Boil blockchains down to their base elements and you’ll find just one key ingredient: history.

We’re conditioned, though, to only care about what’s happening next. The next token launch, exchange listing, funding round or hot new primitive.

It’s hokey, but with all that’s happening, it’s worth spending some time this weekend mulling over how crypto has changed our collective history. Onwards!

🔗 Check the chain

At face value, President Trump is well on his way to giving crypto what it wants. 

A US government strategic crypto reserve. Or maybe it’s a stockpile. Is there a difference?

Anyone interested in wading into that debate is well covered on X and so on. 

Same goes for those keen to moralize the implications of US government agencies accumulating coins other than bitcoin — perhaps even ones backed by funds and entities controlled by appointed officials like venture capitalist David Sacks.

I’m taking a different path. Let’s put aside the US strategic stockpile. It doesn’t exist, yet.

What does verifiably exist onchain is the growing crypto portfolio of World Liberty Fi, the DeFi project endorsed by the Trump family. 

And because this is crypto — and it's on Ethereum — we know exactly what it’s doing at all times, and whether it’s underwater or not.

I touched on this earlier this week, but World Liberty Fi has bought more crypto since Trump’s inauguration on Monday. 

The chart below treats World Liberty Fi’s stockpile as a fund. Its performance is plotted by the blue line.

When the blue line goes into the red, World Liberty Fi’s accumulated portfolio is underwater. It’s otherwise ahead on its purchased crypto to date when it's in the green area. 

The portfolio is ahead by 4.3%, as of this morning, although there would be additional small gains related to liquid ETH staking which were not included in the analysis.

Most recently, World Liberty Fi spent $22.5 million on Thursday, on a mixture of ETH, TRX and wrapped BTC. That’s on top of the $2.65 million in TRX bought on Tuesday.

Those purchases brought World Liberty Fi total spend to $245.3 million across six different coins since it began at the end of November: the three above as well as LINK, ONDO, AAVE and ENA, a set which should integrate with the platform in some capacity in the future.

As you can see, the portfolio, now worth nearly $256 million, has spent about half the time ahead. That makes sense, considering it’s regularly accumulating crypto (although with no real stated goal for what it will be for as yet, other than for strategic purposes).

Sure, handwringing about how all this could go wrong is probably justified. Especially if World Liberty Fi’s portfolio indeed turns out to be Trump’s strategic crypto reserve.

It’s worth appreciating, however, that the very blockchain rails on which the stockpile exists make those concerns much easier to navigate. We can see what it’s doing. We can see when it buys, sells, stakes or otherwise transfers any of the coins it holds. And they will be forever trackable, at least within the current capabilities of analytics software.

The tools for everything to go right are there. We’ll just need to actually use them to make sure that it does.

— David

P.S. Help us build a better Empire and complete our short audience survey. Thank you!

“We’re just trying to be the onchain Apple.”

Now that’s a banger of a quote. 

James Zhang, founder of Jambo, said it to Empire host Santiago Santos in a bonus Empire episode last week. 

Jambo, for those of you who may not be aware, is an onchain mobile network. We’ll get more into it in a bit, but Zhang’s points about really looking to give folks access to the digital economy stood out to me. 

Right now, Jambo’s biggest user base is in Latin America. Zhang originally thought the biggest user base would perhaps be Africa, but that hasn’t been the case… yet. 

As Santos noted, “the next JPMorgan doesn’t look like JPMorgan. It looks like an MVNO with fintech services layered on top.”

People should be able to digitally access all the integrations without ever having to go into, say, a bank branch.   

For Jambo, that means not only reaching a user base, but ensuring those users are as loyal as I am to Apple. And that’s where crypto comes in. 

And now you know.

I had a chance to chat with Zhang earlier this week, and I was curious how he’d classify Jambo. Is it a DePIN? Is it more? 

What can I say, I’m paid to be nosey. 

First let’s start with the basics. Jambo’s been around for a while, having last raised capital from a number of big VCs back in 2022. The round was led by both Pantera and Paradigm, if you want to be specific. 

Zhang’s the first one to admit that it was a totally different market when they last raised compared to now, and the team’s been hustling. Even back in 2022, the reception for Jambo was “great,” Zhang noted. There’s an appetite to disrupt the Latin American and African phone markets with a device that is “censorship resistant.”

But after the 2022 raise, Jambo and Zhang had to go into “cockroach mode” to survive the bear. And now, well, we’re here, on the other side.

Zhang wouldn’t turn down the opportunity to raise again, he admitted, especially because he finds this market trickier than a bear market. 

“The reason is because in the bear market, we had already raised funding. We had already built our team, and [then] it was just shipping product. And honestly, there weren't as many … you could say distractions, and … macro is distractions. But when one memecoin gets launched and sucks 90% of liquidity, it's a little tough on the rest of the market or any narrative, so for us, we just honestly want to see more stability going into a token launch,” he told me.

Zhang said that they’ve never specifically branded as a DePIN though Jambo clearly has elements of that, given that it offers both hardware and networks.

“If you take our entire network together, it becomes one of the largest DePIN networks that users can tap into,” he said. 

He’d prefer if you think of them as a consumer-facing product, given that it’s their specialty. Outside of the hardware offerings, they also launched a satellite program earlier this week to “connect all 700,000-plus devices,” he said.

Maybe Zhang’s really not that far off when he says he wants to be the onchain Apple.

— Katherine

Last week, we asked: “Will Trump usher in the Golden Age of Crypto?”

About three-quarters of you said: “Absolutely. I’m front-running the strategic reserve already.” What chads.

This week, we want to know: