The Crypto Basic

Consensys Software Inc. plans a two-company reorganization by year-end 2026. The current entity will be renamed MetaMask, while the Protocols Group will move into a newly created business that keeps the Consensys name, according to a Sept. 9 company announcement. 

Joe Lubin will chair MetaMask and serve as CEO. He will also become executive chairman of the new Consensys. Mike Kriak will lead the company as CEO, with David Cunningham as president.

MetaMask will retain its consumer self-custody business while expanding into payments, savings, investing, and traditional financial products.

Consensys Software said its consumer and institutional businesses are increasingly pursuing different priorities. The company also said financial firms are moving beyond blockchain trials and putting systems into production, alongside growing demand for stablecoins, tokenization, and infrastructure. 

Lubin said Consensys teams had spent more than a decade contributing to Ethereum through work spanning the protocol, tools, and infrastructure that supported self-custodial finance and sovereign networks. 

He described MetaMask as having emerged from those efforts to become the most widely used self-custodial wallet, while now developing into a platform for handling money in multiple forms. 

MetaMask Consumer Unit Extends Beyond the Wallet 

MetaMask dates to 2016, when it launched as an Ethereum browser extension that let users interact with decentralized applications and manage crypto assets, according to a Consensys history of MetaMask.

Company figures put MetaMask downloads above 100 million across about 190 countries. Consensys Software also says the platform has facilitated cumulative transaction volume measured in trillions of dollars. 

In February, eligible users outside the United States gained access to an Ondo Global Markets offering comprising 200 tokenized U.S. stocks, along with exchange-traded funds and commodities. 

The MetaMask card reached 49 U.S. states later that month after earlier availability in Europe, Canada, Mexico, Brazil and Argentina. The Mastercard-enabled product provides U.S. users with rewards in the mUSD stablecoin. 

MetaMask launched Money Account in June, giving eligible mUSD balances access to a variable annual percentage yield of up to 4%. The yield comes from DeFi lending strategies and does not constitute interest paid by MetaMask or the stablecoin issuer.

Money Account balances can also be used for MetaMask Card purchases, trading, perpetuals, and prediction markets.

Separately, Lubin said last year that MetaMask would get a MASK token and connected the plan with the wallet’s decentralization strategy. Fortune reported around the restructuring announcement that the company was not providing information about either a possible IPO or a token. 

Linea, Besu and Teku Move With Institutional Business

The new Consensys will take responsibility for Linea, the Besu and Teku clients, and its institutional infrastructure business.

Its mandate will center on Ethereum infrastructure for financial institutions deploying blockchain technology for tokenization, stablecoins, and other onchain financial services.

Linea is also positioned to attract institutional capital. Notably, Consensys’ Besu infrastructure is in use at Citi, DTC, and BNY Mellon.

Cunningham said tokenization is becoming central as financial institutions and market-infrastructure providers move toward round-the-clock operations. 

He added that Consensys Software’s open-source technology provides part of the technical base for that transition. The institutional business delivers interoperability infrastructure for the world’s largest financial marketplaces, where privacy, operational resilience and scalability are required, Cunningham said.

Trezor and BitBox issued fresh phishing warnings after customers received fraudulent emails that appeared to originate from the hardware wallet companies’ communication channels.

Both companies told users to avoid unexpected security messages, especially those that direct recipients to external links.

The incidents surfaced Wednesday and, based on the companies’ preliminary assessments, appear to involve outside email or newsletter infrastructure rather than compromises of the wallets themselves.

Trezor and BitBox Investigate Email-Service Incidents

Trezor attributed its campaign to a security incident affecting a company it uses for email delivery. The breach allowed attackers to send emails that appeared to come from Trezor.

Among the fake messages was an email carrying the subject “Critical Security Alert: STM32 Entropy Vulnerability.” Trezor identified the notice as fraudulent and warned customers not to click any links in the email.

BitBox disclosed comparable activity later that day, saying some customers had received messages crafted to resemble official company communications.

The company’s early findings focused on the service used to distribute its newsletter. BitBox said the same infrastructure may also have been involved in phishing aimed at other Bitcoin businesses, raising the possibility that several firms were being targeted through a common external vendor.

Neither company described the latest incidents as evidence that attackers had penetrated its hardware wallets.

Earlier Disclosures Add Context to Latest Warnings

The phishing alerts follow a series of unrelated security disclosures involving Trezor, BitBox, and companies that provide services for their products.

Trezor reported in August that information associated with close to 14,000 customers had been exposed through ShipMonk, a third-party fulfillment company. A subsequent disclosure in early September expanded the affected population by about 67,000 U.S. customers.

Those exposures concerned information stored by an outside service rather than data taken from Trezor hardware. The new email campaign likewise centers on infrastructure operated beyond the wallet itself.

BitBox has faced separate security concerns. In July, it responded to concerns over a Coldcard entropy-generation flaw, saying BitBox products were not affected by the vulnerability.

The following month, BitBox published fixes for two significant firmware weaknesses. At the time of the disclosure, the company said it was unaware of any exploitation of the vulnerabilities or any related loss of user funds.

However, the current Trezor and BitBox warnings are centered on social-engineering emails, not confirmed breaches of their wallet devices.

Customers are being advised to treat unexpected security messages cautiously and to verify unusual requests through official company channels before taking action.

Hunter Biden’s LAPTOP memecoin lost more than 99% during a turbulent Wednesday debut, with the project saying automated sniper activity and insufficient liquidity in the launch pool drove the sharp price reversal.

The token rose above $300 following its airdrop and, during its first hour of trading, briefly carried a market capitalization of roughly $110 billion. Most of that advance quickly disappeared, leaving LAPTOP near $0.84 shortly after midnight Thursday, according to DexScreener.

The project said its original trading pool introduced LAPTOP at $0.05. According to a Wednesday Medium update from the team, strong buying interest emerged immediately, drawing sniper bots as the market maker lacked enough liquidity to meet demand. The team said the imbalance triggered the rapid surge and reversal before the pool could deepen.

To address that problem, the project plans to release 4 million tokens for Aerodrome liquidity incentives at midnight UTC on Sept. 10, increasing the amount available for liquidity support. The planned release equals 0.4% of LAPTOP’s total supply. The team said the move is designed to bring trading liquidity closer to market demand.

Bubblemaps separately estimated that roughly four in five people who traded LAPTOP ended up with losses. The blockchain analytics company identified two traders whose losses fell between $100,000 and $1 million, around 100 who lost between $10,000 and $100,000, and approximately 700 whose losses ranged from $1,000 to $10,000.

Prediction Outcomes Set Up 10 Million-Token Burn

Meanwhile, LAPTOP’s supply is being reduced under a mechanism linked to real-world predictions. The project said two of those events have produced “Yes” outcomes, requiring 10 million tokens to be destroyed and cutting circulating supply by an expected 1% during the first week after launch.

Biden had previously explained on X that 30 separate predictions account for 30% of the token supply. Each prediction is connected to a public, real-world event: tokens assigned to an outcome are burned when it resolves “Yes,” while the tokens are donated to charity if it does not.

One completed prediction involved 5 million LAPTOP and was fulfilled after digital artist Beeple mentioned the token, according to the project’s Medium update. The team did not disclose what triggered the other resolved prediction.

Project Addresses X Suspension and Token Distribution

Another issue emerged Wednesday when X suspended the LAPTOP Foundation’s official account. Biden said the project was seeking to regain access to the account and indicated that the suspension would not cause him to step away.

The team also provided further details about how the token reached users. It said LAPTOP was not sold through a presale, influencers received no special allocations, and buyers did not receive an opportunity to purchase the token before its wider availability. The project also said it had not paid crypto key opinion leaders (KOLs) to promote LAPTOP.

For the airdrop, subscribers who joined Hunter Biden’s Substack before Sept. 6 could claim 80 million LAPTOP tokens. The team characterized those recipients as genuine individuals rather than artificial or preferentially selected accounts.

Former Silvergate Bank CEO Alan Lane has challenged the regulatory narrative surrounding the crypto lender’s 2023 closure, saying the bank had the financial resources to continue operating but ultimately chose to shut down under pressure from the Biden administration.

Lane made the allegations Tuesday in his debut Substack article, accusing the Biden administration of orchestrating a campaign against Silvergate that ultimately contributed to its liquidation. He said political forces influenced the decision to close the bank even though it had already weathered an exceptional surge in customer withdrawals.

During the fourth quarter of 2022, Silvergate met withdrawals amounting to roughly 70% of its demand deposits, according to Lane. He argued that doing so without becoming insolvent demonstrated that the bank could have continued operating.

Silvergate disclosed the severity of the deposit exodus in an operational report released in early 2023. Deposits from digital-asset clients had fallen to $3.8 billion by Dec. 31, compared with $11.9 billion at the close of the previous quarter, representing a 68% decline.

Meeting withdrawal demands required Silvergate to draw heavily on its balance sheet. Asset disposals during the quarter generated a $718 million loss as the bank sold $5.2 billion from its debt-investment portfolio. By year-end, its liquidity position included $4.6 billion in cash and assets readily convertible to cash. Lane said additional liquid assets were available to either sell or pledge against borrowing when liquidity was needed.

His explanation for Silvergate’s demise conflicts with conclusions later reached by federal investigators, who identified vulnerabilities inside the bank itself rather than attributing its liquidation to government efforts against the crypto industry.

Regulatory Record Challenges Lane’s Account of Silvergate

In a report issued in September 2023, the Federal Reserve’s inspector general identified a combination of factors behind Silvergate’s decision to liquidate. The review pointed to the bank’s dependence on deposits from digital-asset businesses, its rapid growth, and vulnerabilities arising from several forms of funding exposure.

The report also identified weaknesses in the bank’s risk controls, corporate governance, and risk-management practices. It faulted regulators as well, concluding that supervisors could have intervened earlier and responded more forcefully as the bank’s vulnerabilities emerged.

Lane has also pushed back against criticism of Silvergate’s anti-money laundering controls, maintaining that regulators never proved the bank’s AML framework had failed. 

Regulatory enforcement nevertheless followed after the bank’s closure. In July 2024, the Securities and Exchange Commission accused Lane, Silvergate Capital, and former chief risk officer Kathleen Fraher of misleading investors about the effectiveness of the bank’s Bank Secrecy Act and AML compliance program and its oversight of crypto customers, including FTX.

The SEC alleged that Silvergate’s automated transaction-monitoring system failed to screen payments totaling more than $1 trillion on the bank’s payments network. The regulator also claimed that nearly $9 billion worth of potentially suspicious activity linked to FTX-affiliated entities went undetected.

Lane resolved the SEC case without admitting or denying the regulator’s allegations. The resolution required him to pay a $1 million civil penalty and barred him from serving as an officer or director for five years.

Silvergate separately faced action from the Federal Reserve, which imposed a $43 million penalty over deficiencies in the bank’s transaction-monitoring practices. The Fed later said Silvergate completed its liquidation, repaid all customer deposits and ceased operating as a bank.

Lane Points to 2023 Crypto Banking Warnings

Lane’s case for government pressure goes beyond Silvergate’s treatment by regulators. He cited joint guidance issued by federal banking agencies in early 2023 as evidence, in his view, of a broader effort to constrain the crypto sector.

The guidance warned banks about risks associated with crypto-related activities. The Federal Reserve, however, said banking organizations were neither prohibited nor discouraged from serving any particular customer category.

The agencies withdrew the statements in April 2025.

Jack Dorsey’s Block is pursuing a federal banking charter in the United States as it looks to bring Bitcoin and stablecoin custody operations into a nationally regulated trust institution.

Block announced the move Tuesday, saying the proposed institution will operate as Builders Bank & Trust, N.A. The company submitted its application to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC). If granted, the charter would place the proposed bank under OCC supervision.

Builders Bank is not intended to operate as a conventional lender or deposit-taking institution. The proposed bank would focus on trust functions involving digital assets and would neither accept customer deposits nor issue loans.

For Block, the proposed charter would place certain existing custody and related services under a unified federal regulatory framework. The structure is designed to accommodate growth in those activities without expanding Builders Bank into the type of business typically associated with conventional lenders.

Block has selected digital asset strategy lead Lee Woolley to serve as the proposed institution’s president and chief executive. Woolley said the venture would draw on expertise from Block’s digital-asset operations and Square Financial Services, along with the banking experience of the team being assembled for Builders Bank.

Crypto Firms Pursue National Trust Charters

Block is entering a regulatory path already being pursued by several other companies across the crypto and financial-technology sectors.

Ripple is partway through that process after regulators conditionally cleared its planned trust institution. Circle and BitGo have already passed the final approval stage. Kraken owner Payward and digital-asset infrastructure provider Zerohash are earlier in the process, with their applications still awaiting a decision.