Since El Salvador announced in 2021 that it would list Bitcoin as its national currency, the national reserve of Bitcoin has taken shape. At the Bitcoin 2025 conference held on May 29, American financial experts and Salvadoran Bitcoin consultants Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert, Bitcoin Beach project founder Mike Peterson, and Panamanian Mayor Mayer Mizrachi, who is only in his 30s, gathered to discuss whether Panama will become the next El Salvador.
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ToggleEl Salvador first uses BTC as national currency, Panama is expected to follow
Peterson, founder of Bitcoin Beach, said at the beginning that everyone was shocked in 2021 when Salvadoran President Bukele announced that Bitcoin (BTC) would be used as legal tender.
He then pointed out that in 2022, some people claimed that three countries would follow suit, but in the end nothing came of it, making many people feel like it was a rug pull scam. Now he believes the situation is completely different and Bitcoin is actually taking root in various parts of Central and South America, especially in Panama.
Mayor Mizrachi said that he has started to pay taxes with BTC, and canal tolls will also use BTC
Panama Mayor Mayer Mizrachi said that he was originally an entrepreneur specializing in the field of encrypted secure communications. He is no stranger to the concept of "public and private keys" and has been paying attention to the development of El Salvador since 2021. He said:
“Currently, Panama has passed a city council bill that allows citizens to pay taxes and municipal fees with BTC.”
Although Bitcoin is not legal tender in Panama, they have successfully enabled the city government to accept Bitcoin payments through a payment processor, and the actual revenue is in US dollars. This model does not require amending national laws; municipalities can promote it on their own and has also attracted mayors of other Latin American cities to seek advice. Mizrachi further revealed:
“We are even wondering if the Panama Canal tolls can be paid with BTC to speed up customs clearance.”
Max & Stacy share the experience of El Salvador: Legislation to eliminate shitcoins is the real freedom
Max Keiser, a Bitcoin consultant for El Salvador, joked that he was Bitcoin's "biological father," while Stacy Herbert, also a consultant, added that she had talked about Bitcoin in the media as early as 2010.
She stressed that the key to El Salvador’s success is not just promoting Bitcoin, but:
- Establishment of the Bitcoin Office, reporting directly to the President
- Passed a bill that clearly states that all cryptocurrencies except Bitcoin are unregistered securities
- Block 90% of scammers who want to sell shitcoins
El Salvador teaches 7-year-old children about Bitcoin, education takes root from an early age
Herbert also talked about another key point: "Bitcoin education is not only about technology, but also about mental training." They promote the Kubo+ project to allow young students to write programs and understand Bitcoin. More importantly:
"Learn what proof of work means, and learn to be responsible for yourself."
They also collaborated with German creator Lina Seiche to launch the financial literacy education textbook "The Little Holder" to teach 7-year-old children what money and Bitcoin are. This year, this set of teaching materials will also be introduced to the Panama City Library.
Panama Bank to Launch BTC Account and Trading Services
Panama City Mayor Mizrachi pointed out:
In Panama, about $5 billion in Bitcoin transactions are made each year
Local people have already adopted it, but there is a lack of clear policy support
Currently, Tower Bank and the second largest state-owned bank Caja de Ahorros will launch Bitcoin accounts and trading services
Mizrachi said that the current core strategy is to pilot first and then legislate.
Lessons from El Salvador: Change people’s mindset from spending to saving
Keiser, the Salvadoran Bitcoin consultant, concluded:
“Bitcoin allows people to shift from a spending mindset to a saving mindset, which is the beginning of economic hope.”
He also added that since Trump took office, the pressure from the United States on Central and South America has decreased, and Panama can be more confident in promoting Bitcoin policies without having to worry about being sanctioned by the United States or kicked out of the SWIFT system.
Bitcoin is still the focus of the future, Panama is expected to become an economic powerhouse in Central and South America
At the end of the discussion, moderator Mike Peterson also emphasized:
“Please buy Bitcoin, not products linked to Bitcoin.”
In summary, this conversation was not only an exchange of experience between El Salvador and Panama, but also showed that Panama is actively applying national resources to Web3 fields such as Bitcoin. As policy experiments and private adoption advance simultaneously, perhaps in the future Panama will really have the opportunity to become another new economic center in Latin America.
Risk Warning
Cryptocurrency investments carry a high degree of risk, their prices may fluctuate dramatically, and you may lose all your investment. Please assess the risks carefully.
Ross Ulbricht, the founder of Silk Road, attended the Bitcoin 2025 conference as a free man for the first time on May 29, the day he was sentenced to life imprisonment ten years ago. During his speech, he tearfully thanked the crypto for their support and US President Donald Trump for granting him amnesty. He elaborated on the meaning of life he learned in prison and said he was willing to take on everything just to make more people truly understand the value of freedom. He also reiterated the importance of Bitcoin to the world, saying that its freedom and decentralization will be invincible, and unity will be the key to the advancement of cryptocurrency.
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ToggleKey Summary
Ulbricht praised Trump for keeping his word and thanked the crypto for not giving up on him in the past ten years
Emphasizing freedom, decentralization and unity are the three major beliefs of the future of the crypto world
Recalling the days in prison when I was monitored, silenced, and locked in a small dark room
The "beehive" metaphor represents freedom and decentralized power, warning that losing unity will lead to failure.
Recalling the lessons of the Silk Road, warning everyone not to be complacent and not to let ideas and habits be bound
A life sentence ten years ago was like a death sentence, but now he has been given a new life
Ulbricht founded the Dark Web e-commerce platform Silk Road in 2011, but was arrested by the FBI in 2013 for drug trafficking, conspiracy to launder money, and even planning murder to protect his own business. He was subsequently sentenced to life in prison without parole in 2015.
During his speech, Ulbricht recalled that he was sentenced to life imprisonment on May 29, 2015 at the age of 31, and now he has been reborn. With tears in his eyes he said:
“I am very grateful to the crypto for their support and hard work in helping me regain my freedom. Thank you President Trump for fulfilling his promise to grant me amnesty. He is a man of his words.”
Seriously out of touch with technological development, Ulbricht said it was like walking out of a time machine
Ulbricht went on to say that before he was released from prison, he had never seen a drone or played VR, and even AI was unfamiliar to him. Then he talked about Bitcoin and said in surprise:
“When Silk Road was created, one BTC was less than $1, and now the price has exceeded $100,000. This is ridiculous!”
We are not free yet, Ulbricht says we still have to go from 10 to 100
Ulbricht said that Bitcoin has developed from "0 to 1" when he founded Silk Road, and the community has expanded to "1 to 10", but now the task is "from 10 to 100". This process requires three major principles, namely freedom, decentralization and unity, none of which can be missing.
Using the metaphor of a honeycomb, freedom and decentralization are advantages, but lack of unity will lead to failure
Ulbricht shares a story about removing beehives himself when he was younger. He removed the nests scattered in seven corners outside his home one by one, but found that no wasps fought back against him. He said:
"They were free and scattered, but because they were not united, none of them stung me, which allowed me to successfully demolish all the beehives."
He believes that this metaphor is applicable to the current crypto. He said:
"We are free and we are scattered, but if we are not united, we can be easily defeated like those wasps."
The flame of freedom remains unextinguished despite the shackles of a bitter prison
Looking back on his time in prison, Ulbricht said the loss of freedom was not a switch, but many layers. He was once handcuffed and had his hands and feet shackled, unable to choose how to sit or lie down. But even then, he could choose one thing:
"I can choose not to give up the joy in my heart, which is my last flame of freedom."
Understanding the value of decentralization through the lessons of the Silk Road
Ulbricht did not shy away from talking about the past. He believed that the failure of Silk Road made him realize that centralization is a weakness of a single point of failure.
He emphasized that today’s Bitcoin world is different, with decentralized nodes, diverse wallets, and a wide variety of on-chain experimental projects. But as long as this decentralization is maintained, this ecosystem can continue to grow.
Prisons rule by division; unity is the key to freedom
Finally, he mentioned that the different ethnic groups in the prison were divided and excluded each other, but as long as the prisoners collectively protested, wrote letters, and went on hunger strike, the management would obey. Ulbricht says this also applies to the real world:
"Those who oppose freedom love to see us quarreling; they are afraid of our unity."
Then he thanked everyone with a choked voice:
"I thought I was going to die in prison, but now I'm standing here. You set me free, and this force will go far."
Risk Warning
Cryptocurrency investments carry a high degree of risk, their prices may fluctuate dramatically, and you may lose all your investment. Please assess the risks carefully.
At a time when the integration of AI and cryptocurrency has become a hot topic, Dragonfly Capital partner Tom Schmidt expressed a cautious view that was different from the mainstream on the TBPN Crypto Day program. He pointed out that most of the current decentralized AI concepts face major technical bottlenecks. Instead, stablecoins and blockchains may find a more practical foothold in the application of proxy micropayments.
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ToggleDecentralized AI is difficult to implement: decentralized GPUs are difficult to handle large models
Tom Schmidt admitted that Dragonfly Capital tends to be conservative, even bearish, on current projects on the market that combine AI with encryption technology.
He pointed out that most projects focus on the concepts of decentralized inference and GPU resource sharing, but such ideas have appeared in early projects such as Golem , but have never been able to overcome the core challenge: " How to effectively dispatch distributed computing power to complete the calculation of high-performance AI models? "
If you think about how you actually train a state-of-the-art AI model, you don’t use a million consumer-grade GPUs spread across the world; you need a large, centralized, high-performance cluster of A100s.
Schmidt emphasized: "Computing is not a monolith"
Different tasks require different types of resources, but it is difficult for decentralized networks to uniformly schedule and simultaneously meet the requirements of "performance" and "stability".
He reminded the market that there is a huge gap between the current imagination and reality of "Web3 resource-sharing AI".
A truly viable intersection: stablecoin-based proxy micropayments
Despite his skepticism about decentralized AI, Schmidt does not deny the potential of combining AI and cryptography.
He mentioned that Dragonfly is more interested in applications that combine the deterministic properties of blockchain, especially "micropayments for AI agents ." In these scenarios, stablecoins can provide programmable and instantly settled micro-transaction capabilities and meet the needs of many AI applications for certainty and finality, which is difficult for traditional financial systems to achieve:
As AI agents become more prevalent and require payment to obtain data or access services, they will need a payment system that can handle extremely small amounts, “as low as a penny or even less.”
He added, “Traditional SaaS payment providers are unable to meet this demand, and stablecoins have unique advantages in achieving this.”
An opposite view emerges: Will decentralized AI approach from the perspective of “attention”?
Another industry insider, Nathan Worsley, founder of Euphoria, started from the perspective of “ attention economy ” and believed that AI and encryption technology have a high degree of product-market fit (PMF) in the content distribution and interactive design of Web3:
The evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs) and AI has enabled us to more accurately analyze posts, videos, and sentiment, providing a comprehensive picture of “mindshare” that was impossible to quantify in the past.
AI combined with encryption exploration, from hype to practice
Tom Schmidt's calm analysis injects a dose of sobriety into the hot AI and encryption craze. He reminded the market not to pin all hopes on decentralized reasoning, which is not yet feasible, but to focus on the application layer where blockchain can truly bring value. Among them, proxy payment and stablecoin micro-transactions may become the path for the real implementation of AI crypto.
Of course, he also welcomes the participation of other ideas to inject more possibilities into this cross-experiment of AI and encryption and jointly promote the evolution of this field.
Risk Warning
Cryptocurrency investments carry a high degree of risk, their prices may fluctuate dramatically, and you may lose all your investment. Please assess the risks carefully.
Binance founder CZ(CZ) wrote on X today that the overly transparent design of the current decentralized exchange (DEX) has instead triggered a series of market manipulation and damage to user rights, especially in the perpetual contract market (Perp DEX). He suggested developing a " dark pool-style Perp DEX ", sparking community discussion on the future possibilities of DEX.
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ToggleThe cost of on-chain transparency: How did DEX become a sniping field?
In traditional concepts, the transparency of blockchain symbolizes trust and openness, but CZ pointed out that this characteristic becomes a double-edged sword on DEX.
Since all trading orders are publicly entered into the memory pool (mempool), malicious robots can monitor in real time and preemptively place orders to conduct "front-running " and " sandwich attacks" , that is, inserting transactions before or after you to manipulate the price, causing you to trade under worse conditions.
This type of behavior is considered a MEV (maximum extractable value) attack. According to statistics from the DeFi ecosystem, millions of dollars of user funds are lost each year as a result. Not only has the slippage increased, but the overall trading experience and costs have also deteriorated.
Whales have nowhere to hide: The dilemma of large traders
CZ further emphasized that such problems are even more fatal in the perpetual contract (perp) market. Because once the liquidation price is discovered by others, market tycoons may work together to push the price to that point, forcing a forced liquidation. Even with abundant financial resources, it is difficult to escape the fate of being "collectively encircled and suppressed".
In addition, on CEX, although the order will not reveal the identity of the orderer, large orders are still easily detected by the market, thereby creating slippage risks. In DEX, the situation is even worse:
When you want to buy or sell an asset worth $1 billion, the transparent flow of funds and order information will be noticed by everyone, thereby triggering expectations, which in turn harms the interests of the whale themselves.
For these whale, a transparent market becomes a shackle rather than a guarantee. CZ believes that such a market mechanism no longer works for everyone.
CZ’s blueprint: creating a “dark pool-style Perp DEX”
In response to the above structural problems, CZ proposed a disruptive suggestion: "Create a perpetual contract DEX that combines the trading logic of the Dark Pool ."
Dark pools are widely used in traditional finance for large-scale institutional transactions. They have the characteristic of "non-disclosure of orders" and can prevent market pre-reaction and price manipulation. In theory, dark pool trading volumes are typically several times higher than public order books (lit pools).
CZ suggested that new DEX should adopt zero-knowledge proof (ZK Proof) or similar encryption technology to achieve the following features:
Order information is completely private
Records of user funds entering smart contracts can be published later
Prove the legitimacy and validity of transactions without revealing specific information
In this way, DEX can achieve dual protection of traders' privacy and security while maintaining the spirit of decentralization.
Widespread response: Is privacy or transparency better?
CZ's post quickly attracted responses from the industry and developers. Hyperliquid founder Jeff wrote an article analyzing: " Transparent transactions can actually improve the execution efficiency of large transactions ." This is in contrast to the past view that transparency makes people vulnerable to hunting.
On the other hand, some people take the opposite view. Quantitative trader Will Meng emphasized that openness and transparency are not good for some institutional investors with complex trading strategies. There are competitors everywhere in the market. Moreover, dark pools and OTC platforms are becoming more and more popular in the traditional financial market in the United States:
Although a fully transparent order book may seem fair, it may actually endanger privacy and policy protection and is not the best choice for all institutions and large investors.
What’s the next step? The test of balancing privacy and decentralization
CZ finally said that he did not intend to argue about which market mechanism is better, but believed that different traders have different needs: " Dark pool DEX may provide new options. " He also encouraged developers to take action. Although he did not guarantee investment or response, he was willing to listen to ideas and provide opinions.
The current crypto market is facing new risks caused by transparency, and "privacy-oriented decentralization" may become a key trend in the future development of DEX.
Risk Warning
Cryptocurrency investments carry a high degree of risk, their prices may fluctuate dramatically, and you may lose all your investment. Please assess the risks carefully.
