🤡 TRUMP and dump

The president’s memecoin faces a massive unlock

Brought to you by:

Howdy!

Today’s discourse surrounding tokenized babies has been one of Crypto Twitter’s funniest gags in a long time. I had tears in my eyes reading “The Pro-Social Case for Tokenizing Babies (proposal and design).”

Today, we’ve got the TRUMP unlock, 3iQ’s SOL staking ETF, and Mert’s laws of shitposting:

TRUMP token slides ahead of massive unlock

It’s a good old Trump and dump.

Tokens worth 20% of the current supply of the memecoin launched by Donald Trump are set to be unlocked tomorrow, according to data from Tokenomist. Fears surrounding the token’s supply increase caused the token to drop 2.7% this week. That happened as memecoins generally roared to life: Out of the 10 largest memecoins by market capitalization, TRUMP is the only one that is down on the week, according to CoinGecko.

Tomorrow, 40 million TRUMP — worth around $300 million on extremely flimsy paper — will be made available to the token’s creators, as well as CIC DIGITAL, a Trump-owned entity that was involved with the president’s NFT collection. 

There’s not yet any indication as to whether the president’s team plans to sell the tokens on the open market or hold onto them for longer. Trump hasn’t inspired much confidence in his personal interest in the memecoin, in any event. 

Since TRUMP’s launch, the president wrote about it online just once, calling it “SO COOL!!!” in a Truth Social post. When asked about the token by a reporter a few days after its January launch, Trump said, "I don't know much about it other than I launched it, other than it was very successful." An X account linked to the token’s website is barely active. 

Despite everything, there still are some folks holding TRUMP. The token has over $1.5 billion in market capitalization — more than TIA, ARB and JUP. I asked my X followers if they were still holding TRUMP, and why.

“I went all in on it, hoping it will reach an all time high, but slowly I am losing my hopes day by day,” one anonymous account wrote.

Another self-identified US Army and crypto veteran likened TRUMP to a collectible and said they hold some in their IRA (which I didn’t know was possible — the wonders of technology!).

One case people made for TRUMP was that the token could trade as a kind of sentiment check on Trump’s presidency. That really hasn’t been the case: The token’s largest single-day pump came on Valentine’s Day, which was the day Argentine President Javier Milei launched the ill-fated LIBRA token

So the best investment thesis for Trump’s memecoin, as far as I can tell, is that someday he might post about it on Truth Social again. Construct your retirement accounts accordingly.

— Jack Kubinec

P.S. Fill out our short audience survey and help us build a better Lightspeed. Thank you!

Brought to you by:

Zenrock is a permissionless, decentralized custody network backed by 1RoundTable Partners, 10T, Maven11, and Spartan.

Live on Jupiter, $ROCK is the native token for transactions within the Zenrock ecosystem and secures Zenrock’s decentralized custody network. The first application launching on Zenrock is zenBTC — yield-bearing Bitcoin on Solana.

zenBTC will be live in April 2025.

Day one of the first Solana staking ETF:

3iQ’s Solana staking ETF began trading on the Toronto stock exchange yesterday. It’s the first such product to trade in North America.

The ETF has a net asset value of $4.5 million, according to 3iQ’s website. Not bad, but not necessarily much to write home about either.

— Jack Kubinec

Mert just gave a masterclass on one of Crypto Twitter’s highest art forms: the shitpost. In a recent video from Superteam UAE, the Helius CEO delivers five golden rules for anyone looking to inject the oomph of degeneracy into their timeline.

Rule one: Don’t take yourself too seriously. "You're going to die, and nobody will care what you said on the internet," Mert begins. As long as you're not too mean, don’t punch down, and keep it light, your only job, really, is to have fun.

Rule two: Say the quiet part out loud but in a funny way. "If you just say what everybody's thinking but are maybe too afraid to say, but in a funny way, then people won't be mad; they will just laugh." The trick isn't confrontation; it's comedy. Truth, yes, drama, no.

Rule three: There are no rules. Yes, that’s the rule. "People will tell you things like 'keep your posts short, only use very simple words', and that's generally good advice," he concedes. "But you can also just tell completely random stories that are super long, and then get them with an 'increase bandwidth, reduce latency' at the very end, and catch everybody off guard." The best posts surprise the reader, so embrace chaos.

Rule four: Be curious. "Always be a learning machine, and then let your unconscious do the rest." Don’t force it, he says, "Do not just try to shitpost about something that you think other people will like. There must be some things that you're curious about on your own." So whether it’s blockchain interoperability or your irrational beef with Canada, go ahead and speak your piece. Be your own human.

Rule five: Observe the world. "Shitposting, in my view, is very similar to something like stand-up comedy," Mert says. It’s all about noticing the obvious truths no one else calls out. "Don't think about creating, just think about observing [...] Turn off that filter that says, ‘Oh, I shouldn't say this because my girlfriend will love me less.’ You don't have a girlfriend. It's totally fine. Just say what you think."

— Jeffrey Albus

A message from Infra, core contributor at Raydium: