ordinance. The consultation showed broad market support for the proposed regimes, with respondents largely agreeing with the policy direction under the “same business, same risks, same rules” principle. The framework aligns the scope of virtual asset advisory and management with existing regulated activities covering securities advisory and discretionary asset management, the SFC said in a statement on Tuesday.

3. Banca Sella gets green light to provide crypto services to customers in Italian first

   • Banca Sella said it secured a crypto services license from the Bank of Italy under the European Union’s Markets in Crypto-Assets regulation, clearing the way for it to offer digital-asset services later this year. The private lender plans to offer a platform for the custody, transfer and receipt of digital assets for selected corporate clients later this year. Sella joins about 20 major European banks already offering crypto services under MiCA and is a founding member of the Qivalis stablecoin initiative and EU tokenization projects such as Pontes and Appia aimed at strengthening the bloc’s financial autonomy.

4. Indonesia blocks Polymarket, calling prediction market online gambling in disguise

   • Indonesia’s Ministry of Communication and Digital Affairs has blocked access to Polymarket, saying the crypto-based prediction market amounts to online gambling under local law. The ministry said it had cut access to the platform and was tracing affiliated social media accounts for possible restrictions across other digital channels. Alexander Sabar, director general of digital space supervision, claimed that platforms that allow users to wager money on uncertain outcomes remain gambling products, even when they use blockchain technology or crypto assets. The platform has grown into one of the largest crypto prediction markets, but regulators in several jurisdictions have treated parts of the business as gambling rather than financial-market activity.

   • In a related news: Spain joins growing list of countries shutting out Polymarket and Kalshi

5. Bitcoin’s famous CME gaps are about to disappear, though three remain unresolved

   • CME Group has officially entered the always-on crypto market. Beginning Friday, CME Bitcoin futures and options now trade 24 hours a day, seven days a week on Globex, CME’s electronic trading platform, with only a 60-minute weekly maintenance pause between 10PM and 11PM UTC each Sunday.

     While weekend trades will still clear on the next business day, the broader implication is significant as the long-standing CME weekend gap has effectively disappeared. For years, the Friday close through Sunday reopen created one of bitcoin’s most recognizable structural inefficiencies. Traders routinely positioned around “gap fills,” exploiting the disconnect between CME’s limited trading hours and Bitcoin’s continuous spot market. Thin weekend liquidity often exaggerated those moves, turning the CME gap into both a technical indicator and a speculative strategy.

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Innovation & Adoption 💡📈

1. MoonPay Lets Users Buy Bitcoin in ChatGPT

   • MoonPay launched a dedicated application inside ChatGPT Apps on May 23 that allows users to generate cryptocurrency purchase links without leaving OpenAI’s chatbot. The app supports Bitcoin (BTC), XRP, Solana (SOL), and USDC. Users can ask ChatGPT about a cryptocurrency and then request a purchase for a set dollar amount. The chatbot generates a MoonPay checkout link. That link redirects the user to MoonPay’s website to complete Know Your Customer (KYC) verification and connect a wallet. Users who have already completed KYC can sign in with an existing account and pay using a previously linked method without repeating the process. MoonPay joins Kraken, OKX, CryptoAudit, and RealOpen as crypto-related apps in the ChatGPT store.

2. Cash App Now Supports Stablecoins, Despite Bitcoin Maxi Jack Dorsey’s ‘Gatekeeper’ Gripes

   • Cash App has begun supporting stablecoin transactions on networks including Ethereum and Solana, a major crypto milestone for the popular payments platform previously dedicated to Bitcoin under maximalist Jack Dorsey. In addition to the aforementioned blockchains, Cash App users have the ability to send and receive Circle’s USDC on Ethereum scaling networks Polygon and Arbitrum. There are currently no fees involved in such transfers, according to the payments platform’s website. Unlike some competitors, stablecoins received by Cash App users are automatically converted into dollars, represented as standard balances.

3. Samsung units to acquire $408 million stake in Upbit operator Dunamu

   • Three Samsung affiliates will purchase a 4% stake in Dunamu, the company behind South Korea’s largest crypto exchange, Upbit. According to multiple local news media reports, Samsung Securities, Samsung SDS, and Samsung Card announced Thursday that they will acquire 1.39 million shares in Dunamu for approximately 613 billion Korean won ($407.7 million). Samsung Securities will acquire a 2% stake in Dunamu, while the other two affiliates will each purchase 1% in the company, per the reports. South Korean IT giant Kakao previously owned the shares.

4. OKX’s X Layer launches Exchange OS, allowing users to create custom crypto markets

   • X Layer, OKX’s EVM-compatible Layer 2 blockchain, launched Exchange OS, a new upgrade that allows users to deploy their own crypto markets. According to the official announcement from X Layer, the upgrade enables developers, institutions, and ecosystem participants to create spot, perpetual, and outcome markets with the same infrastructure stack powering OKX.

     “Exchange OS is designed to address one of the biggest structural limitations in on-chain finance today: fragmented infrastructure,” the team wrote. “Builders still face the same tradeoff — rely on centralized infrastructure or rebuild complex exchange systems from scratch.”

5. Hyperliquid rolls out validator-governed prediction markets for real-world events

   • Hyperliquid has begun supporting outcome markets tied to offchain events as part of its HIP-4 upgrade, allowing validators to deploy and settle such prediction markets. In announcements posted on Telegram and Discord, Hyperliquid said that such outcome markets will be published by automated newsfeed software that validators run as part of their regular chain operations. “Validators vote on deployment and settlement of canonical markets based on a variety of factors, including unambiguous rules, correctness, and subjective quality of the market,” the team said.