Move over TRUMP. Hello DJTGST.

Why it matters: Meme coins, alas, are not dead.

Driving the news: Yesterday, a golden statue of the president holding a bitcoin was parked for a few hours outside the U.S. Capitol as a way of saying thank you for supporting the crypto industry, and to "ignite conversation."

• Unlike the Official Trump meme coin and the Trump NFTs, this was not a Trump family initiative, however.
• The people behind it created a meme coin to go with it.
• It was created on the launching site Pump.fun, and DJTGST (Donald J. Trump Golden Statue) also went live yesterday. As of this morning its market cap was about $64,000.

The big picture: Despite signs that the air was coming out of the meme coin market, a number of indicators suggest that one of the largest platforms to launch them is doing quite well.

• Pump.fun ran an initial coin offering for its PUMP token in July, where it raised $600 million. That would have been one of the biggest deals in the ICO heyday of 2017.
• More tellingly, the PUMP token has, in recent days, risen to a price that is about 20% above its post-ICO high.

Zoom in: A lot of hot tokens come out of the gate strong, but they never get above that initial high. PUMP did it in a few months.

• One reason: Every day it uses its revenue to buy PUMP off the open market.

State of play: Pump.fun has actually evolved its business model in a way that may not be obvious.

• It once was a place to launch silly meme coins and see if they grabbed speculators.
• It became a live-streaming platform with an innovative way of paying talent.

How it works: Creators who make tokens that become moderately popular start to share in its trading fees on Pump's decentralized exchange.

• Just how much they get depends on how big the token is. In short, the fee structure incentivizes creators to keep driving attention to them.
• For a lot of them, it means live-streaming. For some, it means making a giant statue of Trump, painting it gold, and posting it up in D.C. for a bit.

By the numbers: Creators have claimed $21 million in fees over the last week.

• That's still fairly small, considering that OnlyFans paid over $100 million per week to creators last year. YouTube has paid nearly five times that.
• On the other hand, Pump.fun got to 1/5 of OnlyFans pretty quickly.

Fun fact: Last weekend, two young guys made $160,000 in three days after live-streaming themselves running through a Dodgers ball game.

What we're watching: That gold-painted statue stunt could pay off. Or its foam core may be the perfect metaphor for the asset it promoted.

The bottom line: Pump.fun is winning by playing the numbers.

Two members of Congress sent a letter to the Securities and Exchange Commission asking it to answer questions about Justin Sun, the Chinese crypto billionaire and founder of the firm behind the Tron blockchain.

Between the lines: Sun has been a recurring character for us this year, due to his eagerness to get into the good graces of President Trump by buying tokens associated with his crypto efforts.

• He was also under investigation by the SEC until the agency put it on hold shortly after Trump took office.

What they're saying: "Given the litany of issues associated with Mr. Sun's investments in the President's cryptocurrency ventures and his plans to take Tron public through the reverse merger process, we request that the SEC ensure that Tron Inc. meets the rigorous standards necessary to be listed on U.S. stock exchanges," Rep. Sean Casten (D–Ill.) and Sen. Jeff Merkley (D–Ore.) wrote in a letter to the agency.

• The congressmen follow up with 11 questions for the SEC to answer, concerning topics like his connections to China's ruling party, criminal organizations using Sun's cryptocurrency and connections to Trump-connected organizations.

In the weeds: The two ask the SEC for all kinds of information about Sun, his business dealings, and what kind of discussions the SEC may have had about him so far.

Yes, but: Sun doesn't exactly seem to be in the Trumps' good graces these days.

• His massive buy of WLFI tokens were locked up as they became tradable.
• No word so far that anything has changed with regard to that lockup.

The bottom line: Sun's getting it from all sides these days.

To the surprise of no one who actually looked at its IPO filings, the market interest in the Gemini stock waned quickly.

Why it matters: The company is the latest major pure crypto company to hit the public market.

• Gemini is a cryptocurrency exchange, but it's never made for much of a challenger to the big guns of the space based in the U.S.: Coinbase and Kraken.

By the numbers: The exchange lost $282.5 million in the first half of 2025.

• For comparison, Coinbase, the top U.S.-based exchange, had more than $1 billion in net income for the same period (though a lot of it was driven by revaluing its shares in Circle, the stablecoin issuer, after it went public).

The bottom line: This may have been a test to see how the market reacted to a company fully aligned with the MAGA movement.

🕵 Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) raised question of whether or not David Sacks has overstayed his time in the White House. (CNBC)

👩‍🏫 Financial services firms have a new suite of courses they can take on digital assets. (FINRA)

🎰 Kalshi, the formerly crypto-free prediction market, announced partnerships with major players in the blockchain world. (The Block)

✅ The SEC cleared another hurdle for the listing of many more crypto spot ETFs by approving rule changes on three national exchanges. (Reuters)

💵 Bonus report: Beyond the Deposit Debate: Why Stablecoins Complement Banks and Strengthen the Dollar (Coinbase Institute)