(04/52) Weekly Market Insights: TRUMP: The New Meme Coin Leek Harvester

Hot News

• The next president of the United States, Trump, launched his own TRUMP memecoin on the Solana chain last weekend, with 20% used for liquidity and public distribution, and the remaining 80% reserved for the team. The FDV of the TRUMP token soared to more than $75 billion last Sunday, and Solana's market value has increased by 34% in the past week to $130 billion. The TRUMP token also quickly landed on several major exchanges, including Binance and Coinbase, while Binance's annualized funding rate remained at about 100%. At the same time, the Moonshot app jumped to the first place in the US App Store's financial category ranking.
• The millions of dollars in fees generated by TRUMP's Meteora decentralized exchange LP contract were actively converted into SOL and transferred to centralized exchanges, while WLFI was actively accumulating ETH at the same time. Soon after, the first lady of the United States, Melania, also launched her own memecoin.
• Even though Trump was reportedly set to sign an executive crypto policy order addressing bank account issues for cryptocurrency-related organizations and repealing crypto accounting policies that require banks to record digital assets as liabilities, the fact is that Trump did not mention Bitcoin or cryptocurrencies in his inauguration speech.

Macro Outlook

• The US Producer Price Index (PPI) rose 0.2% in December, lower than the market expectation of 0.3%.
• The U.S. core inflation rate rose 0.2% in December, down from 0.3% in November and slightly below the market expectation of 0.3%. Analysts predict that the core personal consumption expenditures (PCE) index will rise to between 0.16% and 0.19% in December, which is seen as a positive signal and strengthens the market's expectations of two interest rate cuts in 2025.
• US retail sales rose 0.4% in December, far below market expectations of 0.6%.

The upcoming economic calendar includes:

• Friday, January 24, 11:00 AM: Bank of Japan (BoJ) rate decision (25bp hike expected)

Cryptocurrency Market Quick Facts

• Nasdaq has submitted an application for a Litecoin (LTC) ETF to the US SEC. Bloomberg analyst Eric Balchunas predicts that LTC may become the next approved cryptocurrency ETF.
• VanEck has submitted an application to the US SEC for the Onchain Economy ETF, which aims to invest in cryptocurrency-related companies such as exchanges, crypto payment platforms, and mining companies.

Layer 1 and Layer 2 Public Chains

• Vitalik announced a structural adjustment to the leadership of the Ethereum Foundation to enhance the technical expertise and communication capabilities of the leadership. In addition, Vitalik changed his X profile picture to Milady NFT.
• Soneium has officially launched its mainnet, focusing on the development of entertainment, games, consumer applications, social networking, NFT and DeFi. Shortly after the mainnet was launched, Soneium blocked some memecoins on the grounds of intellectual property infringement. This move sparked some opposition, but Vitalik publicly expressed support for enterprise-controlled L2 solutions.
• Saga launched Metropolis, which enables AI Agents to launch a layer of network based on Saga infrastructure. Metropolis has established partnerships with Eliza Labs, Virtuals and Wayfinder.

Dapps

• The Eliza team released a white paper introducing its AI Agent modular operating system designed for developers.
• Virtuals announced that it will use 30 days of TWAP from transaction taxes to repurchase and destroy individual Agent tokens, and distribute 30% of the revenue to the wallet of the Agent deployer.
• Coinbase launched the Morpho-based cbBTC lending library on its exchange, allowing users to borrow USDC by pledging cbBTC.
• Tether has launched USDT0, an OFT standard token based on Layer Zero, which supports cross-chain operations of the stablecoin between multiple mainstream blockchains at low fees.
• Ethena's USDe and sUSDe are approved for integration into Spark's liquidity layer, allowing Spark to obtain Ethena rewards directly without going through the lending market.
• Liquity launched sBOLD, a yield-generating stablecoin for its V2 BOLD, which compounds ETH rewards in the V2 stable pool back into BOLD.
• Fluid launches GHO/USDC Smart Vault. Fluid has seen over $1 billion in volume in the past week, and despite being a lending protocol at its core, it has already ranked among the top three Ethereum exchanges, behind only Uniswap and Curve.
• Solv launched the SOLV token on several major exchanges, including Binance and Hyperliquid. About 18% of SOLV was in circulation at launch, and the token can be used to enjoy discounts such as SolvBTC redemption fees.
• Pyth launches Pyth Lazer, providing price and market data feeds with 1 millisecond update rates.
• Justin Sun announced the launch of USDD 2.0, offering 20% APY.
• Worldcoin announced an upgrade to World Mini Apps and launched the Mini Apps Incubation Fund.
• Frax Finance launched frxETH V2, opening a lending pool for validators with a minimum of 8 ETH, allowing them to borrow 24 ETH to run a node.

Governance/Project Updates

• Azuki announced that it will launch the ANIME token on January 23rd.
• World Liberty Financial is expected to make a major announcement this week.
• Multicoin Capital partners proposed the SIMD-0224 proposal, suggesting that Solana adopt Smart Emissions in its network emissions. The example in the proposal shows that the target staking participation rate is 50%. If the participation rate reaches 70%, the inflation rate will be reduced by 1%; if the participation rate drops to 40%, the inflation rate will increase by 0.5%.

Token Unlock

WELL tokens were unlocked on January 23rd and account for 1.17% of the token supply.

IMX tokens were unlocked on January 24th and represent 1.43% of the token supply.

ALT tokens were unlocked on January 25th and represent 10.4% of the token supply.

RON tokens were unlocked on January 27th, accounting for 8.86% of the token supply.

GRASS tokens were unlocked on January 28th and represent 1.51% of the token supply.

OP tokens were unlocked on January 31st and represent 2.38% of the token supply.

SUI tokens were unlocked on February 1st and represent 2.66% of the token supply.

JTO tokens were unlocked on February 7th and account for 3.97% of the token supply.