Copernicus was wrong about the sun. The world revolves around Trump’s pen this week.

Out of hundreds of executive orders, a Ross Ulbricht pardon is arguably the most important for Trump’s relationship with crypto moving forward.

No official word yet. But it’s early!

In the meantime:

• Bitcoin dropped slightly to $104,000 after President Donald Trump failed to mention crypto or bitcoin in his inauguration speech.

• The official TRUMP token is down 20% to $37 with a market cap of $7.5 billion.

• Total liquidations in the past 24 hours topped $578 million, per CoinGlass data.

🏛️ A new era

David was right yesterday, TRUMP is so much more than a memecoin. 

Empire co-host Santiago Santos, in an Empire livestream last night, said that the launch “sets the tone,” and, honestly, I agree. 

“One of Trump’s superpowers is that he has the unbelievable ability to read the room at scale, and he has a really good sense of what people want from him and what's going to resonate with people,” Blockworks co-founder Mike Ippolito said on the stream. 

About recent memecoin launches, I’ve seen and heard a lot of comparisons to ICOs back in 2017. That comparison makes sense, but there’s a slightly different one I want to make today, so bear with me. 

As this played out over the weekend, I was quietly watching markets for Trump’s coin. For some reason, I couldn’t help but see similarities to the GameStop-driven memestock (or momentum stocks, IYKYK) craze around Covid. 

It’s not a perfect comparison, and I’m well aware of that, but the hype and appetite over the weekend brought me right back to 2021.

With TRUMP, there wasn’t a Reddit post that started the snowball effect, and the leader of the free world is very different from GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen in terms of both celebrity and power.

Still, it was clear in how people interacted with TRUMP. I heard from folks that they were jumping into Trump’s token merely for the vibe (and the hope of making some generational wealth).

The lack of communication from Trump or his team regarding the token gave me weird flashbacks — when people took cryptic tweets Cohen’s account as a surefire sign that he was going to make GameStop great again.

Santos thinks that if Trump’s team had been more transparent, there might’ve been a different reaction to the MELANIA token (ICYMI, TRUMP tanked after the Melania token was announced before regaining a little). 

Although, I suspect there would’ve been a leg down no matter what, considering people were certain to still be left wondering what the hell was happening. 

Ippolito’s concern is that this erodes some of the hard-earned trust that crypto is trying to earn back post-FTX. Whether or not that’s the case, discussions I had with non-crypto people this weekend suggest some folks have a hard time looking past the meme of it all. 

On the positive front: “Crypto is showing how much legs it has in terms of being a new capital market,” Ippolito said. And that is one of the most interesting aspects of TRUMP. Perhaps, like the team behind the Trump token said to Jason Yanowitz, the token really is a movement. 

Either way, this whole saga has started conversations about the potential for more of these types of political or celebrity tokens. But we also need to keep dialogue open about the effects they may have on crypto.

There’s always a place for memes in crypto. Let’s not become the meme. 

— Katherine

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• Speaking of memes, the official DOGE (the government department, not the dog-based meme) logo on the newly launched site is, funnily enough, the iconic Shiba Inu.

• Did Gary Gensler get the last laugh? The SEC filed a suit against the company behind Helium Labs on Friday.

• Oh, and Vitalik Buterin (sporting his new Milady profile picture) took to X to clarify that he’s the only person deciding on the new Ethereum Foundation leadership though he wants, in due time, to have a “proper board.”

🧠 Bold strategy

Anthony Bourdain would famously go to great lengths to avoid and outwit a guy inside him who wanted to rot in bed all day.

I do something similar with my inner contrarian. But I can’t help it with this one: The crypto portfolio of Trump-linked DeFi platform World Liberty Financial could very well turn out to be the crypto strategic reserve which many anticipate will soon be announced. 

And it’s already getting messy.

To the conspiracy theorist that sometimes types for me — like the rat in Ratatouille — there are obvious signs.

Donald Trump Jr. perhaps let it slip on X. To commemorate Trump Sr.’s second inauguration on Monday, becoming the 45th and 47th US president, World Liberty Financial made a series of what it called “strategic purchases” of various coins.

Deep thinkers would quickly spot that one of those coins is not like the others. 

World Liberty Financial runs on Ethereum — so ETH makes sense. Trump has also done well courting the Bitcoiners, so wBTC gets a green check as a DeFi-compatible nod to the real thing. 

So does AAVE, LINK and ENA. Platforms tied to all three coins are expected to integrate with World Liberty Financial whenever it goes live.

But why TRX?

(The conspiracist in me is now screaming about the $30 million plowed into the World Liberty Financial token sale by Tron founder Justin Sun last month. And the curious switch from cbBTC to WBTC amid that drama. Ignore him.)

For what it’s worth, if World Liberty Financial really is the US crypto strategic reserve in disguise, it’s doing pretty well so far. 

It has spent $220.1 million on crypto since the end of November. Now it’s worth $234 million, putting it over 6% ahead, with gains made on BTC, ETH and AAVE against losses in TRX, ENA and ONDO.

Maybe let it cook.

— David

On our minds: Crypto’s final form