🦅 Commander on Chain

It’s probably safe to say that Donald Trump isn’t really signing transactions on Polygon and Ethereum himself.

Still, those handling the crypto projects he’s linked to are doing their best to have Trump live up to his moniker: The First Onchain President.

I’ve spent the morning compiling onchain data for Trump-linked crypto projects — his NFT collections (trading cards) and upcoming DeFi platform World Liberty Financial.

The goal: Calculate the cumulative value of Trump’s onchain footprint.

It was a quick analysis, but the data shows that Trump has so far raked in almost $84 million in crypto revenue in two years.

Trump’s four NFT collections on Polygon have generated $7.7 million in crypto (WETH and POL fka MATIC). 

That revenue was derived from a mixture of primary sales and royalties on secondary sales. The first set of Trump NFTs went on sale two years ago almost to the day, in December 2022.

(Note: The NFT collections have also brought in additional offchain revenue, as the project accepts fiat via credit card payments. Credit cards aren’t exactly onchain yet, so those sales have been left out of the totals above, although they could range in the millions.)

There’s also a suite of unofficial Trump memecoins that regularly pay a transfer tax to Trump wallets.

Ultra small cap coins with names like “DT Inu” and “Take America Back” have gifted about $240,500 to Trump to date. 

The coins’ token contracts automatically forward small sums of USDC or ETH to Trump’s wallets every time they’re transferred, including when they’re traded on DEXs. 

This has resulted in sudden, short-lived bursts of additional crypto revenue for Trump’s onchain footprint. 

As for how much has been cashed out — whoever is handling Trump’s crypto has so far seemingly liquidated $3 million ETH on Coinbase.

Trump’s address deposited 1,325.16 ETH to the exchange across November and December 2023, a sum that would’ve been worth $4.9 million if held until today.

And then there’s the World Liberty Financial token sale. Which, until Tron founder Justin Sun aped in $30 million, appeared to run out of steam at just over $20 million.

As of this morning, the WLFI offering has brought in over $75 million for the platform, with 80% ($61 million) of it coming in after Trump’s win in November, even if Sun was responsible for about half of that.

It goes deeper: World Liberty’s wallet has also accumulated amounts of DeFi tokens AAVE, LINK, ENA and ONDO in the past week or so, altogether worth $5.2 million at current prices. 

The working theory is that World Liberty Financial is holding them as it is set to integrate with those protocols moving forward, especially in light of Ethena Labs’ newly-announced strategic partnership, as well as World Liberty’s Aave temp check for teaming up, made in October.

Between all this and Trump’s spiritual purchase of a burger with bitcoin in the leadup to the election, it’s obvious that the President-elect is indeed deeper in crypto than any other Commander-in-Chief, and perhaps even any US politician.

Still, it’s not without intrigue: World Liberty Financial just offloaded around $11 million in Coinbase’s wrapped bitcoin token cbBTC, while simultaneously picking up an equivalent amount of wBTC, as shown on the chart above by the purple and red shaded areas.

Coinbase was recently locked in a brief legal battle with wBTC’s custodian, BiT Global, after the firm sued over the delisting of WBTC in light of Justin Sun’s reported affiliation. On Wednesday, a federal judge ruled that Coinbase could delist WBTC without worry.

Whatever World Liberty Financial’s reason for switching wrapped bitcoin tokens, it all tracks. After all, what would the first onchain President be without the traditional crypto drama?

— David

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• Crypto is recovering from a sudden retracement after the Fed signaled slower rate cuts.

• BTC dipped as much as 6% in response, from $104,850 to $98,840. Current price: $102,000.

• HYPE is still the best-performing top-100 coin in the past week, up 46%. BGB and VIRTUAL follow closely with 41% and 37% apiece.

• PENGU claims have slowed, with 86% of eligible addresses (964,414) receiving their tokens to date. 

• That leaves almost 3.1 billion PENGU unclaimed, per this Dune dashboard, currently worth $93.6 million. Total airdrop value right now: $564.9 million.

🎮 Game on

Let’s look ahead and forget about bitcoin (briefly) sliding under $100k, shall we?

For Amberdata’s Greg Magadini, any altcoin szn is currently set to give retail a potentially profitable run. Though, clearly, this is crypto and everyone should maintain caution.

Anyway, he pointed out that altcoins offer regular investors a “more even playing field” than the stock market does. 

“If you think about a company that goes public, typically there are VCs that are early stage investors, there's a Series A, B, C, so on, so forth. Then there's an IPO, and then retail buys at the very, very tail end. In crypto, it's actually the opposite. Its retail is in Discords — small teams essentially talk to their Discord communities to launch a token, and often retail is the first one to be in the market, so they essentially have an information advantage,” Magadini explained. 

“And so that's what makes this market very interesting: as a small player, you can invest and be at the forefront of value creation. But obviously the volatility can be crazy, and there's a lot more scams. There's no regulation along the way. Basically, you are kind of on your own.”

Magadini said that bitcoin — though volatile — is the lowest volatility asset for crypto right now, and also has the benefit of being the biggest market in which most people, and institutions, with crypto exposure are in. 

This opens the door for a potential altcoin rotation to have a “higher beta performance,” where bitcoin can go 2x, and altcoins go 10x, Magadini said. 

The good news for retail this cycle is that, despite seeing institutional action in bitcoin and ethereum, Magadini said that he thinks institutions are still “locked out” until we see an altcoin become a major pair.

— Katherine

• Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said the Fed isn’t “allowed to own bitcoin” and that the law isn’t “looking” for a change anytime soon. 

• A former vice president at Delphi Digital was sentenced to four years in prison for embezzlement. 

• CoinDesk allegedly removed an article about Justin Sun after the billionaire pushed the media company to take it down, Fortune reported.

• Exodus officially uplisted to the NYSE American on Wednesday.

• Kraken’s layer-2 Ink went live on Wednesday.

Q: Final riff of the year: What grinds your gears?

Influencer or celeb coins. I’m so over seeing investors get screwed because some celeb shilled a coin before rugging. 

I should caveat this by adding that I’m not against all influencer/celeb coins but let’s be honest, the vast majority are just schemes to make a quick buck. 

As crypto grows and matures, there’s not really going to be room for this kind of story to keep repeating itself. I’m counting down the days till it’s a thing of the past. 

Was that spicy enough for y’all? 

— Katherine

That we still don’t have a properly viral mainstream crypto game.

And I don’t mean collectible battle games like Axie Infinity. Give me a Tetris clone that rewards players with NFTs when hitting certain milestones, or setting a new high score on global leaderboards. 

It feels like crypto games too often get lost in the sauce — requiring so much time and effort: bridging tokens or otherwise acquiring the in-game currency, and farming for eons until any of it seems worthwhile.

Just let us open a browser and go. We need crypto games built specifically for people with only 15 minutes a day to commit.

— David