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Incrypted Conference 2026 Takes Place in Kyiv — Ukraine’s Largest Crypto Event of the Year
On June 13, 2026, Kyiv hosted Incrypted Conference 2026 — the annual crypto conference organized by the team behind Ukraine’s leading crypto media outlet, Incrypted. The event took place at the Parkovy Exhibition and Convention Centre and brought together around 2,000 attendees in person.
This year the conference expanded its format: for the first time, the program ran across two parallel stages — the Main Stage for key discussions and the Workshop Stage for hands-on sessions. The entire third floor of the Parkovy Centre was utilized for the event, including a VIP zone with exclusive activities.
Key figures:
~2,000 in-person attendees
3,100+ views of the live stream
8,000+ views of the online marathon held ahead of Incrypted Conference
~100 partners, speakers, and media partners combined
In keeping with tradition, government representatives took to the stage to discuss crypto regulation in Ukraine and share updates on the progress of the virtual assets bill. Panelists included Yaroslav Zhelezniak, Member of Parliament and First Deputy Chair of the Committee on Finance, Tax and Customs Policy; Oleksiy Semeniuk, Chair of the National Securities and Stock Market Commission; and Dmytro Nikolaievskyi, Chief Legal Officer at the Project Office of the Ministry of Digital Transformation of Ukraine.
Beyond regulation, Incrypted Conference covered a broad range of topics: market outlook and trends, trading strategies and risk management, the role of artificial intelligence in Web3, and more.
Speakers included Andriy Hnatiuk (Co-Founder, Superteam Ukraine), Anton Dziuba (CEO & Co-Founder, DOUBLETOP), and crypto influencer and analyst Cryptomannn. Binance Co-CEO Richard Teng and Binance CMO Rachel Conlan recorded special video addresses for conference attendees.
“Hosting an in-person conference in Kyiv during wartime is a deliberate choice. We believe that live communication and networking matter for the community — especially now. As long as Ukraine’s Web3 community keeps coming together, it keeps growing, and we’re doing everything we can to make that happen,” — Ivan Pavlovskyi, CEO of Incrypted.
Ahead of the offline conference, the Incrypted team also hosted the Incrypted Online Conference — a large-scale online event featuring leading voices from the global Web3 industry. Participants included representatives from Binance, Kraken, 1inch, Solana, Base, OKX, Optimism Foundation, Cointelegraph Accelerator, NEAR Intents, Trezor, Mantle, Avalanche, CertiK, Limitless Labs, Kolo, and others. The Incrypted Online Conference gathered more than 8,000 views across platforms.
The offline event was supported by numerous partners who set up their own booths on-site — attendees had the opportunity to meet project teams, try out products and services, and take part in prize giveaways.
“Incrypted Conference is proof that Ukraine’s crypto industry keeps working and growing despite all the challenges we face. Our mission is to continue developing the community and providing a platform for knowledge sharing and meaningful connections — and we will keep doing that,” — Andriy Makarov, COO and Co-Founder of Incrypted.
Incrypted Conference is held annually as part of Ukrainian Blockchain Week, organized with the support of the Incrypted team in Kyiv. This year, UBW featured events from Binance, Solana Superteam, BingX, Solus, and Juscutum, drawing more than 10,000 attendees in total.
About Incrypted
Incrypted is Ukraine’s largest media outlet covering cryptocurrencies, blockchain technology, and the Web3 industry. Since 2017, the Incrypted team has been actively developing the local crypto community and organizing Ukraine’s largest crypto events, including Incrypted Conference and Ukrainian Blockchain Week.

Polymarket has built its brand on the premise that prediction markets reflect genuine, verifiable outcomes — real money, real bets, real winners. A new investigation from the Wall Street Journal suggests the platform’s own promotional machine operated on a very different premise: a marketing network of paid influencers staging fabricated wins on fake versions of the site, with viewers never told that the dramatic payouts they were watching had never actually occurred.
The investigation reviewed 1,105 videos produced by ten content creators tied to a marketing network connected to Polymarket. The pattern the journalists uncovered was consistent and deliberate — and it raises serious questions about how much of the platform’s viral growth has been built on content that misrepresented what was actually happening on the site.
Bets That Existed Only on Camera
According to WSJ’s analysis, roughly 70% of the videos reviewed depicted bets totaling approximately $1.9 million in claimed wagers — and none of them, the investigation concluded, were real. The footage was instead recorded using purpose-built replica websites designed to visually mimic Polymarket’s actual interface, allowing creators to simulate placing large bets and celebrating dramatic wins without any real money or real market activity involved.
One of the cited examples involves college student George Macihara, who posted a video in January claiming he had won $100,000 betting that Donald Trump would publicly say the word “McDonald’s.” Reporters established that the event never occurred, and that every user who had actually placed that specific bet on the real platform lost money.
A separate set of 118 videos depicted what creators presented as successful bets generating nearly $900,000 in combined winnings. WSJ’s analysis of Polymarket’s own public trading data found that if those exact bets had actually been placed as described, they would have produced a combined loss of more than $166,000 — not a profit. The fabricated outcomes shown to viewers were not just exaggerated. They were the inverse of what would have actually happened.
Who Was Behind the Camera — and How Much They Were Paid
WSJ’s reporting indicates Polymarket’s marketing operation worked primarily with young content creators, many of them college students, who were compensated between $2,000 and $3,000 per month for producing this content. According to people who participated in the program, creators were advised against disclosing their financial relationship with the company to their audiences. Only after WSJ journalists began asking questions did some of the influencers add “partner” labels to their profiles — a disclosure that arrived after the questionable practice had already been running for an extended period, rather than from the outset.
The investigation also uncovered technical evidence supporting the existence of fabricated platforms used for filming. One website operated under the domain poiymarket.com — a typosquatted address designed to be visually almost indistinguishable from Polymarket’s genuine domain at a casual glance. Reporters found interface elements on these fake pages that did not exist on the official platform, along with links pointing to the company’s internal testing environments. The site was taken down shortly after WSJ submitted questions to Polymarket for comment.
The Distribution Machine Behind the Videos
WSJ’s investigation paid particular attention to how this content actually reached audiences at scale. The marketing operation relied on a multi-layered distribution network involving livestreamers, short-form video creators, and so-called “clippers” — accounts that systematically re-uploaded and redistributed the original content across TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube to maximize reach beyond what the original creators could achieve alone.
According to estimates from analytics firm Tubular, the combined campaign generated more than 140 million views across platforms. That figure represents a substantial portion of the organic-feeling social proof that has shaped public perception of Polymarket as a platform where ordinary users win large sums of money through sharp predictions — proof that, according to WSJ’s findings, was manufactured rather than earned.
Polymarket’s Response
Polymarket rejected the characterization of the investigation and stated it remains “dedicated to supporting accurate, fair, and transparent markets.” The company also announced plans to conduct a comprehensive audit of the promotional content used to market the platform — a commitment that, notably, follows the publication of the investigation rather than preceding it.
The company has not provided a detailed accounting of how many creators were involved beyond the ten profiled by WSJ, nor has it clarified whether the compensation structure described in the report — flat monthly payments rather than commission tied to actual platform activity — incentivized the kind of fabricated content the investigation documented.
Why This Matters Beyond Marketing Ethics
This is not the first credibility challenge Polymarket has faced in 2026. The platform has separately dealt with federal insider trading prosecutions, including the arrest of a U.S. Army soldier accused of using classified intelligence to place winning bets, and the arrest of a Google engineer accused of using internal company data for the same purpose. Academic research from London Business School and Yale found that a small fraction of users — roughly 3% — generate the majority of the platform’s price discovery and profits, while the remaining 97% largely fund those returns through losses.
The WSJ investigation adds a different but related dimension to that pattern: evidence suggesting that the platform’s perceived popularity and the social proof driving new user acquisition were, at least in part, artificially manufactured through paid actors performing fictional outcomes. For a platform whose core value proposition rests on the credibility of its markets and the transparency of its outcomes, a marketing strategy built on fabricated wins represents a particularly uncomfortable contradiction.
Whether Polymarket’s promised audit produces meaningful accountability — or simply a quiet end to the specific tactics WSJ documented — will likely determine how much lasting damage this investigation does to a platform that has spent considerable effort positioning itself as the legitimate, transparent alternative to traditional betting markets.

ポリマケットは、予測市場が真実で検証可能な結果を反映するという前提に基づいてブランドを築いてきました — 実際のお金、実際のベット、実際の勝者。しかし、ウォールストリートジャーナルの新しい調査によると、プラットフォームのプロモーション活動は非常に異なる前提に基づいて運営されていたようです：報酬を受け取るインフルエンサーのマーケティングネットワークが、サイトの偽のバージョンで作り上げた勝利を演出し、視聴者には見ている劇的な配当金が実際には決して発生していなかったことが伝えられなかったのです。
この調査では、ポリマケットに関連するマーケティングネットワークに結びついた10人のコンテンツクリエイターが制作した1,105本の動画がレビューされました。ジャーナリストたちが発見したパターンは一貫しており、故意のものでした — そして、プラットフォームのバイラル成長が実際にサイトで起こっていたことを誤って表現したコンテンツにどれだけ依存しているのかについて、深刻な疑問を提起します。

Incrypted Conference 2026 Takes Place in Kyiv — Ukraine’s Largest Crypto Event of the Year
On June 13, 2026, Kyiv hosted Incrypted Conference 2026 — the annual crypto conference organized by the team behind Ukraine’s leading crypto media outlet, Incrypted. The event took place at the Parkovy Exhibition and Convention Centre and brought together around 2,000 attendees in person.
This year the conference expanded its format: for the first time, the program ran across two parallel stages — the Main Stage for key discussions and the Workshop Stage for hands-on sessions. The entire third floor of the Parkovy Centre was utilized for the event, including a VIP zone with exclusive activities.
Key figures:
~2,000 in-person attendees
3,100+ views of the live stream
8,000+ views of the online marathon held ahead of Incrypted Conference
~100 partners, speakers, and media partners combined
In keeping with tradition, government representatives took to the stage to discuss crypto regulation in Ukraine and share updates on the progress of the virtual assets bill. Panelists included Yaroslav Zhelezniak, Member of Parliament and First Deputy Chair of the Committee on Finance, Tax and Customs Policy; Oleksiy Semeniuk, Chair of the National Securities and Stock Market Commission; and Dmytro Nikolaievskyi, Chief Legal Officer at the Project Office of the Ministry of Digital Transformation of Ukraine.
Beyond regulation, Incrypted Conference covered a broad range of topics: market outlook and trends, trading strategies and risk management, the role of artificial intelligence in Web3, and more.
Speakers included Andriy Hnatiuk (Co-Founder, Superteam Ukraine), Anton Dziuba (CEO & Co-Founder, DOUBLETOP), and crypto influencer and analyst Cryptomannn. Binance Co-CEO Richard Teng and Binance CMO Rachel Conlan recorded special video addresses for conference attendees.
“Hosting an in-person conference in Kyiv during wartime is a deliberate choice. We believe that live communication and networking matter for the community — especially now. As long as Ukraine’s Web3 community keeps coming together, it keeps growing, and we’re doing everything we can to make that happen,” — Ivan Pavlovskyi, CEO of Incrypted.
Ahead of the offline conference, the Incrypted team also hosted the Incrypted Online Conference — a large-scale online event featuring leading voices from the global Web3 industry. Participants included representatives from Binance, Kraken, 1inch, Solana, Base, OKX, Optimism Foundation, Cointelegraph Accelerator, NEAR Intents, Trezor, Mantle, Avalanche, CertiK, Limitless Labs, Kolo, and others. The Incrypted Online Conference gathered more than 8,000 views across platforms.
The offline event was supported by numerous partners who set up their own booths on-site — attendees had the opportunity to meet project teams, try out products and services, and take part in prize giveaways.
“Incrypted Conference is proof that Ukraine’s crypto industry keeps working and growing despite all the challenges we face. Our mission is to continue developing the community and providing a platform for knowledge sharing and meaningful connections — and we will keep doing that,” — Andriy Makarov, COO and Co-Founder of Incrypted.
Incrypted Conference is held annually as part of Ukrainian Blockchain Week, organized with the support of the Incrypted team in Kyiv. This year, UBW featured events from Binance, Solana Superteam, BingX, Solus, and Juscutum, drawing more than 10,000 attendees in total.
About Incrypted
Incrypted is Ukraine’s largest media outlet covering cryptocurrencies, blockchain technology, and the Web3 industry. Since 2017, the Incrypted team has been actively developing the local crypto community and organizing Ukraine’s largest crypto events, including Incrypted Conference and Ukrainian Blockchain Week.

A stablecoin built to maintain a steady dollar peg has instead become the latest casualty of a DeFi trust collapse. MSUSD, the stablecoin issued by Main Street Finance, lost its dollar peg on June 20th and crashed to approximately $0.25 — a decline of more than 90% within hours of its reserve verification provider walking away from the project entirely.
The trigger was not a hack, an exploit, or a liquidity event in the traditional sense. It was a single sentence from a third-party auditor. Accountable, the firm responsible for verifying that MSUSD’s reserves matched its circulating supply, announced it had unilaterally terminated its agreement with Main Street, stating bluntly:
“Accountable has terminated its service agreement with MainStreet, effective immediately. MainStreet was unable to meet our verification standards.”
The market’s reaction was immediate and brutal. Without third-party reserve verification, holders had no independent confirmation that MSUSD remained backed, and confidence evaporated within hours.
What Accountable’s Withdrawal Actually Means
The mechanics of this collapse reveal something important about how fragile stablecoin confidence has become in 2026, particularly for smaller, less established projects competing against giants like USDC and USDT. Stablecoins derive their value from a simple promise: that every token in circulation is backed by an equivalent dollar-denominated asset, verifiable through ongoing third-party attestation. When that verification mechanism disappears — regardless of whether the underlying assets are actually still present — the market treats the absence of proof as equivalent to the absence of backing.
Main Street’s team pushed back hard against that interpretation, characterizing the entire episode as a reporting and compliance dispute rather than evidence of insolvency. The company maintains that MSUSD’s reserves remain fully intact and has committed $8 million in USDC specifically to support liquidity and demonstrate its ability to honor redemptions during the crisis. The team has also stated it is actively searching for a replacement auditor to restore the verification infrastructure that Accountable’s exit eliminated.
Whether that explanation satisfies the market is a separate question from whether it is true. Stablecoin de-pegging events have historically been driven as much by perception and panic dynamics as by the actual solvency of underlying reserves — and once a token has fallen 90% in a matter of hours, restoring confidence requires significantly more than a statement and an $8 million liquidity commitment.
The Contagion Reaches Altura
The most consequential downstream effect of the MSUSD collapse has been its impact on Altura, a separate DeFi protocol that found itself facing a liquidity crisis despite having no direct exposure to MSUSD as an asset.
Altura announced it was closing its primary vault — holding approximately $39 million — after users initiated mass withdrawals in response to the broader panic. Within 24 hours, more than $8.5 million in USDT had been pulled from the protocol. Altura’s head, Ranvir Arora, was explicit that the protocol held no direct investment in MSUSD itself. The connection between the two protocols was indirect but structurally significant: both relied on the same third-party verification provider, Accountable.
That shared dependency turned out to be enough to trigger contagion. Users who held positions in Altura, observing that the protocol used the same auditor whose withdrawal had just triggered MSUSD’s collapse, appear to have concluded that Altura’s reserves might face similar verification risk — regardless of whether Altura’s underlying assets were ever actually at risk. The result was a liquidity run driven by associative risk rather than direct exposure, forcing Altura to halt its vault to prevent a disorderly collapse.
Altura’s representatives have stated that the protocol’s funds remain intact and that the stablecoin backing involved is sound — framing the issue purely as a loss of external verification rather than an actual shortfall in reserves. That is precisely the same defense Main Street has offered for MSUSD, and the parallel is unlikely to be coincidental given the structural overlap between the two projects.
Why a Single Auditor’s Decision Can Move Markets This Violently
The MSUSD and Altura situation together illustrate a structural vulnerability that has become increasingly visible across DeFi in 2026: third-party verification providers occupy a position of outsized influence over protocols that depend on them, and the abrupt withdrawal of that verification can trigger market reactions disproportionate to any actual change in underlying solvency.
Accountable’s statement gave no detailed explanation of which specific verification standards MainStreet failed to meet. That ambiguity itself contributed to the panic — without specifics, the market was left to assume the worst-case interpretation rather than a narrower compliance or reporting issue. Whether Accountable’s decision reflected a genuine red flag about MSUSD’s reserves or a more mundane administrative or contractual dispute remains unconfirmed publicly.
For the broader stablecoin sector, the incident raises uncomfortable questions about concentration risk in the verification ecosystem. When multiple protocols rely on the same auditor for reserve attestation, a single firm’s decision to walk away from a client — for any reason — can cascade across protocols that have no direct financial relationship to each other, purely through the shared dependency on that auditor’s credibility.
What Happens Next
Main Street is actively pursuing a new audit relationship to restore third-party verification for MSUSD, and has signaled its $8 million USDC commitment as evidence of solvency in the interim. Whether that is sufficient to restore the peg, or whether MSUSD has suffered the kind of reputational damage that stablecoins rarely recover from after a 90%+ de-peg, will become clear in the coming weeks.
Altura’s situation remains similarly unresolved. The vault closure has stopped the immediate bleeding, but the protocol now faces the challenge of rebuilding user confidence after a liquidity event triggered entirely by association with another protocol’s crisis rather than any failure of its own.
The episode adds to a growing pattern across 2026’s DeFi landscape: trust infrastructure — auditors, verification providers, oracles, multisig configurations — has repeatedly proven to be the most fragile layer in a sector that otherwise prides itself on cryptographic certainty. When that trust layer breaks, even protocols with genuinely sound reserves can find themselves facing a market that no longer believes them.

安定したドルペッグを維持するために構築されたステーブルコインは、代わりにDeFiの信頼崩壊の最新の犠牲者となった。メインストリートファイナンスが発行したMSUSDは、6月20日にドルペッグを失い、約$0.25にクラッシュした — これは、準備金の検証プロバイダーがプロジェクトから完全に撤退した数時間以内に90%以上の減少を示している。
トリガーはハッキングでも、エクスプロイトでも、従来の意味での流動性イベントでもなかった。第三者の監査人からの一文だった。MSUSDの準備金がその流通供給量と一致していることを確認する責任を持つ企業は、メインストリートとの契約を一方的に終了したと発表し、率直に述べた：

One of the most credible voices to ever work inside the Ethereum Foundation just published the most direct warning the organization has received from one of its own. Trent van Epps, who spent five years at the EF coordinating core development and protocol funding before leaving in April 2026, wrote that Ethereum’s core infrastructure faces a slow-burning funding crisis that could fully materialize within 3 to 9 months — and that the structural causes go far deeper than a temporary budget gap.
The warning lands at a moment when ETH itself is already under scrutiny. Bankless co-founder David Hoffman recently sold his entire ETH position, arguing that network growth and asset appreciation have decoupled. Van Epps’ essay adds an institutional dimension to that skepticism — suggesting that even Ethereum’s technical foundation, the part of the ecosystem least exposed to speculative sentiment, is running out of runway.
What “Subtraction” Actually Means — and Why It’s Backfiring
Van Epps centers his analysis on a philosophy the Ethereum Foundation has openly embraced for seven years, internally called “Subtraction.” The idea, first articulated in 2019 and restated in the EF’s March 2026 Mandate, is that the Foundation should deliberately shrink its relative influence over time — pushing value creation out into the broader ecosystem rather than accumulating it internally.
As a governance principle, Subtraction has succeeded in one specific way: it has convinced the community that the EF does not want to be Ethereum’s permanent center of gravity. But Van Epps argues it has failed to specify what happens to the functions the Foundation currently performs once it steps back.
Legitimacy, he writes, tends to pool according to power-law dynamics rather than disperse evenly — and right now there is still only one institution with the brand trust, Vitalik Buterin’s direct affiliation, ownership of ethereum.org and the @ethereum handle, and historical employment of roughly a quarter of active core protocol contributors. Subtraction has reduced the Foundation’s appetite to use that position. It has not yet produced a replacement for it.
The Treasury Is the Real Constraint
The philosophical debate matters less than the financial one underneath it. Van Epps is explicit that legitimacy is downstream of competency, and competency is downstream of resources — and the EF’s resources are shrinking on a defined schedule. The Foundation has spent down a significant portion of its ETH treasury over the past decade bootstrapping the ecosystem, and in June 2025 it adopted a formal glide path to cut annual spending from roughly 15% of treasury value down to a 5% endowment-style baseline by 2030.
That kind of disciplined drawdown is standard practice for any institution trying to ensure long-term solvency. But it collides directly with a second, less foreseeable event: the Client Incentive Program — a four-year initiative that funded the teams maintaining Ethereum’s client software through staking rewards — expired in April 2026 with no announced successor. Two funding mechanisms that ecosystem developers had built multi-year plans around have now both contracted or disappeared in the same calendar window.
Van Epps puts a number on what’s actually required to keep the lights on: approximately $30 million annually, spread across client teams, researchers, and coordination staff working across more than ten different client implementations. Against Ethereum’s market capitalization, or against the amount of value secured on the network, that figure is trivial. Against an EF treasury that is deliberately winding down its annual disbursements, it is no longer guaranteed.
Why a Funding Gap Becomes an Institutional Capacity Problem
The most important argument in Van Epps’ piece isn’t about dollars — it’s about what happens to people and knowledge when the dollars disappear. Ethereum’s ability to ship complex, security-critical protocol upgrades across a dozen independently maintained clients is not a static asset. It is built from specific engineers who have accumulated years of context about how the protocol actually works, where its fragile edges are, and how previous upgrades were coordinated.
That expertise doesn’t sit in a treasury report; it sits in people who can leave the ecosystem the moment funding becomes unreliable.
Van Epps’ core warning is about timing asymmetry: the damage from underfunding shows up 12 to 18 months after the funding actually disappears, by which point the contributors who left have already moved on and the institutional memory they carried has already eroded. He argues the industry is structurally bad at pricing this kind of risk — it looks survivable in the moment and becomes expensive only in hindsight, with looming technical challenges like quantum resistance and further scaling work sitting squarely in the crosshairs of whatever capacity gets lost.
A Foundation That Was Never Meant to Be Permanent
Van Epps frames the funding crisis as inseparable from a larger succession question, quoting Vitalik Buterin’s own recent acknowledgment that the EF “was not designed to be an eternal steward” — its original mandate, tied to the token sale documents, was completed back in 2022. If that’s true, then the Foundation’s declining capacity isn’t a malfunction; it’s the natural endpoint of a structure designed to phase itself out. The unresolved question Van Epps raises is who, or what, actually inherits that stewardship role, and whether any replacement mechanism currently exists with comparable legitimacy, neutrality, and resourcing.
He proposes three design principles for whatever comes next: explicit, accountable stewardship over Ethereum’s software, network, and asset as three distinct but interdependent resources; funding mechanisms that are neutral and scalable rather than dependent on a single treasury; and a renewed willingness to prioritize broad adoption rather than treating it as secondary to internal governance principles. None of these exist yet in a form the ecosystem has coalesced around.
A Skepticism That Extends Beyond One Essay
Van Epps is not a lone voice raising these concerns. His essay arrives alongside a broader wave of public skepticism about Ethereum’s direction — from prominent community figures questioning whether ETH the asset can capture the value that Ethereum the network continues to generate, to ongoing debate about whether the Foundation’s governance philosophy has kept pace with the scale of what it’s responsible for. The fact that this particular warning comes from someone who spent five years inside the institution, coordinating the very funding mechanisms now under strain, gives it a different weight than commentary from outside observers.
Van Epps’ own departure in April 2026 is itself part of a broader pattern. In recent months, the Ethereum Foundation has seen a notable wave of departures, with several experienced staff members and researchers leaving the organization — raising separate but related concerns about institutional knowledge loss at precisely the moment the Foundation is also reducing its financial capacity. The combination of fewer resources and fewer veteran staff compounds the risk Van Epps describes: it’s not just that funding is contracting, but that the people who best understand how to allocate scarce funding effectively are leaving alongside it.
Ethereum’s protocol layer has weathered funding uncertainty before. What Van Epps is describing is not a single crisis but a compounding one — a treasury drawdown, an expired incentive program, and an unresolved succession question landing in the same narrow window, with consequences that may not be fully visible until well after the window has closed.

Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of FTX who is currently serving a 25-year federal sentence for one of the largest fraud schemes in crypto history, has revealed plans for what comes after his release — and they involve launching a cryptocurrency token. In an interview with New York Magazine conducted from the federal prison in Lompoc, California, where he is incarcerated, Bankman-Fried said he intends to build a new token-based venture and predicted it would attract significant demand the moment it launches.
The comments arrive as Bankman-Fried continues pursuing legal avenues to overturn his conviction, including a formal pardon petition filed in June 2026 — even as he discusses post-release business plans with the kind of confidence that suggests he is treating his eventual freedom as a matter of when, not if.
The $50 Million Threshold for “Real Money”
Bankman-Fried’s framing of his future ambitions was characteristically blunt. Describing what it would take to rebuild meaningful wealth, he told a member of the prison staff:
“To make real money, you need to start with real money, you know, $50 million–$100 million, and then you can open a real business, and then you can truly succeed.”
The remark reveals a worldview that has remained largely unchanged since his conviction — one in which capital scale, rather than caution or rehabilitation, remains the primary variable in his calculation of future success. He told New York Magazine he plans to launch his own token once released, expressing confidence that the project would generate substantial demand essentially on the strength of his name and reputation alone.
New York Magazine was careful to note an important caveat: it remains unclear whether Bankman-Fried was being serious or speaking with the irony that characterizes much of his commentary about prison life. The publication acknowledged it could not rule out either interpretation — a useful reminder that SBF’s public statements since his conviction have frequently blurred the line between genuine intent and performative detachment from consequences.
Still Fighting the Conviction
Bankman-Fried’s token ambitions are unfolding alongside continued legal efforts to escape the 25-year sentence a federal court handed down in March 2024 for orchestrating fraud that resulted in the loss of more than $8 billion in customer funds. According to the New York Magazine report, his parents have hired two Republican lobbyists specifically tasked with advancing the case for a presidential pardon — an effort that has not yet produced results but reflects a sustained, well-resourced campaign rather than a token legal formality.
This is not Bankman-Fried’s first prison interview. In an earlier conversation, he described significant weight loss and explained that he had been bartering goods like rice and mackerel, which function as informal currency within the correctional facility — a detail that underscores the gap between his stated ambitions and his current daily reality.
Life Inside Lompoc
The portrait of Bankman-Fried’s daily routine that emerges from the interview is notably mundane. Asked to describe his days behind bars, he offered a characteristically flat response: “Boring, nothing unusual.” He continues taking prescribed medication for ADHD and depression and maintains the vegan diet he kept before his incarceration — a choice that means he does not eat in the prison cafeteria with other inmates. Instead, he purchases food through the facility’s commissary system, building his diet primarily around rice and dried roasted beans.
He has also acquired a SCORE 7T tablet — a device issued to federal inmates under the Secure Commitment to Offender Re-entry and Enablement program, which allows access to approved entertainment including movies, television, and games. Among the games available, Bankman-Fried specifically mentioned Shattered Pixel Dungeon as one he plays. He is permitted one or two phone calls per week, each capped at 15 minutes — a constraint that shapes how he is able to communicate with journalists and, presumably, with the lobbyists working on his behalf.
A Critique of the System That Holds Him
During his calls with the press, Bankman-Fried has used the limited time available to criticize the structure of the U.S. correctional system itself, arguing that extended decades-long sentences that remove people from society are fundamentally counterproductive rather than rehabilitative.
He also offered an unusual articulation of what he fears most about his current circumstances — not violence, not the loss of freedom in the abstract, but what he described as the risk of his own mind narrowing toward triviality, gradually losing the breadth of thought that once made him useful as a person. To illustrate the point, he used an analogy involving an AI model trained exclusively on the animated series SpongeBob SquarePants, suggesting that such a system would eventually lose access to any reasoning or ideas beyond the narrow patterns embedded in that single source material — and that prolonged isolation could do something similar to a human mind.
That same allegory appears in a book Bankman-Fried has been writing, titled “Manfred,” which he began before his incarceration. The manuscript is described as a memoir-style reflection on his life, his sense of purpose, and the business decisions that led to FTX’s collapse.
What the Pattern Actually Suggests
Taken together, the interview paints a picture of a man whose core instincts — confidence in his own judgment, comfort with large abstract capital figures, and an apparent belief that reputation alone can generate market demand — remain fundamentally unchanged by conviction or incarceration. Whether the token comments were sincere planning or prison-interview theater, the fact that Bankman-Fried is publicly discussing a return to crypto markets at all, while simultaneously lobbying for a pardon from a 25-year sentence tied to an $8 billion fraud, will likely generate exactly the kind of attention he appears to be courting.
For a crypto industry that has spent years working to distance itself from the FTX collapse and rebuild institutional trust, the prospect of Bankman-Fried re-entering the market — even hypothetically — is a reminder of how recently the industry’s most damaging scandal actually occurred, and how unresolved its central figure’s accountability remains.

FTXの創設者であり、暗号史上最大の詐欺スキームの一つで25年の連邦刑に服しているサム・バンクマン-フリードが、出所後の計画を明らかにした。それは暗号通貨トークンの立ち上げを含んでいる。カリフォルニア州ロンポックの連邦刑務所からのニューヨーク・マガジンとのインタビューで、バンクマン-フリードは新しいトークンベースのベンチャーを立ち上げる意向を示し、ローンチの瞬間にかなりの需要を集めると予測した。

One of the most credible voices to ever work inside the Ethereum Foundation just published the most direct warning the organization has received from one of its own. Trent van Epps, who spent five years at the EF coordinating core development and protocol funding before leaving in April 2026, wrote that Ethereum’s core infrastructure faces a slow-burning funding crisis that could fully materialize within 3 to 9 months — and that the structural causes go far deeper than a temporary budget gap.
The warning lands at a moment when ETH itself is already under scrutiny. Bankless co-founder David Hoffman recently sold his entire ETH position, arguing that network growth and asset appreciation have decoupled. Van Epps’ essay adds an institutional dimension to that skepticism — suggesting that even Ethereum’s technical foundation, the part of the ecosystem least exposed to speculative sentiment, is running out of runway.
What “Subtraction” Actually Means — and Why It’s Backfiring
Van Epps centers his analysis on a philosophy the Ethereum Foundation has openly embraced for seven years, internally called “Subtraction.” The idea, first articulated in 2019 and restated in the EF’s March 2026 Mandate, is that the Foundation should deliberately shrink its relative influence over time — pushing value creation out into the broader ecosystem rather than accumulating it internally.
As a governance principle, Subtraction has succeeded in one specific way: it has convinced the community that the EF does not want to be Ethereum’s permanent center of gravity. But Van Epps argues it has failed to specify what happens to the functions the Foundation currently performs once it steps back.
Legitimacy, he writes, tends to pool according to power-law dynamics rather than disperse evenly — and right now there is still only one institution with the brand trust, Vitalik Buterin’s direct affiliation, ownership of ethereum.org and the @ethereum handle, and historical employment of roughly a quarter of active core protocol contributors. Subtraction has reduced the Foundation’s appetite to use that position. It has not yet produced a replacement for it.
The Treasury Is the Real Constraint
The philosophical debate matters less than the financial one underneath it. Van Epps is explicit that legitimacy is downstream of competency, and competency is downstream of resources — and the EF’s resources are shrinking on a defined schedule. The Foundation has spent down a significant portion of its ETH treasury over the past decade bootstrapping the ecosystem, and in June 2025 it adopted a formal glide path to cut annual spending from roughly 15% of treasury value down to a 5% endowment-style baseline by 2030.
That kind of disciplined drawdown is standard practice for any institution trying to ensure long-term solvency. But it collides directly with a second, less foreseeable event: the Client Incentive Program — a four-year initiative that funded the teams maintaining Ethereum’s client software through staking rewards — expired in April 2026 with no announced successor. Two funding mechanisms that ecosystem developers had built multi-year plans around have now both contracted or disappeared in the same calendar window.
Van Epps puts a number on what’s actually required to keep the lights on: approximately $30 million annually, spread across client teams, researchers, and coordination staff working across more than ten different client implementations. Against Ethereum’s market capitalization, or against the amount of value secured on the network, that figure is trivial. Against an EF treasury that is deliberately winding down its annual disbursements, it is no longer guaranteed.
Why a Funding Gap Becomes an Institutional Capacity Problem
The most important argument in Van Epps’ piece isn’t about dollars — it’s about what happens to people and knowledge when the dollars disappear. Ethereum’s ability to ship complex, security-critical protocol upgrades across a dozen independently maintained clients is not a static asset. It is built from specific engineers who have accumulated years of context about how the protocol actually works, where its fragile edges are, and how previous upgrades were coordinated.
That expertise doesn’t sit in a treasury report; it sits in people who can leave the ecosystem the moment funding becomes unreliable.
Van Epps’ core warning is about timing asymmetry: the damage from underfunding shows up 12 to 18 months after the funding actually disappears, by which point the contributors who left have already moved on and the institutional memory they carried has already eroded. He argues the industry is structurally bad at pricing this kind of risk — it looks survivable in the moment and becomes expensive only in hindsight, with looming technical challenges like quantum resistance and further scaling work sitting squarely in the crosshairs of whatever capacity gets lost.
A Foundation That Was Never Meant to Be Permanent
Van Epps frames the funding crisis as inseparable from a larger succession question, quoting Vitalik Buterin’s own recent acknowledgment that the EF “was not designed to be an eternal steward” — its original mandate, tied to the token sale documents, was completed back in 2022. If that’s true, then the Foundation’s declining capacity isn’t a malfunction; it’s the natural endpoint of a structure designed to phase itself out. The unresolved question Van Epps raises is who, or what, actually inherits that stewardship role, and whether any replacement mechanism currently exists with comparable legitimacy, neutrality, and resourcing.
He proposes three design principles for whatever comes next: explicit, accountable stewardship over Ethereum’s software, network, and asset as three distinct but interdependent resources; funding mechanisms that are neutral and scalable rather than dependent on a single treasury; and a renewed willingness to prioritize broad adoption rather than treating it as secondary to internal governance principles. None of these exist yet in a form the ecosystem has coalesced around.
A Skepticism That Extends Beyond One Essay
Van Epps is not a lone voice raising these concerns. His essay arrives alongside a broader wave of public skepticism about Ethereum’s direction — from prominent community figures questioning whether ETH the asset can capture the value that Ethereum the network continues to generate, to ongoing debate about whether the Foundation’s governance philosophy has kept pace with the scale of what it’s responsible for. The fact that this particular warning comes from someone who spent five years inside the institution, coordinating the very funding mechanisms now under strain, gives it a different weight than commentary from outside observers.
Van Epps’ own departure in April 2026 is itself part of a broader pattern. In recent months, the Ethereum Foundation has seen a notable wave of departures, with several experienced staff members and researchers leaving the organization — raising separate but related concerns about institutional knowledge loss at precisely the moment the Foundation is also reducing its financial capacity. The combination of fewer resources and fewer veteran staff compounds the risk Van Epps describes: it’s not just that funding is contracting, but that the people who best understand how to allocate scarce funding effectively are leaving alongside it.
Ethereum’s protocol layer has weathered funding uncertainty before. What Van Epps is describing is not a single crisis but a compounding one — a treasury drawdown, an expired incentive program, and an unresolved succession question landing in the same narrow window, with consequences that may not be fully visible until well after the window has closed.

正式に発表されました。オープンネットワークのネイティブトークンがリネームされました。TONは今やGRAMです — 同じブロックチェーン、同じネットワーク、同じコミュニティ、新しい名前、新しいティッカー、新しいロゴです。リブランドはエコシステムのウォレット全体でライブになっており、主要な取引所も自分たちのタイムラインで移行を進めています。ホルダーにとって最も重要なことは、事前に理解しておくべき点は、あなたからのアクションは一切必要ないということです。
「全てのTON保有分は自動的に1:1でGRAMに変換されます。スワップもマイグレーションも必要なく、ホルダーからのアクションは一切不要です」とTONブロックチェーンチームがXで確認しました。

公式発表です。オープンネットワークのネイティブトークンが改名されました。TONは今やGRAMです — 同じブロックチェーン、同じネットワーク、同じコミュニティ、新しい名前、新しいティッカー、新しいロゴです。リブランドはエコシステムのウォレット全体でライブになっており、主要な取引所はそれぞれのタイムラインで移行を進めています。ホルダーにとって最も重要なのは、事前に理解しておくべきことは、あなたからのアクションは必要ないということです。
「すべてのTON保有分は自動的に1:1でGRAMに変換される。スワップも移行も不要、ホルダーからのアクションは必要ない」とTONブロックチェーンチームがXで確認した。

欧州連合の暗号規制移行は7月1日に終了します — そして数字は厳しい物語を語っています。2024年にEU全体で登録された3,000以上の暗号企業のうち、2026年5月時点でMiCAの認可を受けたのはわずか194社です。Wu BlockchainがESMAのデータを引用して報告しています。
つまり、既存の欧州暗号業界の約75%が数週間以内に運営資格を失う危険に直面しています。7月1日以降、無許可のプラットフォームに何が起こるのか — そしてそれに依存するユーザーにとって — これは今、欧州の暗号規制における最も緊急の質問です。

欧州連合の暗号規制の移行が7月1日に終了します — 数字は厳しい現実を物語っています。2024年にEU全体で登録された3,000以上の暗号企業のうち、2026年5月現在でMiCAの認可を取得したのはわずか194社です。これはWu BlockchainがESMAのデータを引用して報告した内容です。
つまり、既存の欧州暗号業界の約75%は、数週間以内に運営資格を失う可能性があります。7月1日以降、無許可のプラットフォームとそれに依存するユーザーに何が起こるのか — これが今、欧州の暗号規制における最も緊急の問いです。

Anthropicが公開した最強のAIモデルがリリースされてから3日後、米国政府がそれらの取り下げを命じた。
6月12日、商務省は輸出管理指令を発行し、Anthropicに対してClaude Fable 5およびClaude Mythos 5へのアクセスをすべての外国人に対して停止するよう指示した — 米国内外にいる外国人を問わず、Anthropicで働く外国人従業員も含まれる。これは、公に展開された最前線のAIモデルに対する政府による初の強制的取り下げのようだ。

Anthropicがこれまで公開した中で最も高性能なAIモデルを発表してから3日後、米国政府がこれらのモデルを取り下げるよう命じた。
6月12日、商務省は輸出管理指令を発表し、Anthropicに対してClaude Fable 5およびClaude Mythos 5へのアクセスを一時停止するよう指示した。これは、米国国内外にいる外国人国家の従業員を含む、すべての外国人に対して適用される。この措置は、公開された最前線のAIモデルに対する初めての政府による強制的な取り下げのようだ。

AiX3がグローバルコネクト2026をローンチ
APAC、MENA、EMEA地域のAI、信頼、ヘルスケア革新リーダーを集めたグローバルバーチャルシンポジウム || 2026年7月15日 || 12:00 PM – 4:30 PM GST
ドバイ、UAE – 2026年6月
ヘルスケア業界は何年もAIについて話してきましたが、今の違いはその会話が会議室を出て、臨床ワークフロー、資金調達ラウンド、国家デジタルヘルス戦略に移行したことです。2026年7月15日、AiX3はAPAC、MENA、EMEA地域でこの変革を実際に推進している人々をつなぐ国際バーチャルシンポジウム、AiX3グローバルコネクト2026のローンチでそのシフトに焦点を当てます。

AiX3がGlobal Connect 2026を開始
AI、信頼、ヘルスケアイノベーションのリーダーをAPAC、MENA、EMEA全域でつなぐグローバルバーチャルシンポジウム || 2026年7月15日 || 12:00 PM – 4:30 PM GST
ドバイ、UAE – 2026年6月
ヘルスケア業界は何年もAIについて話してきました。今の違いは、その会話が会議室から臨床ワークフロー、資金調達ラウンド、そして国家的なデジタルヘルス戦略に移ったことです。2026年7月15日、AiX3はAPAC、MENA、EMEA全域でこの変革を実際に推進している人々をつなぐ国際的なバーチャルシンポジウム、AiX3 Global Connect 2026を開始し、その変化を鮮明に浮き彫りにします。

RAISEサミット、2026年7月8日–9日にルーヴルのカロセルで再び開催
9000人のグローバルリーダーがパリに集結、AIが実行の時代に突入
パリ、6月12日 – 人工知能が実験段階から経済のあらゆるセクターでの大規模展開へと移行する中、RAISEサミットは2026年7月8日–9日にルーヴルのカロセルで開催され、9000人のグローバルリーダーが業界にとっての重要な瞬間に集結します。CxOサミットとMACHINAサミットの立ち上げとともに、参加者の80%以上がCレベルであるRAISEは、AI戦略、投資、政策、展開が交差する世界で最も影響力のあるフォーラムの一つとなっています。

RAISEサミットが2026年7月8日～9日にルーヴルのカルーセルで開催される
AIの実行時代に突入する中、9,000人のグローバルリーダーがパリに集結
パリ、6月12日 – 人工知能が実験段階から経済のあらゆる分野での大規模展開へと移行する中、RAISEサミットは2026年7月8日～9日にルーヴルのカルーセルで再び開催され、CxOサミットおよびMACHINAサミットの立ち上げとともに業界の重要な瞬間に9,000人のグローバルリーダーを集結させます。参加者の80%以上がCレベルであるRAISEは、AI戦略、投資、政策、展開が交差する世界で最も影響力のあるフォーラムの一つとなっています。