Bitcoin Retreats From $60K, Potentially Signaling an End to Its Dominance
Trump reveals he holds more than $1 million in crypto as election season heats up...
Bitcoin’s impressive run to account for nearly 60% of crypto’s overall market cap might be coming to an end, according to one of the industry’s largest investment firms.
And this week, Fed Chair Jerome Powell and Co. will descend on Jackson Hole in Wyoming to share his latest view on the economy and interest rate cuts — plus TRON’s Justin Sun looks to emulate Solana’s success with memecoins.
Per usual, you can watch us discuss all of this and more in our Live Monday News Digest, or just keep reading for a recap!
Crypto Inflows Remain Weak
Investments in crypto asset products remained weak, according to the latest numbers from CoinShares. Not only did Ethereum and Bitcoin barely make it into the green, Solana suffered its worst outflows on record, with investors pulling more than $39 million.
That could just be investors looking to pull from less efficient Solana trusts ahead of the trading debut for the first Solana ETF in Brazil, which is expected in the coming weeks, or it could be a rolling over of the enthusiasm that has come from memecoins launched on Solana.
TRON Bets on Solana’s Memecoin Success
If Solana’s woes are actually being caused by investors betting the memecoin craze is over, that doesn’t bode well for one project that just announced plans to copy that playbook.
Competing Layer-1 blockchain TRON recently unveiled a copy of pump.fun, the platform that lets anyone whip up a memecoin for as little as $2. The platform has led to thousands of memecoins being created on Solana and now TRON is getting in on the action by launching SunPump.
TRON founder Justin Sun said the project will also launch with $10 million set aside to help creators grow their ecosystems. That seems interesting though, since many of these memecoins are often launched with the explicit understanding that there isn’t much of a reason to ever buy them beyond pure speculation.
Is Bitcoin’s Dominance Over?
We’ve reached the point in the cycle where it’s worth checking in on Bitcoin’s overall share of the total crypto market cap. At 57%, it’s both near a three-year high and — if you compare to last week — starting to roll over.
Pantera Capital Portfolio Manager Cosmo Jiang recently joined us to share that historically Bitcoin usually tops out by adding about 20 percentage points in dominance during a cycle as is approaching that now.
"I do think we're at a point where we are closer certainly to the longer tail tokens taking off and really outperforming. But again this all hinges on the fundamentals of these protocols,” he said in our latest interview.
Trump Reveals $1M+ In Crypto Holdings
Former President Trump recently revealed how much he holds in crypto. According to new filings, he holds more than $1 million in Ethereum. Arkham Intelligence has that total closer to about $3.5 million in total, thanks to a number of NFT projects Trump had launched.
Aside from the crypto holdings themselves, filings also show that Trump made $7.15 million through a licensing agreement with a firm called NFT INT, and the former first lady, Melania Trump, also made $330,609 in income from the sales of NFTs.
On the one hand, that’s a lot of money. On the other hand, relative to Trump’s net worth, that’s somewhat small potatoes. Nonetheless, Trump’s team only continues to get more pro-crypto. This week, billionaire Cantor Fitzgerald CEO Howard Lutnick, who also custodies Tether’s billions in U.S. treasury holdings, joined the Trump transition team. That’d be a huge pro-crypto advocate steering the ship should Trump win re-election.
ICYMI: Can Crypto Help Prevent an AI Monopoly Disaster?
As the AI race rages on, Big Tech companies are taking different approaches to rolling out the tech. Surprisingly, Meta has leaned into open-sourcing a lot of its AI models. Zuck recently explained that he envisions a lot of people building agents, and that by open-sourcing the tech, he can help bring the best tools to Meta’s billions of users around the world.
Allora Network is working to build a way for people to monetize pieces of AI models, and we recently caught up with the co-founder of Allora to chat about how crypto might be able to help prevent a winner-take-all outcome: