Subscribe to Bankless or sign in
1️⃣ 
Roman Storm on Trial
Prosecutors laid out their arguments against 
Tornado Cash developer Roman Storm this week in a New York courtroom. Storm faces charges of money laundering, conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money transmitter, and conspiracy to violate US sanctions. Early witnesses for the prosecution seemed to lack some basic understanding of how money is generally moved by crypto criminals and how funds are tracked.
The defense is expected to rest their case early next week. In February, Storm's co-founder Alexey Pertsev was sentenced to 64 months in prison by a Dutch court.
I am very concerned that the courts, these AUSA's prosecuting crypto crime, and the IRS do not seem to understand the difference between using LIFO to:
— Tay 💖 (@tayvano_) July 24, 2025
(1) establish the amount of assets that flowed through a very limited set of KNOWN parties and a very limited set of their… pic.twitter.com/y8eQHmbjAU
2️⃣ DOJ's Next Target?
While Storm's trial is still ongoing, some have criticized the silence of early Tornado Cash backer Dragonfly Capital throughout the process. It appears that the influential crypto VC firm is under the eye of the DOJ themselves with prosecutors detailing that they had not ruled out charges against the firm's founder 
Tom Schmidt and a number of other partners at the firm who had been involved in the deal.
"We believe deeply in Americans’ right to privacy, and the lack of it remains one of crypto’s largest unsolved problems. We therefore stand by our investment," Dragonfly managing partner 
Haseeb Qureshi said on Twitter.
Dragonfly invested into PepperSec, Inc., the developers of Tornado Cash, in August of 2020. We made this investment because we believe in the importance of open-source privacy-preserving technology. Prior to our investment, we obtained an outside legal opinion that confirmed that…
— Haseeb ＞|＜ (@hosseeb) July 25, 2025
3️⃣ ETH Treasury Level-Up
While ETH treasury operators are still early in their life cycles, the firms continued to make big moves this week, with BitMine effectively doubling its funds with its latest buy to over $2.1B worth of ETH. SharpLink continues to look like the premiere venue with the firm gaining a new CEO from BlackRock's Digital Asset team this week, a move which did not manage to reverse the firm's stock slide. SBET fell 31% this week as ETH's breakout appeared to stall. This week's major entrant was The Ether Machine, which comes online with $1.5B in committed capital to buy more ETH.
We are The Ether Machine.
— The Ether Machine (@TheEtherMachine) July 21, 2025
Today we launch the largest public vehicle ever built to own and manage ETH with over $1.5B in committed capital.
This is Ethereum’s institutional chapter.
Not passive. Not synthetic. Not outsourced.
⬇️
4️⃣ Trump Media's 
Bitcoin Strategy
Earlier this week, we laid out the Trump Family's investments in the crypto space over the past couple years, as the President has completely shook up his fortune via crypto investments. This week, Trump Media announced that it now holds the majority of its liquid holdings in BTC, some $2 billion in assets.
JUST IN: Trump Media is now the fifth largest corporate Bitcoin treasury with 18,430 Bitcoin pic.twitter.com/cxWuOHpcu0
— Bitcoin Archive (@BTC_Archive) July 21, 2025
5️⃣ 
Ethereum Pumps the Gas
Ethereum took a big gulp of gas this week as it boosted its block gas limit from 36 million to 45 million units (a 25% jump) at block 22,968,004. This means more transactions per block, less congestion, and potentially lower fees. It didn’t need a hard fork—validators phased it in themselves. Next up: a short‑term target of 60 million and long‑term dreams of 150 million gas per block via the “Fusaka” upgrade.
