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Pump.fun reportedly raising $1 billion via token sale

Details are scarce on the fundraise, which could be among crypto’s biggest this year.

Pump.fun, the blockbuster meme coin platform built on the solana blockchain, is reportedly planning a $1 billion raise via a token sale, giving it a $4 billion valuation. This would represent one of the largest crypto raises this year, according to Bloomberg.

Details are scarce, though one X user predicted Pump.fun may launch a $PUMP token in the next two weeks.

The platform launched in 2024 with massive success. It allows users to create and sell solana tokens very easily, and a few meme coins have become quite popular. Top coins in the $3.7 billion ecosystem include pnut and Moo Deng, which are both down more than 5% in the past 24 hours.

Nic Puckrin, founder of Coin Bureau, said Pump.fun has been a resounding success in the solana ecosystem, “whether you like it or not,” as it has become hugely profitable.

“But reportedly, revenues have now somewhat dried up, and if this is true it’s understandable that Pump.fun wants to boost profits in some other way,” Puckrin said. “Again, though, this may not be the most sustainable solution for the long term, but more of a stopgap.”

Revenue for the meme coin machine decreased to $47.4 million in May, a steep drop from its peak of $134.17 million in January, DefiLlama data shows, reflecting the waning of the meme coin mania that raged on earlier this year. The meme coin market cap is just over $61 billion today, down from $111.7 billion on Inauguration Day.

“While it has created a huge unlock in terms of the ability to launch tokens quickly and at low cost, the platform also led to a lot of people losing a lot of money on worthless meme coins, encouraging gambling-like behavior instead of sustainable investing,” Hadley Stern, chief commercial officer of Marinade, said.

A recent Solidus Labs report also found that “approximately 98.7% of tokens on Pump.fun... exhibited characteristics of pump-and-dump schemes or rug pulls.” It also called the solana ecosystem “ground zero for fraudulent activity.”

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Hyperliquid reclaims all-time high

HYPE, the native token powering perpetuals exchange Hyperliquid and its underlying blockchain, rebounded to reclaim its all-time high previously set at the start of the month.

Treasury firms Hyperliquid Strategies and Hyperion DeFi have also rallied as the token increased double digits in the last 24 hours to trade as high as $76.70, rising past its record price set nearly two weeks ago, according to CoinGecko. In the interim between all-time highs, HYPE pulled back to around $53.

The token has several tailwinds, the first coming from ETF flows. Since their inception in May, HYPE ETFs have yet to record negative weekly outflows, posting a cumulative total net inflow of $171.8 million, per SoSoValue.

The second comes from Hyperliquid spending basically everything it earns in fees to buy HYPE, a mechanism embedded into the protocol’s codebase.

The venue’s buyback funding mechanism is set to add a new source of yield. Validators of the network activated “AQAv2,” which means stablecoin deployers will share about 90% of reserve yield revenue on their supply within the protocol.

Around $6.1 billion of Circle’s USDC resides in Hyperliquid, per DefiLlama. Accrual begins on August 26 and the first payment is made on October 3, the network announced in its Discord channel last week.

A substantial amount of capital is riding on different positions of HYPE. In total, a move down to under $53 would result in the liquidation nearly 1.8 million HYPE worth of leveraged long positions on the on-chain perps venue, or $131.7 million, data from CoinGlass shows. For the upside, a climb above $100 results in the liquidation of more than 3 million worth of leveraged HYPE short positions, or $221.5 million.

HYPE’s rebound to all-time high comes after Michael Selig, chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, defended his agency’s decision to approve regulated perpetuals, or futures contracts without expiration dates, CNBC reported on Monday.

Last month, the CFTC approved bitcoin perpetual futures trading in the US through regulated prediction markets firm Kalshi and an affiliate of centralized exchange Coinbase.

“Perps are highly likely to become lightly regulated and thus approved in the US,” said David Pakman, head of venture investments at CoinFund.

“We expect to see perps for many different types of assets, from commodities to equities,” Pakman told Sherwood News.

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Crypto market snaps back as sentiment lifts, with altcoins from ethereum to XRP soaring

The market capitalization of the crypto industry has jumped around $83.2 billion in the last 24 hours, with privacy-focused token Zcash and worldcoin, the native cryptocurrency of the network backed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, leading market gains, jumping over 22%.

But the last 24 hours have been good across the board:

Investors have been eager to see some positive signs around the Iranian conflict ending, coupled with hopeful outlooks around the CLARITY act, both breathing some life into assets, Kairos Research cofounder Ian Unsworth told Sherwood News.

Simon Shockey, a crypto strategist at crypto wallet infrastructure firm Privy, said the upswing stems from several things converging. He pointed to how alt markets broadly were very oversold following the bug found in Zcash that shook confidence.

Friday, Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox said Anthropic didn’t find any more serious bugs with the Zcash protocol after Shielded Labs requested the AI firm run a security audit of the network with Mythos.

Shockey added that the pool of willing sellers has dwindled. Even if structurally, AI is a much more compelling and asymmetric bet in the eyes of allocators, many of these crypto assets have simply run out of marginal sellers despite some shorter-term narrative-driven pumps. The only people left to sell at this point are the teams themselves and VCs.

Net-net: oversold conditions plus exhausted seller bases plus a macro backdrop thats stabilized equals a snapback, especially in names that have real usage or community conviction behind them,” Shockey told Sherwood.

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