CoW DAO x @AragonProject - live on X Spaces this Thursday, May 21st at 4pm CEST 📢 Luís from CoW DAO and Jordan & Ivan from Aragon will be discussing COW's value distribution mechanism, walking through the research and the Core Team's view, and answering your questions live. Drop your questions below 👇 or in our Discord - thread closes Wednesday!

Secretary Pete Hegseth made an unprecedented move to hit the campaign trail in support of a former Navy SEAL who is trying to unseat longtime Republican congressman and Trump antagonist Thomas Massie.

The Core Team view on CoW DAO's path to value distribution is now live on the forum. 📢 The discussion builds on research, community feedback, and collaboration with @AragonProject around the Value Distribution Mechanism RFP. Jump in and share your thoughts!

Ethereum is for shipping. Here are 22 things the Ethereum ecosystem launched, upgraded, and announced over the past month. 0/ Ethereum hit a new all-time high of 72.8 Million monthly transactions, the highest in network history. 1/ @ethereumfndn, @chainlink, and @Nethermind launched a $1M audit subsidy program to help Ethereum builders access high-quality security reviews. 2/ South Korea’s largest crypto exchange, Upbit, announced plans for GIWA Chain, an Ethereum L2 built on @Optimism. 3/ @AragonProject introduced Permissions Audits to help protocols secure roles, multisigs, and admin systems. 4/ @fileverse shipped Comments v2, improving the collaboration experience, with privacy by default. 5/ The Ethereum Applications Guild (@EthAppsGuild) launched to support Ethereum-native apps and real-world adoption. 6/ Privacy went live on @Optimism with confidential computing support on OP Mainnet. 7/ @StarkWareLtd brought native proof verification to Starknet mainnet with Shinobi, enabling private trading flows and OTC settlement. 8/ @worldcoin launched World ID 4.0, expanding proof of human credentials across apps, enterprises, and AI agents. 9/ Applications on Ethereum hit ~$310B in user deposits. 10/ @l2beat released a new interactive interoperability map showing how value moves across Ethereum’s expanding ecosystem. 11/ @AlchemixFi launched V3, the latest version of its self-repaying, non-liquidating loan product, with higher capital efficiency and improved peg mechanics. 12/ @OfficialMoonDAO raised $172k + from 157 contributors to send the man who coined the “overview effect” to space. 13/ @ethereumfndn announced the Road to @EFDevcon 8 Academic Program, supporting regional research and academic events ahead of Devcon. 14/ Ethereum core contributors gathered in Svalbard for Soldøgn Interop, a week-long event focused on hardening Glamsterdam implementations to help scale Ethereum securely. 15/ @basepaint_xyz hit 1,000 straight days of onchain art creation, with 121M+ pixels painted and $1.5M + distributed to 4,000+ artists. 16/ New Ethereum community hubs launched in Hong Kong and Floripa, growing local coordination and ecosystem activity across Asia and Latin America. 17/ The EF’s ETH Rangers public goods security program wrapped after helping recover or freeze $5.8M, reporting 785+ vulnerabilities, and identifying ~100 North Korean IT workers targeting Web3 teams. 18/ @centrifuge launched a tokenized S&P 500 fund on @base, bringing 24/7 onchain index exposure to non-U.S. users. 19/ @0xcatalysis launched Covered Vaults on Ethereum, DeFi vaults with built-in onchain risk coverage backed by delegated capital. 20/ @Uniswap processed $3T in all-time volume on Ethereum mainnet. 21/ @RAILGUN_Project hit $5 billion of total all time private volume.

BREAKING: If the Wall Street Journal’s sourcing holds, the UAE just became the most consequential actor in this war. Not the US. Not Iran. Not Israel. The UAE. Here is why this is the tweet of the day. Dubai has been Iran’s financial oxygen for forty years. Not metaphorically. Literally. Through every round of American sanctions, every UN resolution, every OFAC designation, every European bank exit from Iranian correspondent relationships, Dubai remained the one global financial center where Iranian money could move, convert, and access global trade. The shadow network operating through Dubai’s currency exchanges, free-zone shell companies, and gold trading houses is not a marginal phenomenon. It is Iran’s primary mechanism for converting oil revenues into usable foreign currency, for paying for weapons components, for funding proxy operations from Hezbollah to the Houthis to every other instrument of Iranian regional power. The US Treasury has spent twenty years trying to close it and has never fully succeeded because closing it required UAE cooperation that the UAE, for its own sovereign economic reasons, consistently declined to provide. The UAE is now, according to the Wall Street Journal, considering providing it. Understand what has changed. The UAE’s entire strategic calculus for forty years was based on a deliberate ambiguity. Dubai would not be a sanctions enforcer. It would be a neutral financial hub, a free port for global capital regardless of political origin, and in return it would receive the economic dynamism that comes from being the one place money can always go. That ambiguity was worth hundreds of billions of dollars in financial services revenue, real estate investment, and trade flows. It was also worth significant leverage over Tehran, which needed Dubai and therefore could not completely antagonize it. Iran fired 1,072 drones at the UAE in six days. Iranian missiles struck Dubai’s international air corridor. Iranian ordnance forced the closure of 70 percent of regional flights. Iranian attacks on the Fujairah bypass threatened the one infrastructure node that allows UAE oil to reach markets without transiting Hormuz. Iran did not merely attack a military ally of the United States. It attacked the economic infrastructure of the country that had been its financial lifeline. If the UAE freezes those assets, it is not a sanction. It is a severance. It is the moment when the country that kept Iran financially connected to the global economy for four decades decides that the relationship has a price, and that Iran has paid it. Every Iranian proxy operation, every weapons procurement, every foreign currency mechanism that runs through Dubai collapses simultaneously. Not because of American pressure. Because Iran made it politically impossible for Dubai to continue providing the service. The 1979 US asset freeze of $12 billion was a superpower’s financial declaration of war. This would be the financial declaration of war from the country that has been the last exit from financial isolation that Iran possessed. Tehran spent forty years cultivating Dubai. It spent six days destroying the reason Dubai would protect it. The invoice, again, has been delivered by Iran to itself.