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Elon Musk tweet turns a $575 bet on a Shiba-themed token into $1.1 million

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Elon Musk tweet turns a $575 bet on a Shiba-themed token into $1.1 million

Memecoin season keeps printing life-changing trades for people willing to take a shot.
An anonymous wallet bought 2.79 billion ASTEROID tokens for $575 on April 17 and sold the entire position for 503 ETH on Tuesday, worth roughly $1.17 million, according to on-chain tracker Lookonchain. The round trip took five days and produced a return of more than 2,000x.

ASTEROID is an Ethereum-based memecoin branded as “First Shiba In Space.” It is themed after a Shiba Inu drawing by Liv Perrotto, a teenage cancer patient who died in January 2026 after a five-year battle with the disease.

Two years before her death, Perrotto sketched the dog while serving as a volunteer on SpaceX’s Polaris Dawn ground support team. The design, inspired by Elon Musk’s own Shiba Inu named Floki, flew on the Polaris Dawn mission in September 2024 as the crew’s zero-gravity indicator.

Before she passed, Perrotto had written down eight questions she hoped to ask Musk. The final one asked whether Asteroid could become SpaceX’s official mascot. Her mother shared the list publicly after her death, and media personality Glenn Beck amplified it on April 16. The post went viral, reached Musk, and he said “ok” in response to making Asteroid the official SpaceX mascot.

That response ignited the token. ASTEROID’s market cap ran from roughly $50,000 to more than $20 million within hours of Musk’s reply, then pushed past $100 million over the following days on more than $100 million in 24-hour trading volume.

At its peak the token briefly entered the top 200 cryptocurrencies by market cap. As of European morning hours on Wednesday, it trades at $0.0004435 with a $186.5 million market cap and $24 million in 24-hour volume.

The token has no formal SpaceX endorsement, no licensing arrangement, and no confirmed Musk involvement beyond the social media replies.

It trades on Uniswap against wrapped ether with a market cap of $186.5 million and 24-hour trading volume of $24.3 million. Price is up 20.69% over 24 hours, 28.54% over six hours, and has climbed about 10x from the wallet’s entry point on April 17, according to DEX Screener data.

Bitcoin fails to break $80,000, back under $78,000

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Bitcoin fails to break $80,000, back under $78,000

Bitcoin BTC$78,010.32 has pulled back slightly after briefly approaching the $80,000 mark on Tuesday.

At the time of writing, it was trading at $77,794, still up 0.4% over the past 24 hours, after hitting a peak of $79,388 before gradually easing lower during the overnight session.

The 24-hour low of $77,464 was set Thursday morning, meaning the full range of the move was about $1,900. Ether (ETH) slipped 0.7% to $2,344, XRP (XRP) fell 1.7% to $1.42, solana (SOL) dropped 1.5% to $85.83, and BNB declined 0.6% to $635.

Brent crude held above $95 a barrel as the U.S. maintained its naval blockade on ships going to and from Iranian ports while Iran kept the Strait closed to almost all other international traffic. Iranian gunboats fired on commercial ships in the waterway on Wednesday.

Trump’s April 7 ceasefire remains in place “indefinitely,” but Vice President JD Vance’s planned Tuesday trip to Islamabad was called off after Iran declined to send a delegation. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Trump has not set a firm deadline for an Iranian proposal.

The divergence in the top 10 backs the positioning read. Bitcoin is up 4% on the week, every other major is within 2% either direction, with ether and solana actually down.

When a rally concentrates in one asset while the rest of the complex fades, the source of the bid is usually narrow rather than broad.

Bitpanda CEO Lukas Enzersdorfer-Konrad took the opposite view, arguing the overnight push toward $80,000 signals digital asset industry maturity and resilience backed by institutional participation and clearer regulatory frameworks.

That framing is harder to reconcile with a market where bitcoin is leading alone amid thin altcoin participation and where funding rates have been negative for roughly 47 consecutive days, one of the longest stretches of bearish derivatives positioning on record.

A slide below $76,000 would mean the $79,388 high printed the top for this leg, and the next move requires either genuine Iran progress or a shift in the funding rate picture that pulls real capital back in.

Base Pushes Toward Final L2 Stage with First Independent Upgrade

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Base Pushes Toward Final L2 Stage with First Independent Upgrade

Base’s Azul upgrade is currently live on testnet, with mainnet launch scheduled for mid-May.

Base, the Ethereum layer 2 network developed by Coinbase, announced Tuesday evening its first independently built network upgrade, dubbed Azul, targeting mainnet activation on May 13.

The upgrade marks a “major step” in Base’s push toward Stage 2 decentralization — the highest trust-minimization standard for Ethereum L2s, according to the Base Engineering Blog post announcing the upgrade.

The centerpiece of Azul is a multiproof system that combines two independent proof mechanisms — a trusted execution environment (TEE) prover and a zero-knowledge (ZK) prover — into a single security layer. Either can finalize a transaction on its own, but when both agree, withdrawals from Base to Ethereum settle in as little as a day, the post notes. This architecture satisfies a core Stage 2 requirement: the ability to detect and handle proof system failures entirely on-chain.

Base currently ranks as the second-largest L2 by total value secured, with $12.12 billion, per L2Beat data. Arbitrum One is ranked first with just over $16 billion.

The announcement comes amid growing pressure on L2s to mature their security models. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has pushed for faster L2 withdrawal times to reduce reliance on third-party bridges, while also questioning whether the original L2 vision still holds as the space has evolved. Base’s multiproof design is explicitly modeled on Buterin’s L2 finalization roadmap, the Azul announcement notes.

Beyond security, Azul streamlines Base’s underlying client stack and aligns the network with Ethereum’s latest execution-layer specs. Base has also doubled down on stablecoins, global markets, and AI agents as its core growth bets, and faster, cheaper finality is foundational to all three.

Azul is live on testnet now, with a $250,000 bug bounty competition running through May 4.

This article was written with the assistance of AI workflows. All our stories are curated, edited and fact-checked by a human.

Russia Passes Crypto Regulation Bill In First Reading

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Russia Passes Crypto Regulation Bill In First Reading

Russia’s lower house of parliament passed a bill in first reading on Tuesday that would create the country’s core legal framework for digital currency, moving Moscow closer to a system that channels crypto trading through licensed intermediaries under Bank of Russia oversight.

The draft bill No. 1194918-8, titled “On Digital Currency and Digital Rights,” passed its first reading in the State Duma on Tuesday, according to official records.

The bill would allow Russians to buy and sell crypto through approved intermediaries as early as July, while banning unlicensed crypto platforms beginning in July 2027, if the draft becomes law.

The bill is part of a new comprehensive legislative package aimed at restricting crypto trading to regulated platforms in Russia, alongside at least three other related bills introduced. One of them, bill No. 1194929-8, also passed the first reading on Tuesday.

Together, the bills would push Russia’s crypto market toward a licensed, state-supervised structure, though key enforcement pieces are still unresolved.

Key provisions of the bill

Bill 1194918-8 “On Digital Currency and Digital Rights,” would introduce investment limits for retail investors, allowing purchases only of the “most liquid digital currencies,” as defined by the Bank of Russia.

Those assets would have to meet several thresholds, including an average market capitalization of more than 5 trillion rubles ($66.6 billion) over the two years before listing, average daily trading volume of more than 1 trillion rubles ($13.3 billion) over the same period, and a trading history of at least five years.

The legislation would require retail investors to pass a test and would cap purchases through a single intermediary at 300,000 rubles ($4,000) per year.

The bill also allows residents to buy crypto abroad through foreign accounts, provided those transactions are reported to tax authorities.

The legislation also maintains a strict prohibition on crypto payments, a core provision of the crypto law “On Digital Financial Assets,” which took effect in 2021.

Supreme Court says criminal bill is premature

Apart from the two draft bills that passed their first reading, lawmakers have introduced two separate measures establishing liability and criminal penalties for violations of the new rules, including bills No. 1194944-8 and No. 1209607-8.

The latter proposes criminal penalties for unlicensed digital asset services and mandates registration with the Bank of Russia, with fines and prison terms for non-compliance.

But the Supreme Court declined to support that measure in its current form, saying the proposal depends on a broader digital currency framework that has not yet been adopted and therefore appears premature.

Draft bill No. 1209607-8 development (translated by Google). Source: The State Duma

“The proposed article is drafted as a blanket provision, the application of which is not possible in isolation from rules directly established by regulatory acts,” the court said in an official review of the bill released last week, adding:

“Meanwhile, the draft federal law ‘On Digital Currency and Digital Rights,’ aimed at regulating issues related to the organization of digital currency circulation, is currently under development. Until the relevant federal law is adopted, the initiative in question appears premature.”

That means Tuesday’s first-reading vote is important not because it advances the base law that other enforcement measures still depend on.

Related: Russia-linked crypto exchange Grinex halts trading after $14M hack

Several local industry participants have repeatedly warned that the proposed legislation could backfire, pushing the sector further underground instead of bringing it out of the grey zone.

Magazine: How crypto laws changed in 2025 — and how they’ll change in 2026