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Could Wellness Be an Onramp to Web3? Moonwalk Fitness’ Caitlin Cook Thinks So

Published

7 часов ago

16 мая, 2025

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There’s no shortage of crypto projects that have been touted as the thing that will onboard the next billion users to Web3, but Moonwalk Fitness has a slightly different approach — wellness.

The fitness accountability app, which launched for iOS and Android earlier this year, essentially offers users a way to bet on whether they’ll meet their fitness goals — for now, that’s daily steps, but Moonwalk Fitness’ Director of Growth Caitlin Cook — speaking with CoinDesk ahead of Consensus 2025 in Toronto — that the project hopes to add different types of in-app fitness challenges and metrics beyond step count.

In its current form, Moonwalk Fitness presents users with a variety of games to choose from, varying in duration, step-count, and buy-in price. Users have to pay a fee (in USDC, BONK, or SOL) to join the game. If they hit their daily step goals, they get all their money back – plus the opportunity to split a prize pool, created from the deposits of users who didn’t meet their step goals. In this way, Moonwalk Fitness offers users both a carrot — the potential to make money — and a stick — the potential to lose money — in their fitness journeys.

Cook said users all around the world are finding their way to Moonwalk Fitness , adding that she was particularly bullish on markets like Southeast Asia and Africa. Because users can create their own games, setting their own buy-in prices, there is no financial barrier to entry.

“What’s enough for someone to actually perform the action is different depending on where you are,” Cook said. “So we have games where [the buy-in] is a very tiny amount of BONK, where maybe it’s a couple dollars in USDC, and people are eating it up,” Cook said. “Becasue instead of gatekeeping it, where it’s like, ‘oh, you need X amount of money to join, we’re opening it up to everyone.”

The project’s four biggest markets are currently France, the U.S., Nigeria and Vietnam, Cook said.

“I think a lot of crypto builders generally tend to focus on the same markets where it’s like the more affluent people who get to deploy capital,” Cook said. “If you have legs that work, you can use this product. The total addressable market is quite large.”

Seeing the growing adoption of Moonwalk Fitness around the world has been exciting, Cook said.

“Opening our Twitter every day is incredible, because it’s like, I’ll see a group of Venezuelan grandmas going for a walk together, posing for a picture, which is so cool,” she said. “We just had people do a meet up in Turkey that we did not organize. It was just like a group thing where they just decided to go out and walk. The appeal is very broad.”

Even for people who are already active, Cook said the ability to make money from something they’re already doing makes Moonwalk Fitness appealing.

“We see that in Nigeria, for example, they’re walking so much, and they’re like, ‘Oh, my God, I can make money from something I’m doing already.’ And it’s like, yes, you can. It’s a fun way to make something that’s ordinary a little bit more gamified in a super simple way.”

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Alchemy Acquires Solana Developer DexterLab for Undisclosed Sum

Published

3 часа ago

16 мая, 2025

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Blockchain development platform Alchemy said it has acquired Solana developer DexterLab for an undisclosed fee.

The acquisition will accelerate the development of Solana-based Web3 applications to meet growing enterprise demand, Alchemy said in an emailed announcement on Friday.

DexterLab’s technology has previously powered the Solana development of Google and the Solana Foundation, establishing itself as «a go-to infrastructure provider,» according to Alchemy’s announcement.

One of Alchemy’s aims in acquiring DexterLab is to consolidate Solana development alongside that of Ethereum to reduce complexity for projects building across multiple networks.

Alchemy may be be attempting to capture the growing prominence of Solana as a preferred venue for blockchain applications.

While Ethereum remains comfortably the larger blockchain in terms of total-value locked, there are some metrics where Solana can claim the ascendancy. For example, active addresses on Solana have been over 210 million in the last three months while Ethereum and Ethereum Layer-2 addresses are just below 80 million. Transactions on Solana have also outnumbered Ethereum: 4.75 billion to 1 billion.

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Eric Trump: ‘The Banks Made The Biggest Mistake of Their Lives’

Published

3 часа ago

16 мая, 2025

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“There’s a famous saying that sometimes the enemy of your enemy is actually your best friend,” Eric Trump told the crowd at Consensus in Toronto, Canada. “That was the Trumps with the crypto community. And I think the banks made the biggest mistake of their lives.”

The son of U.S. President Donald Trump and co-founder of bitcoin BTC mining company American Bitcoin is also an adviser to World Liberty Financial (WLF), which recently launched a U.S. dollar-backed stablecoin, USD1, that has already reached $2 billion in market capitalization.

Co-founders of WLF joined Trump on stage on Friday as they announced that USD1 was now operable across multiple blockchains through Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP).

Trump painted a vivid picture of personal grievance turned into ideological conviction, claiming he was “canceled” by major financial institutions for his political views which then got him interested in crypto as a shield against financial gatekeeping.

“So many of the banks have been weaponized and I was case in point,” said the son of the U.S. president. “I was probably the most canceled person for doing absolutely nothing wrong, only because we had a political view, and a political view that might not have been popular with some of the big financial institutions and guys, they came after me like I was a dog.”

USD1, he said, is a patriotic financial tool for people in unstable or corrupt regimes.

“It gives so much freedom of financial choice, especially to markets and countries where people have never had any kind of financial freedom, had never had any kind of financial independence, might be in a country where it’s war torn, where it’s subject to corruption, it’s subject to ridiculous inflation,” he said. “Every single day they go to work and their money is being burned under their mattress, and all of a sudden, we give the world the ability to be on the US dollar backed one to one by US Treasuries.”

Earlier today, lawyers representing WLF pushed back against scrutiny from U.S. Senator Richard Blumenthal, the leading Democrat on a panel responsible for investigating corruption and mismanagement, who had asked about the ownership and investment structure for Trump-affiliated entities, including WLFI, in a letter last week.

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Crypto Miners Soar on OpenAI-CoreWeave Deal; Galaxy Jumps in Nasdaq Debut

Published

3 часа ago

16 мая, 2025

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While cryptocurrencies put in a flattish performance on Friday with bitcoin BTC churning around $104,000, crypto-related stocks were having a moment to shine.

Crypto mining and data center firms such as Cipher Mining (CIFR), Hive Digital (HIVE), Hut 8 (HUT) and TeraWulf (WULF) booked 10%-20% gains on optimism about artificial intelligence (AI) computing demand, jolted by CoreWeave (CRWV) signing a $4 billion deal with ChatGPT-developer OpenAI. These firms are often seen as proxies for AI-linked infrastructure bets due to their data center assets.

For its part, CoreWeave soared more than 26%.

The rally extended to Galaxy Digital (GLXY), which rose 8% on its first day of trading on the Nasdaq, marking the firm’s long-awaited U.S. market debut. The company, previously only listed in Toronto, manages crypto investments and trades digital assets and also has a data center business.

Crypto exchange Coinbase (COIN) rebounded 9% after a sharp drop Thursday triggered by customer data breach and ongoing regulatory scrutiny by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

DeFi Development (DFDV), the real estate tech firm with a Solana SOL treasury strategy, surged 45% to fresh record highs on news of striking a validator operation deal with memecoin BONK BONK and adding more SOL tokens to its balance sheet.

Meanwhile, BTC held just above $104,000, up 1.3% over the 24 hours, while ether ETH gained 2.3% to $2,580. The broad-market CoinDesk 20 Index was flat, with XRP XRP underperforming as a U.S. judge rejected the settlement proposal between Ripple and the SEC.

Inflation expectations through the roof

On the macro front, the University of Michigan’s latest inflation survey showed consumers expect 1-year inflation to rise to 7.3%, up from 6.5%, the highest since the 1980s, while expectations for 5-10 years ticked up to 4.6%, a multi-decade high.

«It’s so high it doesn’t make sense,» Louis Navellier, chief investment officer of money management firm Navellier said in a market note.

Responses showed staggering divergence in outlooks by political affiliations, with the Republican outlook for far tamer inflation. Traditional markets, consequently, shrugged off the data, with major U.S. stock indices climbing higher towards the latter hours of the session.

However, rising inflation expectations may have a second-order impact on markets by discouraging Fed policymakers from cutting rates in the next months.

«The concern here is that the Fed has expressed interest in consumer expectations on inflation, and with their concern about the potential of tariff-fueled inflation, it may give them further reason to pause,» Navellier said.