The S&P 500 and Nasdaq hit record highs, the cryptocurrency market saw a general increase, with MSTR surging by 9.39%.

On April 23rd, Eric Ya-Hua, founder of Liquid Capital (formerly LD Capital), took to social media to share his insights: “One of the key reasons for the wave of crypto VC and project failures in the past is that most funding went to supporting teams building useless Web3 products—with the biggest mistake being benchmarking against Web2 offerings. At its core, Web3 is a financial industry, so there’s no need to replicate Web2 tools. The most successful crypto companies to date are all finance-focused: stablecoins, exchanges, payments—every major winner falls into this category. Now, as the AI era takes shape, two truths stand out: first, large funding rounds aren’t needed to hire massive teams; second, AI + finance is a new frontier. We believe top founders with a small group of elites can build leading companies—and this is currently the biggest opportunity in primary market investing.”

On April 23, derivatives whale "Top 10 Goals First" took to social media to note that the long position they entered the previous day has been closed via a take-profit order. The position was opened at $75,731 per BTC, totaling 717.491 BTC—valued at approximately $55.6 million at the time of opening.

**FTX Founder SBF Temporarily Withdraws New Trial Motion, Citing Fair Hearing Concerns** April 23rd — FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) has temporarily withdrawn his motion for a new trial, per a letter sent to New York Judge Lewis J. Liman, where he stated he does not believe he can receive a “fair hearing” before the judge. Filed Wednesday with the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, SBF noted he had been focused on addressing questions from Judge Liman—including whether his attorney drafted the motion filed under Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 33 (a new trial request). “Because I’ve had to focus on these issues instead of drafting a response to the prosecution’s opposition, and because I don’t believe I can get a fair hearing on this before you, I’m now requesting to withdraw the Rule 33 motion—without prejudice to refiling it after my direct appeal and related requests for a new judge are resolved,” SBF wrote in the letter.

As of April 23, Onchain Lens data shows whale address 0x5C2 opened a 3x short position on CHIP in the past 24 hours, currently sitting on a floating loss of over $1.7 million. Another whale, 0x0ee, deposited $1.9 million in USDC into Hyperliquid and made its first CHIP trade: it netted $323k in profits from a long position, but was partially liquidated during a subsequent short position, ultimately closing the position with a loss of over $1.26 million.

On April 23, on-chain data analyst Yujin reported that 75,700 ETH (roughly $175 million) stolen by the KelpDAO hacker has been mostly converted to BTC after a day and a half of mixing activity. The hacker’s cross-chain ETH-to-BTC swaps were primarily facilitated via the THORChain protocol. The activity has generated $800 million in trading volume and $910,000 in platform fees for THORChain.

April 23 — Ben Pasternak, founder of Solana-based decentralized app Believe, was arrested and charged with second-degree strangulation and third-degree assault, per the New York Criminal Court.