The Annual MBC Pilgrimage Is On the Horizon
PLUS: The Pectra Upgrade, Stripe’s stablecoin rollout, and everything else reshaping how the internet moves money.
If you were there last year, you already know. If you weren’t — you missed a moment.
But dont worry, tickets to the Midwest Blockchain Conference 2025 are officially live.
I had the pleasure of sitting in on the kickoff call. The energy? Off the charts. This year, they’re taking it even further. Hosted once again at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, MBC might just be the biggest student-led blockchain conference in the country. Maybe the world.
Built by the clubs, powered by the network, and backed by a who's-who of Web3 giants, MBC is where top student talent meets the real world. Think hiring pipelines, deal flow, demo days, parties, panels, and all the chaotic beauty that happens when 70+ universities descend on Ann Arbor with something to prove.
Last year? They sent students to Gemini, Coinbase, Galaxy, and beyond. This year? More speakers, more sponsors, more opportunity — plus live music, after parties, and more free merch than your closet can handle.
That’s enough for now - more updates coming soon via their Twitter and the group chat. But, here’s everything you need for the timing being.
After you’ve locked in your ticket, lets dive in and explore what else is making moves across Web3 this week — from Ethereum’s Pectra upgrade to Stripe’s stablecoin power play and more.
Ethereum's Blob Get Buff
Ethereum’s Pectra upgrade went live on May 7, and while it didn’t come with much fanfare, it introduced a quiet but meaningful shift in how the network scales — especially for rollups. Most coverage focused on account abstraction (via EIP-7702) and validator experience improvements (EIPs 7251 and 6110), but the most economically significant change may have been a tweak to Ethereum’s blob system.
Blobs — introduced last year with Dencun — are Ethereum’s dedicated data layer for rollups. They’re cheaper than calldata and purpose-built for storing compressed transaction data off-chain while preserving on-chain settlement. Pectra expanded how many blobs can be included per block, increasing both the baseline and ceiling. This effectively increased the available data bandwidth for rollups by ~50% — without touching gas limits or the execution layer. The result? A sudden abundance of data availability space on Ethereum L1, reshaping the dynamics of rollup competition, costs, and validator load.
In case you missed it, Galaxy Research published a fantastic post-upgrade analysis of Ethereum’s blob market. The main takeaway: rollups are getting more room to post data, but they’re not using it all yet. That supply-demand mismatch has driven blob prices to near-zero, reversing the rising fee trend we saw earlier this year. The report tracks how daily blob usage has grown since Pectra, but still lags behind the new target rate — meaning Ethereum’s blob layer is currently oversupplied.
This has translated into significantly lower costs for rollups, higher margins, and less ETH being burned by the network. But it also means consensus-layer nodes are now storing more blob data than ever before — with implications for decentralization and node requirements over time. The report helps quantify these shifts, but more importantly, it shows how Ethereum is actively experimenting with modular scaling — testing what happens when you give rollups more room to grow, and seeing who shows up to fill it. We think it’s a pretty cool piece to check out, so we’ve linked it below.
Stripe’s $1B Stablecoin Play Is the Real Mass Adoption Signal
When Stripe announced its $1.1B acquisition of Bridge earlier this year, it wasn’t just a crypto infra deal - it was a signal. One of the world’s largest and most respected payment companies had made a long-term bet on stablecoins. Not to speculate. Not to hedge. But to integrate them, deeply, into the infrastructure of global payments. That wasn’t hype. That was mass adoption - playing out not in headlines, but in APIs.
At its Sessions conference this month, the pieces started coming together. Stripe launched stablecoin financial accounts in over 100 countries, announced a USDC-denominated Visa card, and rolled out crypto-native balances and payouts - all accessible through the same tools used by platforms, marketplaces, and merchants today. These aren’t pilot experiments. They’re production-grade features, built into Stripe Connect, Treasury, and embedded finance rails.
Zoom out, and the strategy is clear. Stripe isn’t just betting on stablecoins - it’s recognizing them as the next logical evolution in moving money online. Stablecoins settle faster, cost less, and work across borders without relying on legacy intermediaries. But instead of promoting crypto for crypto’s sake, Stripe abstracts it away. Merchants never see a blockchain. Users never hold keys. Funds are priced in fiat, and routed however Stripe deems most efficient - sometimes through banks, increasingly through stablecoins.
That’s what made the Bridge acquisition so important. Bridge wasn’t just a plumbing company - it specialized in converting between fiat and stablecoins, routing through the right chains, and handling the messy compliance needed for payouts in places where traditional rails fall short. Stripe could’ve spent years building this. Instead, it bought a team that had already done it - and was already powering real-world use cases from SpaceX treasury ops to emerging market gig work.
All of this is happening alongside a bigger shift. At Sessions, Stripe also debuted a new AI foundation model trained on tens of billions of transaction signals. It’s already improving fraud detection and optimizing payment flows - making the rails smarter, while stablecoins make them faster. Together, they point to Stripe’s broader thesis: money is becoming programmable. And the companies that abstract complexity - not amplify it - will define the next decade of finance.
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The Most Unhinged Exit Strategy in Crypto
Tbh, we’re not sure anything’s going to top this — now or ever. We usually reserve this final slot for the most unhinged stories in Web3. And this one... is on a different plane entirely.
22-year-old crypto founder Jeffy Yu staged his own death, launched a memecoin called $LLJEFFY, and published an obituary calling himself a “martyr of imagination and creativity.” It didn’t last long. Within days, sleuths tracked him down to his parents’ home in San Francisco, where reporters found him alive, barefoot, and visibly annoyed.
Yu had claimed his “deadman’s switch” launched the coin after his passing, tying it to a concept he dubbed “legacoins” — tokens meant to preserve the memory (and value) of the deceased. On-chain data later showed wallets linked to Yu moving over $1.3M post-“death,” raising suspicions of a cashout. The obituary vanished, the story unraveled, and Yu declined to explain how much of it was real. As of this week, he's alive, flipping flop-flops, and likely looking for a new place to stay.
Sometimes the market’s irrational. Sometimes, it’s just theatrical. Either way - don’t let anyone tell you crypto is boring.
That should be quite the story to end with this week. We’ll see you next Tuesday.