Crypto
Nation's Capital Prepares For President-Elect Trump's Second Inauguration
(Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

New cryptocurrency $TRUMP surged, briefly hitting a $70 billion market cap

Trump’s new crypto project soared ahead of his inauguration, as reports emerge of a blizzard of executive orders planned for Day 1 of his presidency.

The keys to the White House have passed, once again, to Donald Trump.

Inaugurated as the United States of America’s 47th president, today’s swearing-in ceremony — moved indoors because of forecasts predicting it could be the coldest Inauguration Day since 1985 — gives the green light for the incoming administration to begin legislating its substantial agenda. Toward the top of that list of priorities is advocating for the cryptocurrency industry.

Trump 2.0

On Friday, reports emerged that making crypto a national priority could be among a flurry of executive orders that Trump issues on Day 1. But before any more details surfaced, the then president-elect sprang another surprise on the crypto universe: $TRUMP, a meme coin he launched while hosting a “Crypto Ball” for the industry on Friday night.

Two days later, $MELANIA was born, announced via a social-media post from the incoming first lady.

Initially, $MELANIA’s debut dragged $TRUMP down, but the pair of cryptocurrencies have since regained some footing. At this writing, the two tokens have a collective (fully diluted) market cap of nearly $60 billion.

The $TRUMP coin has an initial circulating supply of 200 million coins, with plans to release another 800 million over the coming three years. At current prices, that implies a market cap of either ~$47 billion or ~$9 billion, depending on which measure is used.

$TRUMP surge
Sherwood News

Per the asset’s official website:

“Trump Memes are intended to function as an expression of support for, and engagement with, the ideals and beliefs embodied by the symbol ‘$TRUMP’...”

Also:

“CIC Digital LLC, an affiliate of The Trump Organization, and Fight Fight Fight LLC collectively own 80% of the Trump Cards, subject to a 3-year unlocking schedule.”

For years, the financial instrument to support Trump was the stock of DJT, the Trump Media & Technology Group. Now the “crypto president” has a new vehicle.

Zooming out: over the weekend, other digital assets also made gains, with bitcoin and solana now up 18% and 46%, respectively, over the past seven days.

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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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