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Solana pulls ad after huge backlash

But was it an epic fail or more a case of “all press is good press”?

Yaël Bizouati-Kennedy

Well, solana was having a moment… for a moment. Talks about including the token in the crypto national stockpile, the slew of spot solana ETFs filings, and its recent fifth birthday had the coin buzzing again. Then it posted what many describe as (at best) a very cringe and “idiotic” ad: “America is Back — Time to Accelerate.” An enormous backlash ensued, so it deleted the ad, though it took them a while to pull the plug.

The ad features a man named “America” in a therapy session after being diagnosed with “rational thinking syndrome.” Critics argue the 2-minute, 38-second ad is pro-Trump (notably, President Trump’s eponymous meme coin, trump, was launched on the solana blockchain), “anti-woke,” and makes fun of gender identity. A lot. The therapist says things like, “Why don’t we take this energy and channel it into doing something more productive, like coming up with a new gender.”

“I want to invent technologies, not genders,” the America character says to the therapist. 

“Solana put out a politically divisive ad engaging in social identity issues around pronouns versus a focus on technology,” Two Prime Digital Assets CEO Alexander Blume said. “I think solana was aiming to be bold and align with tech-first values, but waded too deep into issues that distract from the offerings of their product.”

Others said that the ad was “brilliant marketing” as the “cringy rage bait” ad went viral. After all, as the saying goes, “all publicity is good publicity.”

“The solana ad felt out of the blue, given the nature of it punching down,” Alan Orwick, cofounder of Quai Network, said. “Solana is in the zeitgeist, so to kick other groups when it was uncalled for received clear backlash. Its important to remember crypto is apolitical, and the networks behind the assets should be credibly neutral.”

The ad was meant to promote solana’s Accelerate “series of events” in May in New York City. The events are organized along two distinct conferences: “Scale or Die” and “Ship or Die.” 

Solana is the sixth-largest crypto by market cap with $62.2 billion, but the price is down almost 40% since March 2024.

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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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