Good now revolutionaries—

Will is back from Mexico and the timing could not have been worse for DeFi. Over the weekend, KelpDAO was exploited for ~$293 million via a Layer Zero bridge — the attacker fraudulently minted RSE, parked it on Aave as collateral, and borrowed out legitimate dollars in roughly an hour. It's the biggest DeFi hack of 2026 so far, and Layer Zero is pointing directly at North Korea's Lazarus Group / "Trader Traitor." Aave froze RSE on V3 and V4, but not before the contagion kicked in: Aave saw ~$6.2B move out (~23% of locked capital), Morpho lost almost a billion in net outflows, Jupiter and Sky Protocol bled too.

Also on the show: Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire pushing back on protocol-level kill switches; Alex making the case that these aren't hacks at all — they're bridge exploits cascading into protocols that weren't built to absorb them; the Vercel / Shiny Hunters breach where $500K in Bitcoin is the asking price for Next.js supply-chain access; Bitcoin's top-heavy-but-grassroots case; and the White Whale's return post — plus the pump.fun copycat that tagged Evan within minutes. Evan closes with the sharp one: don't buy creator coins. Ever.

Sponsor callout:

Today is the day — the co-branded Arculus x Rise Up Purple Wallet is live for pre-order at rumshq.com. Limited quantity, up to five per person, pay in cash or crypto (BTC/ETH/SOL/USDC/USDT). Shout-out to Crystal who grabbed #1 of 100.

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Good now revolutionaries—

Quigley is back, and we spent 90 minutes on the two themes everyone in crypto should be obsessing over right now: quantum risk and the endless creativity of social-engineering attackers. We start with the pump-and-dump clinic of the week — Allbirds, a failing shoe company whose stock ripped 400–600% after announcing a pivot to "GPU-on-demand AI" — and trace the lineage back through Kodak, Long Blockchain, and Atari. Same playbook every time, still legal, still heartbreaking for retail.

Then Quigley unpacks BIP-361, the quantum-resistant Bitcoin proposal from Jameson Lopp that would freeze vulnerable addresses in phases. Google's new paper pulled the "cryptographically relevant quantum computer" timeline in to roughly 2030 — about nine minutes to derive a private key from an exposed public key. It's important but not urgent, and the fix is less exotic than it sounds: stop taking the convenience shortcuts (Taproot, reused addresses, public-key-exposing spends) that quantum exploits.

The second half is the Quigley School of Paranoia: $450M in protocol losses year-to-date, most of it social engineering, not software. The $280M Drift hack came from DPRK operatives who funded a fake quant firm and spent six months building rapport at Solana conferences. The fix is friction — keep accounting off LinkedIn, whitelist your wires, voice-verify every new instruction, isolate your financial device, and ditch SMS 2FA for an authenticator app. "You don't need to outrun the bear. You need to outrun the guy running from the bear with you."

Plus: IONQ's photonic interconnect of two trapped-ion systems at 99.99% fidelity, the Bitcoin Talk forum puzzle at privatekeys.pw, the Genius Act quietly not defining stablecoins as needing a blockchain, and Quigley's pitch for a pencil-and-paper blockchain workshop at Consensus Miami.

Arculus Wallet (getarculus.com — code ARCURUMS10) for the cold-storage-or-get-rekt crowd

RUMSHQ community at community.rumshq.com — where the show lives 24/7.

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☕ THE RISE UP MORNING SHOW☀️
LIVE Monday - Thursday @ 7a central
Helpful web3 news, commentary, & answers to your crypto questions.

🍻RISE UP AFTER DARK🌗
LIVE Wednesdays @ 7p central
DYOR and BYOB for casual Q&A, fun with expert guests, and altcoin research.

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LIVE Monday @ 7p central
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Good now revolutionaries — it's World Liberty Financial week, whether we like it or not. Evan and Alex break down the new 62.3-billion-token unlock proposal, the absurd 1% governance quorum, and why Justin Sun is now publicly accusing the team of a "hidden blacklisting function" and threatening court over it.

Then the stablecoin question: USD-1 is backed one-to-one with US treasuries — technically. Most of it lives in three Binance wallets. We walked the Arkham dashboard live. And if it collapses, what happens to your redemption? Alex called it: "USD-1 is the Trump Bible of stablecoins." That bit stays in.

Plus a real-world scam PSA roundup: G-Love (yes, "My Baby's Got Sauce" G-Love) lost 5.9 BTC to a malicious Ledger app in the Apple App Store. Evan got a physical-mail Trezor scam letter with a QR code. A new "T7X Trusted Smart Chain" pops up reading straight from the MLM playbook. We tell you how to spot it.

And the big-beef RWA segment: a viewer challenges Evan to compare MetalX Lending vs Aave, and he does — live, on DeFi Llama. The result is not close. Aave's active loans: $18.28B. MetalX: $10.8M. The takeaway holds for the rest of crypto too: liquidity begets liquidity, and that's why serious institutions build on Ethereum + Aave.

Cold storage sponsor: Arculus — card wallet, $99, code ARCURUMS10 for 10% off at getarculus.com. Join the Rise Up community at community.rumshq.com

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☕ THE RISE UP MORNING SHOW☀️
LIVE Monday - Thursday @ 7a central
Helpful web3 news, commentary, & answers to your crypto questions.

🍻RISE UP AFTER DARK🌗
LIVE Wednesdays @ 7p central
DYOR and BYOB for casual Q&A, fun with expert guests, and altcoin research.

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Good now revolutionaries— Evan and Alex are holding it down solo for another No-Will Wednesday, and they brought the DeFi receipts. This episode runs straight through liquidity pools, a short squeeze anatomy, a quantum-proofing proposal for Bitcoin, and a market check you'd expect from an adult.

The main event is a 30-minute DeFi deep dive that starts with Steckler's question about a wrapped BTC/UNI liquidity pool on Uniswap — and expands into a full explainer: impermanent loss, how to read DeFi Llama, when providing liquidity makes sense, and Alex's real current position (Jito SOL/SOL on Kamino, since you asked). The honest answer: providing liquidity is "selling volatility" — and knowing when to sell is the whole game.

From there: the RAVE token. A web3 music DAO that went from $0.25 to $11 in a week — and analyst Jeremy BTC found the team moved 20 million tokens to BitGet ten hours before the price exploded. The retail buyers at $8–$9 "thought they were early." They weren't. The ones who moved the tokens were. And they still have 752 million more to sell. Evan's verdict: don't buy this.

BIP-361 is the other headliner: Jamison Lopp and co-authors have published a multi-phase proposal to quantum-proof Bitcoin by phasing out quantum-vulnerable wallets, preventing new funds from going in, and eventually freezing old UTXOs unless ZK-proof recovery is completed. Bitcoiners are calling it laughable. Alex disagrees — "coordination is not centralization" — and makes the case for why acting now beats waiting.

Also: Carrot/Drift update (CRT is at negative 99.7% APY, it's not a bug), the "Goldilocks rally" context after the Strait of Hormuz blockade-driven BTC dip to $71K, RUMS 500 coming April 30 (William Quigley is back Thursday, Amy Street tonight on After Dark), and why Bitcoin hitting $300K this year requires you to believe in a decoupling that doesn't exist yet.

Arculus is the official cold storage sponsor of Rise Up. Get their $99 wallet for $89 with code ARCURUMS at getarculus.com. Military discount stacks.

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☕ THE RISE UP MORNING SHOW☀️
LIVE Monday - Thursday @ 7a central
Helpful web3 news, commentary, & answers to your crypto questions.

🍻RISE UP AFTER DARK🌗
LIVE Wednesdays @ 7p central
DYOR and BYOB for casual Q&A, fun with expert guests, and altcoin research.

📈RISE UP MARKET WATCH🤑
LIVE Monday @ 7p central
Technical analysis, real macro insight, and practical takeaways to help you invest smarter in every market.

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WANT MORE?
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Nothing on this channel should be construed as financial/legal advice. Educational/entertainment purposes only....

Good now revolutionaries — Episode 17 of Trust Issues is here, and we spent nearly the entire episode doing a deep dive on World Liberty Financial that somehow got more unhinged as it went on.

Emily walked us through the full structure: the two Trump-affiliated tokens (WLFI and USD1), the $500M MGX investment from Abu Dhabi, Binance's 80% concentration of USD1, and the layered LLC structure — CIC Digital, Fight Fight Fight, and DT Marks DeFi — all of which are publicly documented on an OGE Form 278E that apparently nobody read. Trump is literally listed as manager, president, secretary, and treasurer of CIC Digital, which owns a controlling stake in Fight Fight Fight, which flows 75% of WLFI revenue back to DT Marks DeFi — which still lists Trump personally as owner and controller. One layer of separation. Insulting.

Then we got to AquaOne: a company created two weeks before it made a $100 million deal with World Liberty, whose wallet has on-chain ties to North Korean hackers via Bybit and OKEx. And then Emily dropped the thing that made Lindsay's closing thought fall apart: Aqua One committed $500M in USD1 for Middle Eastern regional infrastructure — meaning foreign governments are now accumulating the president's company's stablecoin in place of US dollars. As a geopolitical weapon, that is nightmare territory.

We also covered the wave of crypto protocol hacks this week (Kraken, Cowswap, Awaken Tax), Lindsay's move to Delphi Digital, and Emily's Tinder-for-jeans app that accidentally turned into a dead internet theory experiment on Reddit.

────────────────────────────────────────

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☕ THE RISE UP MORNING SHOW☀️
LIVE Monday - Thursday @ 7a central
Helpful web3 news, commentary, & answers to your crypto questions.

🍻RISE UP AFTER DARK🌗
LIVE Wednesdays @ 7p central
DYOR and BYOB for casual Q&A, fun with expert guests, and altcoin research.

📈RISE UP MARKET WATCH🤑
LIVE Monday @ 7p central
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Nothing on this channel should be construed as financial/legal advice. Educational/entertainment purposes only....

Good now revolutionaries—

It's a no-Will Tuesday (he's still in Mexico — Evan has a theory), but Evan and Alex are fully locked in for a packed news day. They open with the SEC's new staff guidance on DeFi front ends — a five-condition framework that lets certain crypto interfaces potentially operate without broker-dealer registration. Alex breaks down what it actually means: not law, not policy, not enforcement, just "vibe guidance." The sheriff who's not enforcing anything can always be replaced. The Clarity Act is still the real prize, and it's on shaky procedural footing.

Then it's into the Circle/USDC freeze controversy — $420 million in illicit funds have escaped the platform since 2022, $285 million of it from the Drift social engineering exploit. CEO Jeremy Allaire says no freeze without a court order. Alex unpacks why that's both principled and deeply uncomfortable. Followed by Kraken's extortion incident: a criminal group threatening to release internal screen recordings of client data. Evan's scam warning is clear: anyone telling you Kraken's wallet isn't safe is trying to scam you. Then Aave at $82, HYPE at $45, and the "Aave Will Win" governance vote that redirected 100% of Aave-branded revenue to the DAO treasury. Alex cautious but moving toward a position.

The second hour belongs to the most honest breakdown of crypto marketing dysfunction you'll hear anywhere. Alex goes off — how protocols spend millions on Twitter KOLs, hit 90% churn, and ignore audiences like RUMS where actual interested retail investors live. Rise Up's CPM: $0.0069 per thousand impressions. The next-best creator in a Polygon case study was $6.88. Then a Q&A on crypto point-of-sale payments for small businesses, the Uniswap vs. Western Union fee comparison, and a heartwarming close about Radio Dan making the 20-minute trek across Philadelphia to fix Carol's computer. And Arculus — Evan closes the show by pointing to them as the example of how you tell a better story in crypto.

A big rise up. Trust Issues is tonight at 7:30pm ET with Lindsay Poss finally back.

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☕ THE RISE UP MORNING SHOW☀️
LIVE Monday - Thursday @ 7a central
Helpful web3 news, commentary, & answers to your crypto questions.

🍻RISE UP AFTER DARK🌗
LIVE Wednesdays @ 7p central
DYOR and BYOB for casual Q&A, fun with expert guests, and altcoin research.

📈RISE UP MARKET WATCH🤑
LIVE Monday @ 7p central
Technical analysis, real macro insight, and practical takeaways to help you invest smarter in every market.

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RISE UP!
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Nothing on this channel should be construed as financial/legal advice. Educational/entertainment purposes only....

Good now revolutionaries — Evan Mann and Alex Popovic bring you a packed Monday as Will heads to Mexico for a well-deserved vacation. The show leads with the story dominating crypto Twitter all weekend: World Liberty Financial, President Trump's DeFi protocol, deposited five billion WLFI tokens onto the Dolomite lending protocol to borrow roughly $80 million in USDC. The problem? WLF controls both sides of the transaction, depositors who supplied the USDC can no longer withdraw their funds due to a 98% utilization rate, and WLF's own GPT-written tweets managing the fallout accidentally admitted to the whole scheme. Evan and Alex walk through why this is mechanically identical to the FTX playbook: mint a token, use it to drain other people's money. Justin Sun showed up to performatively complain. Nobody is getting held accountable.

Then the show pivots to something actually useful: a clinic on how to research a crypto project yourself. Evan and Alex walk through CoinGecko, Tokenomist, Bubble Maps, Etherscan, and Arkham Intel — showing how to check token holder concentration, read onchain data, and verify claims before trusting anyone. Hyperliquid gets a deep-dive too: what it is, why its revenue numbers are extraordinary, and the legitimate controversy around its validator concentration and the Jelly incident.

Closing headlines: Solana's SF billboard, the BitTensor top subnet leaving over centralization disputes, and an update on Bitcoin's quantum resistance — turns out a hash puzzle trick may make BTC transactions quantum safe without any fork.

Arculus is the official cold storage sponsor of Rise Up — use code ARCURUMS10 for 10% off at GetArculus.com or in the TikTok shop. Military and veterans get 25% off. The Rise Up Purple Wallet pre-order is going live this week.

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☕ THE RISE UP MORNING SHOW☀️
LIVE Monday - Thursday @ 7a central
Helpful web3 news, commentary, & answers to your crypto questions.

🍻RISE UP AFTER DARK🌗
LIVE Wednesdays @ 7p central
DYOR and BYOB for casual Q&A, fun with expert guests, and altcoin research.

📈RISE UP MARKET WATCH🤑
LIVE Monday @ 7p central
Technical analysis, real macro insight, and practical takeaways to help you invest smarter in every market.

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WANT MORE?
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FOLLOW OUR HOSTS:
☮️ Evan Mann: https://beacons.ai/conversationswithevan
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🐬 Will Watson: https://coinguide.vip

RISE UP!
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Nothing on this channel should be construed as financial/legal advice. Educational/entertainment purposes only....

Good now revolutionaries — Thursday April 9, and it's a packed final show of the week. Iran is now accepting ships through the Strait of Hormuz — but requiring payment in Bitcoin, stablecoins, or Chinese yuan. Alex walks through exactly what the Iran oil union's spokesperson got wrong about Bitcoin (one out of three ain't bad: correct on sanctions, wrong on the transaction time and trackability). Community warned: scam tokens with IRGC-adjacent tickers are already proliferating on pump.fun. Do not buy them.

Anthropic's unreleased Mythos model found thousands of zero-day exploits across every major OS and browser — including a 27-year-old bug for under $50 in compute and a full remote code execution exploit for under $1,000. Anthropic responded by assembling Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Nvidia, and seven others into a $100M defensive coalition called Project Glasswing. Alex's take: legitimately scary, potentially also a power consolidation move — but the Drift exploit already proved social engineering is the real attack vector, and AI making that faster is a serious concern for every DeFi protocol.

Rise Up intern Matthew Wiley gave the definitive community primer on Katana — the Polygon-incubated L2 that delayed its TGE, changed airdrop terms last-minute without community votes, and is now posting 1% APY on USDC. Matthew Fisher (CEO) was scheduled but had a scheduling snafu. The team is rescheduling. Will Watson exits bearish: oil to $150, 3–4 months of selling ahead, bottom in crypto and stocks somewhere between mid-summer and early fall. Plus: Alex explains MicroStrategy's full suite of derivative products (STRC, STRK, STRF, STRD), and what Saylor's awful AI commercial with Taylor Swift's voice says about the state of institutional crypto marketing.

Sponsored by RUMSHQ Premium Members — every Thursday the after-show live call runs inside the community. 10-day free trial at community.rumshq.com.

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☕ THE RISE UP MORNING SHOW☀️
LIVE Monday - Thursday @ 7a central
Helpful web3 news, commentary, & answers to your crypto questions.

🍻RISE UP AFTER DARK🌗
LIVE Wednesdays @ 7p central
DYOR and BYOB for casual Q&A, fun with expert guests, and altcoin research.

📈RISE UP MARKET WATCH🤑
LIVE Monday @ 7p central
Technical analysis, real macro insight, and practical takeaways to help you invest smarter in every market.

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WANT MORE?
👉Connect w/us on your favorite social: https://rumshq.com
👉Become a guest or sponsor: riseup@rumshq.com
👉Join our free community: https://community.rumshq.com

FOLLOW OUR HOSTS:
☮️ Evan Mann: https://beacons.ai/conversationswithevan
🤬 Alex Popovic: https://alexpopovic.info
🐬 Will Watson: https://coinguide.vip

RISE UP!
✊🔥

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Nothing on this channel should be construed as financial/legal advice. Educational/entertainment purposes only....