Can meme coin ETFs turn dumb bits into real bucks?

“Trump himself just launched his own meme coin. If that’s legal, why shouldn’t a doge ETF be?”

1/23/25 12:50PM

Meme coins want to play with the grown-ups in finance, and to prove it, a whole new slew of meme-coin-based ETFs have been submitted for approval.

The mind-boggling rapid institutionalization and the push for normalizing meme coins comes just a couple weeks after bitcoin ETF’s first birthday.

On January 22, Bitwise filed a for a dogecoin ETF trust in Delaware, and the day before, Rex Osprey filed for seven (!!!) spot crypto ETFs, including a dogecoin ETF, a Trump ETF, a bonk ETF, an XRP ETF, as well as relatively more traditional ones, like ethereum and solana ETFs.

Bitwise Doge ETF likely coming soon.. and yes I checked and this is def legit (vs some whack job committing forgery for a quick pump a la BlackRock XRP that one time). pic.twitter.com/MxoswD0IFy
— Eric Balchunas (@EricBalchunas) January 22, 2025

Doge — meme coins’ eldest sibling, at 11 years old — is the seventh-largest crypto, with a $52 billion market cap. It’s up 338% in the past year, and is experiencing a huge boost thanks to its No. 1 fan and DOGE leader Elon Musk.

The newest big meme coins on the scene, trump and $MELANIA , launched just before the presidential inauguration. The five-day-old Trump meme coin has a $7.5 billion market cap and ranks 29th in market cap of all cryptocurrencies, according to CoinGecko.

Whether Trump 2.0 will usher in the materialization of altcoin and meme coin ETFs remains to be seen, but the trend is gaining momentum.

Two Prime Digital Assets CEO Alexander Blume told Sherwood News that these ETF applications are realistic.

“Our new regulatory regime looks to be much more permissive toward crypto,” he said. “Trump himself just launched his own meme coin. If that’s legal, why shouldn’t a doge ETF be?”

Arman Meguerian, founder and CEO of investment platform Timestamp, had some reservations about the new ETFs containing “the most speculative of crypto assets.”

“I don’t oppose these proposed ETFs for doge, bonk, Trump, and possibly other meme coins. If the market demands such products, then they should be allowed,” Meguerian said. “However, investors should be aware of the risk involved and invest with the appropriate precautions in mind. In the big picture of this industry, the highest-quality asset is bitcoin.”

Last year, VanEck and 21Shares filed applications for solana ETFs, and Cboe followed with an application to list them on its exchange, starting the clock ticking for the SEC to make a decision on them by March.

Yaël Bizouati-Kennedy is a financial journalist who’s written for Dow Jones, The Financial Times Group, and Business Insider.

Sage D. Young3h

Solana treasury company dumps more than 12% of its entire stash

On Monday, SOL Strategies, a solana treasury firm, reported the sale of 65,001 tokens to settle more than $4.1 million of debt.

The sale reduced the company’s total holdings of solana by nearly 12.5% from 521,174 tokens to 456,173 tokens, worth roughly $29 million as of writing.

The sale “reflects a decision to reduce debt and further clean up our balance sheet to assist us to fully focus on the operating businesses,” SOL Strategies CEO Michael Hubbard said in a statement.

The news comes one week after the firm announced closing the acquisition of HoudiniSwap, a privacy-based decentralized exchange aggregator, for $18 million.

Shares of SOL Strategies have dropped over 6% today as the underlying cryptocurrency at the center of the firm’s treasury strategy has decreased 5% in the last 24 hours, and 16.8% in the past seven days. The token is down 78% from its all-time high of $293.31 in January 2025.

Meanwhile, solana ETFs have seen $5.5 million in outflows in June, on track to record their first monthly outflow since their inception last year, data from SoSoValue shows.

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BitMine buys the dip, makes largest ethereum purchase this year

Despite having an unrealized loss of nearly $9.7 billion, the leading ethereum treasury firm has acquired even more of the token.

BitMine Immersion Technologies announced it has acquired 126,971 tokens over the past week, the firm’s largest purchase of ethereum this year. The company’s total stockpile stands at 5.5 million, or around 4.6% of ethereum’s total supply.

“We increased our buying as we believe this pullback in ETH prices does not reflect the strengthening of Ethereum fundamentals,” BitMine Chairman Tom Lee said in a statement.

The acquisition comes after the crypto markets saw a broad downturn last week, with many tokens hitting multiyear lows.

Lee argued the sell-off in crypto was a “superficial take.” As artificial intelligence grows more capable, demand for hardened infrastructure is likely to increase alongside expectations that AI systems will expose flaws in centralized rails and weak decentralized protocols, according to Lee.

“We believe this actually strengthens the use case and product market fit for hardened and reliable decentralized blockchains like ethereum,” Lee said. “Thus, we believe ETH prices should not be coming under pressure.”

Meanwhile, last week ethereum ETFs saw more than $173 million in outflows, marking the fourth consecutive week of net redemptions, data from SoSoValue shows.

Joe Lubin, cofounder of ethereum and current CEO of software development firm Consensys, said the recent moves by the Ethereum Foundation, namely staff turnover and leadership changes, are not evidence of a crisis, but a necessary evolution, per a CoinDesk report. Lubin emphasized that “Ethereum is not on the decline, not at all,” even if “we are not front and center right now in terms of capital inflows, investments.”

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Strategy makes big bitcoin buy after period that ranked “among the worst weeks of the decade”

The digital asset stockpiler reversed course from its small sale and purchased $101 million worth of bitcoin.