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Cryptocurrency

Maddow Slams Trump and Calls Bitcoin ‘Scam’ – She Got These 5 Facts Wrong

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The Rhodes Scholar and liberal media commentator said in a segment that aired Thursday, March 6, that cryptocurrency is a scam. She also slammed the White House for “playing this game.”

President Donald Trump signed an executive order earlier that day establishing a national digital asset reserve.

White House crypto czar David Sacks said, “The US will not sell any Bitcoin deposited into the Reserve. It will be kept as a store of value. The Reserve is like a digital Fort Knox for the cryptocurrency, often called ‘digital gold.’”

“It’s worth looking at this crypto thing a little bit,” Maddow said on her show. “Only because it is a deeply, deeply old-fashioned simple scam. At this point, which points right to the White House.”

Here’s what Maddow said about Bitcoin and what she got wrong.

1. Unlike Beanies, Bitcoin’s Price Goes Up

“Helpfully, the broad strokes of crypto trading are not complicated,” Maddow said. “It’s like when there was the Beanie Baby craze in the late 1990s.”

“It was a Beanie Baby trading bubble,” she explained. “Other than some emotional value if you had one as a child, Beanie Babies did not have much inherent value.”

“But it was worth buying up a bunch of them because there was speculation on the premise that as collectibles, maybe one day your Beanie Babies collection could be worth a lot of money.”

There is, however, a key difference between Bitcoin and Beanie Babies. While Beanie Babies debuted in 1993 at the World Toy Fair in New York City, this toy fad reached its height six years later in 1999.

Following the dot com crash in 2000, the auction price frenzy for Babies never recovered to those levels again.

To get a realistic idea of the aftermarket value of stuffed toys, one need only study a local thrift store in their city. But unlike Beanie Babies, Bitcoin’s price has been going up ever since it launched on Jan. 3, 2009.

That’s 16 years of growth in daily exchange rate for the dollar that dwarves comparable ROIs from the highest- flying tech stocks in the stock market’s entire history.

During its periodic bear markets, which have so far occurred on a fairly predictable 4-year cycle, critics have repeatedly called Bitcoin a fad and declared it dead.

But every time the skeptics have turned out wrong when the price sets new all-time high records within four years. When it comes to historical records, there is no sensible comparison between Beanie Babies and Bitcoin.

While the toy collectibles peaked in 1999 and never recovered, Bitcoin created 84,000 new crypto millionaires in 2024, according to a report on CNBC.

2. Beanie Babies Markets Are Not Liquid or Transparent

“Cryptocurrencies operate on the same idea,” Maddow went on in her segment to say.

“They have no inherent value at all. The only value they have is that if you have some reason to believe that somebody else might want to buy them from you in the future.”

“What that means in very practical terms is that convincing other people that your crypto is popular and in demand— that is key to actually making money.”

But it’s not true that cryptocurrencies operate on the same idea as toy and fashion manias or that assets like Bitcoin have no inherent value.

Beanie Babies are not a financial product and do not bear qualities that would make them suitable for use as one. It is not as easy as sending an email to exchange a truckload of toy plushies, but it is very nearly that easy to exchange Bitcoin.

It’s also unfeasible to keep track of how many Beanie Babies are in the market and post up-to-the-minute daily trading data about each one.

It is not only feasible with Bitcoin and other cryptos like the ones going in the national reserve— computer developers engineered them that way.

That’s part of the value they provide that makes it possible to use these digital commodities as financial products and investment vehicles: liquidity and transparency.

3. Beanie Babies Are Not Durable and Fungible Like Crypto

Meanwhile, Beanie Babies are not durable and fungible like cryptocurrencies. Who wants someone else’s stuffed toy that they’ve been blowing their nose on and rubbing Cheeto grease into?

These inventories have market values that are highly sensitive to wear and tear, and the products are very vulnerable to deteriorating into a condition with a resale value marked well below retail.

Even when maintained in mint condition, after-market values for toy collectibles are more like the market for used automobiles. After being driven off the lot, they immediately and sharply depreciate.

The inventors of crypto assets BTC, on the other hand, paid careful attention to designing their economics or “tokenomics” to optimize them for resale value over time and for the foreseeable future.

Cryptocurrencies like the two mentioned above have supply limits that introduce scarcity economics. They are also not subject to deteriorating physical condition.

In fact, any unit of Bitcoin is always equal to any other equivalent unit in market value. This is called fungibility, and it is a system requirement for an asset to function as a currency.

4. Beanie Babies Are Not Scarce Like Bitcoin

“The idea of hyping cryptocurrency is that people should buy in soon, right?” Maddow continued on her show.

“Get in on the ground floor while it’s cheap because it’s about to go way up in value because there’s so much interest in it. If you get in on the ground floor now, then you’ll make a bundle. It’s the whole hype. It’s the whole scam.”

While it is true that participants in crypto markets may engage in inauthentic, hyped-up marketing tactics, that doesn’t make the underlying assets a scam.

Nor does it mean there aren’t more intelligent reasons why financial geniuses like BlackRock’s Larry Fink, Shark Tank panelist Kevin O’Leary, or Strategy’s Michael Saylor believe investing in Bitcoin and the blockchain is not only not a scam— but the next phase of developing the Internet and human civilization.

5. Bitcoin Commands Real Demand, Not Just Hype

After making all these mistakes in her broadcast, Maddow finally undid her own case completely with her closing thoughts on this segment.

“Imagine Trump had just announced that the US government was going to buy up tons of Beanie Babies,” the MSNBC host said. “We are going to establish a federal government reserve of billions of Beanie Babies.”

“What do you think would happen to the value of Beanie Babies? Turns out there’s a huge guaranteed buyer for these things. They’re buying billions of them.”

The answer to her question is: Their value would probably go up like most analysts expect of Bitcoin. Since there’s a huge guaranteed buyer and that buyer is the US government.

Not bad for a scam.

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Cryptocurrency

Edgen Launches “AI Super App,” Democratizing Institutional-Grade Crypto Market Intelligence

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[PRESS RELEASE – Hong Kong, Hong Kong, May 14th, 2025]

Edgen ends its invite-only phase, launches globally as the first AI super app to unify trading insight, social signal, and real-time on-chain analytics into one platform.

Edgen, the AI-native market intelligence platform designed to restore informational edge in the age of noise, today announced its public release. Following a closed beta with over a million data being analyzed daily, Edgen is now accessible to all without invite codes, waitlists, or onboarding gates.

Dubbed the “AI Super App” for market intelligence, Edgen merges real-time social sentiment, on-chain analysis, and modular, specialized AI agents into a single AI-native workflow, giving retail traders and independent analysts the tools and clarity once reserved for hedge funds and quant desks.

Backed by Framework Ventures, North Island Ventures, Portal Ventures, Hivemind Capital Partners, and Moonrock Capital, Edgen introduces a new intelligence framework for navigating markets: an always-on, modular reasoning engine for traders, capable of parsing live markets, detecting signals before they trend, and enabling conviction where once there was chaos.

”We built Edgen to help traders make smarter decisions, faster. It gathers insights from the entire market and from everyone, learns from them, and gives them an edge. Markets move fast. Edgen helps people move faster and smarter. When information is everywhere, what matters most is how fast you can turn it into conviction. That’s what Edgen unlocks,” said Sean Tao, Cofounder of Edgen.

The Mental Infrastructure for Smart Money

Markets today are not won by access to data, but by the ability to reduce complexity into clarity, faster than consensus. In a trading environment increasingly shaped by narrative cycles, virality, and social-driven volatility, Edgen offers an intelligence operating system, one that fuses structured AI orchestration, speed, and execution with human pattern recognition and intuition.

“If Bloomberg Terminal were invented today for a generation raised on Discord, DeFi, and ChatGPT, it would look like Edgen,” Sean added.

Edgen is built on a proprietary Efficient Decision Guidance Model (EDGM)—a lightweight, real-time system that intercepts user queries, identifies intent, and routes them through a stack of specialized agents and relevant data sources. Rather than relying on a monolithic and rigid LLM, Edgen dynamically coordinates smaller tools, models, and data sources in parallel, creating answers that are faster, cheaper, and optimized for the crypto-native environment.

This routing system is what makes Edgen not just fast, but contextually intelligent. It knows when to pull on-chain data, when to surface X/Twitter sentiment, when to highlight smart money flows, and when to do all three at once.

From Tool to Network: Edgen as Collective Cognition

Edgen offers users four core interfaces: real-time Search, momentum Radar, crowd-sourced Insight feeds, and a dynamic crowdsourced intelligence layer known as “Aura”. These modules do not exist in isolation, they are stitched together by EDGM to form a continuous perception loop.

Every search query, every published call, and every response reinforces the system. In this way, Edgen behaves not as a platform, but as a distributed learning brain, one trained not by engineers, but by the most attuned minds in the market.

This architecture includes a Cognitive Layer (query parsing and tool routing with EDGM), an Agentic Layer (modular agents for TA, macro, on-chain, and social signal interpretation), and a planned Execution Layer, which will allow AI-generated insights to translate directly into trade execution or smart contract interaction.

“Imagine spotting a sudden spike in a microcap token. Edgen Search gives you an instant TLDR of its utility, recent smart wallet buys, and who’s talking about it on Twitter, all in one click,” said Sean.

Aura: A Crowdsourced Intelligence Layer for the Intelligence Economy

Edgen’s vision is not to replace human judgment, but to amplify it. Every question asked, every insight shared, contributes to the platform’s intelligence. The more users engage, the more refined and valuable Edgen becomes, creating a self-reinforcing loop of market understanding.

Unique to Edgen is its incentive mechanism. Aura is a non-tradable metric that tracks a user’s insight contributions, predictive accuracy, and impact within the ecosystem. It operates as a kind of proof-of-intelligence, ranking those who identify signals before the market does.

“The real arms race in crypto trading isn’t for blockspace. It’s for information asymmetry, attention, synthesis, and decision velocity. Edgen is how we give individuals an institutional lens without replicating institutional baggage”, Sean continued.

Aura is earned in two primary ways: by training the AI through verified high-quality insight, or by distributing that insight and triggering real user engagement. These contributions are scored through a three-tier process involving automated model review, community rating, and expert verification.

This system allows Edgen to transform every high-quality market thesis, meme-framed call, or chain-driven analysis into live training data, creating an AI that reflects the instincts of real traders, not corporate abstractions.

A Platform Designed for a Smarter Future

Edgen marks the beginning of a new infrastructure layer for financial cognition. Looking ahead, Edgen releases the Edgentic Marketplace, a permissionless environment where third-party developers can publish AI agents, custom workflows, and strategy modules built atop Edgen’s multi-agent infrastructure. This isn’t just about empowering traders. It’s about democratizing institutional-grade tools and unlocking them for everyone from digital asset holders to the crypto curious, giving all participants a path to think, act, and evolve like smart money.

About Edgen

Edgen is the leading AI-powered market intelligence operating system in the crypto space. Through its proprietary Efficient Decision Guidance Model (EDGM), the platform transforms high barrier institutional-grade strategies into universally accessible smart tools. Pioneering the “Cognition-as-a-Service” (CaaS) architecture, Edgen integrates modular AI agents, real-time social sentiment analysis, and on-chain analytics to empower retail traders and independent analysts to navigate crypto markets with institutional-grade precision.

Backed by crypto-native funds such as Framework Ventures and North Island Ventures, Edgen’s technical team combines former Wall Street quantitative trading experts and core Web3 protocol developers, collectively building the cognitive infrastructure for next-generation open finance.

Website: https://www.edgen.tech/

X/Twitter: https://x.com/EdgenTech

Media contact: press@edgen.tech

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Ethereum (ETH) Flies to 11-Week High, Bitcoin (BTC) Rejected at $105K (Market Watch)

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Bitcoin’s price actions remained relatively dull even though the US CPI numbers came out yesterday and were slightly lower than expected.

Many altcoins have notched impressive gains over the past 24 hours, with RAY and ENA leading the pack from the largest 100.

BTC Maintains $103K

The primary cryptocurrency enjoyed the beginning of May as its price finally conquered the $100,000 level last Thursday, and it hasn’t looked back since. It kept climbing even during the weekend, but the culmination transpired on Monday when the US and China announced a tariff pause. At the time, BTC skyrocketed to almost $106,000, which became a new multi-month peak.

However, the bears finally intervened at this point and didn’t allow an attempt for an all-time high. Just the opposite; BTC started losing value and dropped below $101,000 on Monday evening.

It didn’t stay there for long and bounced to around $103,000 yesterday. The aforementioned better-than-expected US CPI numbers for April failed to result in immediate price volatility, but BTC still challenged $105,000 in the evening to no avail.

Since then, the asset has lost nearly two grand and fights to stay above $103,000. Its market cap is well above $2.050 trillion on CG, while its dominance over the alts has taken a beating and is down to 59.1%.

BTCUSD. Source: TradingView
BTCUSD. Source: TradingView

ETH at $2.6K

Ethereum has completely reversed its sluggish and disappointing performance at times in the past week or so. It has jumped by another 4.5% in the past 24 hours and now sits close to $2,600 after surging to a new multi-month peak of almost $2,750 earlier today.

Other notable gainers from the larger-cap alts today include SOL, DOGE, TRX, AVAX, and PI. RAY, ENA, and MKR have surged by double-digit price increases, while WIF has dropped the most since yesterday by losing 5% of value.

The total crypto market cap has recovered over $60 billion since yesterday and is above $3.460 trillion on CG.

Cryptocurrency Market Overview. Source: QuantifyCrypto
Cryptocurrency Market Overview. Source: QuantifyCrypto
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Disclaimer: Information found on CryptoPotato is those of writers quoted. It does not represent the opinions of CryptoPotato on whether to buy, sell, or hold any investments. You are advised to conduct your own research before making any investment decisions. Use provided information at your own risk. See Disclaimer for more information.

Cryptocurrency charts by TradingView.

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Ethereum’s 49% Rally in 6 Days Catches Doubters Off Guard: Santiment

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Ethereum (ETH) has roared back into the spotlight with a vengeance, surging over 49% in just 6 days to briefly flash past $2,700, a price point not seen since February 23.

The rally, which began on May 7 after ETH bottomed near $1,800, has reignited talk of the long-dormant “flippening” narrative, in which Ethereum could overtake Bitcoin (BTC) in market capitalization.

From FUD to FOMO

According to a May 13 report from Santiment, Ethereum’s six-day run, which took it from under $1,800 to over $2,700, marked one of the sharpest rebounds in recent memory and triggered a dramatic shift in sentiment.

Analyst Brian Q partly attributed the turnaround to crypto’s deeply irrational crowd behavior. He noted that just a week ago, social media was rife with jokes about Ethereum’s underperformance, with bearish price calls for ETH dominating online conversations between May 6 and 7 as the asset lagged behind rivals.

However, once the rally started on May 8, the mood flipped dramatically, as retail traders scrambled to justify entry points, with some speculating on the altcoin going to $3,500 and beyond.

“We can really see how price calls across social media have done a complete 180 as doubters have been silenced by Ether’s rally,” wrote Brian Q.

Santiment also noted how years of underperformance had conditioned the market to dismiss Ethereum, only for the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency by market cap to pump when least expected.

“With dismissal from the crowd,” the report stated, “comes massive pumps that blindside the doubters.”

Institutional Moves and On-Chain Signals

Interestingly, the rally coincided with aggressive accumulation by some institutional players. On-chain tracker Lookonchain reported that in the last week, London-based Abraxas Capital bought 242,652 ETH worth some $561 million, with 185,309 ETH valued at $400 million plucked from exchanges in just 72 hours.

Experts say ETH’s price action is more than just a short squeeze, with analyst Rekt Capital pointing out that the cryptocurrency closed last week at $2,514, officially reclaiming its macro $2,200 to $3,900 range lost in the first quarter of 2025.

“Any dips, if needed at all, would only solidify $2,200 as range-low support,” he wrote on May 12, while also highlighting the asset’s attempts to fill a macro CME gap between $2,900 and $3,350.

Adding to Ethereum’s strength is the surprisingly low network fee environment. Previously, Santiment noted that average transaction fees remain around $0.84, well below the $7+ seen six months ago, removing a common barrier to adoption.

However, cautious voices have warned that the current trading zone between $2,400 and $2,700 could be a consolidation phase before the next leg up or a possible shakeout. According to Daan Crypto Trades, if momentum falters, there may be a possible retest down to $2,300 or even $2,100.

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