Crypto’s most powerful use case right now is still capital formation.

It’s just that the shape that it ends up taking tends to be a little… off. Think of it like the odd misshapen tomatoes that supermarkets throw out in favor of perfectly round ones. Still good — just not to everyone’s appetite. 

Let’s hope for prettier tomatoes next season.

Elsewhere:

• Bitcoin’s holding on to $96,000, down slightly over the past day while ETH floats around $2,600. 

• JUP has lost over 12%, landing itself toward the top of the top 100 losers list so far this morning. 

• Total liquidations in the past 24 hours topped $271 million, nearly three-quarters coming from longs.

💣 The fallout continues

“I spread the word,” Argentine President Javier Milei reportedly said in a TV interview yesterday defending his promotion of Libra. 

Milei seems pretty set in denying any wrongdoing in the Libra fiasco, despite promoting the coin on his own social media and watching it tumble more than 90% overnight after briefly hitting a $4.5 billion market cap.

For Milei, who admitted he’s not an “expert,” the lack of judgment here is potentially career-damaging. And my use of “potentially” there is generous given Milei’s excuse that his specialty is “economic growth, with and without money.” 

Monday morning saw the S&P Merval index — the benchmark stock market index for Argentina — fall over 5%. Mind you, for the folks who don’t keep up with the Argentinian economy, it just exited a recession.

As Galaxy’s Alex Thorn pointed out, this is just the latest Solana memecoin debacle after TRUMP and MELANIA earlier this year. And that’s going to lead to some potentially painful questions. 

“While a souring memecoin narrative had already begun following the liquidity suck caused by $TRUMP’s launch, the fallout from the $LIBRA launch and dump could result in further destruction of the memecoin complex, thus reducing the market’s need to hold SOL,” Thorn wrote in a note.

This saga, however, has all the drama: A president in hot water, onchain data showing insider selling, and — as of late last night — an executive departure.

Ben Chow, co-founder of Meteora (which was used to create liquidity pools for LIBRA), resigned late Monday after the scandal. 

Prior to Chow’s resignation, he said: “Meteora and I personally, have never received or managed any tokens on the side, do not receive knowledge or get involved with any offchain dealings, and we keep to the highest levels of confidentiality for any token launch happening on our platform.”

Meow, who founded Jupiter and co-founded Meteora, said he believes Chow’s statement that there wasn’t any “financial inappropriateness in dealing with partners” but that he had “shown a lack of judgment and care about some of the core aspects of the project.”

For Thorn, this is just the latest “sordid episode of Solana’s memecoin complex.”

Here’s the thing: There’s now a pattern of memecoin launches tied to political figures and I can’t be the only one watching it take place with discomfort. 

There’s no denying that memecoins have had quite the run, but — as Thorn pointed out — this type of activity could just lead to the market reducing overall positions in SOL. 

Which leaves me wondering: Where do we go from here?

— Katherine

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• Robinhood is plotting an expansion into Singapore, with plans to release crypto offerings via Bitstamp later this year. 

• ICYMI: David Bailey joined the Empire crew to chat about working with President Donald Trump’s campaign.

• The beginning of the end of a saga? FTX is set to start repayments to the first wave of creditors on Tuesday.

🧐 Plot too thick

Kanye West. J.K. Rowling. Woody Allen. Some find it nearly impossible to separate art from artist.

Crypto markets are struggling with something similar about Solana. While there are all sorts of use cases for the chain that don’t have anything to do with highly manipulated memecoins, SOL is still getting punished for the LIBRA debacle — which all happened on Solana.

Since LIBRA insiders pumped and dumped the coin on Friday evening (supposedly to outsnipe the snipers waiting to capitalize first), SOL has tanked by as much as 18%.

It’s rebounded slightly since but the damage is clear, especially considering BTC and ETH are mostly even over the same period. SOL now has a $83.4 billion market cap, just over half that of XRP.

Meteora is tied to both Jupiter — though it’s said that the two have been positioned independently over the past year — and LIBRA. JUP, the native token for Solana DEX aggregator Jupiter, has also shed as much as 24%. 

The chart above plots price action for six coins throughout the LIBRA launch starting almost two days earlier: TRUMP (orange), MELANIA (yellow), ETH (green), SOL (purple) and JUP (pink).

LIBRA’s market cap is otherwise shown by the blue area in the front. 

What’s peculiar is that TRUMP, JUP and MELANIA rallied hard leading up to LIBRA’s sudden appearance, with the former reaching as high as 54% just four hours before LIBRA launched, and JUP as much as 17%. 

Those trajectories changed one or two hours before LIBRA hit the chain and have been trending downward ever since the scandal broke out. 

Jupiter, in a statement on X, described plans to launch LIBRA as an “open secret in memecoin circles.” The team says it has conducted an internal investigation and found no evidence of insider trading.

We’ll probably never know if the pre-LIBRA pumps were coincidences. But it’s obvious that the market finds it all convenient enough to bundle them all together under one roof — the Solana memecoin complex, as Galaxy’s Thorn put it — and it’s indeed valued much lower than before, at least over the short term.

— David

On our minds: Self-regulation