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Meme coin bonk passes $TRUMP in market capitalization

Bonk’s $1.75 billion valuation makes it the largest meme coin on the solana blockchain.

Sage D. Young

Solana has a new meme coin leader. 

Dog-based cryptocurrency Bonk jumped 57.6% in the last seven days, reaching a market capitalization of roughly $1.73 billion, dethroning the president’s trump token, which sits at a $1.72 billion market cap. Bonk is now the most valuable meme coin in the Solana ecosystem and the fourth-largest meme coin overall, behind dogecoin, shiba inu, and Pepe. 

Crypto users have generated over $1 billion in trading volume for bonk over the last 24 hours, multitudes higher than last week when the figure was under $200 million, data pulled from CoinGecko shows.

“I don’t think bonk flipping $TRUMP has much direct signal to it when examined alone, but bonk’s re-rating is certainly important,” Ian Unsworth, cofounder of crypto research firm Kairos, said. 

LetsBonk leaps in platform activity

Bonk’s price action comes as its meme coin launchpad, LetsBonk.Fun, has seen an increase in activity. LetsBonk jumpstarted a hackathon competition on Sunday as several meme coins emerging from the token launchpad have reached new all-time high valuations.

USELESS, a token that rolled out in May from LetsBonk, has had a meteoric rise and now has a market cap of $255 million with a liquidity level of $3.7 million, per analytics trading platform DexTools. 

Meanwhile, LetsBonk’s daily fees on Sunday reached a record level, surpassing $1 million, according to blockchain analytics firm DefiLlama. Half of the platform’s fees generated from on-chain activity, such as token launches, are dedicated to the buyback and burning of the bonk meme coin. LetsBonk has earmarked 34,453 solana tokens, or $5.2 million at current prices, to date for the buyback and burning of bonk. 

Pump.Fun, responsible for fartcoin, pnut, and Moo Deng, is one of the most successful crypto applications, generating over $830 million in fees since its inception last year. LetsBonk started in part as a response to Pump.Fun as bonk contributors noticed that smart contracts belonging to Pump.Fun have sent solana tokens stemming from its fees to centralized exchange Kraken instead of keeping the attained value within the on-chain economy. 

“The bonk re-rating is largely a reflection of coiled anticipation for PumpFun exposure, and Pump is rumored to launch at $4 billion FDV [fully diluted valuation],” Unsworth told Sherwood News. Bloomberg reported in June that PumpFun is planning to raise $1 billion at a $4 billion valuation by selling tokens.

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Payward, parent company of crypto exchange Kraken, puts plans for IPO on hold

Payward, crypto exchange Kraken’s parent company, has paused its plans for an initial public offering until market conditions improve, according to a report from CoinDesk that cited two people with knowledge of the matter. 

Since the firm announced in November its preparation for an IPO of its common stock, the total market capitalization of the crypto industry has shed around $652.2 billion, from $3.2 trillion to $2.5 trillion as of Wednesday, data from CoinGecko shows. 

The news comes two weeks after Kraken received approval for a master account from the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, allowing the crypto exchange to connect to the Fed’s payment infrastructure used by traditional banks and credit unions. 

Last year, Kraken raised $800 million at a $20 billion valuation from institutional investors such as Jane Street and Citadel Securities.

Payward, parent of crypto exchange Kraken, has put its IPO plans on hold

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The news comes two weeks after Kraken received approval for a master account from the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, allowing the crypto exchange to connect to the Fed’s payment infrastructure used by traditional banks and credit unions. 

Last year, Kraken raised $800 million at a $20 billion valuation from institutional investors such as Jane Street and Citadel Securities.

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SEC and CFTC issue new guidance on how securities laws apply to crypto assets

On Tuesday, the US Securities and Exchange Commission, together with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, issued an interpretation clarifying how federal securities law applies to crypto assets, a first step toward developing a clearer regulatory framework. 

The interpretive guidance introduces a token taxonomy for different types of cryptocurrencies, with SEC Chairman Paul S. Atkins adding that “most crypto assets are not themselves securities.”

Examples of a digital commodity, “a crypto asset that is intrinsically linked to and derives its value from the programmatic operation of a crypto system that is ‘functional,’” include:

The guidance also includes definitions of digital collectibles (such as NFTs), stablecoins, digital tools, and digital securities (such as tokenized real-world assets and stocks).

This is a monumental step in the mainstream adoption of the industry and clears a hurdle in how crypto can operate going forward, according to David Pakman, head of venture investments at CoinFund. “This will allow new token designs with the confidence that their existence does not require registration with the SEC, etc.,” Pakman told Sherwood News.

Despite the clarification efforts from the two organizations, the market capitalization of the crypto industry has dropped about 2% in the last 24 hours as each of the tokens mentioned in the guidance are trading lower in the period, data from CoinGecko shows.

The joint agency action also complements congressional efforts to turn a crypto market structure framework into law. With the goal of providing regulations on the offer and sale of digital commodities, the CLARITY Act passed the House of Representatives last year and is now sitting in the Senate.

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