⚖️ Code is law

This is not a happy story. But I can’t get it out of my head.

Earlier this month, it was reported that 21-year-old Alabama resident Berman Nowlin — convicted of wire fraud and money laundering charges over an NFT rug pull in 2022 — had died by suicide.

A district court in Florida had ruled him guilty only three weeks earlier. He was due for sentencing later in January and faced a maximum sentence of five years in prison.

The rug pull in question referred to a short-lived Bored Apes-inspired project Undead Apes Society, which included three NFT collections released over two months.

Nowlin was described as the developer who coded the smart contracts. 

A second individual, Devin Rhoden, managed the art model engine for the NFTs. Rhoden is a 23-year-old senior airman in the US Air Force who worked as a cyber analyst.

Here’s the timeline as presented in court filings:

March 2022: 2,500 Undead Apes NFTs were minted on Solana for 0.05 SOL each (~$10,000 at the time). UndeadApes were “unique Apes with over 60 hand-drawn traits on the Solana blockchain. Ready to take on the Metaverse.”

Later in March 2022: 750 Undead Lady Apes were minted on Solana for 0.75 SOL each (~$53,400). These had supposed DeFi functions — stakers would earn up to 6x, 75% of royalties would go back into the liquidity pool, with the rest going toward paying the team.

April 2022: Floor prices for the initial Undead Apes collections reached 3.6 SOL (~$400) and 6 SOL ($660), respectively. In terms of SOL, that's 72x and 8x on their initial mint prices.

Later in April 2022: A third mint was announced for Undead Tombstones, featuring a collaboration with Stoned Ape Crew, an unaffiliated project, which allegedly drove up mint prices.

Tombstones were said to come with additional features for existing Undead Apes holders that could generate additional return on investment.

Two hours later: The Stoned Ape Crew denies any partnership or involvement with Undead Apes Society. The Undead Apes team abandons the mint shortly after — taking the proceeds — and floor prices for all related NFTs immediately crash 85%. 

Discord members then received a message from Rhoden in the Undead Apes Society chat saying, “Yall are dumb as fuck.”

Authorities traced earnings from the rug pull amounting to $161,548, which had been cashed out into US dollars and split about evenly between the bank accounts of Nowlin and Rhoden.

Going by the evidence supplied by the prosecutors, there appeared to be a plan to rug the entire time. The Feds were initially tipped off by another Air Force member who lost money in the scheme.

Still, two things are haunting me. The first thing is the relatively low amount of money extracted from the rug pull. 

Perhaps I’m desensitized by much larger fraud cases over the years, but it was still enough for Rhoden to receive five years probation after pleading guilty, and his testimony is said to have led to the conviction of Nowlin, now deceased. 

The other is that Nowlin had been diagnosed with autism. His family described him as above-average when it came to intelligence but he had the emotional maturity of a 14-year-old. He reportedly taught himself to code and spent most of his time online, playing video games and chatting in Discords.

There is so much about crypto that is larger than life — often larger than any life we could ever imagine. But the Undead Apes rug pull wasn’t any of that. 

People, of course, lost money very quickly. Who knows what would have happened had the team actually followed through on their promises. More than likely, they would have still lost money.

Usually, reading about rug pulls comes with some schadenfreude. Perps get caught under all sorts of silly circumstances, which makes for compelling crime stories.

Fraud is bad and bad actors should be caught. That’s what happened with the Undead Apes rug pull. Woefully, though, it now serves as a dark reminder that while the money and assets are silly and digital, the stories are painfully real.

— David

• BTC is down 3% in the past day and is now working on a recovery from Wednesday’s 2025 low of $92,704. Current price: $92,958.

• AI agent coins are correcting: VIRTUALS and AI16Z have dropped by 30% in the past week. 

• Both are still up by 94% and 169% respectively over the past month.

• Global stablecoin supplies are at another all-time high past $206 billion, up by about $3 billion in the past week per DeFiLlama.

• USDC is growing particularly fast, minting over $9 billion since the start of December.

☀️ Land of the rising SOL

ICYMI, Sol Strategies announced that it was investing CAD $25 million ($17.4 million) in the Solana ecosystem earlier this week. 

CEO Leah Wald told me ahead of the new year that Sol Strategies was focused on building up the “next level” of its business strategy. 

Obviously, given Sol’s focus, the firm is gonna be bullish on the ecosystem, but Wald noted how pleasantly surprised she was at the amount of developer activity and overall enthusiasm for Solana right now. 

She is skeptical, however, about a solana ETF being approved in the US “anytime soon.”

“I think there's quite a while until a SOL ETF gets approved. During that time, as a former issuer, I know that you have a long time where you're working with the staff and you're working on education. That gives [potential issuers] a year…to educate the staff and make sure that everybody's up to speed on what you know SOL actually is, and the merits and benefits, and provide…that additional timeline for maturity,” she explained. 

But she does think that Canada is likely to approve a SOL ETF from 3iQ before we see a slew of US products because the Canadian issuer is “always ahead of the US.”

Out of curiosity, and given Wald’s experience, I pushed her on why she thinks a potentially crypto-friendly regulator wouldn’t look to get an ETF that holds SOL out the door. She told me part of her reasoning was exactly because of the changing leadership at the SEC. 

If the new SEC chair “came in and said, ‘okay, all crypto ETFs are approved overnight,’ I think that that's dangerous, actually,” she explained. It would be better to see a regulator who’s willing to put in the work to understand the differences between something like Solana and Ripple and speak to potential issuers prior to just greenlighting ETFs.

I guess we’ll have to make do with the crypto ETFs we have at home.

— Katherine

• The FTX estate said hold your horses, the FTX EU sale to Backpack isn’t a done deal.

• Terraform Labs co-founder Do Kwon’s trial is set for early 2026 after he was extradited to the US. 

• Buying bitcoin is about to be cool, Fidelity said in a new report. It expects central banks and countries to look into snapping up some bitcoin this year.

• Finnish police seized watches worth $2.6 million from Hex founder Richard Heart. 

• Bhutan’s special administration region plans to hold bitcoin, ether and BNB as part of its strategic reserves.

Q: What are you excited about in crypto this year?

The million-dollar question. 

Keeping my financial nerdiness in mind, I’m going to say crypto firms going public. Like I’ve written about before, I’m a sucker for some public documents that give a look behind the curtain of companies. 

I’m also interested in seeing what themes and narratives pop up this year. And, perhaps importantly, what narratives are deemed worthy of investments.

Honestly, there’s so much to be excited about, it’s hard to narrow it down. I'm not complaining though, it’s a good spot to be in.

— Katherine

Excited might be the wrong word, but I’m with the rest of crypto in waiting for whatever Trump does with bitcoin and crypto.

It’s increasingly feeling like the crescendo of the bull market is tied to whatever that might be, beyond World Liberty Financial. 

Could it be underwhelming? Absolutely. Will it dictate the next few years for crypto? Most probably.

Aside from that, bring on the mainnet launches for rival layer-1s Monad and Berachain, with the latter destined to make crypto fun again, at least in the short-to-mid term.

— David