An Argentine judge dismissed the criminal probe into President Javier Milei, his sister Karina and LIBRA adviser Hayden Davis.The judge found that Milei's promotion of LIBRA did not constitute fraud, despite the attention his support drew to the token.LIBRA lost more than 95% of its value after reaching about $5, while wallets linked to its creator withdrew around $99 million in cryptocurrency.An Argentine federal judge has dismissed the criminal case against President Javier Milei over his promotion of LIBRA, a memecoin that crashed soon after its launch in February 2025.
The ruling also covers Milei's sister Karina, the presidency's secretary general. U.S. businessman Hayden Davis, who described himself as an adviser to the token's launch, was also covered by the dismissal, Reuters reported.
In all, 11 people were cleared, including lobbyist Mauricio Novelli and KIP Protocol CEO Julian Peh, according to Infobae. None of them had been formally questioned in the case.
Judge Marcelo Martínez de Giorgi acknowledged that Milei's endorsement could have given the launch "greater impact,” but said his social media post and LIBRA's subsequent collapse were insufficient to establish fraud without evidence of a specific deception, the report adds, citing court records.
The judge also found no evidence that Karina Milei sought or received money in exchange for access to the president, or that proceeds from LIBRA reached public officials, according to Argentine fact-checking outlet Chequeado.
In February 2025, CoinDesk reported that it had obtained text messages in which Davis bragged about buying access to the president’s inner circle, sent money to Karina Milei, and claimed he could influence the president's decisions. Davis subsequently denied making any payments to either Milei or his sister.
Milei promoted LIBRA on X on Feb. 14, 2025, saying the Solana-based token would help fund small businesses in Argentina. It rose exponentially before losing more than 90% of its value, leading to the destruction of over $250 million in investor wealth.
Blockchain researchers found that eight wallets linked to the token's creator had withdrawn around $99 million in crypto, according to the report. Davis said he held close to $100 million after the crash but denied wrongdoing.
Milei later deleted his post and denied ties to LIBRA. He said he had acted in good faith and pulled his support after learning more about the project.
In an official statement, the president's office said the judge granted a prosecutor's request to dismiss the case because the acts under review did not constitute a crime. It characterized the probe, opened ahead of Argentina’s 2025 midterm elections, as an attempt to harm Milei’s reputation in an election year.
The case may not be fully closed, however.
Prosecutor Eduardo Taiano, who requested the dismissal, is not expected to appeal. In July, the judge removed the investors who had joined the case as plaintiffs, and an appeals court upheld that decision in September.
Those investors have challenged their removal before the Federal Criminal Cassation Court. If they are reinstated, they could appeal the dismissal.
Read more: Will Argentinian President Milei's Crypto 'Fiasco' Be a Deathblow for Memecoin Craze?
Siding with prosecutor Eduardo Taiano, Judge Marcelo Martínez de Giorgi cleared all 11 people under investigation, Kelsier's Hayden Davis included. The order is not yet final.
Argentine judge dismisses LIBRA memecoin case against Milei
Original Image Credits: Gage Skidmore / flickr.com
Posted October 23, 2026 at 11:05 pm ET.
Argentine federal judge Marcelo Martínez de Giorgi on Oct. 23 dismissed the LIBRA memecoin criminal case against President Javier Milei, presidential Secretary-General Karina Milei and nine others, including Kelsier Ventures’ Hayden Davis, ruling that the events fit no crime.
Granting federal prosecutor Eduardo Taiano‘s request, the judge found his opinion properly grounded in the evidence and, absent any independent accusation, ruled as asked, according to an Unchained translation of the 60-page decision. The dismissal cites article 336, section 3 of Argentina’s national code of criminal procedure and adds the standard line that the proceedings leave the reputations of those investigated intact. None of the 11 was ever formally questioned as a suspect.
The ruling, which circulated through Argentine media, had not been posted on the judiciary’s official website as of Friday evening.
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Why the Judge Found No Crime On fraud, the judge granted that a sitting president’s backing could lend a project unusual reach and sway how far some buyers trusted it, but wrote, per the Unchained translation, that this did not necessarily mean anyone was given a false picture of reality. He also cautioned against inferring fraud only from the final split of gains and losses, and agreed with Taiano that the record did not establish any criminally relevant deception.
He found no official act tied to the project and no use of public resources, rejecting the claims of abuse of authority and negotiations incompatible with public office against Javier Milei. As for Karina Milei, he wrote that the evidence did not establish any concrete illicit exchange, or that she had acted as a paid go-between for access to her brother, the accusation two opposition lawmakers made in the original complaint.
Ruling Not Yet Final The decision orders the file archived only once final. The judge removed five investors as private plaintiffs on July 3; a federal appeals panel upheld that on Sept. 4. On Sept. 16, they asked the federal criminal cassation court to reinstate them. Unchained could not confirm the outcome or whether anyone will appeal.
The 2025 Collapse Milei promoted LIBRA in a Feb. 14, 2025, X post as a private project to fund small Argentine businesses. The token’s market cap peaked at $4.56 billion that night and was down more than 94% within 11 hours of its debut, Cointelegraph reported, drawing on Dexscreener data. Milei deleted the post and wrote hours later that he had no connection to the venture and had not known its details.
In May 2025, Circle froze $57 million in USDC linked to the scandal. A New York federal judge on Sept. 29 dismissed with prejudice an investor lawsuit against Kelsier Labs, Davis and others.
Related Listen: Why Did Hunter Biden Launch a Meme Coin? Partly to Troll Trump
AI-assisted content: This article was produced with the assistance of AI tools and was reviewed, edited, and fact-checked by a member of the Unchained editorial team before publication.
Not financial or tax advice. PANews content is strictly educational and informational and is not investment advice, financial advice, tax advice, legal advice, or a solicitation to buy or sell any digital asset, security, or financial product. Do your own research and consult qualified advisers.
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Fuzzybear ($FUZZYBEAR), an XRP Ledger memecoin, gained 70% in seven days. The token draws its story from an early XRPL address and a 2014 order of 1 XRP for 1 Bitcoin.
Fuzzybear, a memecoin issued on the XRP Ledger (@XRP) $XRP, has extended a sharp rally. The token, listed as $FUZZYBEAR, rose 50% in 24 hours and 70% over seven days. CoinGecko puts its market cap at $24.5 million.
What is Fuzzybear?Fuzzybear is a community-driven memecoin on the XRP Ledger (XRPL). The project's narrative is built around the 'Fuzzybear' XRPL address, which was activated by Opencoin (now Ripple) in February 2013. The project specifically highlights a 2014 event in which this address placed a decentralized exchange (DEX) order of 1 XRP for 1 Bitcoin $BTC.
According to CoinGecko, the token has no formal technical utility such as staking or revenue distribution, and is designed to grow as supporters join the movement. It operates as a zero-tax asset with a fixed total supply. CoinGecko lists a maximum supply of 321 billion tokens.
On-chain records cited by the project's community show a wallet named FuzzyBear placed the 1 XRP for 1 BTC order on January 1, 2014. Market trackers describe the token as a tribute to that account. Data provider xrpl(.)to says the token launched on FirstLedger on 23 January 2025.
Market contextThe latest move marks a notable shift in momentum. On 16 October, xrpl(.)to recorded a market cap of $10.81 million and 11,223 accounts holding the token. The same source noted that the market cap had peaked at $17.54 million on 25 July 2026. A market cap of $24.5 million would sit above that earlier peak, although figures vary between data providers and change quickly.
The rally comes as XRP itself trades under pressure. Crypto news outlet reports said XRP traded near $1.30 on October 20, with CoinGecko recording a daily range between $1.29 and $1.32. Fuzzybear's gains therefore run against the weaker price action in the wider XRP market.
Memecoins on the XRP Ledger are volatile and small by market value. Cryptonews has listed no built-in utility, heavy reliance on hype and ongoing regulatory risk among the drawbacks of the token. Sharp short-term gains can reverse quickly, and readers should review liquidity and holder concentration before trading. Data from xrpl(.)to shows the hundred largest holders own 62.8% of the supply.
Sources
CoinGecko: Fuzzybear price, market cap and project details
xrpl(.)to: Fuzzy Bear token data and holder statistics
Crypto news: XRP whale outflows hit five-year low as price struggles near $1.30
The memecoin market has entered the final quarter of 2026 at roughly $30 billion, with far more new tokens than lasting trading markets. CoinGecko put total crypto capitalization growth at 39.6% in Q3 even as average daily volume fell 8.6%, and a Bitquery study found most Pump.fun coins stopped trading after their first day. The question for the rest of Q4 is whether traders bring new capital to the category or keep moving the same capital between short lived launches.
Summary
Total crypto market capitalization rose 39.6% in Q3 while average daily trading volume fell 8.6%, CoinGecko reported. CoinGecko valued the memecoin category near $29.9 billion in its October 18 snapshot, with 24 hour volume near $3.4 billion. Bitquery found 79% of Pump.fun tokens in its study had no trades after launch day. Only 1 in 58 Pump.fun launches graduated to a full trading pool in Bitquery’s November 2025 to October 2026 sample. Pump.fun added a 0.45% app trading fee on October 17 for wallets without a referral code. The memecoin category has registered about $29.9 billion in market value in an October 18 snapshot. CoinGecko’s meme category snapshot put Dogecoin near $12.4 billion and Pepe near $1.6 billion, with different kinds of trading activity hidden under the same label. Market value and 24 hour trading volume change continuously; these figures are dated observations, not values fixed for the rest of the quarter.
CoinGecko’s third quarter market study described a crypto recovery in prices that outpaced participation. The same study said memecoin trading became a major source of activity on Robinhood Chain, a network presented as infrastructure for tokenized assets. A market in which incumbent coins retain liquidity and new launchpads draw speculative trades can look healthy at a glance even if few new coins continue trading after their initial burst. A Q4 outlook needs to measure both halves separately.
The sector’s $30 billion starting point conceals concentration A category capitalization combines coins with vastly different markets. CoinGecko’s October 18 list put Dogecoin around $12.4 billion and Shiba Inu around $2.9 billion. On a roughly $29.9 billion sector total, the two represented close to 51% by simple division, subject to movements and category membership. Adding Pepe’s approximately $1.6 billion takes the three to around 56%. The calculation uses rounded constituent values and the category value from the same displayed page; it is a share of reported market capitalization, not a measure of where every trade occurred.
Dogecoin’s scale means it can stabilize a sector average when a cluster of small tokens collapses. The reverse is possible: DOGE can fall even as a handful of new launches multiply. Capitalization alone therefore cannot answer whether traders are buying memecoins across the board. A large legacy asset, a newer exchange listed coin and a fresh token on a bonding curve respond to different pools of buyers and different liquidity constraints.
A recent selection of established memecoins at crypto.news discussed Dogecoin, Shiba Inu, Pepe, Bonk and Floki according to their history, communities and observable activity. Selection on those grounds is distinct from a prediction that they will outperform. Their market access and prior trading records let an outlook examine behavior across many sessions. A token minted yesterday has no comparable record, however large its launch day percentage gain appears.
CoinGecko displayed approximately $3.4 billion in category trading volume over 24 hours in its October 18 snapshot. Dividing that figure by roughly $29.9 billion in market value yields a volume to market cap ratio near 11.5% for that particular day. A ratio built from one rolling 24 hour window is not proof that 11.5% of all memecoins changed hands; volume may include repeated turnover of the same units across venues, and the capitalization is a snapshot. The useful Q4 comparison is the same measure tracked on consistent days and against each coin’s own earlier levels.
Liquidity is more specific than volume. A deep order book can absorb a large trade without moving much; a shallow pool can record high turnover as traders repeatedly buy and sell small amounts while even a moderate order moves the price. Aggregated category volume does not describe spreads, pool depth or the cost of exiting an individual memecoin. Those details determine whether a nominal gain can be realized, particularly in new tokens whose first purchasers may be a large share of all holders.
The category composition can change as data providers add or remove tokens or classify a project differently. PUMP, the token associated with a launchpad, appears on CoinGecko’s meme category list; its economics and holder base are different from those of a token without a business attached. Comparisons across months require checking whether the same constituents are included. A rising category total caused by adding a newly listed token is not identical to price gains among existing coins.
Q3’s recovery drew less trading than its prices suggest The CoinGecko Q3 report put total crypto market value at $3.0 trillion at September’s end, up $840.1 billion from the end of June. August accounted for more than half the quarterly gain. Average daily trading volume nevertheless fell 8.6% from Q2, and centralized exchange spot volume dropped 14.2% to $1.65 trillion. These are marketwide figures, not a claim that memecoin spot volume declined by the same percentages.
The contrast matters to a sector outlook because small, volatile tokens often depend on the willingness of marginal buyers to chase gains. A market can reprice upward when sellers hold back even if trading thins. Continued gains in the largest crypto assets do not guarantee the same depth of demand in tokens launched by the thousands. Conversely, volume could return to memecoins while the total market stays flat if traders rotate among assets. The report identifies the broad setting; Q4 memecoin flow must be checked separately.
The quarter supplied an example of attention moving between chains. Robinhood Chain generated more than $88.9 billion in trading volume since its July 1 public launch, CoinGecko said. Native decentralized exchange daily volume rose from $1.3 million at launch to a reported $3.5 billion peak on September 4, coinciding with the CASHCAT coin and launchpad activity. The network averaged about 9.5 million daily transactions in Q3, but CoinGecko noted that most newly deployed tokens failed to gain traction. None of those figures establishes that all the trading volume came from memecoins or that each transfer represented a new user.
Robinhood Chain activity cooled from its September pace. An October network analysis recorded an average of 6.2 million daily transactions during October 2 to 8, 42% below the mid September comparison used in that report. The drop does not establish an irreversible reversal, because chain transaction counts can respond to bot behavior, transaction fees, application launches and the mix of activities. It does show why Q3’s peak cannot be projected through December as a steady run rate.
Trading across different chains creates another complication. A user buying a memecoin on Solana, moving to Robinhood Chain for a new launch and later trading Dogecoin through a centralized exchange has not necessarily added capital to the sector. Gross volumes at all three venues can rise as the same wallet rotates. A durable sector expansion would be easier to identify if market capitalization, stable liquidity and repeated trading by holders broadened together, rather than a headline volume series moving alone.
Most new tokens lose the market before week five Bitquery analyzed Solana token survival from November 1, 2025 through October 7, 2026. Its study covered 11.5 million new tokens that traded, including 8,984,141 originating on Pump.fun. Among the Pump.fun group, 79% traded only on launch day. Approximately 1.5% had any trade in their fifth week, and just 0.2% registered ten or more fifth week trades. The percentages describe that study’s historical sample, not an assured outcome for a coin launched this month.
The study reported that one in 58 Pump.fun launches graduated to a full trading pool. Graduation is not the same as a liquid market weeks later. A third of September’s graduations took three trades or fewer, according to Bitquery. The findings complicate a simple success rate: a coin can cross the platform’s migration threshold without developing a diverse, active market afterward. A new listing or an impressive launch day chart should be evaluated against whether trading continues after the first wave leaves.
Bitquery followed the tokens beyond their launch venues. Its table shows that 51% of Meteora DBC coins traded on launch day only, against 79% at Pump.fun, but just 1.9% of Meteora DBC coins recorded any fifth week trade, compared with 1.5% at Pump.fun. A better first day retention number did not translate into a broad population of month old markets. The cohorts have different designs and participants, so the difference should not be attributed solely to a launchpad’s technology.
The sample needs a clear denominator. It includes tokens with at least one trade, not every contract created or every idea proposed. It counts any fifth week trade differently from ten or more trades, and neither threshold measures meaningful liquidity. One wallet can generate transactions without demonstrating a community of independent buyers. Bitquery’s 0.2% fifth week ten trade figure is thus a stricter participation filter than its 1.5% any trade measure, but still a modest one.
For a Q4 readout, the useful cohort is coins launched in the first half of October and observed again at 24 hours, seven days and five weeks. That sequence would reveal whether new fee arrangements and changing market conditions coincide with longer trading lives. A comparison must allow the full observation window to pass: a token launched on October 17 cannot be labeled a five week survivor or failure on October 18. The launch date, venue and minimum trading threshold all need to stay fixed when comparing cohorts.
Survival tells only one part of the story. Established memecoins are survivors by definition, so a sample restricted to currently listed coins will overstate the chance that a new token lasts. A sample restricted to launches will understate how much of today’s sector value sits in older coins. The divide between the two populations is central to the Q4 outlook. Sector returns may be positive because large coins rise even while most new issues disappear, or the established leaders may lose value amid a frenzy of new issuance.
A fee change gives the fourth quarter a new incentive Pump.fun’s October 17 fee schedule adds a platform fee of 0.45% on trades placed through its web or mobile app by a wallet without a referral code, and 0.40% where the wallet applied another user’s code. The charge sits on top of protocol, creator or holder reward, and liquidity provider fees. Pump.fun says it does not apply to trades through Terminal or third party interfaces. The schedule covers the first purchase made when creating a coin and app orders that execute later.
For a bonding curve transaction, the published existing fees total 1.25%: 0.30% to the creator, 0.95% to the protocol and zero to a liquidity pool. Adding 0.45% produces a listed 1.70% charge on an eligible app trade without a referral code. If both a purchase and a later sale each have exactly $1,000 in notional value, the two listed charges amount to $34 before price movement, slippage and network costs. The equal notional assumption is for comparison; a real sale may have a different value and therefore a different dollar fee. A referred wallet’s corresponding listed rate is 1.65% per side under the same bonding curve schedule.
The new charge changes the economic difference between using Pump.fun’s app and another route to the same underlying market. It does not mean all trades now cost 1.70%; graduated pool fees vary by a coin’s market capitalization, third party interfaces may charge separately, and a referral code changes the app fee. Traders should check the fee displayed for the particular order. A view of gross launchpad fees without the recipient split can misread what reaches the company, creator, liquidity providers or referrers.
An October 17 account of perpetual trading covered Pump.fun’s separate Hyperliquid feature and its builder fee of up to 0.10% per order. Perpetual futures are a distinct product with different costs. Pump.fun’s new app platform fee does not apply to those perp orders under the October 17 schedule. Combining the percentages across unrelated trades would produce a misleading total.
Fee income can hold up even if individual memecoins do not. Launchpads earn from a flow of new creations and repeated trading; traders who lose interest in one token may generate fees on the next. Pump.fun fee revenue exceeded $10 million over one week in an August comparison, illustrating how trading turnover can benefit the platform even when individual coin outcomes differ. For token holders, the economics are different: each new coin competes for attention and available capital, and the cost of entering and exiting reduces the gain left from a small price move. The Q4 question is whether additional fees finance better discovery and lasting participation, or simply collect more from an existing cycle of churn. The published fee schedule establishes charges; it cannot establish the behavior that follows.
Established coins face a different demand question Dogecoin’s October 18 market value was roughly six times that of Shiba Inu and more than seven times that of Pepe in CoinGecko’s snapshot. Its deep listing history and broad market access make DOGE a useful gauge of established memecoin demand. Those qualities do not mean it will outperform newer tokens. Large capitalization demands more net buying to achieve a comparable percentage gain, while a relatively small token can move quickly through a thin order book in either direction.
The experience of a regulated investment wrapper illustrates how access and appetite differ. Bitwise planned to close its Dogecoin ETF after roughly ten months, with final trading expected October 14. The closure of one fund is not a vote on every Dogecoin investor or all future memecoin products. It does show that the existence of an exchange traded route cannot be treated as evidence of durable demand. Existing spot markets, other funds and direct brokerage trading may still serve different customers.
Pepe and Shiba Inu offer other kinds of comparison. A price gain in Pepe accompanied by persistent volume across major venues would provide different evidence from a thin spike in a new launch. Shiba Inu’s long holder history can make supply distribution and large wallet sales relevant even when launchpad counts surge elsewhere. None of these coins shares a single underlying cash flow that lets an analyst set a common fair value. A sector forecast should examine their trading patterns and relative strength without inventing a fundamental earnings multiple.
Price charts alone can conceal capital rotation. If DOGE loses market value while a smaller token rises by the same dollar amount, the total category may barely change, even though social feeds appear full of gains. Likewise, a meme coin’s percentage rally from a tiny starting capitalization contributes little to a $30 billion category. Comparing the change in dollars as well as percentages is necessary when deciding whether new buyers arrived at scale. A cohort of winning tickers selected after the fact is not evidence of the return on the full universe of launches.
Communities are measurable only imperfectly. Holder addresses can multiply because one person uses several wallets; social followers can remain after trading interest fades. Repeated trading volume, available liquidity and the number of distinct wallets that still transact after a few weeks offer more direct observations. None identifies the identities or motivations of all buyers. The indicators become persuasive when several independent measures move in the same direction over time.
Three paths for the rest of Q4 A scenario needs a starting value and conditions that could disprove it. The October 18 CoinGecko category observation near $29.9 billion is a reference, not a fixed forecast input. A $35 billion sector would stand roughly 17% above that value; $40 billion would be around 34% higher. A $25 billion sector would be about 16% lower, and $20 billion about 33% lower. The percentages come from subtracting $29.9 billion and dividing by $29.9 billion, rounded. The endpoints are illustrative market size markers, not estimates of probability or a price target for any particular coin.
Expansion case, approximately $35 billion to $40 billion. Established leaders would hold or gain in dollar value while a larger share of new coins retains active trading beyond the first week. Sustained category volume, deeper liquidity and activity across more than one chain would support the case. Pump.fun and other launchpads could see fee income rise, but the stronger evidence would be broad participation that persists after campaigns and initial social attention fade. The case weakens if category gains depend on one legacy asset or a short lived launch while active trading and depth keep shrinking.
Rotation case, approximately $25 billion to $35 billion. Capital would keep moving between established coins and new themes without lifting the category decisively. DOGE might retain deep liquidity while newer coins post brief rallies and then fall silent. Launchpad revenue could remain substantial because churn itself generates fees. The scenario describes a wide range around the October reference: a category near $30 billion in December could hide major winners and losses beneath the aggregate. Consistent coin level and cohort data would distinguish it from genuine broadening.
Contraction case, approximately $20 billion to $25 billion. Established coins would lose enough capitalization that a few new winners could not offset them. Lower category volume, widening spreads, weaker late cohort survival and falling onchain fee generation would support the downside case. A macro shock or reduced appetite for speculative assets could accelerate such a move, but the evidence gathered here does not assign either event a likelihood. The case would be challenged by several weeks of improving liquidity and persistent activity across established coins and new cohorts.
The cases are deliberately conditional. The boundaries are not technical support or resistance levels, because a sector capitalization is a sum of assets with changing classifications and supplies. If CoinGecko changes the set of tokens included, the headline total can move even if individual prices do not. A material Q4 classification change would require reconstructing the series on a like for like basis before treating a crossing of $35 billion or $25 billion as a market signal.
The bull case has evidence, and it has limits CoinGecko’s Q3 report gives the optimistic case a real starting point. Memecoin trading helped drive activity on Robinhood Chain, and the wider crypto market recovered sharply in August. The largest memecoins still support substantial reported trading, while new platforms can draw users who were not active in earlier cycles. New holder reward arrangements may keep some participants involved longer. Rising revenues at a launchpad and strong category turnover could accompany that expansion.
The counterargument is equally concrete. Q3 average trading volume fell despite the rise in total market capitalization, and Bitquery’s large historical cohort found little fifth week trading for most new launches. Robinhood Chain transaction counts later eased from the mid September comparison. No one figure proves that Q4 will be weak: a broad crypto volume measure is not a memecoin volume measure, old launch cohorts do not determine new ones, and a chain’s transaction count includes more than meme trades. Together they identify the questions a bullish thesis must answer with subsequent evidence.
The sector could have a strong quarter led almost entirely by DOGE, SHIB and PEPE while the launchpad survival rate remains poor. A new cohort might retain users better even if prices on the largest coins fall. Both outcomes would make a single phrase such as “memecoin season” too broad to be informative. The disagreement is about where and for how long buyers are active, not whether memecoin trades occur at all.
Macroeconomic data will shape the background, but they do not set a mechanical timetable for a memecoin rally. The Federal Reserve meets October 27 and 28, according to its calendar, and U.S. inflation data for October are scheduled for November 10. A less aggressive policy path could support risk taking, while a new inflation surprise could hurt it. Prior positioning and crypto specific flows can complicate either reaction. The Q4 analysis should check what the sector actually did after the releases, not infer an effect from the calendar alone.
What the data still cannot tell us Neither the CoinGecko category page nor Bitquery’s study measures all memecoin capital flows. Capitalization multiplies price by circulating supply; it does not mean investors contributed that entire dollar amount. Volume can include rapid turnover of the same capital. Token survival registers transactions, not profitable exits. Launchpad fees are the sums paid by traders and may be split among protocol, creators, holders and liquidity providers.
Crosschain accounting creates further uncertainty. Wrapped tokens, bridged liquidity and coins with similar names can appear in multiple places. A sector series needs a defined token set and consistent time convention. Price snapshots taken at one time and volume observations from another can create ratios that seem precise but are not. The figures in this article are explicitly dated where they can change and should be refreshed before publication.
The Bitquery cohort ends October 7 and cannot show how the October 17 Pump.fun fee will affect new token behavior. A change in fees may encourage use of other interfaces, alter trade frequency or make little difference compared with price volatility. Its effect requires observing comparable cohorts after the new schedule took effect. The study’s historical rates are a benchmark to test against, not an expected value assigned to every Q4 token.
Investor outcomes are especially difficult to infer from successful token examples. A wallet’s realized gain requires knowing when it bought, how many units it sold, the available exit liquidity and every fee paid. A quoted market capitalization or an unrealized balance is not a cash return. At Q4’s first substantive reporting checkpoint, CoinGecko’s October 15 report supplies the Q3 marketwide volume baseline, while Bitquery’s October 10 verified cohort supplies the launch survival baseline for subsequent comparisons.
What to watch Category market value and constituent list: Compare CoinGecko’s daily category total with the same large coins and check whether reclassification changes the series. Trading volume and liquidity: Track repeated daily volumes alongside order book or pool depth for DOGE, SHIB, PEPE and representative new coins. Seven day and fifth week launch survival: Compare new October cohorts with Bitquery’s 79% launch day only and 1.5% fifth week any trade benchmarks after enough time passes. Launchpad fee and revenue splits: Observe whether Pump.fun trading, platform fee income and creator or holder rewards grow together after the October 17 change. Activity across chains: Compare Solana and Robinhood Chain transaction and DEX volume patterns without treating every transaction as a new memecoin investor. FAQ What is the outlook for memecoins in Q4 2026? The outlook depends on whether activity extends beyond major coins and launch day trades. This feature sets conditional expansion, rotation and contraction cases around CoinGecko’s roughly $29.9 billion category snapshot on October 18, not a guaranteed quarter end target.
How large is the memecoin market in October 2026? CoinGecko’s category page showed approximately $29.9 billion in market capitalization and around $3.4 billion in 24 hour trading volume in the October 18 snapshot. Both measures change continuously and depend on the provider’s included tokens.
Are new memecoins still attracting traders? New launches continue to trade, but durability is scarce in Bitquery’s historical Solana sample. It found 79% of Pump.fun coins had no trades after launch day and 1.5% registered any trade in their fifth week.
What share of Pump.fun coins reach a full trading pool? Bitquery found one in 58 Pump.fun launches graduated in its November 2025 to October 2026 study period. Graduation describes migration to a trading pool and does not establish lasting liquidity or gains for holders.
Did memecoin activity rise during Q3? CoinGecko reported intense memecoin driven activity on Robinhood Chain during Q3, including a peak of $3.5 billion in daily native DEX volume on September 4. Its report did not assign every transaction or every dollar of that volume to memecoins.
Does a higher DOGE price mean the whole sector is recovering? No. Dogecoin accounted for roughly $12.4 billion of a near $29.9 billion CoinGecko meme category snapshot on October 18. Its size can lift a category total while many smaller tokens lose value or stop trading.
Did Pump.fun change its trading fees in October? Yes. Its October 17 schedule added a 0.45% app platform fee for wallets without a referral code and 0.40% for referred wallets, on top of applicable existing trade fees. The new platform fee does not apply to Terminal or third party interface trades under that schedule.
What would strengthen the bullish Q4 case? Several weeks of volume growth, deeper available liquidity and more new launch cohorts still trading after seven days and five weeks would support it. A one day rally or a high count of newly created tokens is not enough. This is educational analysis, not investment advice.
Disclaimer: This article is for information and educational purposes only and does not constitute financial or investment advice. Figures reflect regulatory filings and reporting available at the time of writing and change with each disclosure. Nothing here is a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any security or asset. Always do your own research. Information is accurate as of October 18, 2026.
MemeToro has reported $163,467.81 raised in Stage 8 of its$ MT crypto presale, approaching the round's $176,896.90 target as the project details the tokenomics supporting its planned AI memecoin ecosystem on BNB Chain. The Stage 8 price is $0.00528 per$ MT. At $163,467.81 raised, another $13,429.09 would take the stage to its $176,896.90 target.
SINGAPORE, Oct. 16, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) --
MemeToro has reported $163,467.81 raised in Stage 8 of its $MT crypto presale, approaching the round's $176,896.90 target as the project details the tokenomics supporting its planned AI memecoin ecosystem on BNB Chain.
The Stage 8 price is $0.00528 per $MT. MemeToro lists $0.05186 as its planned launch price. That figure is part of the project's launch plan and does not establish the price at which $MT will trade once exposed to open-market supply and demand.
The current token allocation assigns most of the 1.2 billion $MT supply to the public sale, with the remaining tokens divided between exchange reserves, marketing, trading, rewards and the team.
Stage 8 moves toward its round target
Stage 8 has reached approximately 90% of its stated funding target based on MemeToro's crypto presale latest figures.
At $163,467.81 raised, another $13,429.09 would take the stage to its $176,896.90 target.
Tokens in the current stage are priced at $0.00528. The presale structure establishes a price for the current round before the planned token launch.
MemeToro's stated $0.05186 launch price is separate from any future market price. Once a cryptocurrency begins open trading, liquidity, circulating supply, buyer and seller activity and wider market conditions can affect its value.
The presale is running while MemeToro develops the launchpad and AI infrastructure intended to form the wider use case for $MT.
Public sale receives 71% of the supply
MemeToro's corrected tokenomics put the total $MT supply at 1.2 billion tokens.
Of that amount, 852 million $MT, or 71%, is allocated to the public sale.
CEX reserves account for 120 million tokens, or 10% of supply. The marketing partner allocation is 90.72 million $MT, or 7.56%.
MemeToro Trading receives 60 million tokens, representing 5%, while 53.28 million $MT, or 4.44%, is assigned to MT Rewards.
The team allocation is 24 million $MT, or 2% of total supply.
The public-sale allocation is therefore considerably larger than any individual non-sale category.
The remaining supply has separate allocations
The 29% of supply outside the public sale is divided by function rather than placed into a single project allocation.
The 10% CEX reserve provides a distinct pool associated with centralized exchange requirements. MemeToro has separately designated tokens for its crypto presale, marketing partner, MemeToro Trading and MT Rewards.
The team holds the smallest named allocation at 2%.
These figures describe how the supply is divided. They should not be read as a vesting schedule or release timetable unless MemeToro separately publishes those conditions.
That distinction matters because allocation and circulating supply are different measures. A token can belong to a particular allocation without necessarily entering circulation at the same time as tokens in another category.
$MT is being designed around the MemeToro ecosystem
MemeToro is developing $MT alongside its AI Meme Launch Agent and BNB Chain launchpad rather than presenting the token as a standalone asset.
The project advertises staking rewards as one planned use within the $MT ecosystem. MemeToro is also developing a broader platform around AI-assisted memecoin creation, launches, market data and related crypto tools.
Its AI agent is intended to identify market signals and turn selected concepts into structured memecoin proposals. The launchpad is being designed to take approved proposals into funding rounds governed by smart contracts.
MemeToro has published working examples of this infrastructure through its open-source repository, although several components remain under development.
The extent to which those planned functions create demand for $MT will depend on the completed platform and its adoption. Presale participation does not guarantee future token value or liquidity.
About MemeToro
MemeToro is developing an open-source AI memecoin launchpad on BNB Chain. The project combines an AI Meme Launch Agent, fair-launch infrastructure, bonding curves, market analytics and planned $MT ecosystem functions.
The $MT crypto presale is currently in Stage 8. Cryptocurrency presales are speculative and carry a risk investors should research and make confident decisions.
Memecoin launches have made it easier for creators to turn internet trends into digital assets. However, the same simple launch process has also raised questions about how much control developers hold over buyer funds.
Rug pulls remain one of the biggest concerns. These schemes can involve developers withdrawing liquidity, abandoning a project, or using hidden contract powers against token holders.
MemeToro is taking an open-code approach as it builds an AI-powered memecoin launchpad on BNB Chain.
The project has published development code for its AI proposal pipeline and FairLaunchEscrow funding architecture. Its latest update adds a funding interface designed around direct contract access, withdrawals, refunds, and token claims.
MemeToro has also raised more than $163,000 in Stage 8.
Why MemeToro’s Open-Source Code Could Set a Higher Standard for Memecoin Launches
A common problem with new memecoin projects is that buyers may know the token’s story without understanding its contract rules. Important details about funding, liquidity, and developer control can remain unclear.
MemeToro is developing an alternative built around publicly inspectable code.
Its GitHub repository contains the AI proposal pipeline, FairLaunchEscrow development work, tests, and examples of structured launch information.
The project follows a Propose, Verify, Fund, and Launch approach. Its AI agent researches possible memecoin ideas, while public contracts are intended to enforce funding conditions.
This separation gives each part of the system a defined role.
MemeToro’s AI agent can generate concepts and explain its reasoning. The smart contracts are designed to control contribution limits, deadlines, refunds, and finalization.
Publishing this work allows outside developers to examine the intended rules before the full launchpad is deployed.
MemeToro’s FairLaunchEscrow Targets Common Rug Pull Concerns
One major rug pull concern involves what happens to funds after contributors send money into a project. MemeToro’s FairLaunchEscrow design aims to make those movements depend on predefined contract conditions.
The draft contract includes minimum funding targets, hard caps, wallet limits, and refund paths.
MemeToro’s latest exit-window update also gives contributors a defined period to withdraw. A round cannot finalize while that period remains open.
The proposed process includes:
Published terms: Supply, pricing, and funding conditions appear before contributions.
Withdrawal rights: Contributors can exit during the stated window.
Refund conditions: Failed rounds can return funds to eligible contributors.
Liquidity rules: Successful rounds are intended to move funds toward locked liquidity.
MemeToro’s development materials also describe limits on administrative fund withdrawals within the fair-launch escrow.
The FairLaunchEscrow contract remains an undeployed development draft. Its published code provides a basis for technical review, while production deployment and independent security assessment remain separate milestones.
Why MemeToro’s New Funding Interface Strengthens Its Buyer-Focused Design
MemeToro is now building a funding interface that connects users directly with smart-contract functions.
The interface is designed to provide one place to join a round, withdraw before finalization, claim tokens, or request eligible refunds.
Its main advantage is the separation between website access and contract authority.
If MemeToro’s website becomes unavailable after contracts are deployed, contributors could still use another compatible blockchain interface to submit permitted transactions.
This matters because the website would not be the only route to the funding contract.
MemeToro is also developing proposal fingerprints. These digital identifiers help connect the published AI proposal with the parameters used to create its funding round.
The result is a system designed to make both the information and the financial rules easier to inspect.
MemeToro’s $163K Presale Adds Momentum to Its Open-Code Development
MemeToro’s Stage 8 presale has raised more than $163,000, with $MT priced at $0.00528.
The project’s total supply is fixed at 1.2 billion tokens. Public sale accounts for 852 million tokens, while the remaining supply supports exchange reserves, marketing, trading, rewards, and the team.
MemeToro plans to use $MT for platform access, transactions, staking, rewards, and memecoin-related services.
At the Stage 8 price, a $500 purchase represents approximately 94,697 $MT before fees. If the token eventually reached $0.05186, that amount would have a hypothetical market value near $4,911.
The project also plans memecoin trading features that connect its AI discovery system with broader ecosystem activity.
Users can find current participation information through MemeToro’s how to join page.
Final Words: MemeToro Makes Public Code Central to Its Launchpad Story
The discussion around meme coin rug pulls shows why funding rules deserve attention before a token launches. MemeToro’s open-source approach puts those rules into public development materials instead of relying only on promotional descriptions.
Its FairLaunchEscrow design includes contribution limits, exit windows, refund conditions, and proposed liquidity controls.
The new funding interface adds another important feature by making contract access a central part of the user experience.
MemeToro’s AI agent also creates documented proposals that can be checked against published funding parameters.
Together, these developments give the project a clear technical direction as it builds its BNB Chain ecosystem.
The next milestones involve independent review, deployment, and demonstrating how the complete funding process works in production.
FAQs
Why Has MemeToro Made Its Smart-Contract Code Public?
MemeToro publishes its development code so users and developers can examine funding rules, withdrawal conditions, and proposed contract protections.
How Does MemeToro Aim to Address Meme Coin Rug Pulls?
MemeToro is developing public launch terms, wallet caps, refund conditions, and liquidity rules designed to reduce unchecked developer control.
Has MemeToro’s FairLaunchEscrow Contract Been Audited?
Not yet. FairLaunchEscrow remains an undeployed development contract, with independent security review planned before production use.
Buying a token before its public trading launch usually means committing funds before the final product becomes available. Many buyers focus on the token price, potential growth, and launch date without fully understanding what happens to their contribution.
This raises an important question: can you get your money back in a memecoin presale?
The answer depends on the funding agreement and the smart contract controlling the money. Some token sales provide refund conditions, while others treat purchases as final.
MemeToro is developing a different funding model for future AI-generated memecoin launches on BNB Chain. Its FairLaunchEscrow contract introduces a defined exit window, permissionless withdrawals, and refunds when certain funding conditions are not met.
MemeToro has also raised more than $163,000 in its separate $MT Stage 8 presale, priced at $0.00528. The new refund architecture concerns future launchpad rounds rather than automatically changing existing $MT presale terms.
Why MemeToro’s Refund System Could Change Memecoin PresalesA memecoin presale refund system determines when contributors can recover their original funds. MemeToro’s FairLaunchEscrow design makes these conditions part of the smart contract rather than leaving every decision to the project team.
The latest update introduces a published exit deadline. Contributors can withdraw their funds before that deadline without asking for permission.
This creates a clear sequence:
Contribution: A buyer sends funds into the designated escrow contract.Exit period: The contributor can withdraw while the published window remains open.Finalization: The funding round can proceed only after the exit period closes and the required conditions are satisfied.MemeToro’s contract design prevents a launch from finalizing while contributors still have the right to withdraw.
Even if a funding round reaches its hard cap almost immediately, the published exit deadline remains in place.
This is an important design choice because the contributor’s decision period cannot be shortened simply because other buyers contributed quickly.
How the $163K MemeToro Presale Is a Bullish Sign for New InvestorsMemeToro’s existing $MT presale is separate from the future FairLaunchEscrow funding rounds. The project has raised more than $163,000 in Stage 8, with $MT priced at $0.00528. Its total supply is fixed at 1.2 billion tokens, with 71% allocated to public sale.
MemeToro plans to use $MT for ecosystem access, transactions, staking, rewards, and memecoin-related services.
The project also describes AI-assisted memecoin discovery and future trading infrastructure as part of its wider ecosystem.
Buyers can review current participation options through the official how to join page.
Can a $50 Entry in $MT Generate Significant ROI?Even a modest $50 allocation at the current $0.00528 rate buys around 9,470 $MT tokens before any transaction fees come into play.
Based on the project’s publicized launch price target of $0.05186, this small position would be worth roughly $491 on paper, mirroring the same 9.82x valuation jump seen at every other tier examined here.
If MemeToro reach a $1 billion fully diluted valuation with a token price near $0.8333, those same 9,470 tokens would carry a value of about $7,891.
How MemeToro Uses Smart Contracts to Give Buyers More ControlMemeToro’s FairLaunchEscrow architecture uses Solidity smart contracts to manage funding conditions on BNB Chain.
The design includes minimum funding thresholds, maximum contributions, wallet limits, refund conditions, and finalization rules. These parameters are intended to be fixed when the funding round is created.
MemeToro’s latest refund update gives contributors two important forms of control.
First, they can withdraw during the published exit window. Second, refunds can become available if the round fails to meet the conditions needed for a successful launch.
For example, imagine a funding round reaches its minimum target but several contributors withdraw before the exit deadline. Those withdrawals could reduce the remaining contributions below the required minimum.
Under MemeToro’s design, that round should not launch using capital that contributors have already withdrawn.
The contract is also designed so contributed funds have only two permitted destinations: back to contributors or toward liquidity after successful finalization.
MemeToro has published code and tests demonstrating these rules, although FairLaunchEscrow remains an undeployed development contract.
Why MemeToro’s New Funding Interface Matters for Refund AccessA smart-contract refund system becomes more useful when contributors can understand their balances and interact with the contract directly.
MemeToro’s developing funding interface is intended to make actions such as contributions, withdrawals, refunds, and claims easier to access.
The underlying contract design does not require an AI agent or private backend to approve eligible withdrawals.
That means the planned funding system separates website convenience from contract authority. The interface helps users interact with the blockchain, while the contract determines whether an action is allowed.
MemeToro is also developing launch manifests that publish supply, funding targets, wallet caps, and timing rules.
Each proposal can carry a digital fingerprint that links its published information to the funding round.
Together, these features create a clearer record of what contributors agreed to before sending funds. For an AI-powered launchpad, this is a significant development because the software can prepare proposals without controlling contributor money.
Final Words: Is MemeToro the Best Crypto Presale Right Now?Refund access is becoming an important topic as memecoin launchpads introduce more automated funding systems.
MemeToro’s approach focuses on giving contributors a published period to reconsider their participation before a round becomes final.
Its FairLaunchEscrow design also includes permissionless refunds when the required launch conditions are not satisfied.
The latest exit-window update strengthens this approach by preventing early finalization, even when a funding round fills quickly.
MemeToro’s broader AI ecosystem adds another layer through documented proposals, fixed funding parameters, and public smart-contract development.
For buyers researching future memecoin presales, the central benefit is clarity. They can examine when withdrawals are allowed, when refunds apply, and what conditions must be met before funding proceeds toward a launch.
FAQsCan You Get a Refund From a Memecoin Presale?Refunds depend on the project’s funding rules. MemeToro’s developing FairLaunchEscrow system allows contributors to withdraw during a published exit window and receive refunds when a future funding round fails to meet its required conditions.
How Does MemeToro’s Smart Contract Refund System Work?MemeToro’s FairLaunchEscrow contract is designed to hold contributions and enforce funding rules on BNB Chain. Eligible contributors can withdraw or claim refunds directly through the contract without requiring approval from the project team.
Does MemeToro’s Refund System Apply to the $MT Presale?No. MemeToro’s FairLaunchEscrow refund system is being developed for future AI-generated memecoin funding rounds. The current $MT presale follows separate participation terms.
Harold (HAROLD), a Solana memecoin inspired by the Hide the Pain Harold meme, is up about 20% in 24 hours and 30% this week, with a market value near $17.4 million.
Harold (HAROLD), a memecoin on Solana ($SOL) (@solana), is attracting fresh trading interest. The token draws on one of the internet's most recognisable faces, the "Hide the Pain Harold" meme.
HAROLD is up around 20% over the past day and roughly 30% over the week. Its market value stands at approximately $17.4 million. Its appeal rests on humour, relatability and the lasting popularity of the original meme.
The meme behind the tokenHide the Pain Harold is an internet meme built on stock photos of András István Arató, a retired Hungarian electrical engineer. In 2011, he became the subject of the meme because of his facial expression and seemingly fake smile.
The meme spawned image macros and fictional backstories, and Arató revealed his identity in 2016, according to meme(.)com.
Arató's profile has also reached the crypto world. He attended the Token 2049 event in Singapore in 2024 as a guest of the Web3 studio Memeland and the NFT community Arc, Malay Mail reported.
The token's own description leans on the same theme. CoinMarketCap's listing describes HaroldCoin as a memecoin inspired by Harold "Hide the Pain," built around embracing the humour in awkward and challenging moments.
What the data showsMeme tokens built on recognisable internet characters tend to trade on attention rather than fundamentals, and moves of this size can reverse quickly. HAROLD has been through large swings before. CryptoRank data lists an all-time high of $0.02987 reached on 12 January 2025.
Price, liquidity and volume figures differ between data providers and change throughout the day, so readers should check live data on several trackers before drawing conclusions.
This article is for information only and is not investment advice. Memecoins are highly volatile and can lose value rapidly.
Sources:
CoinMarketCap: Harold (HAROLD) price and project descriptionCryptoRank: Harold (HAROLD) price statisticsMalay Mail: Hide the Pain Harold at Token 2049 in Singapore
Binance Life (币安人生), the Chinese-culture memecoin running on BNB Chain, has climbed 12% in the past 24 hours to reach a market capitalisation of $540 million, according to CoinGecko data. The move puts the token among the largest community-driven assets on the network and cements its status as the flagship Chinese memecoin on BNB Chain.
Origins and Community Appeal Binance Life traces its roots to October 2025, when Binance co-founder He Yi responded on X to a post in the Chinese crypto community, casually evoking the phrase "Binance Life." The comment resonated widely and quickly became the spark for a dedicated memecoin. Its narrative centres on wealth aspiration, personal success, and community identity, drawing directly from Chinese retail crypto culture.
The token launched with a fixed supply of one billion tokens in full circulation and charges no transaction tax, keeping the structure simple for retail participants. There is no formal technical team behind the project and no official whitepaper, placing it squarely in the community-driven, sentiment-led category of meme assets.
Binance Life gained further visibility after securing a listing on Binance Alpha, the exchange's early-stage token discovery platform. According to research from DWF Ventures, memecoins account for roughly 39% of all projects listed on Binance Alpha, with BNB Chain and Solana among the most represented ecosystems, reflecting strong platform support for community-driven assets.
Market Context and Risk The token has traded in a wide range since launch. After hitting an all-time high earlier in 2026, Binance Life suffered a steep correction of more than 70%, a trajectory typical of high-volatility meme assets. Its recovery to a $540 million market cap marks a significant rebound.
The broader Chinese memecoin category on BNB Chain has benefited from rising DEX volumes and active retail participation throughout 2026. Trading volumes across BNB Chain decentralised exchanges exceeded $6 billion during peak meme seasons, with Chinese-language tokens playing a central role in driving that activity.
As with any memecoin, Binance Life carries substantial risk. The project has no formal team, no whitepaper, and its price is driven almost entirely by community sentiment and social media momentum rather than technical utility or protocol fundamentals. Investors should exercise caution.
Sources:
Yahoo Finance: Chinese Memecoins Attract Capital as BNB Chain Commits $200,000 in Q1 2026
DWF Ventures: Diving into Binance Alpha and Spot Listing
Analytics Insight: Best Chinese Meme Coins to Watch in 2026
A forensic review by Groom Lake, an intelligence consultancy, has found that a market maker hired for the $LAPTOP memecoin launch deployed only $5,200 of a $500,000 pre-launch budget.
What the Groom Lake Report Found The Groom Lake report reviewed on-chain data from the Sept. 9 opening. It found that the wallet tied to “Market Maker 1” received $500,000 before launch but seeded the main pool with only about $5,200, roughly 1% of the budget.
That pool held fewer than 30,000 $LAPTOP tokens, or about 0.003% of the 1 billion total supply. Pool depth was so thin that a $6 buy could move the quoted price by roughly 5%.
Hunter Biden published the findings on X on Oct. 7, nearly a month after the Sept. 9 LAPTOP launch on the Base blockchain collapsed.
The $LAPTOP token, positioned partly as a response to political memecoins, saw its price spike from roughly $0.05 to about $317 in under two minutes, before crashing more than 98% in the same hour.
The exit came fast. Eighty-four seconds after the price peaked, Market Maker 1 withdrew its funds while selling pressure was still building.
Cash available to sellers near the live price dropped from $16,157 to zero in that window. This followed early rug-pull concerns over the 30% founder allocation that surfaced before trading opened.
Combined, the two market makers extracted an estimated $2.8 million.
Market Maker 1’s positions netted roughly $686,000, part of which was owed to a lender, while a second unnamed firm took in about $2.18 million more than it spent. Groom Lake said it found no comparable case in 668 other token launches it reviewed.
Biden Demands Buyback and Burn Hunter Biden responded to the report by calling out the market maker directly. “The firm that screwed up the launch should buy it all back and burn it,” he wrote on X.
He also said the failure was his personal responsibility. To support his claim of no insider dump, Biden shared a Basescan wallet address showing all 300 million founder tokens still unmoved as of Oct. 7.
The Groom Lake report also confirmed that $LAPTOP was designed with a six-month founder lock followed by a two-year vesting schedule.
Biden said unclaimed airdrop tokens will be burned, and that 5% of the supply was committed to charity.
The airdrop had been targeted partly at wallets that lost money on Hunter Biden’s plan to launch LAPTOP on Base, as a direct contrast to Trump-linked tokens.
That comparison carries weight. Public Citizen estimated that investors in the Official TRUMP memecoin, still down sharply from its peak, lost roughly $3.2 billion.
Following LAPTOP’s plunge of more than 90% from its peak FDV, Polymarket odds on whether LAPTOP would hold a $100 million FDV reached 96% against, a sign that market confidence collapsed almost immediately after launch.
Whether the market maker actually executes a buyback and burn on-chain remains the only verifiable next step for $LAPTOP holders watching the Base pool.
APEPE Surges 21% in 24 HoursApe and Pepe (@apepeofficial) has jumped 21% over the past 24 hours, pushing its market cap toward approximately $325 million. The move adds to a string of volatile price swings for the token, which has drawn attention from retail traders looking for exposure to the broader memecoin sector.
CoinGecko ranks APEPE around No. 141 by market capitalization, with all 210 trillion tokens in circulation. Despite the latest rally, the token remains well below its all-time high of $0.056888, trading roughly 77% beneath that peak.
What Is Ape and Pepe?Launched in June 2023 on the Polygon (@0xPolygon) blockchain, APEPE combines two of crypto's most recognisable meme identities: the "Ape" culture associated with retail trading enthusiasm and the Pepe frog meme lineage. The result is a community-driven token that positions itself as a rallying point for small investors.
The project runs on Polygon's layer-2 infrastructure, which offers low transaction fees and fast settlement times, making it accessible for small-scale retail participation. Its total supply is fixed at 210 trillion tokens, all of which are currently circulating.
Like most memecoins, APEPE carries no formal utility roadmap. Its price is driven primarily by community sentiment, social media momentum, and broader conditions across the memecoin sector. Traders should treat any sharp move in either direction as consistent with the token's historical behaviour rather than a signal of fundamental change.
Sources:
CoinGecko: Ape and Pepe (APEPE) Price and Market Cap
CoinMarketCap: Ape and Pepe Live Price Data
7 October 2026 | 23:28 The Base record supports part of Hunter Biden’s explanation of LAPTOP’s chaotic launch: the wallet he linked holds 300 million tokens, or 30% of the maximum supply, and its filtered history shows no outgoing LAPTOP transfers.
Key Takeaways The linked contract holds 300 million LAPTOP, or 30% of supply. BaseScan lists two incoming LAPTOP transfers and no outgoing ones. The linked overview does not show who controls the contract or whether tokens are locked. Market-maker and launch-trading claims require evidence beyond the wallet. In his October 7 thread, Biden presented what he called a “full independent accounting” of the token’s first day of trading. The post followed LAPTOP’s sharp launch-day spike and collapse on Base, where the planned distribution and early liquidity setup had already attracted scrutiny.
A month ago we launched $LAPTOP.
Within minutes, we had a chart that looked like every celebrity rug ever. Completely broken.
I promised you a full independent accounting. Here it is.
1/
— Hunter Biden (@HunterBiden) October 7, 2026
The linked contract has retained its LAPTOP balance Biden wrote in the same thread that “all founder coins sit in one wallet and haven’t moved since launch.” The address he linked is a SafeProxy contract on Base, a smart-wallet structure that can be configured to require approvals before funds move.
BaseScan overview of Biden-linked wallet. For the LAPTOP contract cited in the thread, BaseScan lists a balance of 300 million tokens. Its filtered transfer history contains two incoming transactions, one for 299,999,999 LAPTOP and another for one token, both made about 29 days ago. No outgoing LAPTOP transfers appear in that history.
The transfer record supports a narrow finding: the address Biden identified has retained the LAPTOP it received. The linked BaseScan overview does not identify the Safe’s owners, establish that it contains every founder allocation or show an agreement governing those tokens.
Visible on BaseScan
300 million LAPTOP in the linked contract. Two incoming transfers into that contract. No outgoing LAPTOP transfer in its filtered history. Not shown in this record
The Safe’s owners and approval threshold. The claimed lock-up and vesting terms. Market-maker agreements and trading decisions. A SafeProxy contract does not prove a lock-up Biden said his coins are locked for six months and then vest over two years. The transfer history shows what has happened so far; it does not itself set the terms of what can happen later.
Safe contracts can be configured in many ways. The linked explorer page does not show whether this address has a time-lock, who can approve a transfer or whether another agreement restricts the signers. A public vesting contract would make the release conditions visible in code. Until then, the stated schedule can be assessed only through later wallet activity and further documentation from the project.
The transfer record answers whether the identified balance has moved. It cannot explain how LAPTOP’s launch price became so volatile, which is where Biden’s account turns to the liquidity pool and the market makers.
Thin liquidity can turn a last trade into a misleading headline Biden said a Groom Lake report commissioned by the project found that one market maker put about $5,200 into a pool holding fewer than 30,000 LAPTOP. In an automated-market-maker pool that shallow, a modest purchase can push the quoted price sharply higher. Multiplying that last trade price by a token’s full supply can then create an enormous implied market capitalization, even though there may be nowhere near enough liquidity for major holders to sell at that valuation.
That is why a headline price and a realizable value can diverge so dramatically during a memecoin’s first minutes. The launch-specific figures remain claims from Biden’s thread and the report published by the project. Checking the market-maker account requires the relevant pool balances, swaps and transaction trail, not merely the 300 million-token balance.
The contract address matters more than the LAPTOP ticker Anyone reviewing the wallet should use the exact token contract: 0xB095274743941e953c746F9C228DA9c18Bb6ec29. Names and tickers can be copied easily, especially on networks where anyone can create a token, and a search for “LAPTOP” can return unrelated lookalike assets.
Using the contract address keeps the review tied to the same token Biden referenced. It also avoids confusing a displayed price or fully diluted value with the liquidity actually available for trading.
The next promises should leave public records Biden said the project will burn most unclaimed tokens from its first airdrop next week. Depending on the token’s mechanics, that should leave a public transaction trail through a transfer to an unrecoverable address, a contract function that reduces supply or another disclosed on-chain process.
The accounting gives readers a specific record to follow rather than a claim that must be taken on trust. The promised burn, any future movement from the linked SafeProxy contract and clearer evidence of the stated vesting terms will determine how much of the remaining account can be independently checked.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. On-chain data can verify balances and transfers, but it cannot establish ownership, intent or the enforceability of off-chain commitments.
Author
Alex is Editor-in-Chief of Coindoo and co-founder of Millennial Media Group, with nearly a decade of experience covering financial markets - crypto first, then everything else. It started in 2016 with Bitcoin. Like most people at the time, he didn't fully understand it - so he kept digging. Blockchain, tokenomics, the projects, the cycles. That curiosity never stopped, and eventually pulled him into traditional markets too: equities, commodities, macro. Not because he left crypto behind, but because you can't properly understand one without the other. What drives him is straightforward: he wants to know why something is happening, not just that it's happening. Most market coverage stops at the headline - price up, price down, here's a chart. Alex finds that kind of reporting actively unhelpful. If you walk away from an article without understanding the mechanism behind the move, what did you actually learn? He holds a degree in Tourism from New Bulgarian University - not the most obvious path into financial markets, but markets have a way of pulling in people who are simply too curious to stay out. He has authored over 200 in-depth analyses and more than 10,000 articles across crypto and traditional finance. He still thinks every day in markets teaches him something new. That's probably why he hasn't stopped.
Largest $MEME Holder Keeps Buying Despite Deep LossesOne trader is not taking no for an answer when it comes to @memecoin. According to on-chain analytics platform Lookonchain, a single address has spent $1.22 million over the past month steadily accumulating $MEME,
That is a significant drawdown by any measure, yet it has done little to slow the buying.
What Is Driving the Conviction?The behaviour raises obvious questions. Doubling down on a position that has lost more than half its value runs counter to conventional risk management, but it is not unheard of in crypto markets, where some participants use sharp drawdowns as opportunities to lower their average entry price, a strategy sometimes called dollar-cost averaging into conviction.
Whether this trader has information the broader market does not, or is simply committed to a long-term thesis on $MEME, remains to be seen. What is clear is that the position size and persistence make this one of the more closely watched wallets in the Memecoin ecosystem right now.
Sources:
KuCoin News: Trader Spends $1.22M on MEME Tokens, Suffers $708K Loss
Phemex: Largest $MEME Holder Adds to Position Despite $708K Loss
CoinMarketCap: Memecoin (MEME) Price
Over the past two weeks, Bitcoin [BTC] has consolidated around the $84k area. Profit-taking selling and excess leverage flush sent prices to a low of $82.5k a week ago, but buyers have responded well and driven BTC prices 3.5% higher.
The altcoin market cap growth spurt in mid-September has also halted at around the $1.17 trillion mark, oscillating without a strong short-term trend as BTC also exhibited range-bound price action.
Source: CoinMarketCap Yet, the altcoin season index remained at 62, showing altcoin performance against Bitcoin has been relatively strong. There is one sector within alts that could be worth paying close attention to.
The memecoin market opportunity Source: CoinMarketCap At the time of writing, the combined memecoin market cap was at $32.09 billion. It has recovered from the $22 billion lows the sector reached in July, but was a long way away from the December 2024 highs of around $120 billion to $137 billion.
Therefore, a Bitcoin recovery and enthusiastic altcoin market sentiment could make the memecoin sector a potential top performer in the coming weeks.
The rewards could be very high. Lead crypto analyst at Glassnode, Antifragile, noted,
This is probably the most asymmetric opportunity in memes we’ve seen in years. Catching a 2x when the conditions are right could be key
The argument put forth was that memecoins barely moved while tech coins such as Layer 2, DeFi, and AI tokens have exploded in value. Capital rotation logic concluded that memes, too, will have their moment of glory.
The high-risk, high-reward bet Source: CryptoQuant Crypto analyst Darkfost agreed with AntiFragile’s findings. The memecoin dominance in altcoin markets, measured as a market cap ratio, was at 0.027, the lowest level yet.
The asymmetry between altcoin performance and memecoins meant a trend reversal trade for investors could be highly profitable. Yet, as always with memecoins, it is a high-risk trade that requires a sudden sentiment shift following a massive price move from any or all of the leading memes.
A few days when leaders such as Dogecoin [DOGE] or Shiba Inu [SHIB] post double-digit percentage gains could be all it takes to catalyze a tremendous shift in attention and capital towards the memecoin sector.
Final Summary The memecoin dominance in altcoin markets was just under 3%, the lowest level it has ever reached. Bullish BTC and altcoin sentiment meant that investors can look at memecoins as a potential high-risk, high-reward opportunity.
BNB Chain is a popular environment for token launches because it supports EVM-compatible smart contracts and a broad set of wallets, decentralized exchanges, and launch tools. A beginner does not need to write every line of Solidity code to create a token, but they should understand the choices that shape the launch.
The key is to begin with structure, not only a token name. A clear concept, visible token settings, and an understandable launch process make it easier for creators and users to follow what is happening.
MemeToro is an open-source AI memecoin launchpad in development for BNB Chain that is designed to research public trends, prepare documented token proposals, and connect launches to planned smart-contract rules.
Let’s explore more.
What Do You Need Before Creating a Memecoin on BNB Chain? Before creating a memecoin on BNB Chain, a creator needs a wallet, some BNB for network fees, a token concept, and a clear plan for supply and launch terms. The technical work can be done through a no-code launchpad or by deploying a custom smart contract.
The first choice is which type of launch to use. A no-code platform may simplify token deployment and early liquidity. A custom contract can give a creator more control, but it requires stronger technical knowledge and careful testing.
A basic launch checklist looks like this:
Item Why it is needed BNB Chain wallet Connects to launch tools and signs transactions BNB balance Pays gas fees for on-chain actions Token name and ticker Gives the token a public identity Total supply Defines how many tokens will exist Launch model Explains whether pricing is fixed or changes with demand Public description Tells users what the token represents and how the launch works It is also useful to decide where users will find the token after launch. Some launchpads connect successful tokens to public liquidity pools, while other systems require the creator to set up liquidity separately.
BNB Chain uses the Ethereum Virtual Machine, often shortened to EVM. This means developers can use familiar Solidity tools, while beginners can use launchpad interfaces that handle more of the technical work.
How Do You Choose a Memecoin Launch Model? A memecoin launch model decides how users enter the token and how the early price is set. The two common approaches are bonding-curve launches and fixed-rate funding rounds.
A bonding curve changes the price as people buy or sell. This model is built around market activity, so the price can move from the moment the launch starts. It can suit creators who want fast, automated price discovery.
A fixed-rate funding round uses the same stated price for everyone during a set period. The creator or platform publishes the supply, price, caps, and timing before users enter. This can make the conditions easier to read because the entry rate does not change during the round.
Creators should compare the models before launching:
Model How pricing works Main question to answer Bonding curve Price changes as demand changes How does the curve move from early buying to liquidity? Fixed-rate round One published price during a funding window What are the supply, cap, deadline, and completion rules? Direct liquidity launch Creator adds liquidity to a trading pool Who controls the supply and initial pool settings? How Does an AI-Guided Launch Process Work? An AI-guided launch process adds research and proposal building before a token is deployed. Instead of starting with a random name, the system can review public information and help create a more documented token concept.
MemeToro’s open-source AI agent is designed for this earlier stage. MemeToro’s AI agent is intended to analyze public news, social discussion, market signals, and online culture, then prepare a BNB Chain memecoin proposal with the reasoning and terms visible to users.
The planned MemeToro workflow has four stages:
Propose: The AI agent identifies a developing narrative and prepares a token idea. Verify: Users review a launch manifest with the concept, supply, price, caps, and timing. Fund: Participants join a proposed fixed-rate funding round. Launch: The planned FairLaunchEscrow framework applies the published funding and finalization conditions. What Terms Should a Creator Publish Before Launch? A creator should publish the main token terms before opening a funding round or public launch. These terms help users understand what the token is, how it is being distributed, and what the platform or contract is intended to do next.
The most important terms are usually simple. State the total supply, pricing method, wallet cap, launch timetable, and liquidity plan in one place. If the launch uses a smart contract, explain which steps the contract is expected to manage.
A clear launch page should include:
the token’s name, ticker, and public concept total supply and the stated allocation for the launch whether the entry price is fixed or uses a bonding curve any wallet contribution limits the funding start and end time the plan for claims, refunds, finalization, and public liquidity MemeToro’s planned launch manifest is built around this type of disclosure. The manifest is designed to give creators a structured way to publish a token proposal and give users a single document to inspect before a round starts.
How Can Beginners Follow the Right Launch Steps? Beginners can create a better BNB Chain launch plan by taking the process one stage at a time. First, write the token concept in plain language. Next, choose the supply and pricing model. Then publish the launch terms before opening access to users.
The technical goal is not to make the process look complex. It is to make each decision understandable. A user should be able to see what token is being launched, what the terms are, and what the smart contract is designed to do.
MemeToro’s planned model gives beginners a useful framework to follow: research the narrative, prepare the proposal, publish the details, and use contract rules to apply the terms.
This approach is designed to make BNB Chain memecoin launches easier to organize for creators and easier to review for users.
FAQs Can beginners create a memecoin on BNB Chain? Yes. Beginners can use no-code launchpads to set up a token, although they should still understand the supply, pricing model, launch terms, and liquidity process.
What is a bonding curve? A bonding curve is a pricing system where the token price changes as people buy or sell during the early launch stage.
How does MemeToro help with BNB Chain memecoin launches? MemeToro is building an AI-guided BNB Chain launchpad that is designed to research trends, prepare documented token proposals, publish launch terms, and connect them to planned smart-contract rules.
Canary Capital Group LLC moved its PEPE ETF application forward on October 2, filing a pre-effective amendment to the fund’s Form S-1 registration statement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The amended filing sets out how the Canary PEPE ETF would hold PEPE Coin, the token behind the Pepe the Frog meme, and confirms the shares are expected to list on the Cboe BZX Exchange.
The trust structure in the amended filing The trust’s investment objective is to track the price of PEPE Coin held by the fund, less operating expenses, with its net asset value calculated against the CoinDesk PEPE Benchmark Rate 60m NY Rate, a benchmark maintained by CoinDesk Indices. Canary Capital Group LLC is the sponsor, while BitGo Bank & Trust, N.A. would custody the fund’s PEPE. CSC Delaware Trust Company is the trustee, U.S. Bancorp Fund Services is the transfer agent, and U.S. Bank N.A. would serve as cash custodian. Shares would be issued in baskets of 10,000, and the filing leaves the ticker symbol blank, meaning it has not yet been assigned. The fund is organized as a Delaware statutory trust, and the amendment was signed by Canary chief executive Steven McClurg.
A memecoin fund joins Canary’s altcoin lineup The PEPE application is the latest in a line of Canary filings that stretch beyond bitcoin and ether. The firm previously filed for a Pudgy Penguins (PENGU) ETF and, separately, submitted a final prospectus for a staked TRON (TRX) ETF. The amendment keeps the PEPE fund in a broader push by issuers to package altcoins and memecoins into exchange-traded products after the Securities and Exchange Commission cleared the first batch of leveraged bitcoin and ether ETPs.
ETFs are not the only place memecoins are finding use. PEPE is accepted for deposits at a small number of online crypto casinos, and BlockchainReporter’s crypto casino lists by coin show which platforms support which tokens, including a dedicated PEPE list.
PEPE volatility and the road to approval The filing carries a blunt risk warning: the shares are speculative securities and an investment in the trust involves significant risk. Because the trust is not registered under the Investment Company Act of 1940, investors would not receive the protections that act provides. The amendment is a step toward an effective registration, not approval, and the fund cannot sell shares until the SEC declares the registration effective. PEPE’s price can swing sharply, and the fund’s prospectus flags volatility, concentrated ownership and reliance on community sentiment among its risks.
AUTHOR
Tokoni Uti is a Lagos-based writer with several years of experience. Her work has appeared in the Huffington Post, the Los Angeles Free Press and the San Diego Free press among others. She is a graduate of Bowen University.
Canary’s amended S-1 provides new operational details for its proposed spot PEPE ETF. The trust would hold PEPE directly, with BitGo providing custody and Cboe BZX as the proposed exchange. PEPE’s 10 largest wallets held about 41% of circulating supply in January, although several are exchange addresses. The filing advances the product but leaves its ticker, launch timing and eventual investor demand unresolved. Canary Capital is moving ahead with one of the more unusual experiments in the U.S. crypto ETF market: putting PEPE inside a conventional exchange-traded fund.
The asset manager filed Pre-Effective Amendment No. 1 to the Canary PEPE ETF registration statement on Oct. 2, adding operational details to its original April filing. The proposed trust would hold PEPE directly and seek to reflect the token’s market price after expenses.
PEPE was trading near $0.000004272 on Oct. 4, down about 2.33% over seven days. The filing therefore comes without the immediate price surge that often accompanies speculative crypto announcements, putting more attention on the product itself and whether brokerage access can create a new source of demand.
Bloomberg ETF analyst Eric Balchunas viewed the amendment as another indication that issuers are becoming more comfortable testing the boundaries of the crypto ETF market.
Canary just amended their Pepe ETF filing… arguably another sign crypto winter has ended. You just weren’t going to even think about launching a Pepe ETF a few months ago. Feels safer to test market now. https://t.co/7UBxit0m2y
— Eric Balchunas (@EricBalchunas) October 2, 2026
His observation points to how far product development has moved: a memecoin ETF that might previously have looked commercially implausible is receiving enough attention for Canary to continue building out the registration.
Canary Defines the Infrastructure Behind a PEPE ETF The amended prospectus provides a clearer picture of how PEPE would fit inside a traditional fund structure.
Canary intends to hold PEPE directly, rather than use futures or other derivatives to replicate its performance.
Shares are proposed for listing on Cboe BZX, while the fund would calculate its net asset value using the CoinDesk PEPE Benchmark Rate 60m NY Rate, a time-weighted benchmark derived from eligible PEPE trading venues.
The institutional infrastructure is also taking shape. BitGo Bank & Trust is named as crypto custodian, U.S. Bank would custody cash, U.S. Bancorp Fund Services would act as transfer agent and CSC Delaware Trust Company would serve as trustee.
Creation and redemption would occur in 10,000-share baskets, with the prospectus allowing authorized participants to transact using cash or PEPE.
One provision is specific to PEPE’s blockchain infrastructure. Because the token operates on Ethereum, the trust may initially hold up to 5% of its assets in ETH to cover network transaction fees. The ETH would be used operationally rather than as a separate investment position. After that reserve is depleted, the sponsor would pay network fees and seek reimbursement from the trust.
It is a small part of the product, but one that exposes the mechanics involved in placing an ERC-20 token inside an ETF. Investors may interact with ordinary brokerage infrastructure, while movement of the underlying PEPE still requires Ethereum transactions.
PEPE’s Largest Wallets Hold 41% of Supply The filing also provides information that matters beyond the ETF structure itself.
According to Canary, the 10 largest PEPE wallet addresses controlled approximately 41% of circulating supply as of January 2026. That figure initially suggests heavy concentration, but it needs qualification because several of the largest addresses belong to centralized exchanges holding assets for customers.
An exchange omnibus wallet can represent thousands of beneficial owners, making it different from a single whale controlling the same amount of PEPE.
Concentration nevertheless remains relevant. Large movements from major wallets can affect available liquidity, particularly when tokens are transferred onto exchanges.
PEPE also differs from many venture-backed crypto assets because it does not have a conventional vesting schedule creating predictable waves of future token unlocks. Substantially all of its supply is already circulating, shifting attention from future issuance toward ownership distribution and existing holder behavior.
Canary’s prospectus is similarly direct about the token’s underlying demand. PEPE has limited transactional utility, while its market value is closely connected with the Pepe the Frog meme, community engagement and online sentiment.
The ETF can change how investors obtain exposure to those characteristics. It cannot remove them.
The Wrapper Does Not Change PEPE’s Risk Profile That distinction is important when comparing the proposal with established crypto ETFs.
Bitcoin has increasingly entered portfolios through regulated funds, corporate treasury holdings and macro investment strategies. PEPE remains much more dependent on speculative demand, trading liquidity and cultural relevance.
Canary is not proposing an active strategy to offset those risks.
The trust would not sell because PEPE appears expensive, accumulate because the token looks undervalued or hedge its exposure during a downturn. Investors would effectively receive PEPE’s market performance after the fund’s expenses and liabilities.
The prospectus accordingly warns that shareholders could lose all or substantially all of their investment.
For some investors, an ETF could still solve a practical problem. Exposure would become available through a conventional securities account without independently maintaining an Ethereum wallet, safeguarding private keys or trading directly on a crypto exchange.
That is an access improvement, not a change in the economics of the underlying asset.
The SEC Has Not Approved the PEPE ETF The Oct. 2 amendment also needs to be separated from an approval decision.
Canary filed a pre-effective amendment, meaning the registration statement remains part of an ongoing process. The prospectus states that the securities cannot be sold until the registration becomes effective.
Several pieces of the proposed fund are now defined, including custody, pricing and creation-redemption mechanics. Others remain unresolved. Most visibly, the ticker field is still blank, and the filing does not establish a confirmed launch date.
That makes the amendment relevant without turning it into an approval signal.
Canary is spending resources to advance the product and has assembled much of the infrastructure necessary to operate it. Whether the fund ultimately reaches investors depends on what happens next in the registration and listing process.
PEPE ETF Faces a Different Test Than Bitcoin Regulatory progress would still leave Canary with a commercial question.
Bitcoin demonstrated that substantial demand existed for crypto exposure through U.S.-listed ETFs. That result does not mean the same demand exists for every digital asset with a large trading community.
Memecoins are particularly difficult to assess.
PEPE can generate significant spot-market activity while remaining readily available to crypto-native traders through existing exchanges. An ETF therefore has to attract investors who want exposure to the token but prefer, or require, a traditional brokerage structure.
That is a narrower proposition than simply proving that PEPE has an active market.
The current price adds useful context. At roughly $0.00000427, PEPE remains a highly sentiment-sensitive asset, and wrapping it inside an ETF would not create cash flows, alter its token supply or reduce its dependence on market demand.
Canary has now provided much of the plumbing needed to test whether that distinction matters to investors. The next meaningful milestones are more concrete: an effective registration, final ticker and fee, a trading date and, if the fund launches, its initial creations and assets under management.
Those numbers would show whether the expansion of crypto ETFs into memecoins is producing a new investment market or simply a broader menu of products.
Alexander Zdravkov is a crypto journalist and market analyst specializing in digital assets, blockchain technology, and the rapidly evolving cryptocurrency market. He entered the industry more than four years ago, drawn to the speed of innovation in crypto and the potential of blockchain-based financial systems to reshape traditional markets. His work focuses on understanding the forces behind crypto market movements, from Bitcoin and altcoin cycles to institutional adoption, regulation, exchange-traded products, stablecoins, DeFi, and emerging blockchain ecosystems. Rather than simply following price action, Alexander looks at liquidity, investor positioning, market structure, and macroeconomic conditions to identify developing trends and explain what they could mean for digital assets. With a degree in International Relations, he brings a broader perspective to cryptocurrency coverage by connecting developments in the sector with monetary policy, geopolitics, regulation, and global capital flows. This allows him to examine crypto not as an isolated market, but as an increasingly interconnected part of the global financial system. Over the course of more than five years in financial journalism, Alexander has written over 5,000 articles covering cryptocurrencies, blockchain, traditional markets, and the global economy. His reporting spans Bitcoin, Ethereum and altcoins, DeFi protocols, institutional crypto adoption, regulation, market infrastructure, security incidents, and major developments shaping the wider digital asset industry. His approach is centered on giving readers context behind the numbers and headlines, explaining not only what is happening in crypto markets, but why it matters and what could come next.
Two cryptocurrency holders can’t pursue a proposed class action to recover funds lost in the implosions of one memecoin touted for its stability and another briefly endorsed by the president of Argentina, a federal court ruled.
The racketeering and fraud lawsuit against the Meteora trading platform, its co-founder Benjamin Chow, and others over the cratered $M3M3 and $LIBRA cryptocurrencies ended with a judgment docketed Thursday in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York.
The allegations don’t show Meteora is a legal entity subject to suit, Judge Jennifer L. Rochon said in the opinion underlying the judgment. ...
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TLDR Fight Fight Fight LLC has revealed plans for a third exclusive gala dinner scheduled for Nov. 22 at Trump National Golf Club in Washington, D.C. Eligibility extends to the top 185 TRUMP token holders based on a leaderboard tracking wallet balances from Sept. 30 through Nov. 12. The TRUMP token was valued at approximately $2.04 on Oct. 1, representing a 97% decline from its January 2025 all-time high of nearly $74. Research from Nansen indicates holders collectively sustained $3.81 billion in losses by June, while Trump’s financial disclosures reveal $636 million in memecoin-related revenue. Multiple U.S. senators including Warren, Schiff, Blumenthal, and Coons have condemned these gatherings and requested SEC scrutiny of the token. President Donald Trump plans to host his third memecoin investor dinner on Nov. 22. The exclusive event is scheduled at Trump National Golf Club in the nation’s capital.
Fight Fight Fight LLC, the entity behind the Official Trump memecoin (ticker: TRUMP), is organizing the gathering.
Invitations extend to the 185 highest-ranked token holders. A specialized leaderboard determines rankings by evaluating both token quantity and holding duration.
The qualification window spans from Sept. 30 to Nov. 12, the event website indicates. The 29 highest-scoring participants will receive VIP treatment including premium seating arrangements.
Select attendees will receive exclusive merchandise: four top holders will get Trump-branded gold timepieces, while others receive fragrances, digital trading cards, and commemorative posters.
Comparing the November Gala to Previous Gatherings This represents the third such exclusive function since the token’s debut. The inaugural dinner in May 2025 accommodated 220 holders at the identical Washington venue.
A second gathering occurred in April 2026 at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, hosting 297 attendees with appearances by former heavyweight champion Mike Tyson.
Event organizers promise Trump will attend alongside three unidentified celebrity guests characterized as “legends.”
The event webpage explicitly clarifies that individual private audiences with the president will not occur. This addresses criticism from previous dinners where participants reported minimal interaction with Trump.
Token Valuation and Financial Losses TRUMP traded at approximately $2.04 on Oct. 1. This represents roughly a 97% decline from the token’s all-time high near $74, which occurred days after its January 2025 introduction.
Trump Price Following the dinner announcement, the token experienced a brief 10% surge before returning to previous trading levels.
Blockchain analytics firm Nansen released research in July showing aggregate holder losses of $3.81 billion through June’s end. The investigation examined activity across nearly 989,000 digital wallets.
Nansen’s findings revealed that approximately two-thirds of TRUMP purchasers experienced financial losses. Under 500,000 wallets showed profits, predominantly those belonging to initial investors.
Trump’s personal financial disclosure documents indicate $636 million in memecoin-related compensation. These same filings reveal minimum cryptocurrency earnings exceeding $1.4 billion overall.
According to the project’s official website, two Trump-affiliated entities control 80% of total token circulation. This allocation follows a three-year graduated release mechanism.
Public Citizen, a nonprofit accountability organization, calculated in August that Trump family cryptocurrency ventures left investors $4.7 billion in the red since 2022. The organization attributed $3.2 billion of these losses specifically to the memecoin.
Congressional Ethics Concerns and Regulatory Scrutiny Senators Elizabeth Warren, Adam Schiff, and Richard Blumenthal submitted formal correspondence following the April dinner requesting information about guest screening procedures and financial structures. They contended these gatherings present ethical conflicts.
Warren and Blumenthal subsequently petitioned the SEC in August to examine potential fraud or improper insider advantages related to the token. The commission has not publicly disclosed any enforcement proceedings stemming from this request.
Senator Chris Coons characterized the November gathering as “corruption” through social media platform Bluesky earlier this week.
The dinner announcement arrives after the Senate rejected the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act last month. This proposed legislation aimed to establish regulatory frameworks for cryptocurrency oversight.
Democratic lawmakers argued the bill’s ethics provisions inadequately restricted government officials’ cryptocurrency involvement. Every present Democrat opposed the measure during the Sept. 15 vote.
For the upcoming November function, event organizers have prohibited attendance by residents of sanctioned nations, including Russia, Iran, and North Korea. The final leaderboard snapshot determining VIP qualification occurs on Nov. 12, with the dinner proceeding ten days afterward on Nov. 22.
Low Ze Sheng has spent the past two years trading memecoins, chasing the jokes and bursts of attention that can send a token soaring before the crowd moves on.
Usually, he buys them with cryptocurrencies such as Ether or Solana. Robinhood Markets Inc. has thrown a different kind of asset into the mix: Stock Tokens, digital securities designed to track individual stocks and backed 1:1 by the corresponding shares. Because they can circulate on the same open crypto markets as memecoins, traders can pair the two in a liquidity pool and swap one directly for the other.
That means Low, a 27-year-old in Singapore, can swap a token tied to Snap Inc. or Nvidia Corp. for a memecoin — and back again. A familiar company is no longer just something to invest in; it can become part of the meme trade itself.
“It feels like I’m in the Snapchat trade since I need to have it to buy the memecoin in the liquidity pool,” Low said. “And it doesn’t feel like gambling. It’s on Robinhood which is trustable.”
Wall Street has spent years promoting tokenization as new plumbing for traditional finance. Robinhood Chain’s recent burst of speculative trading showed another use case: stock exposure is becoming the raw material for crypto speculation, making some of its riskiest bets feel more like stock investing. Robinhood casts that openness as a way to broaden access to financial markets. It also means outsiders can build new trades around public companies without those companies creating or controlling them.
AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc. Chief Executive Officer Adam Aron hit out against the trend last month. After learning that a token tied to AMC was trading through Robinhood without the theater chain’s involvement, he demanded that Robinhood stop. Robinhood co-founder Vlad Tenev pushed back.
Vlad Tenev — Photographer: Daniel Heuer/Bloomberg
More than five years after the meme-stock boom, retail traders are building another layer of stock speculation on a permissionless blockchain. US regulators are also beginning to make room for tokenized trading. The Securities and Exchange Commission last month granted temporary exemptions allowing certain venues to trade tokenized US stocks onchain under specified conditions. The shift comes as retail trading pushes further beyond the traditional market day: Robinhood said this week it plans to offer weekend trading in US stocks, alongside leveraged perpetual futures on some cryptocurrencies.
Read: Robinhood Debuts Weekend Trading, Perpetual Futures in US
“We tokenize stocks, and the first thing people do with it is meme it,” said Eric Conner, a longtime crypto investor. “I think that’s just a sign of the times and a sign of the future.”
Robinhood says each Stock Token is backed 1:1 by the corresponding shares held by a custodian, and each has a live onchain price feed tied to the underlying stock. But that reference price doesn’t dictate the price inside a decentralized liquidity pool, where trading depends on the tokens available and prices can diverge when liquidity gets stretched.
Under Robinhood’s existing structure, Stock Tokens aren’t shares themselves and don’t give holders voting rights in the underlying companies. A Robinhood representative declined to comment.
Daily trading volume in memecoin-stock-token pairs peaked at around $440 million in early September before falling fast, according to Dune data compiled by X user @adam_tehc. Some of the Stock Tokens that became popular pairings were tied to an exchange-traded fund tracking the S&P 500, Nvidia, SpaceX and Meta. Those tokens — which can also trade independently of the memecoins — reached a combined market value of roughly $69 million at their peak, according to RWA.xyz.
Conner is betting the trend has further to run. He bought a memecoin paired with Hims & Hers Health Inc. when its market value was about $600,000. Within roughly a week, he said, it had climbed to about $80 million.
“That obviously made me a little bit more interested in the whole thing,” Conner said.
The pairing also gave the memecoin’s holders a reason to root for Hims. Conner has since appeared on podcasts associated with the company’s investor community.
“Pretty much everyone holding one of these meme stocks is interested in the underlying stock going up, and I think that’s why the general stock communities will probably embrace this,” he said. “It’s my theory that each major stock will have a meme stock kind of winner and community behind it.”
The Hims trade exposed another ripple effect: the new markets can become detached from the stocks beneath them. During a weekend in late August, one liquidity pool came to hold an outsized share of the tokenized Hims supply as the token rose to more than four times the price of the underlying stock. Hims shares themselves barely moved when US markets reopened Monday.
Mostly, those distortions have stayed onchain. Then there was Farmmi. Shares of the tiny Nasdaq-listed mushroom seller surged as much as 321% on Sept. 2 before falling from their peak. Before the move, traders on Robinhood Chain had piled into a memecoin named after one of Farmmi’s mushrooms. It was paired with an unofficial Farmmi token that had no link to the actual shares. At its peak, the memecoin was valued at roughly 10 times the company itself.
Tanay Ved, an analyst at Talos, said Farmmi showed what can happen when “memecoin retail speculation and virality collide with 24/7 markets onchain.”
Market Plumbing
‘Permissionlessness’ trading is a crucial break with earlier retail manias. Put simply, Robinhood doesn’t have to create the memecoin, and the public company doesn’t have to participate in the market forming around its stock.
“I think it is interesting because it shows that in the on-chain environment, like things you can permissionlessly build,” said Alex Thorn, head of firmwide research at Galaxy Digital. “Who knows what else we might find out with tokenized stocks one day?”
In AMC’s case, even the chief executive’s attempt to stop it became part of the speculation. After Aron took aim at the AMC token, traders rallied around a coin called A Meme Coin, or MEME, paired with tokenized AMC shares. At its peak, MEME was valued at nearly $150 million.
Traders “think it’s more bullish that the CEO doesn’t like it and he can’t stop it, at least not immediately,” said Rahul Patel, a crypto founder and longtime memecoin trader.
While retail fads come and go, blockchain-powered finance may end up changing how day traders perceive risk over the long haul.
“My friend who will not buy memecoins will at least be motivated to try this because it does look like the stock market with the boring part gone,” said Low.
President Donald Trump, seen here arriving at a 2024 dinner for his NFT investors, is holding another dinner for his top memecoin holders. (Danny Nelson/CoinDesk)Summary
President Donald Trump’s memecoin investors will get another chance to have dinner with the leader of the U.S. executive branch, with the token managers marketing another “gala dinner” for November. Though Trump is set to attend the event at his Washington, D.C,-area club, the three “legends” advertised on the website haven’t yet been announced. Similar events have drawn criticism from Democratic lawmakers as brash corruption that grants political connection to those investing the most money. Investors in Donald Trump's memecoin are getting another shot at being in a room with the U.S. president, the third such event following others that drew criticism from Democratic lawmakers as an openly corrupt selling of the White House.
The top 185 registered investors in $TRUMP will be invited through the doors of his Trump National private club in Washington, D.C., on November 22, according to the website that manages $TRUMP events. The VIP status — determined by investor engagement in the token — will be locked on November 12, the organization said.
When the "gala dinner" was announced, the price of the coin popped up about 10% to $2.25 before sinking again near the level it's been at in recent days — still a small fraction of the all-time high of around $74.
The event is being billed as the "most exclusive dinner in the world," and is advertising that three other "legends" will join the president, though none have yet been identified.
One thing is for sure, according to the club: "No attendees will be granted a private meet & greet with the President."
That had been a point of disappointment for some participants in past events: While Trump briefly appeared, they didn't get a chance to meet him.
Since his memecoin's launch in the days before he took office again, investors have lost billions of dollars, and those losses have occupied the spotlight during the recent debates over the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act — the crypto market structure bill in the Senate. With Trump's crypto empire in mind, Democratic lawmakers had insisted that the bill limit the digital asset ties of senior government officials, but that provision could never be worked out, and the bill failed to advance last month.
Trump had said he was willing to concede on some of the requests and potentially place his crypto holdings in a blind trust or divest them, but the deal fell apart when the bill failed.
The first Trump memecoin event was also at Trump's Washington-era golf club, and protesters — including congressional Democrats — gathered outside to accuse the president of corruption as unidentified guests gathered.
In April, Trump held a related conference at Mar-a-Lago in Florida for memecoin holders, at which former champion boxer Mike Tyson appeared.
This time, the top "VIPs" will be given gifts, including a commemorative poster and "TRUMP fragrance." The website's tally of current registrants shows that the top investors seeking invitations each hold hundreds of thousands of coins.
12345678910The Definitive Stablecoin Landscape Series: Asia Pacific
The Definitive Stablecoin Landscape Series: Asia Pacific
As stablecoins move into regulated finance, APAC is becoming a key proving ground. This report maps the region’s rules, use cases, and RLUSD’s role.
Sep 15, 2026
As stablecoins move into regulated finance, APAC is becoming a key proving ground. This report maps the region’s rules, use cases, and RLUSD’s role.
Why it matters:
As stablecoins move into regulated finance, APAC is becoming a key proving ground. This report maps the region’s rules, use cases, and RLUSD’s role.
TRUMP memecoin’s organizers have launched another holder-access contest.
The top 185 wallets on a time-weighted leaderboard will secure seats at a November 22, 2026 gala dinner at Trump National in Washington, D.C. President Donald J. Trump is the listed featured speaker. Scoring opened September 30, locking on a November 12 snapshot.
Third Access Event Follows a Well-Worn Playbook This is the third time the project has tied token holdings to presidential access. The May 2025 dinner invited the top 220 holders to the same Trump National venue.
Non-U.S. wallets overwhelmingly dominated that guest list, with 19 of the top 25 addresses linked to international exchanges, drawing swift congressional criticism over foreign capital exposure.
Fight Fight Fight LLC, the Solana-based firm behind the token, is running the contest. The top 29 holders on the leaderboard also earn a VIP reception with Trump.
The top 4 VIP slots come with an 18K gold Trump watch, provided holders maintain their ranking through the snapshot date.
All attendees receive in-person gifts: a TRUMP fragrance, a commemorative poster, a trading card, and a Fight Fight Fight watch. Nothing ships.
The event page rules out private presidential meetings. Separate registration is required, even for existing Coin Club members. Dropping below snapshot rank forfeits VIP bonuses.
April 2026 brought a larger Mar-a-Lago conference for roughly 297 top holders. Cardone Capital’s Grant Cardone was among the speakers at that event.
Both earlier gatherings triggered short-term volume spikes followed by selling.
The November contest is smaller at 185 seats. It again uses time-weighted scoring, which rewards sustained holding over last-minute buys, the same mechanics as before.
Token Down 97%, Losses Pile Up as Insider Supply Stays Large TRUMP memecoin launched days before the January 2025 inauguration and peaked near $73–$75. It trades around $2.04 on October 1, 2026, roughly 97% below that high.
The drawdown has hit retail hard. Close to a million wallets have recorded combined losses of $3.81 billion, while Trump-linked entities reportedly received around $636 million tied to the token.
Insiders still control roughly 80% of supply. In July 2026, Trump’s team moved approximately $16.9 million in TRUMP tokens to Fireblocks custody as Senate voting on the CLARITY Act neared.
Separately, an unauthorized token using the Trump brand dumped 82% of its supply, a reminder that the Official TRUMP memecoin on Solana is distinct from copycat tokens.
Biden said on Unchained that he designed LAPTOP as a contrast to the TRUMP memecoin and told critics who call it a scam to “look at the blockchain.”
Hunter Biden: LAPTOP has opposite tokenomics of Trump's memecoin
Posted September 30, 2026 at 10:21 pm ET.
Hunter Biden said he built his LAPTOP memecoin with the “opposite tokenomics” of the Trump family’s memecoins “to show that you can do this the right way.” He said insiders get 30% of LAPTOP’s supply, compared with what he described as 80% for the Trump tokens, and that half goes to the community.
“Look at the blockchain. All you have to do to see if it was a scam on my part is look,” Biden said on the Unchained Podcast on Wednesday.
The founder tokens “have never moved and are not going to move,” he added, and “not a single dollar has come out of the foundation into the pockets of any of the insiders.” The only insiders, according to Biden, are himself and two other Americans.
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The Founder Allocation Two Base wallets were each funded with 300 million LAPTOP before launch, according to Base blockchain data reviewed by Unchained.
That matches two allocations in the project’s disclosures: the founders’ share and a predictions pool whose tokens are burned when certain real-world predictions come true. Unchained could not confirm which wallet holds which allocation or who controls them. One has not moved any tokens.
The other has sent 17.5 million tokens, or 1.75% of supply, to a burn address. Founder tokens are locked for six months after launch and then vest monthly over 24 months, according to the disclosures.
The Launch-Day Spike LAPTOP fell more than 99% from its Sept. 9 launch-day peak on Base, as Unchained reported. The token traded near $0.079 on Wednesday, above its planned $0.05 launch price.
Biden said one of the token’s three market makers, which he could not name because of confidentiality, but which are named in the website’s disclosures as G20, GSR and Wintermute, made “a major error” by seeding the launch pool with about 29,000 tokens instead of 5 million. In his account, the token jumped from a $50 million fully diluted valuation to a $317 billion market cap within a minute. He called that figure “pure fiction” and said the firm has since admitted the mistake internally.
Biden took responsibility for the launch “regardless of whether it was a market maker’s fault or not.” What he should have done, he said, is explain LAPTOP more before launch, so skeptics would know it did not begin with someone asking him, “Hey, can we slap your name on something and see what happens?”
Instead, by his account, he spent “an enormous amount of time” trying to “learn the community, but also learn the technology.”
Related Listen: The Chopping Block: FOMO’s Co-Founder Defends the Memecoin Trenches, Hunter Biden’s $LAPTOP, and AMC vs Robinhood
AI-assisted content: This article was produced with the assistance of AI tools and was reviewed, edited, and fact-checked by a member of the Unchained editorial team before publication.
A memecoin called Super Inu ($SI) has turned Donald Trump’s decision to rename artificial intelligence into an unexpected crypto market catalyst. $SI, a memecoin paired with tokenized Nvidia stock ($NVDAx) and launched on StonkFun, hit an all-time-high market cap of $60.9 million after Trump pushed “Super Intelligence” as the new name for AI.
The token has since pulled back from that peak but still trades just above $45 million at press time, according to JTX data, representing a roughly 130% increase over 24 hours.
Trump’s Polls & Executive Order Set the Narrative in Motion The connection started on September 19, when President Trump posted a poll on Truth Social asking followers to choose a new name for artificial intelligence, arguing that the term did not accurately describe the technology.
A subsequent poll then asked users to choose between ‘Super Intelligence’ and ‘Superior Intelligence’
That sequence gave the phrase “Super Intelligence” a growing public profile before Trump formally adopted it on September 22, telling the United Nations General Assembly that “from this point forward, all of United States documents, and hopefully the world’s, will be changed to use the much more accurate term ‘super’ as opposed to ‘artificial.’”
Yesterday, September 29, he signed an executive order titled “Inaugurating The Era Of Super Intelligence.” The order directs executive departments and agencies to use “Super Intelligence” and “SI” instead of “Artificial Intelligence” and “AI” in official correspondence, public communications, websites, reports, and other non-statutory documents, where legally permitted.
$SI Briefly Takes the StonkFun Lead The attention pushed Super Inu past $ZCAT temporarily, making $SI the largest memecoin in the StonkFun ecosystem by market capitalization.
The token also sits within StonkFun's reward system, where token holders can receive rewards in the asset their coin trades against. More than $1.6 million in $NVDAx has now gone out to $SI holders as rewards.
StonkFun itself reports more than $85.7 million in cumulative rewards, with over 40.2 million holder payments distributed across 43,632 tokens and more than 2.73 million wallets since launch.
Artificial Inu Bleeds as “Super Intelligence” Takes Over The “Super Intelligence” rebrand and surge of the $SI memecoin have created an ironic reversal for Artificial Inu ($AI), a leading memecoin in the Robinhood ecosystem.
Artificial Inu previously climbed to an all-time high of roughly $387 million in market cap on September 17. It has since fallen below $200 million, with DexScreener data putting its market cap at about $187 million at press time.
As Trump moved from polling alternative names to formally directing federal agencies to “not acknowledge the usage of “Artificial Intelligence” and “AI” in any applicable setting,” the narrative around $AI weakened. The result has been a sharp market repricing, although the move also highlights the volatility that can accompany memecoins whose valuations depend heavily on rapidly changing narratives.
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California Governor Gavin Newsom has approved a package of ethics and consumer protection measures that includes a first-of-its-kind state ban on public officials issuing memecoins.
The announcement from his office on September 27, 2026, was framed in blunt political terms as “THE OPPOSITE OF TRUMP,” pairing the new restrictions with criticism of President Donald Trump’s own 2025 memecoin launch.The centerpiece is Assembly Bill 2409, authored by Assemblymember Avelino Valencia.
It bars California public officers and certain public employees from issuing a memecoin.
The statute defines a memecoin as a digital asset marketed mainly around internet jokes, celebrities, fictional characters, current events, or social trends, with value driven more by hype and community speculation than by a working product or business.
The same law stops digital asset platforms from listing, for California residents, newly issued memecoins offered by or in partnership with federal, state, or local officials.
That listing restriction applies to tokens created on or after January 1, 2027.
Newsom presented the measure as a safeguard against officials cashing in on public office.
In remarks released with the signing, he said no official should profit from their position and that California was putting stronger protections in place.
His office contrasted that stance with Trump’s token, citing reports that nearly one million buyers lost more than $3 billion while the president realized hundreds of millions of dollars in related gains.
The governor’s statement also described the Trump administration as marked by self-dealing.AB 2409 does not outlaw memecoins in general.
Tokens such as Dogecoin remain legal.
The target is issuance and promotion tied to public officials. Enforcement is civil rather than criminal.
The attorney general, district attorneys, city attorneys, and county counsel may sue.
Courts can issue injunctions and order disgorgement of profits.
The memecoin bill was one of several signed the same day.
Senate Bill 1208 expands money-laundering laws to cover digital assets and gives law enforcement clearer authority to freeze, seize, and forfeit crypto linked to crime.
Other measures address ticket refunds and speculative resale, unauthorized resale of restaurant and golf reservations, privacy settings on operating systems and apps, lobbyist ethics, and related consumer and government-accountability rules.
Legislators had already approved AB 2409 without recorded opposition in the final floor votes.
Supporters argued that official-linked tokens create conflicts of interest, pay-to-play risks, and openings for outside influence.
Critics of the political framing may see the announcement as a partisan swipe more than a narrow ethics reform.
Either way, California is now the first state with a statutory ban of this kind, and platforms serving its large market will have until early 2027 to decide how they handle new official-linked tokens.
The law adds another layer to an already fragmented US approach to digital assets.
It does not resolve whether existing tokens such as $TRUMP fall under the new listing rules, and it leaves nationwide policy to Congress and federal regulators. What it does establish is a clear state line: California public officials may not launch memecoins, and platforms face limits on selling certain official-tied tokens to residents after the 2027 cutoff.
Despite spectacular increases in several launched tokens, the memecoin market falls to around 35.4 billion dollars. These performances usually rely on low liquidity, while the sector’s main assets remain stable or decline.
In brief The memecoin market falls to about 35.4 billion dollars, despite several spectacular increases. PUMP stands out thanks to revenues and token buybacks carried out by Pump.fun. The surges of some new tokens rely on very low liquidity and remain very fragile. The major memecoins have not yet participated in a generalized sector recovery. The market remains dominated by short, speculative moves heavily concentrated on a few networks. The memecoin market loses nearly 4% in 24 hours The market capitalization of memecoins just reached nearly 35.4 billion dollars on September 29, down 3.7% in one day. Such a correction confirms an already visible trend. An earlier market analysis had thus shown a capitalization of 35.2 billion dollars and a 24-hour decline of 4.2%.
Thus, the trading volume stands at around 4 billion dollars, according to the data provided by CoinGecko. The sector is therefore not pursuing a collective increase. Capital moves quickly between certain projects and several networks.
The main fluctuations illustrate this fragmentation :
Baby Cali jumped by nearly 11,400%, before losing 17% in one hour ; Shareholder Cat gained about 7,300%, then dropped 37% in one hour ; PUMP rose nearly 12% thanks to the activity of Pump.fun ; DOG, SPX6900, and NPC lost between 11% and 14% over 24 hours. The three largest increases concern tokens that are a few hours or days old. Indeed, their valuation remains between less than 1 million and 9 million dollars. These movements do not necessarily reflect the situation of the major memecoins.
PUMP benefits from revenues and buybacks by Pump.fun PUMP stands out from all the other increases because of an identifiable catalyst. The native token of Pump.fun had benefited from a capitalization close to 2.4 billion dollars after its rise. Thus, the platform used part of its revenues for buybacks of its tokens on the market.
Currently, DefiLlama records 1.71 million dollars in fees in one day, including nearly 920,000 dollars of revenues kept by the protocol. About 625,000 dollars have been allocated to holders through buybacks performed by PUMP. These figures are continuously increasing and thus differ from the previous report of 2.11 million dollars.
Over about thirty days, Pump.fun has generated more than 46 million dollars in fees and 34 million in revenues. Token buybacks approached nearly 25 million dollars over the same period. This programmed demand provides support that most memecoins do not have.
Nevertheless, PUMP experienced a reversal during the session. Its initial lead therefore does not guarantee a sustainable evolution. Buybacks can support the price, but they do not neutralize profit-taking or the general market slowdown.
Extreme increases hide a liquidity problem The actual liquidity available must be compared to the percentages displayed by new tokens. Baby Cali and Shareholder Cat had only 289,000 to 576,000 dollars in liquidity, despite valuations estimated at several million dollars.
A high capitalization does not mean that all holders would sell their tokens at the last displayed price. When the order book remains shallow, a few purchases suffice to make the price explode. Thus, subsequent sales can trigger a correction just as rapid.
The token JACK presents a more severe example. Indeed, it lost 86% in six hours after recording a volume of 12.8 million dollars, while its liquidity did not exceed 54,000 dollars. A large position would therefore have been difficult to liquidate without a strong accentuation of the drop.
During this September, a published study analyzed the 15 million tokens launched on Pump.fun in two years. The researchers identify five manipulation practices, including “wash trading”, coordinated sales, token copies, and artificial promotion on social networks.
The sector is still waiting for a genuine widespread increase The major memecoins are not yet fully participating in the movement. PENGU, BONK, and WIF have dropped between 2% and 6% after recording gains earlier in the week. PENGU notably jumped nearly 38% thanks to the attention surrounding the Korea Blockchain Week.
Most of the increases now focus on Solana and the Robinhood blockchain. Tokens from the latter accounted for more than a third of the 30 best performers. This concentration reveals that investors follow timely narratives rather than a sustainable sector-wide movement.
The return of bitcoin above 85,000 dollars would improve risk appetite. However, a true memecoin recovery might require broader growth, lasting liquidity, and participation by the main tokens. For now, the market mostly rewards short-term catalysts and exposes late buyers to abrupt reversals.
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Luc Jose A.
Diplômé de Sciences Po Toulouse et titulaire d'une certification consultant blockchain délivrée par Alyra, j'ai rejoint l'aventure Cointribune en 2019. Convaincu du potentiel de la blockchain pour transformer de nombreux secteurs de l'économie, j'ai pris l'engagement de sensibiliser et d'informer le grand public sur cet écosystème en constante évolution. Mon objectif est de permettre à chacun de mieux comprendre la blockchain et de saisir les opportunités qu'elle offre. Je m'efforce chaque jour de fournir une analyse objective de l'actualité, de décrypter les tendances du marché, de relayer les dernières innovations technologiques et de mettre en perspective les enjeux économiques et sociétaux de cette révolution en marche.
DISCLAIMER
The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in this article belong solely to the author, and should not be taken as investment advice. Do your own research before taking any investment decisions.
California Governor Gavin Newsom signed legislation on September 27 that bars the state’s public officials from issuing meme coins, while handing California authorities new powers to pursue crypto-linked crime. The signing, announced in a governor’s office release, came as Newsom pointed directly at President Donald Trump’s own meme coin, which has left its buyers with billions of dollars in losses. It is part of a broader package of bills the governor cast as an effort to combat corruption by public officials and hold crypto fraudsters accountable.
What the new law bans Assembly Bill 2409, authored by Assemblymember Avelino Valencia, prohibits California public officers and covered public employees from issuing a meme coin, and bars digital asset service providers from listing certain meme coins issued on or after January 1, 2027 that are offered by or in partnership with a covered federal, state, or local official. The measure defines issuance broadly as making a token available for public purchase, donation, or exchange of value, and it reaches elected and appointed officials, state legislators, and members of government boards, commissions, and committees. It cleared the legislature without recorded opposition, passing the Assembly 77-0 and the Senate 40-0 before reaching the governor’s desk.
Civil enforcement, not new crimes The law creates civil remedies rather than a new criminal offense. California’s attorney general, district attorneys, city attorneys, and county counsel can sue for injunctions and disgorgement of any profits a covered official made from a prohibited token. Politician-linked tokens issued before 2027 are not automatically pulled from trading platforms, keeping the restriction focused on future launches. Newsom framed the measure as an ethics guardrail, saying that “No official should profit off their office,” and tied it to concerns about politicians earning money from digital assets.
A wider crypto crime crackdown Newsom signed Senate Bill 1208 alongside AB 2409. The companion measure, by Senator Tim Grayson, extends California’s money-laundering statute to digital-asset transactions and establishes procedures for law enforcement to seek warrants, freeze, and forfeit crypto connected to specified crimes, including a path for victims to recover funds. The governor’s office linked the package to the TRUMP token, whose roughly one million buyers lost more than $3 billion in a collapse that wiped out nearly 988,000 retail holders while insiders extracted billions.
AUTHOR
Jide Idowu is a skilled freelance writer with expertise in blockchain technology, cryptocurrency, and digital finance. Known for his ability to break down complex topics into clear, engaging content, Jide crafts articles, blog posts, and analyses that resonate with both beginners and seasoned professionals. His work spans a wide range of subjects, from emerging crypto trends to in-depth explorations of blockchain innovations. With a keen eye for detail and a passion for educating readers, Jide is a reliable voice in the rapidly evolving world of digital assets.
The meme market is rotating, not rallying: the category's market cap is down about 4% on the day, and the large caps mostly tread water, with PUMP the standout thanks to Pump.fun's fee and buyback data.
The biggest 24-hour gains sit in hours-old, thinly traded tokens such as Baby Cali and Shareholder Cat, which are already reversing.
DOG, SPX and NPC are down 11-14%, so without a broad meme season the market rewards short-lived catalysts and punishes late entries, with BTC reclaiming $85,000 as the level to watch.
HOT Stories
The market for meme coins is divided but active. Established Solana tokens have seen recent gains, but the industry as a whole has weakened and quick trades have reversed in a matter of hours.
According to the most recent September 28 snapshots, the market cap of the meme category was close to $35.2 billion, down 4.2% over the previous day; a different snapshot showed a 1.7% decline in the overall cryptocurrency market. It's not a clear sector-wide breakout.
Biggest Meme Coin Market WinnersThe biggest 24-hour gains in meme coins are coming from the smallest tokens, while the large caps mostly tread water.
On DexScreener's gainers board, the top spots belong to tokens that are hours or days old:
Baby Cali (Solana): up about 11,400% to an $8.9 million market capShareholder Cat (SHCAT) on Robinhood's chain: up roughly 7,300% to $2.6 millionPevlunora (also on Robinhood's chain): up about 2,300% on an $857,000 market capSource: DexscreenerBaby Cali and Shareholder Cat are already off their highs, down 17% and 37% in the last hour. With liquidity of $289,000 to $576,000, those prices are fragile. Robinhood-chain tokens fill more than a third of the top 30, so that is where fresh money is rotating.
Older small caps are the more durable winners. e/acc is up 116% to an $8.3 million market cap, RuneScape Gold has roughly doubled to $7.4 million, Super Inu is up about 75% to $23.8 million, and NEARLY is up about 70% on the NEAR chain.
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Among the large names, PUMP leads: up about 12% at $0.0053 for a $2.44 billion market cap, the biggest token on the board. DefiLlama shows why it has a bid: Pump.fun took in $2.11 million in fees over 24 hours, and $1.24 million of that went to holders through buybacks. MarsCoin (+15%, $149 million) and Cash Cat (+6%, $184 million) are the other notable gainers above $100 million.
The names that led the week are quieter. PENGU jumped about 38% earlier this week on Korea Blockchain Week hype. PENGU, BONK, and WIF are now down between 2% and 6% on the day, so a 100x on thin liquidity is not the same as a winner you can exit.
Biggest Meme Coin Market LosersAmong well-known names, a same-day tracker showed these biggest 24-hour drops:
DOG•GO•TO•THE•MOON (DOG, Bitcoin Runes): down 13.95%SPX6900 (SPX, Ethereum-origin, with bridged versions on other networks): down 11.60%Non-Playable Coin (NPC, launched on Ethereum and also available on Solana, Base and BNB Chain): down 11.35% You Might Also Like
Live trackers may vary as prices change, and these are rolling 24-hour readings rather than September 28 closing prices. PUMP's abrupt intraday reversal should also be noted as a warning. It is a poor example of a move that persisted throughout the day because of the subsequent four-hour decline, even though its early jump was real in the cited report.
The larger trend on the losing side is that while a few well-known names continue to rise this week, a number of coins may fall sharply.
The Meme Market Outlook The meme coin market is rotating, not running. Traders are chasing individual stories, like Pump.fun platform news, event-driven attention around PENGU, and a few liquid Solana leaders, instead of buying the whole sector.
DexScreener's Trending 6H list shows how narrow the action is. The top Solana spots went to tokens only hours old. NEARPAD gained about 1,650% in six hours on a roughly $849,000 market cap.
PENGU/USDT Chart by TradingViewKorean-themed "busan shark" rose about 2,927% to around $1.8M, and ASTEROID was up 5,342% on the day. Robinhood chain pairs take up roughly half of the top 100, with Cash Cat, Artificial Inu, and Pons among the larger names. PUMP sits near a $2.33 billion market cap, up about 12% on the day.
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The other side of the list is just as loud. JACK fell 86% in six hours after trading $12.8M against only $54K of liquidity, and PAID is off 42%. Several pairs show liquidity roughly equal to market cap, which usually means a dust pool that is hard to exit or a straight up honeypot. Breadth is uneven: a few tokens with a clear catalyst are running, and the rest of the list is bleeding.
What's Next? Without a broad meme season, the market rewards short-lived stories with a catalyst and punishes late entries. Watch whether BTC reclaims $85,000, and whether the leaders keep their liquidity once the new launches fade.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) signed a new piece of legislation on Sunday to safeguard consumers and hold “cryptocurrency fraudsters” accountable.
‘For People, Not the Powerful’The new laws prohibit California public officials from issuing meme coins and companies from listing any meme coin that “uses the likeness or image of a public official.” The Governor’s office described the move as the “opposite” of what President Donald Trump did with his Official Trump (CRYPTO: TRUMP) memecoin.
The legislation also targets fraud and money laundering, setting clear rules for compensating victims of cryptocurrency crimes. The laws set a legal process for seizing cryptocurrency assets from “transnational criminal networks.”
“While the scam that is Donald Trump continues to hurt American families, California is fighting to make our economy work for people, not the powerful,” Newsom said. “No official should profit off their office.”
The White House didn’t immediately return Benzinga’s request for comment.
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The TRUMP ControversyNearly 1 million people lost money on the TRUMP memecoin, racking up $3.8 billion in losses through the end of June.
Interestingly, Trump collected $635 million in royalties from the same cryptocurrency last year, according to his latest financial disclosure.
The TRUMP memecoin reached a market capitalization of nearly $15 billion shortly after its launch, before collapsing 97% to $584 million as of this writing.
Negotiations over the CLARITY Act hit a major snag because of Trump’s cryptocurrency dealings.
A revised provision that would have given state attorneys general direct authority to enforce ethics restrictions on federal officials, including Trump, was added, but it failed to win Democratic support. The bill eventually fell short of the 60 votes needed to advance.
Price Action: As of this writing, TRUMP is down 1.20% in the last 24 hours to $2.07, according to Benzinga Pro.
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Disclaimer: This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors.
Photo Courtesy: Sheila Fitzgerald on Shutterstock.com
Market News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs
Key Points AB 2409 was enacted by Governor Gavin Newsom, prohibiting California government officials from launching memecoins. Cryptocurrency exchanges are restricted from listing official-associated memecoins created after January 1, 2027. A companion measure, SB 1208, extends money laundering statutes to encompass digital currencies. The governor referenced President Trump’s cryptocurrency venture and related investor losses when justifying the legislation. Enforcement relies on civil mechanisms, enabling the state attorney general and local prosecutors to pursue legal injunctions. On September 27, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed landmark legislation that prevents government officials from creating memecoins. The measure, designated as AB 2409, becomes operative for digital tokens launched on or after January 1, 2027.
The statute encompasses elected representatives at state and municipal levels. Additionally, it extends to appointed officials, legislative members, and individuals serving on government boards and commissions.
A select category of public employees falls under the legislation’s scope. This segment includes personnel with decision-making power regarding government procurement and contractual agreements.
Scope of the Prohibition The legislation prevents designated officials from launching a memecoin. The term “issuing” refers to making a digital token accessible to the public through purchase, donation, or value exchange mechanisms.
The statute does not prohibit general memecoin transactions. Nor does it mandate that platforms delist existing politically affiliated tokens created before 2027.
Rather, it focuses on forthcoming token listings. Beginning January 1, 2027, cryptocurrency exchanges cannot list newly created memecoins if they’re issued by, or developed in collaboration with, a designated government official.
This requirement affects platforms conducting business with California residents. Initial versions of the legislation centered on tokens featuring an official’s visual representation or name, but legislators modified this provision before final passage.
The measure received unanimous support. The Assembly passed it 77-0 in May, followed by a 40-0 Senate vote in August.
Governor Cites Presidential Crypto Venture Newsom utilized the signing ceremony to address President Donald Trump’s cryptocurrency activities. Trump introduced his memecoin in 2025.
“No official should profit off their office,” Newsom declared in his signing statement.
The governor’s office referenced analyses indicating that approximately one million purchasers of the Trump-associated token experienced collective losses totaling $3 billion. Concurrently, Trump generated hundreds of millions through the token venture.
Federal ethics disclosures reveal Trump documented $635,068,835 in licensing royalties associated with the memecoin enterprise. This amount represents royalty payments rather than current token market valuations.
Independent blockchain analysis examined by crypto.news identified nearly 989,000 digital wallets containing aggregate unrealized losses of $3.81 billion, according to July 2026 data. The White House has maintained that Trump’s commercial activities present no conflict of interest.
Enforcement Mechanisms AB 2409 does not establish criminal penalties. Instead, it provides for civil enforcement actions.
California’s chief legal officer may initiate civil proceedings against offenders. The legislation also empowers district attorneys, city attorneys, and county counsel to pursue comparable legal actions.
Judicial authorities can issue injunctions to halt prohibited activities. They may also mandate that violators surrender profits derived from memecoin operations.
Companion Legislation Addresses Cryptocurrency Crime Newsom simultaneously signed SB 1208 on the same date. This legislation broadens California’s money laundering laws to encompass digital currencies.
The measure authorizes law enforcement to freeze, confiscate, and forfeit cryptocurrency connected to criminal activity. Agencies may submit freeze orders to exchanges, requiring asset retention for 10 days while warrants are secured.
Confiscated digital assets may remain under law enforcement control for up to three years while victims submit restitution claims. Subsequently, remaining assets transfer to California’s Restitution Fund for victim assistance programs. This provision remains active through January 1, 2032.
Both measures formed part of a comprehensive legislative package addressing cryptocurrency-related crime and public ethics standards that Newsom signed this week.
A single coordinated group extracted at least $18.43 million from 53 memecoin launches on Robinhood Chain over roughly two months, according to an on-chain investigation published by pseudonymous analyst Wazz.
How the Operation Worked Most of the tokens were launched through Pons V2, the leading memecoin launchpad on Robinhood Chain. The operation ran from July 10 to September 21, 2026, cycling profits from one launch into the funding wallet for the next. According to Wazz, the $18.43 million figure represents a floor estimate covering only launches that could be directly tied to the group, not a final audited loss total.
The mechanics were consistent across launches. Token creators exploited an anti-sniping tax exemption built into Pons V2, whitelisting between 15 and 25 wallet addresses before executing a single bulk transaction that bought out each token's bonding curve in under a second. The result left the deployer and whitelisted addresses collectively controlling between 82% and 86% of each token's circulating supply. The coordinated purchase would then immediately trigger migration to a decentralised exchange liquidity pool, leaving ordinary buyers holding near-worthless tokens.
The Block independently reviewed on-chain data and confirmed the sniping mechanics across 10 of the listed launches, as well as one funding flow that linked a sweep of 179.88 $ETH from one launch's collection wallet directly to the wallet that funded the next launch, DEED, roughly 40 minutes before it went live.
Wazz linked 45 of the 53 launches by tracing payments between successive funding wallets, with four more tied through shared private keys used to sign batch funding transactions, and another four through a shared collector wallet. The largest individual extractions were CRUMBS ($3.12 million), LEGS ($2.9 million), and PINK ($1.44 million). The DEED token, which initially triggered the investigation, did not rank among the ten largest cash-outs.
Context and Caveats Robinhood Chain launched as an Arbitrum Orbit Layer 2 network on July 1, 2026. While Robinhood Markets designed the chain for financial services and tokenised real-world assets, speculative memecoin activity quickly came to dominate early trading volumes. Pons, which functions similarly to Pump.fun on Solana, became the chain's dominant launchpad within weeks of going live.
The majority of extracted funds remain held as $ETH rather than stablecoins, making them resistant to freezing. No suspects have been publicly identified or prosecuted. Nothing in Wazz's findings alleges that Pons, Robinhood, or any network operator participated in or was aware of the scheme.
Sources:
The Block: Onchain analyst links $18.4 million in Robinhood Chain memecoin extractions to single rug-pull operation
Crypto Times: Analyst Exposes $18.43M Robinhood Chain Memecoin Rug Pull Ring
CoinDesk: A memecoin making app is driving millions in fees on Robinhood's new blockchain
TLDR Blockchain investigator Wazz traced $18.43 million in stolen funds to a single operation spanning 53 memecoin projects on Robinhood Chain. The coordinated fraud unfolded between July 10 and September 21, 2026, with most launches occurring on the Pons V2 platform. Token creators exploited anti-sniping tax exemptions to allow selected wallets to acquire up to 86% of token supplies immediately after launch. The top three extractions included CRUMBS ($3.12M), LEGS ($2.9M), and PINK ($1.44M). The majority of stolen assets remain in Ethereum, making them impossible to freeze, with no suspects publicly identified or prosecuted. A blockchain researcher operating under the pseudonym Wazz has identified a coordinated fraud operation that siphoned at least $18.43 million through 53 memecoin projects deployed on Robinhood Chain. The investigative findings were shared on X this past Sunday, September 27, 2026.
Robinhood Chain functions as an Ethereum layer 2 scaling solution constructed using Arbitrum infrastructure. The network went live on July 1, 2026, following an official launch ceremony in London hosted by Robinhood Markets.
While Robinhood designed the blockchain primarily for financial applications and tokenized real-world assets—including equity tokens representing shares in publicly traded corporations—speculative memecoins quickly dominated the platform’s initial trading activity.
The majority of these tokens debuted via Pons, the dominant launchpad operating on the network. Pons facilitates new token sales through a bonding curve mechanism, an algorithmic pricing model that automatically increases token prices as purchase volume rises.
Exploiting the Anti-Sniping Tax Exemption Pons implements a sniper prevention tax on purchases executed during the initial moments following a token’s deployment. This protective fee begins at 99% and gradually decreases to zero over approximately five seconds.
Token creators possess the ability to exempt up to 32 wallet addresses from this protective mechanism. This functionality was originally intended to allow legitimate development teams to distribute tokens across multiple wallets simultaneously during launch.
According to Wazz’s investigation, creators systematically weaponized this exemption feature to consolidate supply control. Detailed analysis of nine specific launches revealed that creators whitelisted between 15 and 25 addresses, then executed a single bulk transaction that purchased tokens for all exempted wallets simultaneously.
This coordinated purchase completely depleted the bonding curve’s available supply and automatically migrated the token into a public liquidity pool. Following these maneuvers, the creator and whitelisted addresses collectively controlled between 82% and 86% of each token’s entire circulating supply.
Remarkably, all nine opening purchase transactions were routed through an identical unverified smart contract deployed on August 28, 2026. Wazz identified this contract as belonging to a commercial transaction bundling service accessible to numerous independent users.
Establishing Connections Between Launches Wazz employed three distinct methodologies to connect the 53 launches to a single coordinated group. Forty-five projects were linked through direct funding trails, where proceeds from one launch directly financed the deployment wallet for subsequent launches.
Four additional launches shared an identical private key, which cryptographically signed funding transactions across multiple token deployments. The final four launches were connected through a common collection wallet that received proceeds from several different projects.
The investigation also uncovered evidence that the group occasionally deployed decoy launches before revealing their actual intended token. Three separate token series—CRUMBS, PINK, and DEED—each saw multiple launches within roughly 24-hour windows, with only the final iteration in each series representing the legitimate project.
The DEED token initially triggered Wazz’s investigation. Blockchain forensics revealed that funds ultimately used to launch DEED originated from an earlier token called DRAFT, passing through multiple intermediate wallets before reaching the addresses that executed the opening purchases.
According to Wazz, the vast majority of extracted funds remain held in ETH rather than stablecoins or alternative tokens. This strategic choice significantly complicates potential asset recovery efforts, as decentralized assets cannot be frozen like centrally controlled tokens.
The investigator maintains a comprehensive database with tags applied to every implicated wallet address. Two additional suspected serial-launch operations were identified during the investigation but lacked sufficient evidentiary connections to conclusively link them to this primary group.
To date, no individuals have been publicly identified or face criminal charges related to this scheme. The investigation contains no evidence suggesting that either Robinhood or Pons participated in designing or executing these fraudulent operations.
Prospective token buyers can identify several red flags through onchain analysis before committing to purchases. Key warning indicators include tracing deployer wallet funding sources, examining whether snipe-tax exemptions were configured at launch, and analyzing token distribution concentration within the first block after trading commences.
Share postIn BriefMemecoin trading is high-risk and speculative. Learn the real risks — extreme volatility, rug pulls, low liquidity, scams — and the practical steps that make it safer, including self-custody.
Memecoin trading is highly speculative and can involve significant risk. Memecoin prices can rise or fall rapidly, liquidity can disappear, and some tokens may be associated with scams, rug pulls, or malicious smart contracts. In some cases, traders can lose most or all of the money they put into a token.
There is no risk-free way to trade memecoins. You can reduce some avoidable risks by researching tokens and their on-chain activity before buying, using a self-custody wallet to maintain control of your assets, and only using money you can afford to lose.
What Is Memecoin Trading? Memecoins are crypto tokens commonly associated with internet culture, communities, memes, and social attention. Their prices can be heavily influenced by market sentiment, speculation, and online activity.
Memecoin trading involves buying and selling these tokens in an attempt to profit from price movements. Many memecoins are newly launched and can have limited liquidity, concentrated ownership, or little established track record.
Because creating a token is relatively accessible on many blockchains, memecoins can range from community-driven projects to fraudulent or malicious tokens.
What Are the Risks of Memecoin Trading? No form of memecoin trading is risk-free. The main risks are structural, not hidden:
Risk What it means How to reduce it Extreme volatilityPrices can swing 50%+ in hours with no warningTrade only small amounts you can afford to loseRug pulls & scamsCreators drain liquidity or block salesCheck liquidity locks, holders, and contract flags firstLow liquidityYou may not be able to sell at the price you seePrefer tokens with deeper, locked liquidityPlatform riskA custodial service could freeze or lose fundsTrade from a self-custody walletEmotional / FOMO tradingHype pressures rushed decisionsDecide your limits before you buy, not duringIs Memecoin Trading Profitable? There is no reliable or guaranteed way to profit from memecoins. Some traders have made large gains, but many more lose money, and past performance of any token says nothing about the future. Memecoins have no earnings or intrinsic value to fall back on, so prices depend entirely on demand that can vanish quickly. Treat any money put into memecoins as money you are prepared to lose entirely.
How Is Memecoin Trading Different From Investing? Traditional investing often involves evaluating an asset's fundamentals, expected cash flows, utility, or long-term growth prospects. Memecoin trading is generally more speculative, with price movements often driven by market sentiment, community activity, liquidity, and momentum.
That means the time horizon, research process, and risk involved can differ substantially from investing in assets based on established fundamentals.
How Can I Trade Memecoins More Safely? You cannot eliminate the risks of memecoin trading, but you can take steps to understand them before making a transaction:
Research every token on-chain first: liquidity locked, holder distribution, contract flags (mint/freeze/honeypot).
Use a self-custody wallet so no exchange controls your funds.
Only trade with money you can afford to lose completely.
Set your entry and exit limits before you buy, and stick to them.
Ignore "buy now or miss out" pressure — urgency is a manipulation tactic.
Never share your secret recovery phrase; phishing causes more losses than bad trades.
Does Self-Custody Make Memecoin Trading Safer? Self-custody gives you control of your wallet and private keys instead of placing custody of your assets with a centralized platform. This can reduce certain custodial and platform-related risks, such as relying on an exchange to hold or process withdrawals.
However, self-custody does not eliminate market risk, smart-contract risk, token scams, or transaction risk. You are also responsible for protecting your wallet and approving transactions carefully.
Disclaimer: Content is for informational purposes and not investment, financial, or tax advice. Web3 and crypto come with risk. Please do your own research with respect to interacting with any Web3 applications or crypto assets. View our terms of service.
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Hunter Biden’s Laptop (LAPTOP) posted double-digit gains on Thursday, offering some relief to an otherwise struggling cryptocurrency.
LAPTOP Leaves Big Boys BehindLAPTOP jumped nearly 13% over the last 24 hours, comprehensively beating cryptocurrency heavyweights including Bitcoin (CRYPTO: BTC), Ethereum (CRYPTO: ETH) and Dogecoin (CRYPTO: DOGE).
There was no news or obvious bullish catalyst behind the move at the time of writing.
A Harrowing Start for LAPTOPLAPTOP remains under heavy selling pressure and is down more than 99% from its all-time highs.
Launched on Coinbase Global Inc.‘s (NASDAQ: COIN) Base blockchain, the token experienced a rapid price spike followed by a steep decline. On-chain data attributed the collapse to insider distribution rather than normal selling.
Its market capitalization has collapsed from a peak of $50 billion to just $26 million as of this writing.
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Biden’s ExperimentBiden launched the memecoin, invoking the controversy surrounding his personal laptop recovered in 2020. He framed the memecoin as a symbol of resilience, redemption, and recovery.
He refuted claims of a “rug pull” or any involvement in price manipulation, blaming legacy news and “social media trolls” for distorting the narrative.
Interestingly, Biden said that 20% of LAPTOP supply would be airdropped to wallets, including those that lost money on the Official Trump (CRYPTO: TRUMP) memecoin.
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The frog-themed Solana token $FWOG (@itsafwog) is bucking a broad memecoin sell-off, posting a 22% gain in the past 24 hours and a 58% surge over the past week, even as the wider market faces heavy losses.
A Rally Against the Tide The move stands out against a difficult backdrop. Solana's memecoin ecosystem has shed roughly $250 million in market value over the past 24 hours, while the broader memecoin market has lost approximately $2.4 billion during the same period. That kind of divergence is unusual and has drawn attention to FWOG as one of the few tokens posting meaningful gains in the current environment.
The wider memecoin downturn on Solana fits a pattern that has been building for much of 2026. According to a report by 21Shares, The fading of memecoin activity has weighed on the network's revenue, even as Solana's underlying infrastructure has continued to develop.
What Is FWOG? FWOG is a community-driven token whose appeal is rooted in meme culture and its online following.
As with all memecoins, the risks are significant.
Sources:
CoinGecko: Fwog (FWOG) Price and Market Data
21Shares: Solana H1 2026 Earnings Analysis
Bitrue: Fwog (FWOG) - The Solana Meme Coin Reshaping the Crypto Market
Memecoin presales are drawing attention again because buyers are looking for early access before a token reaches public markets. However, not every presale is trying to solve the same problem. Some focus on community campaigns, some on trading tools, and some on launch infrastructure.
MemeToro, AlphaPepe, and ApeMars show three different approaches. MemeToro is building an AI-led fair-launch platform on BNB Chain. AlphaPepe is centered on AlphaSwap, an AI-driven market-analysis product. ApeMars uses a staged Mars-themed presale with token-burn checkpoints.
MemeToro has raised more than $139,000 in Stage 7 at $0.00430 per $MT, while the other projects use different pricing and utility plans. Buyers should compare what is built, what is planned, and what must happen after launch.
How MemeToro Plans to Change Memecoin Launches MemeToro is a planned BNB Chain ecosystem for researching, funding, and trading memecoins. Its main product is an AI-led launchpad designed to study trends and publish a documented proposal before a token can move toward a funding round.
The AI agent is meant to collect market, news, and social evidence. It then prepares a launch manifest that can show the token concept, supply, funding cap, source material, and fixed-rate terms.
MemeToro’s validator is designed to reject weak proposals. It can reject links that were never collected, token allocations that do not equal 100%, any insider allocation above zero, and funding terms that conflict with the manifest.
$MT is intended to support platform access, launch funding, staking, rewards, future memecoin trading, prediction markets, and the project’s news portal. This means MemeToro is not only selling a meme narrative. It is trying to build tools that could create ongoing demand for the token.
The platform is still in development. Its public fair-launch contract is a foundation, while the live executor, liquidity integration, testnet, and independent review are still pending.
AlphaPepe Focuses On AI Trading Analysis AlphaPepe has raised more than $2.67 million from over 11,700 holders, according to the supplied project information. Its token is priced at $0.02990 in Stage 20, with the project targeting a Q1 2027 close.
The core AlphaPepe product is AlphaSwap. It is described as an early-access AI-driven tool for monitoring whale behavior and supply concentration before users trade.
This gives AlphaPepe a trading-analysis angle. Its reported exchange plans include preliminary commitments with four centralized exchanges, plus a decentralized launch pool.
MemeToro takes a different route. Rather than focusing mainly on helping users analyze an existing token before a swap, it is building a system designed to shape the launch rules before the token exists.
That difference matters for buyers who worry about insider supply. MemeToro’s contract design is intended to make a non-zero insider allocation incompatible with the round math, while AlphaPepe’s stated focus is market analysis and trading intelligence.
Both projects use AI as part of their story. Their value will depend on whether users adopt the tools after the presale period.
ApeMars Uses A Staged Presale And Token Burns ApeMars uses a 23-stage weekly presale structure based on a Mars-travel theme. The supplied information lists a current $APRZ price of $0.00054105 and a stated public listing anchor of $0.0055.
The project also uses scheduled burns at Stages 6, 12, 18, and 23 to remove unsold presale tokens. This creates a clear supply-management story and gives buyers visible milestones during the sale.
MemeToro’s story is more focused on launch rules and platform infrastructure. Its Stage 7 price is $0.00430, and its design uses fixed-rate rounds with no planned insider tiers.
The ApeMars listing comparison suggests a potential gain of more than 900%, but that is a promotional scenario that depends on liquidity and retail demand after launch. MemeToro’s displayed $0.05186 target is also a stated scenario, not a guaranteed market result.
Each project gives buyers a different reason to pay attention: trading analysis, staged scarcity, or fair-launch infrastructure.
Why MemeToro Has A Stronger Rules-Based Case MemeToro’s public contract work is its strongest differentiator. The project has released 1,373 lines of Solidity across 17 files, including FairLaunchEscrow.sol.
The escrow is designed to lock round settings, store a manifest fingerprint, and route funds only to contributor refunds or planned liquidity. It has no planned owner, admin role, or upgrade path.
For buyers who want a more transparent launch process, this is a clear bullish point. The project is trying to move fairness from a marketing promise into code that can be inspected.
MemeToro also lists Coinsult, BlockSAFU, and SOLIDProof as named audit or review providers. These reviews do not remove investment risk, but they give users more public information to examine.
A $500 Stage 7 purchase would provide around 116,279 $MT before fees. At the displayed $0.05186 target, that allocation would have a theoretical paper value of roughly $6,028.
The future result depends on whether MemeToro completes its platform and attracts active users. That is the key risk, but it is also the source of the upside.
FAQs Which project has raised the most money? Based on the supplied figures, AlphaPepe has raised more than $2.67 million. MemeToro has raised more than $139,000, while ApeMars uses a separate staged presale model.
What makes MemeToro different? MemeToro is building AI-assisted launch research and a contract-based fair-launch model that is designed to block insider allocation and lock round rules.
Are presale listing targets guaranteed? No. All stated listing or launch targets are project figures. Actual prices depend on market demand, liquidity, supply, and product delivery.
Memecoin traders often face the same problem at launch: they may not know who received tokens first, whether the rules can be changed, or where the launch funds will go. A token can become popular quickly, but unclear allocation rules can create serious risks for early buyers. This is why public smart contract development is becoming more important.
MemeToro is building a planned BNB Chain platform around this idea. The project has also published 1,373 lines of Solidity code across 17 files for a proposed fair-launch escrow system.
The best memecoin to buy is still never guaranteed. However, MemeToro’s public code aims to give traders a clearer way to inspect the rules behind future token launches instead of trusting simple marketing claims.
What MemeToro’s Fair-Launch Code Is Designed to Do MemeToro’s public repository includes a FairLaunchEscrow contract, interfaces, tests, and documentation. The stated purpose is to help lock important token-launch terms at the beginning. This can reduce the chance that a creator changes the key deal after people send funds.
The proposed code is designed around a simple fairness idea. Contributor and liquidity allocations should equal 100% of the fair-launch split. This is intended to leave no space for a hidden developer or insider allocation.
The project’s stated contract protections include:
launch settings locked at creation no insider allocation in the fair-launch split funds routed toward refunds or planned liquidity public functions for claims, refunds, and finalization For new memecoin traders, this may make a launch easier to understand. It cannot stop market volatility or ensure liquidity. The project also needs to complete deployment, testing, and independent security review. Still, open code provides a more transparent starting point than a launch page with no verifiable rules.
Why Testing Is Important Before a Fair Launch Goes Live Smart contracts must handle more than one outcome. A launch may reach its funding goal, fail to reach it, receive a claim request, or need to issue a refund. If the contract cannot handle these situations correctly, users may face losses or delays.
MemeToro’s public release includes tests for funding caps, deadlines, claims, refunds, and bad contract inputs. Tests do not prove that code is perfect, but they show that the project is checking how the escrow model behaves under different conditions.
This is especially important in memecoin markets, where users often make decisions quickly. A fair-launch contract should not depend on a creator being online to fix every issue. The proposed MemeToro design includes public actions so users can access processes such as claims and refunds under the stated conditions.
The best memecoin to buy may have a strong community and a good concept, but traders should also check the technical rules. MemeToro’s open-code release gives users more information to review. The next step is proving that the same logic works safely in real BNB Chain conditions.
How $MT Could Support a More Active Trading Ecosystem $MT is planned as the utility token across the MemeToro ecosystem. It is intended to support premium access, platform transactions, launch funding, staking, rewards, and future memecoin trading features. The project also lists prediction markets and a news hub in its roadmap.
The AI agent is intended to help creators prepare launch settings. The fair-launch contract is then designed to enforce the key terms. Traders could use the platform to review a launch, follow emerging tokens, and eventually trade them through the wider ecosystem.
This creates a possible utility loop:
AI tools help prepare a launch smart contracts make the rules visible traders discover and follow new tokens $MT supports platform participation The platform is still under development, so this loop is not active today. The bullish case depends on whether MemeToro can make the tools easy to use and bring enough creators and traders into the ecosystem. The risk is that open code alone may not be enough to create adoption.
Tokenomics and Staking Add Further $MT Considerations MemeToro has a 1.2 billion $MT total supply. The public-sale allocation is 857,936,900 tokens.
Other allocations include 120 million for CEX reserves, 96 million for marketing and partners, 60 million for MemeToro trading, 53.28 million for network rewards, and 12.7831 million for the core team.
The project states that public-sale tokens have no vesting and are intended to be claimable at launch. Marketing and partner allocations have a 24-month vesting schedule. This may reduce sudden selling pressure from that part of the supply, although it does not guarantee price stability.
MemeToro also advertises staking rewards of up to 35% APR. These rewards may encourage participation, but they are not guaranteed income and can change. Buyers should read the tokenomics carefully and use the official MemeToro purchase guide before joining Stage 7.
In crypto, a roadmap can describe what a project wants to build. Public code shows what developers have started to build already. That distinction is especially important for a memecoin launchpad, where users need to know how funding, token supply, refunds, and liquidity are meant to work.
MemeToro has released 1,373 lines of Solidity code across 17 files in its latest update. The project is building an AI-led fair-launch platform on BNB Chain and has raised more than $139,000 in its $0.00430 Stage 7 presale.
The open-source update gives buyers and developers a clearer view of the proposed system, including its smart-contract rules and the work still required before mainnet deployment.
About MemeToro and its new AI agent on BNB chain MemeToro is a planned BNB Chain ecosystem for discovering, funding, and trading memecoins. Its main goal is to use an AI agent to research trends and propose launches with documented reasons instead of relying on unverified hype.
The agent is designed to collect social, market, and news evidence. It then prepares a launch manifest that users can read before deciding whether to support a round.
The launch manifest is meant to show the proposed token structure, price, funding cap, and data sources. It gives buyers more information than a standard token announcement.
MemeToro’s validators are designed to reject proposals that fail basic rules. They can reject unsupported URLs, allocation totals that do not equal 100%, insider allocation above zero, and funding terms that conflict with the proposal.
$MT is the planned ecosystem token. It is intended to support access, funding, staking, rewards, memecoin trading, prediction markets, and a news portal.
The project is therefore building both an AI proposal layer and a contract layer. The agent suggests a launch, while smart contracts are meant to enforce the accepted rules.
What a $500 $MT position could look like At the current $0.00430 Stage 7 rate, $500 would provide about 116,279 $MT before fees. MemeToro’s displayed launch target is $0.05186.
If $MT traded at that level, the allocation would have a theoretical paper value near $6,028, or about 12.06 times the original amount.
At a $1 billion fully diluted valuation, each $MT would be worth about $0.8333 based on the stated 1.2 billion supply. The same $500 allocation could then be worth around $96,899.
These figures are illustrative. They do not account for liquidity limits, slippage, transaction fees, taxes, supply changes, or the risk that $MT trades below the purchase price.
The real opportunity depends on whether MemeToro finishes the product and attracts enough users to make its AI-led fair-launch model valuable after the presale.
The 1,373-line release builds the first contract layer The latest update includes 17 files and 1,373 new lines of Solidity code. The main addition is FairLaunchEscrow.sol, a contract designed to hold contributor funds for one memecoin launch round.
The update also introduces ILaunchExecutor.sol. This is the planned plug-in point where future token deployment and liquidity work will connect to the escrow.
A third component, IERC20Minimal.sol, provides the basic token functions needed to support future claim payments. The release also adds documentation, architecture notes, contributor rules, and a full test suite.
The code is built with Foundry, a common Solidity toolkit used for contract development and testing. This allows outside developers to inspect the design and review how the functions are meant to work.
Open-source code does not eliminate risk. It does provide a public trail of development that buyers can compare with the project’s public claims.
The contract design focuses on what cannot happen MemeToro’s fair-launch draft is designed without an owner, admin role, or upgrade path. This is meant to prevent a team from adding new privileges after a round goes live.
The contract locks round settings at creation. It also stores a fingerprint of the public launch manifest, so users can compare the on-chain terms with the plan they saw before contributing.
The design limits contributor funds to two outcomes: refunds or the planned liquidity process. It does not include a stated route for developer or treasury withdrawals.
The allocation logic is designed to prohibit insider supply. Contributors and liquidity must account for the total supply, while any rounding remainder goes to liquidity.
This is a major part of MemeToro’s bullish case. Instead of saying “trust us, there are no insiders,” the project is publishing code intended to make an insider allocation incompatible with the launch math.
The final system still needs independent review and real-world testing. But the initial contract structure gives the community something concrete to examine.
Tests and remaining milestones show a serious development path MemeToro’s test suite checks the important launch states: funding caps, deadlines, thresholds, refunds, claims, and unexpected behavior from connected contracts.
Random-sequence testing is also included. This checks that the contract’s accounting remains balanced across many possible transaction orders and that users cannot claim more than they are owed.
The team added two extra tests to ensure the code reaches funded, launched, claimed, and refunded states. That is a useful detail because a passing test is not enough if it never enters the situation it is meant to verify.
The project still needs to complete the real token executor, manifest-to-contract integration, deployment scripts, factory, BNB Chain testnet launch, ERC-8004 agent identity, and independent security review.
MemeToro lists Coinsult, BlockSAFU, and SOLIDProof as audit or review providers. These give buyers three named firms to check alongside the public code and official project updates.
Visa will end a loophole that allowed certain memecoin purchases by card to generate loyalty points. The network has asked its payment processors to stop using the concerned merchant code starting next week. Purchases will still be possible by card, but without the associated rewards.
In Brief Certain memecoin purchases were classified as digital goods and generated points. Chase reported the anomaly to Visa, while the New York district attorney is examining the case. Card purchases should continue, but without points or cashback. A Merchant Code Allowed Rules to be Bypassed The problem comes from a four-digit merchant code: 5815, normally used for digital books and movies. According to correspondence reviewed by Crypto in America, Visa asked its processors to no longer use it for memecoin purchases.
The investigation published on September 1 by The Block revealed that some dogwifhat (WIF) purchases could be processed as digital goods. The result: transactions triggered rewards programs normally associated with this type of purchase.
The Block notably tested buying WIF via Apple Pay and Google Pay on Fomo and Robinhood Wallet, with a Visa or Mastercard from New York. Crossmint, which provides the infrastructure used for these transactions, was involved in the process.
However, Visa’s rules have other categories for direct cryptocurrency purchases, including codes 6012 and 6051, accompanied by a specific indicator. By using a different classification, the transaction could bypass the usual treatment reserved for crypto.
Chase Reports the Issue to Visa Chase was one of the first banks to notice the anomaly. The bank confirmed to The Block that a transaction was not identified as a crypto purchase and therefore should not have generated rewards.
Crossmint defended its approach. The company considers some concerned tokens as collectibles, notably relying on a SEC staff statement from 2025 concerning certain memecoins.
” Every product we support goes through a detailed review with the relevant partners, including transaction categorization ,” a spokesperson assured.
The tightening follows three days after the CLARITY Act’s failure in the Senate, which left banks empty-handed on stablecoins. On cards, JPMorgan scores a closer point, according to Crypto in America.
The case also interests New York authorities. The office of Attorney General Letitia James told The Block that it was reviewing the situation.
Memecoins Will Remain Purchasable by Card Visa’s decision does not mean the end of memecoin purchases by credit card. Users will still be able to use this payment method, but transactions must now be properly identified as cryptocurrency-related purchases.
For platforms like Fomo and actors facilitating these payments, the disappearance of points could reduce this experience’s appeal to new users.
Crossmint said in April it had registered 68,000 first-time buyers thanks to its Apple Pay button, while Fomo raised $75 million in June for a valuation of $550 million.
For now, Visa is the only network to have announced a precise measure on this loophole. Mastercard has not announced a similar change. The case’s continuation will depend notably on the review conducted in New York.
Ultimately, credit cards will continue to serve as a gateway to memecoins. What disappears is mainly the possibility of turning a speculative purchase into a few extra loyalty points.
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Fenelon L.
Passionné par le Bitcoin, j'aime explorer les méandres de la blockchain et des cryptos et je partage mes découvertes avec la communauté. Mon rêve est de vivre dans un monde où la vie privée et la liberté financière sont garanties pour tous, et je crois fermement que Bitcoin est l'outil qui peut rendre cela possible.
DISCLAIMER
The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in this article belong solely to the author, and should not be taken as investment advice. Do your own research before taking any investment decisions.
19 September 2026 | 21:19 Some memecoin buyers could lose credit-card points after Visa reportedly challenged how Crossmint-powered purchases were classified, according to Crypto in America.
The report concerns a checkout offered through Robinhood Wallet and Fomo. It does not establish a change affecting every card-funded memecoin purchase.
Key Takeaways Visa reportedly rejected digital-media coding for memecoins. Tested memecoin purchases earned ordinary card rewards. Crypto coding may end rewards or trigger fees. Securities law does not control card treatment. Mastercard has not disclosed an equivalent move. How a memecoin purchase earned ordinary card rewards An investigation published by The Block on September 1 tested purchases of the WIF memecoin through Robinhood Wallet and Fomo. Crossmint powered the checkout, while the buyers paid with Visa and Mastercard credit cards through Apple Pay or Google Pay.
The transactions were assigned merchant category code 5815, which is normally used for electronically delivered content such as books, films, music and digital artwork. The tested cards treated the payments as ordinary purchases and awarded their usual points or cash back.
Chase reviewed one of the transactions and said it believed the digital-media category was inappropriate. The bank also said the purchase should not have earned rewards and opened a case with Visa.
On September 19, Crypto in America reported that Visa had told at least one industry participant that MCC 5815 should not be used for memecoin purchases. Payment processors, including Checkout.com, were reportedly given time to end the practice.
The reported grace period is expected to expire during the week beginning September 21, although no exact date was disclosed. Visa has not announced the instruction publicly, and the report does not establish whether it applies globally or only in particular markets. The Block’s earlier test purchases were conducted in New York.
The same checkout can receive different treatment
How the test purchases arrived Code: MCC 5815
Category: Digital goods and media
Observed result: The tested cards awarded normal purchase rewards
How Visa’s manual treats crypto purchases Code: MCC 6012 or 6051, depending on the seller
Category: Cryptocurrency or another cash-like asset
Issuer-dependent result: Rewards, fees and approval policies may change
Why the SEC and Visa can classify the same token differently Crossmint separates approved memecoins from conventional cryptocurrencies in its checkout documentation. It describes eligible memecoins as collectibles connected to internet memes, characters, current events or trends.
The company says each token is reviewed individually and that the checkout supports only secondary memecoin sales. It excludes stablecoins, assets such as ETH and SOL, investment-style tokens and assets intended to function as money.
That distinction resembles the SEC’s treatment of some memecoins. A 2026 SEC interpretation describes certain memecoins as digital collectibles whose value is driven primarily by supply and demand rather than buyers’ reliance on the essential managerial efforts of others. The document identifies dogwifhat, or WIF, as one example.
The SEC is answering a securities-law question: whether the token has the economic characteristics of a security. Visa is answering a payment question: what the cardholder purchased and how the payment must be identified inside its network.
Visa’s official Merchant Data Standards Manual states that cryptocurrency purchases must use MCC 6012 or 6051 and include additional indicators identifying the transaction as crypto. MCC 6012 applies to certain financial institutions, while MCC 6051 covers cryptocurrency sales by non-financial institutions.
The manual does allow some NFT purchases made directly in fiat to avoid the crypto transaction indicator. However, that exception does not automatically extend to every asset another regulator describes as a collectible.
Visa’s reported position therefore treats the direct acquisition of a fungible memecoin as a cryptocurrency purchase, even if Crossmint allows it through a collectible checkout. This separation forms part of a wider US framework: the SEC addresses securities status, the CFTC is pursuing its own market rules after the CLARITY Act failed to advance, and Visa applies private payment-network standards. One decision does not automatically determine the others.
What crypto coding could change for cardholders Merchant category codes are generally invisible during checkout, but they tell card networks and issuing banks what type of transaction is taking place. The merchant and its payment partners submit the data through Visa’s network, while the card issuer applies its own rewards, fee and approval policies.
Rewards may disappear Chase’s Freedom Unlimited rewards agreement says cryptocurrency and similar cash-like transactions do not earn points. That rule explains why the test purchase received rewards under the digital-media code but may not receive them after being identified as crypto.
Other issuers can use different terms. Processing the purchase under Visa’s crypto requirements would not make every card respond identically, but it would give banks the information needed to enforce their existing rules.
Approval and fees will depend on the issuer Some banks allow card-funded crypto purchases, while others restrict them or permit them only under particular conditions. An issuer may approve the transaction without rewards, apply its cash-like transaction policy or decline the purchase.
The available reporting does not establish that every affected purchase will carry an additional fee. Cardholders would need to check their own agreement to see how the issuer treats MCC 6012, MCC 6051 or transactions described as cryptocurrency, cash-like or quasi-cash.
Apple Pay does not determine the category Apple Pay and Google Pay provide a tokenized card-payment interface, but they do not decide how the underlying purchase is classified. The checkout can look unchanged on the phone while the transaction reaching the bank contains different merchant and crypto indicators.
Using a mobile wallet therefore does not guarantee ordinary purchase rewards or avoid an issuer’s restrictions on cryptocurrency transactions.
Crossmint maintains that its procedures have not changed Crossmint has defended its classification of approved memecoins, saying supported assets undergo individual review. The company has also said that relevant partners and payment providers are involved in determining how transactions are categorized.
After the September 19 report, a Crossmint spokesperson told The Block that the company remained in good standing with Visa, Mastercard and its other card-network partners. The spokesperson said its procedures had not changed and would be updated if the applicable guidance changed.
Crossmint’s checkout remained available on Robinhood Wallet and Fomo when The Block checked on September 19. Mastercard has not disclosed whether it has issued an instruction similar to the one reportedly provided by Visa.
The payment route has attracted new users, although the available adoption figures come from the companies involved. Crossmint said more than 68,000 first-time crypto buyers had used its Apple Pay checkout through Fomo as of April. It also attributed a sevenfold increase in Fomo’s weekly active traders to the integration.
Fomo separately told The Block that Crossmint represented approximately 7% of its user inflows. That limits the immediate reach of the reported Visa move: one route into memecoin trading may become less attractive, but buyers still have other funding methods.
What cardholders can check before buying Search the rewards agreement for “cryptocurrency,†“cash-like†or “quasi-cash.†Check whether the issuer permits credit-card crypto purchases. Ask how MCC 6012 or MCC 6051 is treated. Review any displayed fee before confirming the payment. Do not assume Apple Pay changes the transaction category. A coding change will test how much the easy checkout mattered The Crossmint integration removed several steps normally associated with buying crypto. Customers did not first need to purchase a stablecoin, transfer it into a wallet and complete a separate exchange transaction. Receiving ordinary credit-card rewards added another benefit, even if the points did not reduce the price charged at checkout.
Processing these purchases under Visa’s crypto requirements would not prohibit them, but it could remove the rewards advantage and expose more transactions to issuer-specific restrictions. Activity after the coding change may show how sensitive demand is to payment friction, although it will not isolate the effect of lost rewards from possible fees, declined payments or changes to the checkout itself.
If activity falls after the coding correction, that would not necessarily show declining interest in memecoins. It could instead reveal how much demand depended on a checkout that behaved like an ordinary retail purchase. A token may fall outside securities law and still be processed as crypto, with the category and transaction indicators sent to the issuer influencing whether rewards apply, fees are possible or the payment is approved.
This article is provided for informational purposes only. Credit-card rewards, fees, transaction approvals and crypto-purchase rules vary by issuer and may change.
Author
Kosta has reported on cryptocurrency markets and blockchain infrastructure since 2020, bringing over six years of hands-on experience in the crypto industry built through daily tracking of markets, trends, and emerging blockchain developments. Specializing in Bitcoin on-chain analysis, institutional ETF flows, and digital asset price action, his work at Coindoo has been cited by other news agencies and consistently covers market developments with a focus on data-driven reporting across Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, and XRP. Over the years, Kosta has contributed to multiple crypto media outlets in different regions, authoring over 6,000 articles across the sector. His reporting spans cryptocurrency markets and the broader fintech industry, tracking not only price action but also the technological and regulatory forces shaping the ecosystem. To support his analysis, Kosta actively leverages on-chain data and metrics from leading platforms such as Santiment, Glassnode, and CryptoQuant, enabling deeper, evidence-based market insights. He believes in the power of transparency and the data that underpins the blockchain ecosystem. His academic background in Marketing Management from Denmark further complements his analytical approach, adding a strong understanding of communication strategy and content positioning to his work.
Achi (the dog from the famous dogwifhat meme) is seen at the opening bell of the New York Stock Exchange in New York, on January 23, 2025. Dogwifhat (WIF) is a Solana-based dog-themed memecoin that was launched in November 2023. It features a Shiba Inu wearing a knitted hat as its mascot. (Photo by TIMOTHY A. CLARY / AFP) (Photo by TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP via Getty Images)
AFP via Getty Images
Tesoro, a new launchpad on Robinhood Chain that says it will pass tokenized real-world assets back to token holders, puts its TORO token live at 8 p.m. Eastern on Friday, the project said on X, after a three-tier presale it extended by a day. A 3% tax on every trade buys tokenized gold and equities, which go into a vault the project calls a chest. “Now you can launch your own treasure chest,” Matt Wright, a co-founder, said in an interview. “We want to actually drive it into something that gets back to the early community members that are contributing to that platform.” The founding team is two: Wright, a second co-founder who goes by the name Billion. Wright has spent nearly a decade building developer communities, first around JPMorgan’s Quorum, then at ConsenSys, then as co-founder of the AI network Gaia.
“We’re not launching a meme coin launchpad,” Billion said. “You can’t launch just a regular meme coin on our platform.” His reason is the memecoin’s oldest problem. “Every time there’s a dip, especially from Bitcoin, the whole market drags out with it,” he said. Then Robinhood listed tokenized gold and stocks. “We were like, okay, this is really good,” he said. The aim, he said, is “to put the tools out there” so that a user “could actually feel like he is doing something meaningful and it’s not just noise.”
Toro is one example of something larger. The Securities and Exchange Commission let tokenized U.S. stocks trade on blockchain liquidity pools for five years on Thursday, and the conversation since has been about Apple and Nvidia settling on-chain. One clause in the order lets a venue pair a tokenized stock with any crypto asset it chooses, memecoins included. That market already exists. On Robinhood Chain and on Coinbase’s Base, memecoins are trading against tokenized stocks, taxing themselves to buy gold, and spending their fees on lottery tickets.
Memecoins with stocks inside themRobinhood Chain went live on July 1 to carry tokenized stocks. Memecoins took it over instead. Within two weeks CASHCAT, the breakout token, was worth about twelve times every real-world asset on the network combined, and Noxa, the launchpad minting coins at 18,600 a day, took an estimated $12 million in fees and went dark. What came next was stranger. Memecoins started using the stock tokens as their trading pair. A token called Artificial Inu trades against Robinhood’s Nvidia token, and an analysis by DeFiPrime’s Nick Sawinyh on September 1 counted 432 pools pairing memecoins with 19 Robinhood stock tokens, holding about $8.8 million in stock tokens and turning over roughly $95 million a day. When a memecoin called BONER drained the supply of the Hims & Hers token one weekend, he found, it traded as much as 112% above the stock’s last close until Robinhood issued more.
The same thing is happening on Base, where Coinbase’s tokenized stocks launched on August 24. “We’re seeing lots of people pair meme coins with tokenized stocks and that whole thing’s taken off in a big way,” Xen Baynham-Herd, head of marketing and global at Base, said in an interview the morning the SEC order was posted.
The fee is turning into somethingA memecoin’s trading tax has usually been the exit, kept by the launchpad or the deployer, and Noxa’s $12 million is only the latest example. This month the fee started buying things. Lotto Coin, an anonymous-team token on Base, sends every trading fee in USDC to a contract that buys $1 tickets in Megapot, an on-chain daily lottery, each night. Megapot’s public records show the contract held 17,732 of the 21,180 tickets in the September 13 drawing. One of them matched all six numbers. The $213,017.16 prize was paid a minute after the draw to a pool that Megapot said had 417 holders at the time. By my arithmetic on Megapot’s number ranges, that many tickets gave the pool roughly one chance in 80 that night.
“What a day yesterday! We burned over 10% of the token supply at an average price of $2.3m market cap,” the project’s account on X posted on September 14. The token promises nothing else. “Holders receive nothing, earn nothing, and are entitled to nothing,” its website says, and it calls the burn “a mechanism, not a return.” Megapot, which raised $5 million in a round led by Dragonfly in March, said it neither built nor approved the project.
Aerodrome, the largest exchange on Base, pays all of its trading fees to holders who lock its AERO token. Alex Cutler, its co-founder, puts the case for sending fees back to users this way. “The whole promise of this onchain technology is we can distill Interactive Brokers entirely into code and we can redistribute all the value rather than having it extracted to users of these platforms,” he said. Lotto Coin’s version is a bonfire. Tesoro’s version is a treasure chest, and its marketing says so: the X account’s bio reads “Hold $TORO. Dig nothing. Get rewarded in RWAs and Gold.” “We just want to help drive a meme that’s going to help people get equitable utility,” Wright said.
What the order does and does not coverThe SEC’s order describes a narrower world than this one. A qualifying token must be a claim on a real share, which Coinbase’s tokens are: each is backed by a share held by a regulated broker in an Abu Dhabi structure. Robinhood’s Stock Tokens are tokenized debt securities, they track the share price, they carry no ownership claim, and they are restricted from U.S. persons. They sit outside the order, and so does Tesoro’s chest, which holds exposure rather than title. Tesoro’s own terms bar U.S. persons, as Robinhood’s tokens do. Megapot, licensed in Anjouan, in the Comoros, does not serve about 30 countries, the United States among them. A token on an open exchange does not check where its buyers live. The pairing clause is one sentence in an order about Apple and Nvidia. It is the sentence memecoin builders will read first.
Wright built the developer community around Quorum at JPMorgan, the bank’s permissioned Ethereum fork. “First it was WallStreetBets coming to Wall Street,” he said. “Now it’s the Pirates of Robinhood coming to Wall Street.” True to their pirate fashion, Toro has the parrot Hidalgo as a mascot. The market those pirates are sailing into is still one where the buyer carries the risk. Noxa’s holders learned in July that a launchpad can take its fees and vanish, and Lotto Coin’s own website calls lottery play “negative expected value.” Tesoro says it is building against that, in three steps its founders describe as coming over the next few weeks: vaults that hold tokenized Robinhood assets for a memecoin’s holders, AI agents Wright calls a “ghost crew” to run a project’s vault and community, and an on-chain prediction market he calls “rug-proof tech.” Billion described the aim as “tools for additional accountability, additional confidence in whatever the creator is doing.” “You can have a prediction that says the creator does not get the vault assets if that roadmap is not hit,” he said. “It’s a bit experimental.” Nobody designed a market where a lottery token and a gold chest are the first things built on tokenized stocks. It is here anyway, and it is eleven weeks old.
Achi (the dog from the famous dogwifhat meme) is seen at the opening bell of the New York Stock Exchange in New York, on January 23, 2025. Dogwifhat (WIF) is a Solana-based dog-themed memecoin that was launched in November 2023. It features a Shiba Inu wearing a knitted hat as its mascot. (Photo by TIMOTHY A. CLARY / AFP) (Photo by TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP via Getty Images)
AFP via Getty Images
Tesoro, a new launchpad on Robinhood Chain that says it will pass tokenized real-world assets back to token holders, puts its TORO token live at 8 p.m. Eastern on Friday, the project said on X, after a three-tier presale it extended by a day. A 3% tax on every trade buys tokenized gold and equities, which go into a vault the project calls a chest. “Now you can launch your own treasure chest,” Matt Wright, a co-founder, said in an interview. “We want to actually drive it into something that gets back to the early community members that are contributing to that platform.” The founding team is two: Wright, a second co-founder who goes by the name Billion. Wright has spent nearly a decade building developer communities, first around JPMorgan’s Quorum, then at ConsenSys, then as co-founder of the AI network Gaia.
“We’re not launching a meme coin launchpad,” Billion said. “You can’t launch just a regular meme coin on our platform.” His reason is the memecoin’s oldest problem. “Every time there’s a dip, especially from Bitcoin, the whole market drags out with it,” he said. Then Robinhood listed tokenized gold and stocks. “We were like, okay, this is really good,” he said. The aim, he said, is “to put the tools out there” so that a user “could actually feel like he is doing something meaningful and it’s not just noise.”
Toro is one example of something larger. The Securities and Exchange Commission let tokenized U.S. stocks trade on blockchain liquidity pools for five years on Thursday, and the conversation since has been about Apple and Nvidia settling on-chain. One clause in the order lets a venue pair a tokenized stock with any crypto asset it chooses, memecoins included. That market already exists. On Robinhood Chain and on Coinbase’s Base, memecoins are trading against tokenized stocks, taxing themselves to buy gold, and spending their fees on lottery tickets.
Memecoins with stocks inside themRobinhood Chain went live on July 1 to carry tokenized stocks. Memecoins took it over instead. Within two weeks CASHCAT, the breakout token, was worth about twelve times every real-world asset on the network combined, and Noxa, the launchpad minting coins at 18,600 a day, took an estimated $12 million in fees and went dark. What came next was stranger. Memecoins started using the stock tokens as their trading pair. A token called Artificial Inu trades against Robinhood’s Nvidia token, and an analysis by DeFiPrime’s Nick Sawinyh on September 1 counted 432 pools pairing memecoins with 19 Robinhood stock tokens, holding about $8.8 million in stock tokens and turning over roughly $95 million a day. When a memecoin called BONER drained the supply of the Hims & Hers token one weekend, he found, it traded as much as 112% above the stock’s last close until Robinhood issued more.
The same thing is happening on Base, where Coinbase’s tokenized stocks launched on August 24. “We’re seeing lots of people pair meme coins with tokenized stocks and that whole thing’s taken off in a big way,” Xen Baynham-Herd, head of marketing and global at Base, said in an interview the morning the SEC order was posted.
The fee is turning into somethingA memecoin’s trading tax has usually been the exit, kept by the launchpad or the deployer, and Noxa’s $12 million is only the latest example. This month the fee started buying things. Lotto Coin, an anonymous-team token on Base, sends every trading fee in USDC to a contract that buys $1 tickets in Megapot, an on-chain daily lottery, each night. Megapot’s public records show the contract held 17,732 of the 21,180 tickets in the September 13 drawing. One of them matched all six numbers. The $213,017.16 prize was paid a minute after the draw to a pool that Megapot said had 417 holders at the time. By my arithmetic on Megapot’s number ranges, that many tickets gave the pool roughly one chance in 80 that night.
“What a day yesterday! We burned over 10% of the token supply at an average price of $2.3m market cap,” the project’s account on X posted on September 14. The token promises nothing else. “Holders receive nothing, earn nothing, and are entitled to nothing,” its website says, and it calls the burn “a mechanism, not a return.” Megapot, which raised $5 million in a round led by Dragonfly in March, said it neither built nor approved the project.
Aerodrome, the largest exchange on Base, pays all of its trading fees to holders who lock its AERO token. Alex Cutler, its co-founder, puts the case for sending fees back to users this way. “The whole promise of this onchain technology is we can distill Interactive Brokers entirely into code and we can redistribute all the value rather than having it extracted to users of these platforms,” he said. Lotto Coin’s version is a bonfire. Tesoro’s version is a treasure chest, and its marketing says so: the X account’s bio reads “Hold $TORO. Dig nothing. Get rewarded in RWAs and Gold.” “We just want to help drive a meme that’s going to help people get equitable utility,” Wright said.
What the order does and does not coverThe SEC’s order describes a narrower world than this one. A qualifying token must be a claim on a real share, which Coinbase’s tokens are: each is backed by a share held by a regulated broker in an Abu Dhabi structure. Robinhood’s Stock Tokens are tokenized debt securities, they track the share price, they carry no ownership claim, and they are restricted from U.S. persons. They sit outside the order, and so does Tesoro’s chest, which holds exposure rather than title. Tesoro’s own terms bar U.S. persons, as Robinhood’s tokens do. Megapot, licensed in Anjouan, in the Comoros, does not serve about 30 countries, the United States among them. A token on an open exchange does not check where its buyers live. The pairing clause is one sentence in an order about Apple and Nvidia. It is the sentence memecoin builders will read first.
Wright built the developer community around Quorum at JPMorgan, the bank’s permissioned Ethereum fork. “First it was WallStreetBets coming to Wall Street,” he said. “Now it’s the Pirates of Robinhood coming to Wall Street.” True to their pirate fashion, Toro has the parrot Hidalgo as a mascot. The market those pirates are sailing into is still one where the buyer carries the risk. Noxa’s holders learned in July that a launchpad can take its fees and vanish, and Lotto Coin’s own website calls lottery play “negative expected value.” Tesoro says it is building against that, in three steps its founders describe as coming over the next few weeks: vaults that hold tokenized Robinhood assets for a memecoin’s holders, AI agents Wright calls a “ghost crew” to run a project’s vault and community, and an on-chain prediction market he calls “rug-proof tech.” Billion described the aim as “tools for additional accountability, additional confidence in whatever the creator is doing.” “You can have a prediction that says the creator does not get the vault assets if that roadmap is not hit,” he said. “It’s a bit experimental.” Nobody designed a market where a lottery token and a gold chest are the first things built on tokenized stocks. It is here anyway, and it is eleven weeks old.
Circle launched Arc on September 16 with an institutional pedigree few new blockchains can match. Its founding validator set includes BlackRock, Visa, Mastercard, DTCC and ICE, and CEO Jeremy Allaire described the chain as a general-purpose economic operating system for payments, tokenized financial markets and AI-agent commerce. The network uses $USDC for gas and was designed around sub-second settlement for institutional users. Within hours of going live, retail traders had a very different idea.
Launchpads Take Over Day One According to Dune on-chain data, @arc recorded $410.8M in total DEX volume and 7.76 million transactions on its first mainnet day. Memecoin launchpads drove roughly 82% of that activity, generating $336.26M of the total. @Arguspad led the pack by a wide margin, handling $202.35M alone. Minara.fun followed with $36.41M and Tollylabs with $19.65M, according to BeInCrypto. Activity spanned 19 launchpads in total, though volume thinned sharply after the top five.
The token creation numbers were equally striking. Traders minted 97,025 new tokens on Arc on day one. @Arguspad was responsible for 83,751 of them, more than 86% of every token created on the chain, and more single-day token launches than pump.fun has ever recorded in a 24-hour period.
The top five @Arguspad tokens by market cap and 24-hour volume at the time of reporting:
ARGUS: $17.5M market cap / $3.63M volume
UpSideDownCat (USDC): $2M / $1.79M
The Duke of Arc (DUKE): $1.43M / $1.09M
PI: $570K / $521K
FatCatBatRatWifHat (USDC): $332K / $406K
A Pattern That Has Played Out Before The dynamic is not without precedent. Robinhood Chain launched in July 2026 with a similar institutional pitch around tokenized stocks, then saw retail speculation dominate its early weeks before real-world asset value began building in earnest. Strip the launchpad activity out of Arc's day-one numbers and the remaining volume, tied to USDC settlement, tokenized collateral and institutional payment rails, comes to around $74.6M. That is the baseline Circle built the chain for. Whether speculative volume gives way to institutional adoption, as it eventually did on Robinhood Chain, remains the central question heading into Arc's first weeks of mainnet life.
NFA, DYOR.
Sources:
BeInCrypto: Meme Coin Launchpads Captured 82% of Arc's First Day Trading Volume
Circle: Arc Mainnet Launch Press Release
CoinDesk: How Circle's Institutional Arc Blockchain Got Taken Over by Memecoins on Day One
A memecoin presale is often built around promises: a team says there will be fair access, no hidden supply, and liquidity after launch. Buyers may have little way to check those promises before they send funds.
MemeToro is taking a more open approach. It has published 1,373 lines of Solidity code across 17 files under an MIT license, including its first FairLaunchEscrow.sol contract. The project has raised more than $137,000 in Stage 7, with $MT priced at $0.00430.
The new code does not mean the full launchpad is live, but it gives buyers a public view of how MemeToro plans to handle funding, refunds, allocations, and liquidity.
Inside MemeToro’s AI Launchpad Model MemeToro is a planned BNB Chain ecosystem designed to make memecoin launches easier to understand and verify. Its AI agent is intended to study market, news, and social signals before proposing a token concept.
The agent then prepares a public launch manifest. This document is meant to show the evidence, proposed token supply, fixed funding price, cap, and rules for the round.
The project’s validator is designed to reject a proposal if the evidence does not match the source links, if allocations fail to equal 100%, if an insider allocation is above zero, or if funding terms conflict with the manifest.
$MT is intended to support the wider platform. Planned uses include access, launch funding, staking, rewards, memecoin trading, prediction markets, and a news portal.
The AI is not meant to control money by itself. It handles research and documentation, while the smart contract is meant to enforce the accepted launch rules.
The MIT License Makes The Code Easier To Review An MIT license is a simple open-source software license. It allows developers to inspect, reuse, and build on the code under clear conditions.
For a new crypto memecoin presale, this gives the community a chance to look beyond a whitepaper. Developers can read the contract structure, run tests, and compare the public code with the project’s statements.
MemeToro’s update includes FairLaunchEscrow.sol, ILaunchExecutor.sol, and IERC20Minimal.sol. It also adds tests, architecture notes, documentation, and contributor rules.
The code is built with Foundry, a common Solidity development toolkit. This helps developers compile and test the contracts using familiar tools.
Open-source code does not guarantee that a contract is safe or that a token will rise. It does make the stated design more visible. That is a strong trust signal for a presale project that is asking users to assess technology before it reaches mainnet.
The Escrow Is Designed To Lock Funding Rules The fair-launch escrow is designed to hold contributor funds for one launch round. It locks the round settings at the time the round is created.
This means a team should not be able to change the funding cap, deadline, threshold, or allocation structure after people have contributed. The stated design has no owner, admin role, or upgrade path.
The contract also stores a fingerprint of the public launch manifest. This is designed to let users check that the round on-chain matches the terms shown before payment.
MemeToro limits fund movement to two stated outcomes: refunds to contributors or the planned liquidity executor. There is no planned route for funds to move to a developer or treasury wallet.
The allocation math is designed to make insider supply impossible. Contributors and liquidity must account for all tokens, while any remainder from rounding goes to liquidity.
This is a major bullish point. MemeToro is not only describing fair launches. It is publishing the rules that are intended to make them enforceable.
What Still Needs To Happen Before A Live Launch The code release is the contract foundation, not the completed platform. MemeToro still needs to build the real token executor and liquidity connection, which are currently placeholders.
It also needs to connect the AI manifest to the escrow fingerprint, create deployment scripts and a factory for rounds, deploy on the BNB Chain testnet, add ERC-8004 agent identity, and complete an independent security review.
The update includes tests for caps, deadlines, thresholds, refunds, claims, and unexpected contract behavior. It also uses random-sequence testing to check that the accounting stays balanced.
MemeToro lists Coinsult, BlockSAFU, and SOLIDProof as named audit or review providers. Buyers should check the current scope and reports, especially when final mainnet contracts are released.
Getting Started With Your $MT Token Purchase Buying into the MemeToro presale only takes a few minutes, and every step is verified:
Open the Presale Page: Go to the official MemeToro website and find the live presale link. Set Up Your Wallet: Connect a wallet that works with BNB Chain. Choose How to Pay: Use BNB, ETH, USDT, USDC, or a bank card. Lock In Your Tokens: Confirm the transaction. Your $MT balance updates right away. $MT does more than mark your spot in the sale. It unlocks platform access, handles transactions across the ecosystem, and feeds staking pools built for holders who stick around.