Trump Media, Crypto.com announce a new digital asset treasury firm with $6.4 billion in funding

Despite having an early lead in year-to-date gains, meme coins have round-tripped and bled even more. 

For example, frog-based token pepe was up 75% in the first four days of January, but is now about 8% lower than where it started the year. Dogecoin, shiba inu, bonk, pengu, dogwifhat, and trump tell a similar story: posting a positive gain and then slumping into the red. 

Meme coins, cryptocurrencies based on internet jokes that are often critiqued for lacking utility, are reflexive: they can lead gains during bullish market conditions, but see sharper declines in bearish ones. The entire category of meme coins has shed 25.8% of its valuation in the year so far, data from blockchain analytics firm Artemis shows.

The price action of meme coins comes amid a broader market decline that saw bitcoin drop to $63,000 last week as its peers revisited cycle lows. 

“The market has, in large, been bleeding, whether major, altcoin, or meme,” according to Nicolai Søndergaard, research analyst at on-chain data firm Nansen. “It is not surprising to me to see that larger memes as well have been trending down.”

He told Sherwood News, “If we also consider the fact that there are less active wallets now compared to a few months ago, it also makes sense that larger ‘household’ memes would decline as money shifts around to the next shiny thing.”

XRP is seeing the strongest relief bounce on Friday among its peers following the broad market downturn in crypto.

XRP hit its lowest mark since 2024 on Thursday, but the price of the cryptocurrency has increased roughly 20% in the last 24 hours, outpacing bitcoin and ethereum, which have seen 6.5% and 5.2% gains, respectively. Dogecoin has climbed 8% and solana is up 5% in the same period, data from CoinGecko shows.

XRP’s “price tends to amplify market movements,” Kaiko research analyst Thomas Probst told Sherwood News. “Markets are experiencing a phase of liquidity contraction with increasing volatility. Therefore, rebounds can be frequent, even if they are rarely sustained over the long term.”

The relief comes amid increased activity on the XRP Ledger. Crypto analytics firm Santiment flagged that, during the dip, XRP Ledger saw a four-month high of “whale transactions” over $100,000 and a six-month high of unique addresses on the network in one eight-hour candle. “These are both major signals of a price reversal for any asset,” the firm said. 

Ripple, the company closely tied to XRP and its largest holder, said in a Thursday blog post that XRP is “at the heart of every institutional use case,” such as stablecoin payments, tokenized collateral, and lending markets. 

In an updated road map for the XRP Ledger, the firm outlined upcoming features that act as a “building block for composable financial ecosystems.” These features include a lending protocol, confidential transfers using zero-knowledge proofs, and a new layer of programmability to escrow primitives. 

Meanwhile, spot XRP ETFs absorbed $5.9 million worth of inflows on Thursday, helping the week remain in the black at nearly $24 million.