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Listing an altcoin traps exchanges on ‘forever hamster wheel’ — River CEO
When a cryptocurrency exchange lists its first altcoin, it sets itself up for an endless cycle of launching memecoins, warns a Bitcoin-only institution executive.
“The minute an exchange adds one non-Bitcoin token, they are signing up to be on the forever hamster wheel of memecoins,” River Financial CEO Alex Leishman said in a March 29 X post. “It makes no sense to list ETH if you don’t list the tokens issued on ETH, and the same goes for Solana,” Leishman said.
River has no interest in building a “successful crypto casino”
Leishman said while there are many “successful crypto casinos,” he has no interest in building one. River Financial is a Bitcoin-only financial institution focusing on buying and selling Bitcoin (BTC). Several companies have opted for the Bitcoin-only approach, including Swan Bitcoin, Bull Bitcoin, and decentralized exchange Bisq.
Leishman claimed that multi-asset trading platforms prioritize short-term speculation over wealth accumulation:
“The casino business model is built around maximal extraction from customers, and the Bitcoin-only model is focused on helping people build long-term wealth.”
Critics have voiced this point before, even during the memecoin uptrend in early 2024. In April 2024, A16z chief technology officer Eddy Lazzarin said that memecoins hamper the long-term vision of crypto that has kept so many of the original builders in the space.
“At best, it looks like a risky casino,” Lazzarin said.
The memecoin market cap is down 27.94% over the past 12 months. Source: CoinMarketCap
The overall memecoin market cap has taken a significant downturn since the beginning of 2025. Since Jan. 1, the memecoin market cap has slumped almost 49% to $48.49 billion at the time of publication, according to CoinMarketCap data.
However, while altcoins have historically been more volatile than Bitcoin, offering them alongside Bitcoin has been a lucrative move for crypto exchanges and brokers.
Related: Waiting for altcoin season? Data suggests it’s already here
On Feb. 12, Robinhood, which offers several cryptocurrencies to its customers, reported a 700% year-over-year surge in Q4 2024 cryptocurrency revenue.
Some traders seem to interpret a memecoin listing on an exchange as validation of its credibility. Among the 15 memecoins listed by crypto exchange Binance in 2024, 12 saw significant increases in value after going live on the exchange, pseudonymous onchain analyst Ai_9684xtpa said in November.
CoinGecko founder Bobby Ong recently speculated that the memecoin market might be headed toward an “extreme case of power law,” where 99.99% fail and a few rise to the top and endure.
Magazine: Arbitrum co-founder skeptical of move to based and native rollups: Steven Goldfeder
Cryptocurrency exchange OKX reportedly hired former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo to advise it over the federal probe that resulted in the firm pleading guilty to several violations and agreeing to pay $505 million in fines and penalties. Cuomo, a New York-registered attorney, advised OKX on legal issues stemming from the probe sometime after August 2021 when he resigned as New York overnor, Bloomberg reported on April 2, citing people familiar with the matter. “He spoke with company executives regularly and counseled them on how to respond to the criminal investigation,” Bloomberg said. The Seychelles-based firm pled guilty to operating an unlicensed money-transmitting business in violation of US Anti-Money Laundering laws on Feb. 24 and agreed to pay $84 million worth of penalties while forfeiting $421 million worth of fees earned from mostly institutional clients. The breaches occurred from 2018 to 2024 despite OKX having an official policy preventing US persons from transacting on its crypto exchange since 2017, the Department of Justice noted at the time. A spokesperson for Cuomo, Rich Azzopardi, told Bloomberg that Cuomo has been providing private legal services representing individuals and corporations on a variety of matters since resigning as New York governor. “He has not represented clients before a New York city or state agency and routinely recommends former colleagues for positions,” Azzopardi added. OKX reportedly wasn’t willing to comment on its relationships with outside firms. Cuomo, who is now running for mayor of New York City, also advised OKX to appoint his friend US Attorney Linda Lacewell to OKX’s board of directors, Bloomberg said. Lacewell, a former superintendent of the New York Department of Financial Services, was added to the board in 2024 and was named OKX’s new chief legal officer on April 1, according to a recent company statement. Source: Linda Lacewell Related: New York bill aims to protect crypto investors from memecoin rug pulls After the investigation concluded, OKX said it would seek out a compliance consultant to remedy the issues stemming from the federal probe and bolster its regulatory compliance program. “Our vision is to make OKX the gold standard of global compliance at scale across different markets and their respective regulatory bodies,” OKX CEO Star Xu said in a Feb. 24 X post. Magazine: Financial nihilism in crypto is over — It’s time to dream big again Sentient, an artificial intelligence development platform backed by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, has released an open-source AI search framework that it says outperforms leading closed-source competitors. The company announced the public release of Open Deep Search (ODS) on April 2, describing it as a high-performance, developer-friendly alternative to platforms like Perplexity AI and OpenAI’s GPT-4o. Sentient’s ODS aims to empower developers with open-source “Loyal AI” models, which Sentient says preserve the original intent of their developers. The firm’s fingerprinting technology allows developers to protect intellectual property while maintaining model openness — aiming to solve the biggest issue of open-source AI, the challenges of monetizing a model without centralization. “AI should belong to the community, not controlled by closed-source corporations,” according to Himanshu Tyagi, co-founder of Sentient and professor at the Indian Institute of Science. “We’re building, monetizing and delivering open-source AI with a key principle in mind: singularity in intelligence but plurality in use cases,” he added. ”Open-source development ensures performance and user control that closed systems simply cannot match.” Related: Crypto trader turns $2K PEPE into $43M, sells for $10M profit Sentient’s ODS scored 75.3% accuracy on the “Frames” benchmark, which measures factuality, retrieval and reasoning capabilities, used to answer complex “multi-hop questions” that require the integration of multiple sources. ODS surpassed OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4o Search Preview’s 50.5% and the Perplexity Sonar Reasoning Pro, which scored 44.4%. To prevent potential bias, Sentient ensured that its researchers didn’t have access to the Frames testing sets during the benchmarking process. Dobby NFT mint. Source: Sentient “Independent verification is only needed for closed-source solutions because open-source solutions have no incentive to falsely report the evaluations,” Tyagi said, adding: “Anyone with a computer can run our code, reproduce our results, and verify whether it is correct or not. The numbers reported can be reproduced using the repo’s eval section by anyone and thus are globally verifiable.” The ODS release follows growing interest in Sentient’s platform. The firm said it amassed more than 1.8 million waitlist registrations in the lead-up to the launch. Related: $1T stablecoin supply could drive next crypto rally — CoinFund’s Pakman The release of Sentient’s new open-source search framework comes amid a tipping point for open-source AI development. “We’re witnessing a significant shift as open-source AI solutions increasingly challenge closed-source dominance,” Tyagi said. “Examples such as DeepSeek’s advancements in reasoning, Manus’s innovations with agents, and now our own contributions to ODS with advanced AI search frameworks highlight this shift,” he added. “Open-source models can easily outperform closed-source giants with the right architecture,” said Sewoong Oh, Sentient’s lead researcher and professor at the University of Washington. “The results of these benchmarks validate our mission to create an open ecosystem that benefits all AI builders and users.” The launch also builds on Sentient’s earlier momentum. In February, the firm completed one of the largest NFT minting campaigns to date, with more than 650,000 participants gaining fractional ownership of its AI models. Magazine: ‘Chernobyl’ needed to wake people to AI risks, Studio Ghibli memes: AI Eye Bitcoin (BTC) investors who bought BTC in 2020 or later are still waiting for higher prices, new research says. In findings published on X on April 1, onchain analytics firm Glassnode revealed that $110,000 was not high enough to make many hodlers sell. Bitcoiners who entered the market between three and five years ago have retained their holdings despite significant BTC price upside. According to Glassnode, this investor cohort, with a cost basis between the 2020 lows of $3,600 and the 2021 highs of $69,000, is still hodling. “Although the share of wealth held by investors who bought $BTC 3–5 years ago has declined by 3 percentage points since its November 2024 peak, it remains at historically elevated levels,” it said. “This suggests that the majority of investors who entered between 2020 and 2022 are still holding.” Bitcoin Realized Cap HODL Waves data. Source: Glassnode An accompanying chart shows data from the Realized Cap HODL Waves metric, which splits the BTC supply into sections based on when each coin last moved onchain. Using this, Glassnode is able to draw a distinction between the 2020-22 buyers and those who came immediately before them. “In contrast, over two-thirds of those who had bought $BTC 5–7 years ago exited their positions by the December 2024 peak,” it reveals, reflecting their lower cost basis. As Cointelegraph reported, more recent buyers, who form the more speculative investor cohort known as short-term holders (STHs), have proven much more sensitive to recent BTC price volatility. Related: Bitcoin sellers ‘dry up’ as weekly exchange inflows near 2-year low Episodes of panic selling have occurred throughout the past six months as BTC/USD hit new record highs and then fell by up to 30%. Continuing, Glassnode said that current STH participation does not suggest a speculative frenzy — something common to previous BTC price cycle tops. “Short-Term Holders currently hold around 40% of Bitcoin’s network wealth, after peaking near 50% earlier in 2025,” it said, alongside Realized Cap HODL Waves data on March 31. “This remains significantly below prior cycle tops, where new investor wealth peaked at 70–90%, suggesting a more tempered and distributed bull market so far.” Bitcoin Realized Cap HODL Waves. Source: Glassnode This article does not contain investment advice or recommendations. Every investment and trading move involves risk, and readers should conduct their own research when making a decision. Arthur Hayes, Murad’s Prediction For Meme Coins, AI & DeFi Coins For 2025 Expert Sees Bitcoin Dipping To $50K While Bullish Signs Persist Aptos Leverages Chainlink To Enhance Scalability and Data Access Bitcoin Could Rally to $80,000 on the Eve of US Elections Sonic Now ‘Golden Standard’ of Layer-2s After Scaling Transactions to 16,000+ per Second, Says Andre Cronje Crypto’s Big Trump Gamble Is Risky Institutional Investors Go All In on Crypto as 57% Plan to Boost Allocations as Bull Run Heats Up, Sygnum Survey Reveals Ripple-SEC Case Ends, But These 3 Rivals Could Jump 500x
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Cuomo also influenced OKX to make executive appointments: Bloomberg
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Sentient’s ODS outperforms ChatGPT, Perplexity
A turning point for open-source AI
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Glassnode: 2020 Bitcoin buyers “still holding”
Speculators stay cool at BTC price highs
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