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🌒The Dark Side 😶
Plus, 🐳 $6.9M in profits from memecoin sniping, 📉 Selling surge, and more!
Good Tuesday! I’m Juan Aranovich, managing editor of Unchained.
In today’s edition:
🎥 Memecoin streamers go silent
💰 Long-term BTC holders cash out
🌋 Avalanche9000 rolls out
💸 Sniping mastery
📜 XRP ETF race heats up
With over 20 licensed or regulated assets on-chain and a global ecosystem of 400k+ ramps, Stellar is the network of choice for real-world asset tokenization.
What’s Poppin’?
By Sage D. Young, Veronica Irwin and Tikta
Pump.Fun, the Solana-based protocol that enables users to create and gamble on memecoins, has soared in activity, in part due to the protocol’s popular frontend feature that enables users to live stream their reactions to their token’s price movements.
However, the ability to self-broadcast on Pump.Fun was disabled indefinitely on Monday due to concerns about user safety.
Bitcoin Sell Pressure Hits 7-Month High: Who’s Selling?
Long-term bitcoin holders are taking profits, according to onchain analytics firm Glassnode, which found that selling pressure has reached negative 336,000 BTC per month — the highest level since April 2024.
Within the cohort of long-term holders, those who held bitcoin for between six to 12 months spent an average of 26,500 BTC per day in profits. These holders spent bitcoin with an average cost basis that was 71% lower than the market price, meaning they had a lot to gain from bitcoin’s recent rally to the upside.
“With Bitcoin surging from $74K to $99K, they capitalized big on the rally,” said Glassnode.
At the time of writing, bitcoin was trading at around $92,047, down 6.1% over the last 24 hours. The leading digital asset’s dip below the $91,500 mark earlier in the day likely contributed to the $694 million in liquidations observed across major exchanges over the last 24 hours.
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Avalanche’s Biggest Upgrade Goes Live on Testnet
Layer 1 blockchain Avalanche is gearing up for what it describes as “largest network upgrade” since its mainnet launch.
The AvalancheGo Etna upgrade, otherwise known as Avalanche9000, went live on the testnet — the experimental network where developers can test new features before deploying them on the main blockchain — on Monday.
The upgrade aims to make deploying a chain on Avalanche 99.9% cheaper, and introduce greater flexibility in staking, tokenomics, and validator sets.
It comes with two major Avalanche Community Proposals (ACPs): ACP-77, which alters the relationship between layer 1s and validators, and ACP-103, which improves security and user experience on Avalanche’s X-Chain and P-Chain.
Avalanche also introduced a rewards program — Retro9000 — alongside the upgrade’s testnet rollout for developers to register and start building subnets, with $40 million earmarked for developer rewards.
Pump.fun Bot ‘Orca’ Earns $6.9 Million SOL From Sniping Memecoins
A bot on Solana-based memecoin launchpad Pump.fun appears to have made 27,000 SOL, worth around $6.8 million, from sniping memecoins over the last month.
Onchain wallet tracker Lookonchain observed that the bot spent just 2 SOL, worth around $462, to snipe 57 million FATHA tokens, selling them for 4,456 SOL tokens, securing a profit of $1.12 million, which is a return of 2,227 times the initial investment.
The bot also made a return of 943 times their initial investment after using 1.75 SOL to snipe 58.57 million FRIC tokens and selling it for 1,646 SOL.
Lookonchain noted that the bot has already cashed out 19,000 SOL through crypto exchange OKX.
The wallet address, which begins with “orcACR,” has come to be known as “Orca” within the community. Some users have compared Orca’s strategies to Ethereum’s infamous MEV bot “jaredfromsubway.”
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WisdomTree Files for Spot XRP ETF
WisdomTree has established a trust entity in Delaware for an XRP exchange-traded fund — the preliminary step for approval from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in launching a fund.
The filing comes after the global asset manager, which manages $113 billion in assets, recently launched a low-cost XRP ETP in Europe.
Asset managers Bitwise, Canary Capital, and 21Shares have also filed for XRP ETFs over the last few weeks.
At the time of writing, XRP was changing hands at around $1.3, down 10% over the last 24 hours.
Daily Bits… ✍️✍️✍
💰 MicroStrategy made its largest-ever bitcoin purchase, adding $5.4 billion worth of bitcoin and increasing its holdings to 386,700 coins, valued at $37 billion.
🔥 Ethereum’s blob usage surged to over 21,000 per month, matching record highs as Layer 2 solutions such as Base and Arbitrum leveraged blobs for scalable, low-cost transaction bundling, burning $560,000 in fees last week.
📱 Phantom Wallet integrated support for the Base blockchain, enabling users to interact with Base-based tokens, dApps, and memes, potentially driving new activity and liquidity on the network.
💵 Jupiter DAO on Solana opened voting on a $1.5 billion airdrop proposal to distribute 1.4 billion JUP tokens to active users and stakers, aiming to grow the platform’s ecosystem.
🇺🇸 Justin Sun invested $30 million in Trump-linked World Liberty Financial (WLFI), controversially acquiring more tokens than the project initially planned to sell, raising questions about its token limits.
The $$$ Corner…
🤖 Talus Network secured $6 million in a Polychain-led round at a $150 million valuation to expand its decentralized AI ecosystem, including plans for a TikTok-linked AI dating app and the TAI token.
📈 OpenTrade raised $4 million in a seed extension round led by AlbionVC, with participation from a16z Crypto and CMCC Global, to further develop stablecoin-based yield products for asset managers.
What Do You Meme?
📈 Your Market Update 📉
BTC is down 6.4%, trading at $91,824
ETH is down 5.5%, trading at $3,302
BTC dominance: 55.22%
Crypto market cap: $3.29T
*All data as of today, 07:54 am ET. Source: CoinGecko
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