🛝 Sploosh

No question that HYPE is now technically the largest airdrop in crypto history, at least in terms of paper value.

Hyperliquid’s new coin could soon also be the most valuable airdropped token to date.

The team behind the popular perps-DEX-slash-layer-1 initially designated 310 million tokens for the airdrop, with more than 94,000 addresses eligible.

So far, about 270.94 million HYPE has been claimed, per this dashboard from ASXN, equivalent to ~87% of the total.

At current prices, the HYPE sent out would fetch almost $7.6 billion altogether. 

That officially beats Uniswap’s UNI distribution from September 2020, which until now was generally considered crypto’s biggest airdrop.

At UNI’s peak in May 2021, the paper value of the airdrop had surpassed $6.4 billion, more than a billion less than the current value of HYPE’s.

UNI’s airdrop was still larger in scope. Tokens were initially sent to more than a quarter of a million addresses that had, at some point, used the DEX.

Almost 94% of those addresses netted under 412 tokens, which was only slightly above the minimum allotment of 400 UNI (now worth $6,500). 

According to a Dune analysis, more than 250 addresses — liquidity whales, $SOCKS holders and power users — had meanwhile received an eye-twitching 250,000 UNI ($4 million at current prices).

Two years later, 93% of recipients had dumped all their tokens. At that point, only 2% were still holding and only 1% had increased their position.

It’s been less than three weeks since the HYPE airdrop, so it’s too early to say whether its token generation event will be any stickier. 

HYPE has, however, only gone up since, tripling from $3.81 to $28 as of this morning. 

That gives HYPE a market cap of $9 billion — only 9% short of UNI — and a fully diluted value of $27 billion.

Unlike the UNI airdrop, almost 12% of HYPE recipients received between 5,000 and 10,000 tokens, now worth $140,000 and $280,000, respectively. 

4.3% were in the top bracket, which received 10,000 tokens or more, while 57% found themselves in the lowest tranche of up to 100 HYPE ($2,800).

Still, as Hyperliquid’s TVL grows beyond $3.2 billion (now eighth behind Arbitrum and ahead of Sui), some airdrop recipients do appear to have sold their stash.

Earlier today, 182 of the top 500 addresses to receive the airdrop no longer held any tokens at all, according to ASXN data. That includes addresses that netted between 1.95 million ($44.6 million) and just under 100,000 HYPE ($2.8 million).

Dozens of others are now holding up to 75% fewer tokens, although it’s unclear whether they’ve actually sold, as they may have simply moved their tokens to another address, or otherwise deposited them to a supporting exchange.

At the same time, 58 of the top 500 (around 11%) have added to their holdings since the airdrop.

Something tells me many more — especially those who didn’t receive the airdrop — are now waiting for a dip.

— David

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• BTC is hinting at a retest of its latest all-time high, from yesterday morning. (Current price: $107,008; ATH: $107,822.)

• $636.9 million net was plowed into US-listed bitcoin ETFs on Monday, bringing December’s running total to $5.53 billion.

• ETH ETFs have otherwise gained $1.74 billion over the last month to date.

• DeFi’s TVL has hit $156 billion, up 63% since the start of November. DeFi is now only $4 billion away from reclaiming its TVL from before Terra blew up.

• Tether supply has hit $140 billion for the first time ever, having net minted $20 billion USDT in the past seven weeks.

🤌 Where art thou?

I am once again asking: Could we see a Santa Rally? 

Kaiko analysts reckon there’s a chance, though they don’t think it’s worth getting your hopes up for bitcoin at $120,000 by year-end (sad). 

The options data, as seen below, looks promising for a bullish December finale. There are far more calls than puts.

However, analysts think that any rally may be distributed across the ecosystem, with other coins getting a boost. 

“Any upcoming rallies will likely be much broader than last year. Since the election smaller layer-1 coins have been outperforming BTC and ETH as traders repricing risk amid regulatory shifts in the US,” the analysts wrote.

Oh, and any Santa Rally we see may not follow the traditional timeline of a rally (meaning that it occurs in the last five days of the year into the first two days of the new year). Let’s just hope Santa and his elves don’t have to work too much harder for everyone’s bags, I guess. 

This just underpins what we’ve been hearing from analysts and folks around crypto, which is that they expect crypto to come out looking strong in the beginning half of next year. In this week’s Empire pod, Daniel Matuszewski of CMS Holdings and Roshun Patel from Hack both carried a bullish tone. 

Patel, in particular, thinks that there could be big ETF inflows in January but expects seasonality to be a factor once we inch towards the summer. 

“I think as you go into March or May, you can maybe think a little bit more about portfolio rebalancing, but for now it's like. It feels pretty healthy,” he told Jason Yanowitz. 

On the other hand, Matuszewski said that altcoins could have a similar market cycle to what we’ve seen in the past. However, he still expects “crazy swings” from the likes of memecoins and AI chatbot tokens. 

If I’m being honest, I’d be more afraid if both memecoins and AI chatbots weren’t volatile.

— Katherine

• If you thought Wells notices were a thing of the past, think again. NFT project CyberKongz said it was issued a notice from the SEC. 

• Oh, and Fortune’s reporting that the SEC is set to take action against Unicoin (not to be confused with Uniswap) before chair Gary Gensler officially gives up his role in January. 

• FTX distributions will be paid out via BitGo and Kraken starting early next year after its bankruptcy plan goes into effect.

• Crypto.com CEO Kris Marszalek met with President-elect Donald Trump in Mar-a-Lago, Bloomberg reported.

• Anchorage Digital received a BitLicense in New York, allowing it to offer some of its services in the state.

Q: Can governments stop memecoins?

Hah. Not really. 

What I mean is that governments can take action against memecoins. Take a look, for example, at what the UK is doing. It first banned pump.fun and is now issuing notices about coins like retardio. 

But does that stop memecoins? Nah, not in my book. The people who want to participate in that type of risk are still going to find ways to do so. 

I think I may be a bit more conservative on this front — at least when compared to others in crypto — given that I’m all for investor protections. 

I’ll acknowledge here, however, that you might as well do them right if you’re going to do them at all, and a flat ban is perhaps simply the easiest route a regulator can take.

— Katherine

Never. 

As long as there are permissionless chains that can handle smart contracts, there will be memecoins and DEXs on which to trade them.

Even in a Doomsday scenario, it’s possible. 

Barring some cataclysmic event that wipes out all power and internet infrastructure across the world — taking all blockchains offline for an extended period — crypto would find a way.

If exchanges, alongside DEX frontends and apps, were outlawed by some hypothetical techno-fascist decree, one could always just use Claude or ChatGPT to code their own peer-to-peer trades and interact directly with the chain via the command line.

None of this can be stopped. Good luck to the UK.

— David