Memecoin Mania: Not So Maniacal Anymore

Plus, 🔥 Aave’s tokenomics shakeup, 🏦 IRS stares at DeFi defeat 🏴‍☠️ Darknet wallets blacklisted, and more!

Author

Juan Aranovich
March 05, 2025

Hi! In today’s edition:

  • 📉 Pump.fun bubble deflates

  • 🎙️ Is there a case for a crypto reserve?

  • 🏦 IRS DeFi rule set for repeal

  • 🔥 AAVE jumps 26% on buyback plan

  • 🏴‍☠️ U.S. blacklists Nemesis-linked wallets

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By Tikta

Memecoin mania seems to be cooling off as the daily trading volume on Pump.fun, the biggest platform for minting and trading memecoins, has crashed almost 94%.

The platform's trading volume nosedived from its all-time high of $3.13 billion on Jan. 18 to just $192.5 million on Monday, according to data from The Block. It is worth noting that the data tracks tokens created on Pump.fun that transition to major Solana decentralized exchange Radium after hitting a market cap of $69,000 on Pump.fun's bonding curve.

The number of new and active users on Pump.fun has been in significant decline since the start of the year, according to data from crypto education platform Gryphsis Academy’s Dune dashboard.

Pump.fun has generated a hefty $3.05 billion in lifetime fee revenue since its launch in January last year.

A strategic crypto reserve, altcoin ETFs, and a White House crypto roundtable — there’s a lot happening in the crypto space, but not all of it makes sense.

A strategic crypto reserve for the U.S. economy? That’s U.S. President Donald Trump’s latest proposal (or directive?) — and the reaction from the industry has been… let’s just say, mixed. Would it even work? And would it create more problems than it solves?

Meanwhile, the White House is hosting a crypto roundtable — but not everyone is convinced it’s going to be productive. Who will be in the room, what will actually be discussed, and will it help or hurt the industry?

On this episode of Bits + Bips, hosts James Seyffart and Noelle Acheson, together with guests Steve Hou and Steven Ehrlich, break it all down. 

Will tariffs and macro factors keep weighing on crypto? What’s driving the explosion in new ETFs? And what happens if banks start issuing their own stablecoins?

Plus: What could the next real catalyst for the crypto market be?

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pods, Fountain, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Amazon Music, or on your favorite podcast platform.

Five years in the making, the first part of an “Aavenomics” implementation proposal was put to the Aave DAO on Tuesday by the Aave Chan Initiative. 

Marc Zeller, the Aave Chan Initiative’s founder, described it as “the most important proposal” in Aave’s history.

As part of a broader tokenomics overhaul, the proposal calls for starting an AAVE buyback and distribution program, beginning with buybacks of $1 million a week for an initial six months. 

An Aave Finance Committee would increase the buyback budget as more revenue flowed into the protocol from other sources this year.

The proposal also calls for the creation of a non-transferable ERC-20 token named anti-GHO to fully deprecate and replace the current discount on Aave’s decentralized stablecoin, GHO. Essentially a reward program for Aave stakers, 80% of anti-GHO would be distributed to stkAAVE holders. 

A new version of the Aave safety module named Umbrella would protect users from “billions” in bad debt. It would enable the deployment of aTokens as collateral that could be staked and slashed in the event of bad debt.

“High revenue and high cash reserves put Aave in a comfortable position to initiate the Aavenomics update, and current market conditions allow Aave to become even more competitive and gain market share” Zeller told Aave’s governance forum.

Aave is still the largest DeFi lending protocol by a significant margin, with $41 billion in total value locked. 

Its native token, AAVE, rallied more than 26% in the 24 hours to 6 a.m. ET on Wednesday, trading at around $222.

White House Supports Rescinding DeFi Broker Rule

David Sacks, the Trump administration’s artificial intelligence and crypto “czar,” announced on Tuesday that the White House will support efforts to rescind the controversial Internal Revenue Service decentralized finance broker rule.

Sacks shared the White House’s statement on X, calling the rule “an 11th hour attack on the crypto community by the Biden administration.”

The rule classified DeFi businesses as custodial brokers and would have required them to collect and report user data to the IRS from 2026. 

A joint resolution introduced by Texas Senator Ted Cruz and Ohio Representative Mike Carey called for its repeal. 

Members of the Senate voted 70-28 to overturn the rule. The resolution will now pass to the president’s desk for final sign-off.

The U.S. Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) has sanctioned 44 Bitcoin wallet addresses and five Monero wallet addresses associated with the shuttered darknet marketplace Nemesis.

Nemesis, which operated from 2021 until March last year, facilitated nearly $30 million of drug transactions and had more than 30,000 active users.

The frozen addresses were controlled by Iran-based Behrouz Parsarad, the alleged operator of Nemesis, who pocketed “millions of dollars” in transaction fees, by OFAC’s estimates.

Mantle is building the largest sustainable hub for on-chain finance. Launching three new core innovation pillars: Enhanced Index Fund, Mantle Banking and MantleX. 

  • 🇸🇻 El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, on Tuesday rejected the International Monetary Fund’s demand that the country stop buying bitcoin and doubled down on its BTC strategy as it faces compliance reviews in June and September, with a $1.4 billion IMF loan package at risk.

  • 🔧 Ethereum’s Pectra upgrade was activated on the Sepolia testnet early this morning, in the final testing phase before a mainnet rollout that’s expected next month, with major improvements to validator staking, account abstraction, and rollup scalability.

  • ⚖️ The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission agreed on Tuesday to drop its enforcement case against crypto asset trading firm Cumberland DRW, the latest in a wave of crypto lawsuits and investigations it has abandoned under its acting chair, Mark Uyeda, including cases involving Coinbase, Kraken, and ConsenSys.

  • 📱 Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian on Tuesday joined a bid to acquire TikTok’s U.S. operations, with plans to move the platform onchain by integrating the Frequency blockchain for user data ownership and decentralized social media.

  • 🏦 Bybit will reward users who hold or trade Ethena’s USDtb, a stablecoin backed by BlackRock’s BUIDL fund, as competition heats up among crypto exchanges to attract stablecoin liquidity.

  • 🇯🇵 Circle’s USDC is set to become Japan’s first officially approved U.S. dollar stablecoin, with SBI VC Trade, a crypto exchange subsidiary of financial services heavyweight SBI Holdings, securing regulatory clearance to list and distribute it under the country’s new digital payments framework.

  • 📊 CoreWeave, formerly an Ethereum miner, this week filed for a $4 billion initial public offering at a $35 billion valuation after shifting to artificial intelligence, with revenue skyrocketing from $15.8 million in 2022 to $1.9 billion last year.

  • 🌉 Cross-chain token bridge Across Protocol raised $41 million in a Paradigm-led funding round to enhance its cross-chain Ethereum interoperability, aiming to reduce transaction times to under five seconds.

  • 🔗 Infrared Finance, a Berachain liquid staking protocol, secured $14 million in a series-A token sale led by Framework Ventures, bringing total funding to $18.75 million.

  • 💵 Bitcoin and digital asset infrastructure firm Blockstream is set to launch three investment funds — including Bitcoin-backed lending and hedge fund strategies — after securing multibillion-dollar funding as it expands in Japan and targets real-world asset tokenization.

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