It’s Day 2 and we’re accelerating.

So far, bitcoin has stayed above six figures for Trump’s entire second presidency.

That’s it. That’s the tweet.

Meanwhile:

• Solana apps raked in more than 73% of all crypto app revenue on Tuesday – a new record for the chain, per Blockworks Research data.

• No Coinbase bump for TRUMP just yet, it’s still at $41.83 — about where it was when its listing was announced on Monday.

• Global USDC supply has broken $51 billion, its highest since September 2022, with many of the new coins minted on Solana.

🔤 Three little letters

It used to be that pop culture ran on a 20-year cycle. These days, it’s more like 10, or even five.

Crypto is undergoing something very similar, and it’s fast becoming ICOs’ turn. 

Seven years ago, a tidal wave of public token sales hit Ethereum, with over 2,000 separate offerings raking in more than $10 billion — almost two-thirds coming in the first three months of 2018 alone.

Here’s one clear sign that initial coin offerings are coming back: Corn’s recent token sale was seven times oversubscribed in the first few hours, so much so they ended up turning away thousands of investors.

Corn is merging two hot narratives from cycles past: public token sales and yield farming. It debuted last year as the “super yield network,” an Ethereum layer-2 on the Arbitrum Orbit stack with a Bitcoin twist.

It’s built to use tokenized wrapped bitcoin, BTCN, as its native asset — to stake, pay gas and otherwise be put to work across its budding DeFi ecosystem.

Corn’s ICO was conducted through MiCA-compliant token sale platform Legion. Nearly 4,300 applicants requested $69 million in allocations, with the team accepting $8.3 million from around 700 investors. 

Legion is a merit-based venue for connecting projects with the right capital. All participants (which excludes UK and retail in the US) must first KYC, but the real value add is that users can also connect their crypto wallets, X accounts and GitHub profiles.

This allows projects to prioritize investors who are active in crypto, whether that’s showing up onchain or in code, if they so choose.

“We thought: ‘How do we create something that's fair and open for small and big, and how do we get very targeted with our token distribution, so we can be in a place to say we have 1,000 or 2,000 long-term committed investors well before the token goes live?” Chris Spadafora, Corn founder, told me over the weekend.

“That's what drove us to go down this path, but it wasn't an easy decision and it required a lot of work to kind of coordinate all the different groups.”

Those parties included existing Corn backers from its seed and venture rounds last year — venture capital firms Polychain Capital, GSR, Laser Digital and more.

“Anyone that participated in this round went through an identical process,” Spadafora said. “They had to onboard to Legion, they had to apply, and then we had to accept them.” 

The kicker, according to Spadafora, is now that all those funds have been onboarded, the next project that wants to launch on Legion has a direct line and access to some of the biggest funds in the world — along with another 10,000 or 100,000 people on Legion that can invest at the same terms.

But if ICOs really are back, there would need to be improvements. ICOs in 2017 and 2018 were often opaque and painfully skewed toward insiders. Corn’s offering meanwhile had no side letters or secret undisclosed deals. 

“There was one contract, it was loaded. If you wanted to invest $1,000 or a million dollars, it was the same deal. Take it or get the fuck out of here,” Spadafora said, and that attitude might be just what ICOs needed all along.

— David

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This March, join Mike Novogratz and Shervin Pishevar as they share insights from institutional crypto adoption to tech innovation. From markets to venture capital, DAS NYC is where industry leaders shape the next chapter of finance and technology.

📅 March 18-20 | NYC

• Hold your horses: Jupiter’s set to drop $630 million of JUP in its ‘Jupuary’ airdrop.

• A Trump coin ETF may just be a matter of time if Rex or Osprey have anything to say. Both investment managers filed for a TRUMP-backed exchange-traded product.

• MicroStrategy bought another $1.1 billion of bitcoin, putting its holdings at around 461,000 BTC. Yep, you read that right.

🚪 An open door

I’m happy to announce that we can officially retire the term “regulation by enforcement.” It can now join “cautiously optimistic” and “soft landing” on the shelf of terms nobody needs to hear anytime soon. 

Yesterday, acting chair Mark Uyeda announced that Hester Peirce — known around here as Crypto Mom for her dissents over the SEC’s approach to the space — would head up a new taskforce: Crypto 2.0.

With Gary Gensler officially out of the building, it’s now abundantly clear that the SEC is serious about crypto companies coming in and registering. Don’t believe me? Just look at what Uyeda said in the press release: Crypto 2.0 “will succeed only if the Task Force has input from a wide range of investors, industry participants, academics and other interested parties.”

If you’re an avid Empire reader, I’m sure you’ve noticed the optimistic tone David and I have carried for a few months now. We've been saying that the winds of change have shifted the vibe. This week just proved it. 

The launch of Trump’s coin led to some confusion and criticism (some of it, like I talked about yesterday, is justified) but the SEC’s newest task force shows that it’s looking to ensure a framework that actually works for the industry. 

Whether this means that the current lawsuits, including the one the SEC filed against Helium’s Nova Labs on Friday, will be dismissed is still up in the air. 

Remember that Haynes Boone partner Matthew Frankle told us earlier this month that we could perhaps see cases dropped as the SEC adopts a friendlier approach. 

The vibes are high, Crypto Mom is in charge, and we’re soo back.

— Katherine

On our minds: Bitcoin in 2025