Trader turns $3K into $46M in PEPE, Ethereum gas overhaul, Tornado dev guilty: Hodler’s Digest, May 12-18

Trader makes millions after PEPE price soars, a new gas model for Ethereum, and Tornado Cash developer convicted.

A savvy trader made $46 million in profit, which is an eye-watering 15,718-fold return on his initial $3,000 investment. The unknown wallet bought 4.9 trillion PEPE for $3,000 on April 15, which is currently worth over $56 million. The trader sold 1.41 trillion PEPE for $7.4 million and is currently sitting on 3.5 trillion PEPE, worth $38.9 million, according to a May 15 X post from Lookonchain. PEPEs market capitalization was around $4.5 billion on May 15, making it the third-largest memecoin behind Dogecoin (DOGE) and Shiba Inu (SHIB).

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has proposed Ethereum improvement protocol, EIP-7706, which introduces a new gas model for transaction call data. This new fee would be separate from the existing gas fees for transaction execution and data storage. The proposal aims to reduce costs for transactions that are data-heavy but not computationally intensive by setting separate charges for call data, distinct from the costs of executing contract code or storing data in blobs. If the proposal is accepted, the Ethereum network will be responsible for setting the call data costs independently of other costs.

Alexey Pertsev, the developer of the cryptocurrency mixing protocol Tornado Cash, has been found guilty of money laundering, raising potentially severe implications for open-source code developers. The developer was sentenced to five years and four months in prison for allegedly laundering $1.2 billion worth of illicit assets on the platform. The sentencing came despite Tornado Cash being a noncustodial crypto mixing protocol meaning that the funds that go through the protocol are never held or controlled by it.

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