You know, it’s interesting what moves markets sometimes. According to the folks at Kaiko Research, even the idea of a dinner can send a token price soaring. They looked into what happened with the TRUMP memecoin recently, and it tells a bit of a story about how things work right now.
- The announcement of a dinner for top TRUMP token holders caused the token’s price to jump by sixty percent and significantly increased blockchain activity.
- Smaller holders, those with less than $100,000 worth of TRUMP, were the primary drivers of this increased activity following the dinner announcement.
- Despite a memecoin surge, Bitcoin has maintained its dominance, potentially due to increased institutional adoption and a confident options market.
President Trump’s team put out word about a special dinner. This wasn’t just any dinner. It was for the top holders of the official TRUMP token. The very top holders, the top 25 out of 220, would even get to meet the former President.
The announcement came on a Wednesday, April 23rd. What happened next was pretty wild. The price of the TRUMP token jumped. It went from about $9 up to $14.50. That’s a sixty percent increase just like that.
And it wasn’t just the price. Activity on the blockchain (that’s the public record where token moves happen) went way up too. Nearly 10,000 digital wallets moved TRUMP tokens that day. That was three times more activity than the day before.
All this action followed the dinner news. Around $2.3 billion worth of TRUMP tokens changed hands on the blockchain that Wednesday. It was the busiest day for the token that month.
What’s maybe more surprising is who was doing most of the moving. It wasn’t the whales (folks with huge amounts of tokens). It was the smaller holders. Wallets with less than $100,000 worth of TRUMP were the ones driving the activity on Wednesday.
Normally, the activity is more spread out. You see big moves and small moves. But on the day the dinner was announced, things shifted. The share of wallets sending smaller amounts on the Solana blockchain (where this token lives) shot up.
Usually, about 46% of active wallets move less than $10,000 worth of TRUMP. After the announcement, that jumped to 75%. A big chunk of that surge came from really small transfers, under $1,000. Those tiny moves made up almost half of all active wallets that day.
It was a big change, but it didn’t last long. The usual pattern, where large transactions (over $100,000) and smaller ones are more balanced, came back later.
The action wasn’t just on the blockchain either. Trading volume for TRUMP on big crypto exchanges (centralized exchanges) also hit its highest point since way back in mid-February. It was the third-biggest trading day for the token since it started.
After the dinner news, TRUMP’s trading volume actually passed up all the other major memecoins for a bit. Yes, even DOGE. For a while last Wednesday, the President’s memecoin accounted for almost half of all memecoin trading volume on those big exchanges.
Things have calmed down since then. The excitement faded, and volumes dropped off, just like the activity on the blockchain. But the rules for the dinner competition are interesting. They say the top 220 average holders between April 23rd and May 12th are the ones who get invited.
This means we might see more activity soon. People might move tokens back onto the blockchain to make sure their average holding is high enough to qualify for the dinner. It’s like a little game tied to the token.
Now, let’s step back a bit from the memecoin fun. Memecoins like TRUMP have gotten a lot of attention alongside Bitcoin (BTC) during this bull run (that’s the period since late 2022 where prices have generally gone up). In past crypto market cycles, you usually see money eventually move from Bitcoin into smaller coins, which people call “altcoin season.”
This cycle feels a little different. Memecoins got their moment, sure, but Bitcoin has really held its ground. The last time Bitcoin had this much dominance over the rest of the market was in the first half of 2021. That was right before the market saw a big shift into those smaller cryptocurrencies.
But don’t just assume an altcoin season is just around the corner this time. There are reasons why Bitcoin might stay dominant for a while. Some big changes are happening in the market structure itself.
Look at the options market for Bitcoin. Options are contracts that give you the right, but not the obligation, to buy or sell an asset at a certain price by a certain date. The options market seems pretty confident that things will stay as they are heading into the summer.
There’s been a lot of trading volume on options that expire on May 30th on a big exchange called Deribit. This picked up a lot after a large batch of options expired the Friday before.
A lot of the recent activity has been focused on the $100,000 price target (strike price) for that May 30th expiration. People have traded nearly $350 million worth of volume on that specific option in just the past week.
So, is all this volume just because people are feeling good about the market right now? Or does it mean we can really expect Bitcoin to keep rallying through May?
We can look at something called the options delta. It’s a number that gives us a rough idea of how likely it is that the price will hit that target before the option expires. For that popular $100,000 option at the end of May, the delta is around 0.37.
What does that mean? It means there’s roughly a 37% chance that the actual price of Bitcoin will be trading above $100,000 after May 30th. Those aren’t bad odds, are they? Especially considering Bitcoin was trading closer to $74,000 just three weeks ago.
Bitcoin had a bit of a dip in February and March, along with other risky investments like tech stocks. But since April 2nd, when the Liberation Day tariff announcement happened, Bitcoin has actually done better than most traditional investments.
This includes things people usually think of as safe places for money, like gold and US government bonds (US Treasuries). It also outperformed riskier things like tech stocks.
This strong performance lately has made some people rethink if Bitcoin could be a safe place to put money when times are uncertain. Historically, Bitcoin has attracted money during shaky periods, like when the war started in Ukraine in early 2022 or during the US banking problems in March 2023. But usually, it tends to follow the ups and downs of riskier assets.
So, are we seeing the start of a real shift? Is Bitcoin becoming more of a safe haven asset?
One big reason Bitcoin seems stronger is that more companies are starting to hold it as part of their company funds (treasury asset). This kind of demand is usually less sensitive to small price changes. Companies tend to buy Bitcoin when the price goes down, which adds stability.
It’s not just MicroStrategy (Michael Saylor’s company) doing this anymore. That used to seem like a one-off thing. But over the past year, the idea has become more mainstream. Now, over 130 companies, investment funds (ETFs), and even countries around the world hold Bitcoin. There are even new ways to invest, like Bitwise’s OWNB, which lets you invest in companies that hold a lot of Bitcoin (over 1,000 BTC).
This strategy of companies holding crypto is starting to spread to other assets too. Some firms have raised money recently just to add Solana (SOL) to their company holdings. A big market maker called GSR put $100 million into a company called Upex specifically to buy SOL. And a Canadian company, SOL Strategies, raised $500 million last week to increase its SOL holdings.
