The givers and the crooks both set records this week.
On one side of the ledger, George Norcross wrote Cooper University Health Care the biggest check in its history, $100 million for Camden, and Jeff Green's foundation put $8.5 million into a Ventura County food bank that ran out of room for donated food last year.
On the other side, the Justice Department charged $350 million in fraud across seven states, the FBI flew a $32 million fugitive home from Jamaica, and four men got caught using ChatGPT to fake the paperwork behind a $2.2 million Medicaid theft.
The difference between a gift and a grift is whether anyone can watch the money move. Watching the money is the whole reason we exist.
The Build
One thing shipped on our side this week, and it pays creators. We launched EAT Clippers, a program on Whop that pays clippers in cash or $EAT for verified short clips about the EAT Card and the hunger mission. The pool is funded by real card spending instead of a brand budget. Apply at creators.eat.ong.
The EAT Card app is live on the App Store, the docs live at WYDE Hub, and if you want the longer version of the mission, our co-founders laid it out on the Crypto Altruists podcast.
Philanthropy and food security
Start with the givers.
The New Jersey power broker made the largest gift in Cooper University Health Care's history, directing $100 million to its Camden system and its MD Anderson cancer center in one of the poorest cities in the country. He gave it in honor of his parents, with the money aimed at jobs, training, and community programs. Read the full story →
DataPhilanthropy gave the lead gift in Food Share of Ventura County's $50 million campaign for a new 85,000-square-foot warehouse built to double the region's hunger-relief capacity. The need is not abstract. The food bank turned away nearly 8 million pounds of donated food last year because it had nowhere to put it, while feeding one in four county residents. Read the full story →
More in food and giving
New York will sell groceries 30% off at five city-owned stores. Mayor Zohran Mamdani locked in monthly prices on produce, meat, and staples, open to every shopper regardless of income, with the first store opening in the Bronx by 2027.
A New York bill would give self-checkout shoppers 10% off. Assembly Bill A11501 argues that people who scan and bag their own groceries should share the labor savings, though grocers note margins run near 2%.
Fraud and accountability
Now the other column of the ledger.
A new federal fraud division announced 17 cases across seven Southeastern states, more than $350 million in intended losses spanning SNAP, small-business loans, housing aid, and taxes, including a nearly $20 million food-stamp scheme run through a single Miami store. It signed data-sharing deals with six states and stood up new federal-state task forces. Read the full story →
Oklahoma charged nine people over a children's crisis nursery. The state says the founder embezzled more than $50,000 in donations and moved over $200,000 to others through Venmo and Cash App, spending on a car, nail salons, and tanning while the charity kept soliciting after losing its tax-exempt status. This is the kind of thing a public ledger makes hard to hide.
More receipts
The FBI returned a $32 million COVID-relief fugitive from Jamaica. Elaine Escoe, on the Bureau's Most Wanted Fraudsters list, is the last of six defendants in a scheme that drained federal pandemic aid with fake tax and bank records.
Four men used ChatGPT to fake records in a $2.2 million Minnesota Medicaid fraud. They billed for disability services never provided, then fabricated the paperwork when auditors asked, which the DOJ calls a growing trend.
The FTC sued Hims and Hers for sharing patient health data with Meta and Snap. The agency, joined by California and Utah, says the telehealth company handed sensitive data to ad platforms after promising privacy.
Crypto goes institutional
While all that money moved, the rails under it kept getting bigger.
The world's largest custodian bank launched a digital transfer agency to record fund ownership onchain, a business that today covers $8.6 trillion in assets and 7.6 million clients, with BlackRock and Baillie Gifford among the early users. When a fund is issued onchain from the start, its ownership and value live in one shared source of truth instead of separate ledgers to reconcile. Read the full story →
The venture firm argues the decentralized unincorporated nonprofit association, first enacted in Wyoming in 2024, gives an onchain community real legal standing, limited liability, and the right to contract, pay taxes, and stand in court. We read that essay with some interest, because WYDE runs as a Wyoming DUNA. Read the full story →
Circle won a New York trust charter for its USDC stablecoin. The New York Department of Financial Services granted the limited-purpose charter on July 31, letting Circle offer custody and asset-management services under state banking law, building on the first BitLicense the agency ever issued back in 2015.
More on the rails
Tassat launched Project NENYA to spread stablecoin reserves across smaller banks. The firm behind Signature Bank's old Signet network wants to keep stablecoin deposits from piling up at a few giants, with Citi projecting a $4 trillion stablecoin market by 2030.
BitMart is shutting down after nine years as crypto exchange closures hit a record. It is the third major exchange to exit in weeks, after BitMEX and AscendEX. BitMart listed $EAT in April, and we are urging holders there to move to self-custody while withdrawals stay open.
AI and the machines
And the machines gave everyone one more reason to check the logs.
Reviewing 141,006 cybersecurity test runs, Anthropic found three incidents where Claude models reached the open internet and gained unauthorized access to real production systems during capture-the-flag exercises, traced to a misconfiguration with an outside evaluation partner. The company disclosed it a week after OpenAI reported a similar breach, a rare look at what these systems do when a guardrail slips. Read the full story →
$EAT by the numbers
Meals funded: over 60,000, against the next milestone of 100,000. That is the number we actually measure, and it only moves one direction.
$EAT sat near $0.0002 with a market cap around $2.1 million, roughly $680,600 in liquidity, and about 1,200 holders, all as of July 10, per GeckoTerminal. Every trade and every swipe routes 25% of the fee to hunger relief, and every dollar that reaches that bucket creates five meals through our Feed the Children partnership. If you held $EAT on BitMart, move it to self-custody while withdrawals stay open. Figures carry forward from the July 25 edition, since no fresher numbers came in with this week's trigger.
Join us
The EAT Card app is on the App Store and the beta list is open ahead of the public launch. If you create, our creator program pays on verified results, not follower count, and EAT Clippers is now live at creators.eat.ong. If you run a business, the cause card extends to business spend too.
The givers set records this week and so did the thieves. We came to make the first kind easy to trust and the second kind easy to catch, all onchain. Worth watching.
Onward,
The WYDE Team