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People walk past an advertisement feature Donald Trump with...
Ad showing Donald Trump with bitcoin (May James/Getty Images)
“Have FUN!”

As competition to be a top $TRUMP holder ends, the meme coin launches loyalty program, reward points

Details about what the new $TRUMP points program entails are scant.

The competition to win a dinner at the Trump National Golf Club in Washington, DC, on May 22 for the top 220 holders of the $TRUMP token is over. In a post on X, the @GetTrumpMemes account said, “If you were in the top 220 on the leaderboard, check the email you signed up with for details on the Dinner with President Trump as soon as possible.”

Additional prizes were also revealed yesterday and include “a TRUMP DIAMOND HAND limited edition TRUMP SOLANA NFT. Very Special and Rare.”

The post also announced new $TRUMP endeavors: a loyalty program and reward points. Details are scant on the official website, with one line saying, “Connect your wallet NOW and get TRUMP Points IMMEDIATELY! Join the Trump Community! Have FUN!”

The dinner has brought the ire of Democrats, with many, including Sen. Richard Blumenthal, arguing that the dinner might violate government ethics requirements and facilitate “financial transactions with foreign nationals under federal prosecution.”

Last week, a Bloomberg analysis showed that all but six of the top 25 holders are foreign. A report from New York Magazine identifies some of the “winners” who will be at the dinner, which include controversial crypto figure Justin Sun, who has also invested heavily in the Trump-linked World Liberty Financial project.

“The prevalence of these likely foreign buyers echoes concerns that congressional Democrats have expressed about the ethics of marketing the coin with a promise of presidential access,” Bloomberg reported.

$TRUMP, with a $2.5 billion market cap, was launched on the eve of the presidential inauguration. Since then, it has enjoyed some spikes, namely around Inauguration Day and after the “exclusive dinner” announcement, but the token is down 75% since its all-time high on January 19.

Harrison Seletsky, director of business development at SPACE ID, warned about the meme coin frenzy that has returned since the global tariff de-escalation.

He noted that over the last seven days, the market cap of the meme category on CoinGecko has increased 36%, while some, like Solana’s MOODENG, have exploded by 530% in just a week.

“For every success story, there are thousands of horror stories. So, anyone looking to speculate on meme coins must be incredibly careful — remember you’re buying an asset with no intrinsic value. If the only thing driving the price is hype, then the pump will almost certainly be very short-lived,” Seletsky added.

Indeed, a report from the Washington Post focusing on $TRUMP buyers found that at least 67,000 completely new or beginner crypto investors bought Trump’s meme coin, but they almost all bought the coin near its peak price and 80% have lost money on their investment. 

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BlackRock’s bitcoin ETF is on the cusp of $100 billion in assets, a milestone it will have achieved in less than two years

While VOO might be the largest ETF in the world, IBIT — BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF — is the fastest-growing. And the bitcoin-centered product is on the cusp of a major milestone, reporting that it now holds 802,257 BTC, putting it within a whisker of hitting $100 billion in assets (worth roughly $99 billion in good old-fashioned USD at the time of writing).

Considering that BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust launched only 636 days ago, that’s a remarkable speedrun, as individual and institutional investors have embraced cryptocurrency via the exchange-traded fund. For context, VOO took over 2,900 days to hit the same milestone (about eight years).

VOO vs. IBIT spead to $100 billion assets under management
Sherwood News

As noted in a great piece by Robin Wigglesworth in the Financial Times, IBIT is now a major money-spinner for one of the biggest stalwarts of TradFi. As the largest exchange-traded product in the crypto space, and with a not insignificant expense ratio of 0.25%, the ETF is pulling in somewhere in the region of $250 million of revenue for its asset manager parent company. As Wigglesworth puts it:

“Anyway, it’s heartwarming to see that one of the companies profiting the most from an anarchical, decentralised invention supposedly designed to reorder the global financial system is... BlackRock.”

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Bitcoin ETFs take in more than $2 billion in two days

Bitcoin is down 2.7% from its recent record which saw it passing $126,000, but bitcoin ETFs are still hot.

The ETFs have already amassed more than $2 billion this week, on track to surpass last week’s $3.2 billion in inflows. In total, bitcoin ETFs have just under $165 billion in assets under management, representing 6.78% of the total market cap, SoSoValue data shows.

BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust by far took the lion’s share, with $1.8 billion of inflows. The fund is also close to $100 billion in assets, despite not even being 2 years old.

Bitwise CEO Matt Hougan said in a note, “The stars are aligned for a very strong Q4 for flows — more than enough to push us to a new record,” in part thanks to the “debasement trade.” 

10%

Ethereum treasury companies and ETFs hold more than 10% of the cryptocurrency’s total supply of 120.7 million tokens.

Corporate firms own roughly 5.7 million, while ethereum reserves for ETFs stand at 6.8 million tokens, worth more than $59 billion, per data from analytics platform StrategicETHReserve.xyz.

BitMine Immersion Technologies and SharpLink Gaming have taken the top spots among treasury entities, amassing about 3.7 million ethereum tokens worth roughly $17.4 billion. SharpLink Gaming recently announced that its unrealized profits have reached $900 million since the rollout of its ethereum treasury strategy in June. 

Meanwhile, BlackRock’s iShares Ethereum Trust ETF has secured the lead among spot ethereum ETFs with $18.6 billion in net assets. So far in October, $803.1 million of inflows have collectively entered the investment vehicles. 

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Sherwood Media, LLC produces fresh and unique perspectives on topical financial news and is a fully owned subsidiary of Robinhood Markets, Inc., and any views expressed here do not necessarily reflect the views of any other Robinhood affiliate, including Robinhood Markets, Inc., Robinhood Financial LLC, Robinhood Securities, LLC, Robinhood Crypto, LLC, or Robinhood Money, LLC.