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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.

Yaël Bizouati-Kennedy

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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Hyperliquid reclaims all-time high

HYPE, the native token powering perpetuals exchange Hyperliquid and its underlying blockchain, rebounded to reclaim its all-time high previously set at the start of the month.

Treasury firms Hyperliquid Strategies and Hyperion DeFi have also rallied as the token increased double digits in the last 24 hours to trade as high as $76.70, rising past its record price set nearly two weeks ago, according to CoinGecko. In the interim between all-time highs, HYPE pulled back to around $53.

The token has several tailwinds, the first coming from ETF flows. Since their inception in May, HYPE ETFs have yet to record negative weekly outflows, posting a cumulative total net inflow of $171.8 million, per SoSoValue.

The second comes from Hyperliquid spending basically everything it earns in fees to buy HYPE, a mechanism embedded into the protocol’s codebase.

The venue’s buyback funding mechanism is set to add a new source of yield. Validators of the network activated “AQAv2,” which means stablecoin deployers will share about 90% of reserve yield revenue on their supply within the protocol.

Around $6.1 billion of Circle’s USDC resides in Hyperliquid, per DefiLlama. Accrual begins on August 26 and the first payment is made on October 3, the network announced in its Discord channel last week.

A substantial amount of capital is riding on different positions of HYPE. In total, a move down to under $53 would result in the liquidation nearly 1.8 million HYPE worth of leveraged long positions on the on-chain perps venue, or $131.7 million, data from CoinGlass shows. For the upside, a climb above $100 results in the liquidation of more than 3 million worth of leveraged HYPE short positions, or $221.5 million.

HYPE’s rebound to all-time high comes after Michael Selig, chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, defended his agency’s decision to approve regulated perpetuals, or futures contracts without expiration dates, CNBC reported on Monday.

Last month, the CFTC approved bitcoin perpetual futures trading in the US through regulated prediction markets firm Kalshi and an affiliate of centralized exchange Coinbase.

“Perps are highly likely to become lightly regulated and thus approved in the US,” said David Pakman, head of venture investments at CoinFund.

“We expect to see perps for many different types of assets, from commodities to equities,” Pakman told Sherwood News.

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Crypto market snaps back as sentiment lifts, with altcoins from ethereum to XRP soaring

The market capitalization of the crypto industry has jumped around $83.2 billion in the last 24 hours, with privacy-focused token Zcash and worldcoin, the native cryptocurrency of the network backed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, leading market gains, jumping over 22%.

But the last 24 hours have been good across the board:

Investors have been eager to see some positive signs around the Iranian conflict ending, coupled with hopeful outlooks around the CLARITY act, both breathing some life into assets, Kairos Research cofounder Ian Unsworth told Sherwood News.

Simon Shockey, a crypto strategist at crypto wallet infrastructure firm Privy, said the upswing stems from several things converging. He pointed to how alt markets broadly were very oversold following the bug found in Zcash that shook confidence.

Friday, Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox said Anthropic didn’t find any more serious bugs with the Zcash protocol after Shielded Labs requested the AI firm run a security audit of the network with Mythos.

Shockey added that the pool of willing sellers has dwindled. Even if structurally, AI is a much more compelling and asymmetric bet in the eyes of allocators, many of these crypto assets have simply run out of marginal sellers despite some shorter-term narrative-driven pumps. The only people left to sell at this point are the teams themselves and VCs.

Net-net: oversold conditions plus exhausted seller bases plus a macro backdrop thats stabilized equals a snapback, especially in names that have real usage or community conviction behind them,” Shockey told Sherwood.

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