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Can meme coin ETFs turn dumb bits into real bucks?

“Trump himself just launched his own meme coin. If that’s legal, why shouldn’t a doge ETF be?”

1/23/25 12:50PM

Meme coins want to play with the grown-ups in finance, and to prove it, a whole new slew of meme-coin-based ETFs have been submitted for approval.

The mind-boggling rapid institutionalization and the push for normalizing meme coins comes just a couple weeks after bitcoin ETF’s first birthday.

On January 22, Bitwise filed a for a dogecoin ETF trust in Delaware, and the day before, Rex Osprey filed for seven (!!!) spot crypto ETFs, including a dogecoin ETF, a Trump ETF, a Bonk ETF, an XRP ETF, as well as relatively more traditional ones, like ethereum and solana ETFs.

Bitwise Doge ETF likely coming soon.. and yes I checked and this is def legit (vs some whack job committing forgery for a quick pump a la BlackRock XRP that one time). pic.twitter.com/MxoswD0IFy
— Eric Balchunas (@EricBalchunas) January 22, 2025

Doge — meme coins’ eldest sibling, at 11 years old — is the seventh-largest crypto, with a $52 billion market cap. It’s up 338% in the past year, and is experiencing a huge boost thanks to its No. 1 fan and DOGE leader Elon Musk.

The newest big meme coins on the scene, trump and $MELANIA , launched just before the presidential inauguration. The five-day-old Trump meme coin has a $7.5 billion market cap and ranks 29th in market cap of all cryptocurrencies, according to CoinGecko.

Whether Trump 2.0 will usher in the materialization of altcoin and meme coin ETFs remains to be seen, but the trend is gaining momentum.

Two Prime Digital Assets CEO Alexander Blume told Sherwood News that these ETF applications are realistic.

“Our new regulatory regime looks to be much more permissive toward crypto,” he said. “Trump himself just launched his own meme coin. If that’s legal, why shouldn’t a doge ETF be?”

Arman Meguerian, founder and CEO of investment platform Timestamp, had some reservations about the new ETFs containing “the most speculative of crypto assets.”

“I don’t oppose these proposed ETFs for doge, bonk, Trump, and possibly other meme coins. If the market demands such products, then they should be allowed,” Meguerian said. “However, investors should be aware of the risk involved and invest with the appropriate precautions in mind. In the big picture of this industry, the highest-quality asset is bitcoin.”

Last year, VanEck and 21Shares filed applications for solana ETFs, and Cboe followed with an application to list them on its exchange, starting the clock ticking for the SEC to make a decision on them by March.

Yaël Bizouati-Kennedy is a financial journalist who’s written for Dow Jones, The Financial Times Group, and Business Insider.

Sage D. Young13h

Altcoin trading activity has lost its mojo

Non-bitcoin cryptocurrencies have seen their trading volume plummet in the past five months. The combined trading volume of ethereum, XRP, solana, dogecoin, SUI, and chainlink has decreased by 60% since crypto’s October 10 liquidation event, according to Thomas Probst, a research analyst at crypto markets data provider Kaiko.

Main Altcoins Trading Volume in USD — The trading volume of ETH, SOL, XRP, DOGE, SUI, and LINK.

For all altcoins, spot trading volume on Binance has declined between 80% and 85% to $7.7 billion, while altcoin volume on other exchanges has dropped to $18.8 billion, down from a range of $63 billion to $91 billion in October, a Friday report from Decrypt found, citing data from CryptoQuant.

“This trend may be explained by a contraction in market liquidity over the same period,” Probst told Sherwood News. “This phenomenon is also reflected in the average 1% market depth, which stood at approximately $2.6 million before the October 10 crash and is now closer to $1.7 million when aggregated across ETH, XRP, SOL, SUI, and LINK.”

Market depth is used by investors and traders to gauge the scale of liquidity in a market. 1% market depth refers to the amount of liquidity needed to move the market by 1%.

CoinGlass’s Altcoin Season Index, a measure to assess the performance of non-bitcoin cryptocurrencies, has been sitting above 50 this week, suggesting that the current market is neither in a bitcoin dominant phase nor an altcoin season.

“Triple witching” day may put further pressure on bitcoin’s price

This is not “a favorable environment for risk assets.”

Yaël Bizouati-Kennedy15h

Sage D. Young

3/19/26

Hyperliquid is the “1,000 pound gorilla in the room” leading year-to-date market gains amid conflict in the Middle East

While the crypto industry has shed $564.3 billion in 2026, Hyperliquid’s native token has bucked the downtrend and jumped 54.8% year to date.

Yaël Bizouati-Kennedy

3/19/26

Bitcoin tumbles as oil and gas prices spike and the market’s mood turns risk-off

Bitcoin ETFs reverted to outflows and bitcoin suffered $192 million in liquidations in the past 24 hours.

Sage D. Young3/18/26

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