Andre Cronje Exits Sonic Board as S Token Falls 97%

Sonic Labs said Andre Cronje, Michael Kong and David Richardson are leaving its board, handing control to new CEO Matt Visser and COO Kosta Kourkoumelis. The Layer 1 network, formerly Fantom, said the three remain invested but will no longer make business decisions for the organization.

The shake-up comes with S near $0.028, down about 97% from its $1.03 January 2025 peak, and market value near $107 million. DeFi TVL has fallen to about $26 million from more than $1.1 billion in May 2025, leaving community sentiment badly damaged across the network.

Sonic had already changed leadership after naming Mitchell Demeter CEO in September 2025 to lead a $150 million UScapital-markets push. Demeter and business head Evan Owens resigned in February 2026, after which the board directly ran operations before making this latest handoff to executives.

Cronje said he led technical work, including Sonic Gateway, but did not design the FTM-to-S migration, airdrop, emissions, incentives or Opera wind-down. Visser said the priority is discipline and trust, while Sonic cited 400 merged pull requests and two releases shipped this year during the overhaul.

Jared MEV Bot Drained for $7.5 Million in Honeypot

An attacker drained jaredfromsubway, a major Ethereum MEV sandwich bot, by tricking its automated system into approving malicious helper contracts. Blockaid traced roughly $7.5 million in WETH, USDC and USDT, while analysts said the incident avoided phishing, stolen keys, private-key theft and any widely used DeFi protocol exploit.

Over several weeks, the attacker deployed 66 fake token contracts and liquidity pools that resembled profitable trading routes, then left large approvals open after bait transactions. A final coordinator call swept 1,474.58 WETH, about 2.87 million USDC and roughly 2 million USDT into attacker-controlled wallets before later swaps and mixer activity.

Base Sets June 25 Launch for B20 Beryl Upgrade

Base plans to activate its Beryl upgrade on mainnet on June 25 after deploying it to Sepolia, bringing the B20 native token standard to Coinbase’s Ethereum Layer 2. The release also cuts standard withdrawals to Ethereum from seven days to five for the bridge path most providers commonly use.

B20 lets issuers create ERC-20-compatible assets inside Base node software, using Rust precompiles rather than conventional smart contracts deployed as EVM bytecode. The toolkit includes minting, burning, supply caps, transfer controls and freeze-and-seize functions, while Reth V2 reduces node disk usage and supports higher block gas targets.

Schwab Plans S&P 500 Prediction Markets With Cboe

Charles Schwab is preparing prediction markets tied to S&P 500 performance through Cboe Global Markets, according to the Wall Street Journal. The contracts would let users take binary positions on whether the index finishes above or below a stated level, with rollout expected in the coming months.

The brokerage is expected to add a Plus Zone feature that pays based on how close users are to the final S&P 500 level, even when they are only mostly right. Schwab, which holds $11.8 trillion in customer assets, recently expanded into spot Bitcoin and Ethereum trading for retail users.

Data of the Day

Bitcoin transfers below 0.01 BTC, worth about $630, now account for roughly 80% of daily transactions, up from about 44% in 2023, CryptoQuant said. The surge reflects protocol-driven activity where transaction counts rise sharply while the amount of bitcoin transferred remains relatively small across the network.

CryptoQuant linked the shift to OP_RETURN usage from Runes, Ordinals, BRC-20 activity and timestamping services, which can create transactions as low as 546 satoshis. The mempool reached 128,000 pending transactions, though congestion remains concentrated in low-fee transfers and still sits below earlier cycle peaks.

More Breaking News

• Secret Network’s Axelar bridge lost $4.67 million after a custom contract minted unbacked saTokens for seven days before a failed transfer exposed the shortfall.
• Texas brothers Isiah and Raymond Garcia admitted forcing a Minnesota father to transfer more than $8 million in crypto during an eight-hour armed home invasion.
• Kalshi has reportedly opened early IPO discussions after revenue surpassed $2 billion annualized and its May Series F valued the prediction platform at $22 billion.
• Strategy’s STRC preferred stock sank to a record $89, pausing above-par issuance used for bitcoin buys after dividends already forced a 32 BTC sale.
• Celsius founder Alex Mashinsky received a permanent CFTC trading and registration ban, adding to his 12-year prison sentence and earlier lifetime crypto-industry prohibition order.
• Kraken added Solana DEX trading inside its main app, letting users buy thousands of onchain tokens with USD or USDC without handling separate wallets.
• A Japanese corporate pension fund managing about $130 million plans a 1% crypto allocation, signaling wider institutional appetite as national financial rules shift further.
• China’s Z(dot)AI released GLM-5.2, a Huawei-trained open model with a 1 million-token context window that nearly matches Claude Opus 4.8 on long coding tasks autonomously.

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