May 30, 2024 | Read Online

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Note: Byron's OOO this week! While he's busy wandering the streets of Kyoto and not thinking about markets or memecoins, David Canellis and Katherine Ross from the Empire newsletter are taking over Byron's newsletter real estate.

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Pick-Me Coins

They say you should sell shovels during a gold rush.

Pump.fun, the Solana memecoin generator, has certainly nailed that strategy. So much so that minting a personalized token on the platform is now, apparently, a rite of passage for celebs.

Over the past four days, Caitlyn Jenner's X account has nonstop bullposted about her own token, $JENNER, which her team launched on Pump.fun earlier this week.

The videos are strange and surreal, leading to some speculation that Jenner's account had been compromised with deepfakes, all to pump and dump an unofficial memecoin.

Iggy Azalea confused the matter by launching her own memecoin, MOTHER, amid the hype. She also outed an alleged scammer who had purportedly hustled the rapper, Jenner and other celebs with dodgy memecoin schemes.

Still, the general consensus is that Jenner's videos are real and this whole thing is perhaps her publicist's way of latching onto Trump's recent endorsement for crypto. She launched an Ethereum version of $JENNER earlier this morning.

Combined with singer-songwriter Davido's memecoin, as well as short-lived fake $IGGY memecoin from the alleged scammer, the tokens have seen about $400 million in trade volume over the past four days.

JENNER surged to as much as $43.6 million shortly after it first traded and has since sunk by more than 85%. Iggy's is following a similar trend but the volatility could continue for some time.

It's not easy to determine how much money Jenner or Azalea have made by trading their memecoins. But it's really Pump.fun that has found product-market fit.

More than three-quarters of a million tokens have been deployed through Pump.fun, and the platform takes a 1% fee on trades and a small amount of SOL when memecoins make it to live trading on Raydium.

Right now, that's converting to seven-figure fee revenue per day, with yesterday setting a new record of $1.47 million SOL, compared to the previous top of $1.2 million earlier this month.

Overall, Pump.fun has brought in nearly $28.9 million in SOL fees since it launched in January, based on a daily tally, which is more than the market cap of JENNER, MOTHER and DAVIDO combined.

How much of that is real profit is unclear, but the Pump.fun wallet that collects trading fees has so far seen $18.2 million outflows. The purpose of those outflows isn't known and they shouldn't be considered irregular, although most occurred around the trading pause in response to a string of flash loan attacks two weeks ago, which resulted in $2 million in losses for the firm.

Ethereum raised only $18 million for its initial coin offering in 2014. Safe to say, Pump.fun has played its hand perfectly so far.

— David Canellis

Can't stop, won't stop

Have the floodgates opened?

After nearly two years of silence, former FTX executive Ryan Salame seems to have just remembered his X account password. Or, maybe, he's no longer worried about the consequences.

Either way, Salame's got a classic case of the Twitter fingers and has been quite active on social media.

Ryan Salame @rsalame7926

hot damn, this is going to get interesting quickly

May 28, 2024

687 Likes 40 Retweets 213 Replies

His first post, while cryptic, seemed to imply that Salame's ready to talk.

And maybe he is since he only has a few months before he heads off to prison to serve a seven-and-a-half-year sentence.

Earlier this week, Salame was the first of the FTX insiders (aside from Sam Bankman-Fried) to face sentencing, and Judge Lewis Kaplan — who also oversaw the trial and sentencing of SBF — didn't go easy. Kaplan's sentencing exceeded the prosecutor's recommended five to seven years.

Of all of the insiders to cut deals with prosecutors, Salame has been very quiet. His former colleagues Caroline Ellison, Gary Wang and Nishad Singh were all present at Bankman-Fried's trial. While Salame wasn't, prosecutors said he handed over some information ahead of the trial.

Bits and pieces of Salame's side have trickled in through memos to the court from his team, prosecutors and through witness letters like the one I mentioned in a previous Morning Riff from his good friend, and former colleague, Sam Trabucco.

Salame, in what seems to be an attempt to open his narrative, posted about a media interview and followed it up by saying he had no idea about the $55 million loan he received from Alameda.

Ryan Salame @rsalame7926

The 55m loan everyone keeps citing, I had no idea about it until after ftx collapsed. Not a dollar ever touched my account and the receiver had no clue I didn't know about it. Fun thing to learn while my whole world was imploding.

May 29, 2024

108 Likes 7 Retweets 41 Replies

While we've heard bits and pieces from Singh about the political donations, Salame could offer some more insight into them theoretically. In legal filings ahead of the sentencing, his team also said that he was the "first person" to tell Bahamian authorities about FX's fraud.

Overnight, Salame seemed to point to possibly authoring a book — though not on the subject of FTX — when he asked X, "Can someone make a book of the best memes for the next few years and sell it on Amazon. Asking for a…"

He might not be the only crypto executive to take up writing either during or before a prison stint, as former Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao also teased a potential book earlier this month.

— Katherine Ross

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