About last night’s $TRUMP dinner: Protestors, $100,000 watches, and excited attendees

Ethereum climbed to its highest level in over a month on Friday, briefly touching $2,200. The price swing comes amid a new change among ETFs focused on the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization. 

Yesterday, ETHB — BlackRock’s iShares Staked Ethereum Trust ETF — started trading on the Nasdaq, making the investment vehicle the first from the financial titan to include staking, the process of locking up tokens to help secure the network’s consensus mechanism in exchange for rewards. 

The nascent staking ETF has nearly $150 million in net assets, drawing in $43.5 million in inflows on its first day, data from SoSoValue shows. “Pretty good start for any ETF,” Bloomberg ETF analyst James Seyffart wrote in a social media post.

While ETHB is BlackRock’s first ethereum staking ETF, it’s not the first to market. The Grayscale Ethereum Staking Mini ETF launched in 2024, while the Rex-Osprey ETH Staking ETF rolled out last year. 

Ethereum ETFs have seen nearly $157.7 million of inflows in March, on track to record their first monthly inflow since October. 

Meanwhile, the Ethereum Foundation published its mandate, “a document that serves as part constitution, part manifesto, and part guide for the Ethereum Foundation,” on Friday. 

“Our Mandate to EF states what must be cherished to protect the ultimate reason for Ethereum’s existence: user self-sovereignty,” the Ethereum Foundation board wrote. “To be a part of EF, our own teams must remember that Ethereum must, above all, remain censorship resistant, open source, private, and secure (CROPS).”

The mandate is a new chapter in how the organization views its position in the world, according to ethereum cofounder Vitalik Buterin. “We must see ourselves not just as the Ethereum community, but also as maintainers of the Ethereum tool within what you might call the CROPS community,” Buterin said. “This means open-mindedness to new conceptions of what things in the world are our natural allies.”

President Trump’s meme coin has risen 54.6% in the last 24 hours to trade at a more than one-month high. The token’s price performance is outpacing an overall rise throughout the wider crypto industry, boosting its total market capitalization 4.3%.

What’s driving it? Something we’ve seen before: on Thursday, GetTrumpMemes announced that the top 297 holders of $TRUMP will have the opportunity to attend a gala luncheon next month at Mar-a-Lago, where the president will be a keynote speaker.

Last year a similar competition was announced, and the top $TRUMP whales attended a dinner with him at the Trump National Golf Club in Washington, DC, drawing supporters, critics, and protestors to the event.

Despite the recent spike, the cryptocurrency is down 94.2% from its all-time high of $73.43, set the day before Trump’s inauguration last year, when it topped a $70 billion valuation.