The Swiss National Bank (SNB) — basically, the Fed of Switzerland — will extend its experiment with wholesale central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), according to its private sector partner, an exchange.

Why it matters: If CBDCs keep advancing the way they are now, they could become both widely used and never used by people like you and me.

The big picture: Wholesale CBDCs are becoming the model that industrialized nations want to explore, rather than giving their citizens a way to store cash under the mattress (with a thumb drive).

• Wholesale CBDC tokens represent direct liabilities on a central bank, but only get used for settlement between member banks.
• Banks like this because it's the lowest possible counterparty risk for these transactions.

Between the lines: As the Atlantic Council's Ananya Kumar explained to Axios via email, when banks settle accounts with each other using commercial bank money, they all run the risk that one of their peers will fail.

• It's a small risk, but a real one, something they each have to account for. But if everyone settles in central bank money, that risk goes to zero.
• Plus, a wholesale CBDC will enable member banks to have one source of truth that's distributed among them, but which no one entity controls.

For the SNB, the sole issuer of the Swiss franc, getting to this point has been coming for a while. Project Helvetia started as a pilot with the Bank of International Settlements (BIS), where first they modeled a program, and then the SNB put it into the field for two years in collaboration with SDX, a financial market infrastructure firm.

• The final planned phase of that project had been scheduled to end this month.

What they're saying: "The SNB's decision to extend Project Helvetia III for another two years is a positive development for the Swiss digital finance ecosystem. The lack of digital cash compatible with distributed ledger technology is often a significant obstacle," Vincent Gusdorf, of Moody's Ratings digital economy team, said in a statement.

• Not only does digital cash decrease counterparty risk, it might also open up new applications, such as automating transactions between banks using smart contracts.

Fun fact: We can't help but notice that BIS and SNB are using the "W" shorthand ahead of CBDC (wholesale CBDC = WCBDC). They are using it to mean "wholesale," but in the crypto world, it means "wrapped."

• It looks like a little tell that the big banks are paying more attention to blockchains than they admit.

The intrigue: Many people in the cryptocurrency world have had an eye on CBDCs as a way of increasing financial surveillance, but wholesale CBDCs will never touch the accounts of regular people.

• That said, the European Central Bank is still on track to roll out a digital euro.

Last week everyone was talking about whether or not trumpcoin (DJT) was issued by someone in the Trump family.

• It only got spicier when the felon that Twitter loves to hate, Martin Shkreli, confirmed that he was, somehow, some way, involved in launching the token.
• Meanwhile, sources inside Trump's campaign say it was not.

The big picture: But it's clear that the overall interest in meme coins has taken off in a giant way this year.

• GMCI Meme tracks the best of the best meme coins, and those assets shot to the moon as bitcoin ETFs made the market hot again.

What we're watching: The fact that Pump.fun has made launching a meme coin roughly as easy as face-tuning a selfie has only added fuel, but it's clear that the long-simmering blaze that dogecoin started long ago has once again become a full-fledged bonfire.

Free money is cascading around all about us on the internet, and it's been... quite disappointing.

Why it matters: Cryptocurrency projects need a way to find users as fast as possible in order to have adequate liquidity for whatever their funky financial scheme is.

• Through the magic of blockchains, they can just spin up a bespoke kind of money specific to their project and give it to the people who actually use it. That's called an airdrop.

The latest: There have been (or there are — some are ongoing) some big airdrops lately: such as Layer-2 blockchains ZKsync and Blast and chain bridger LayerZero.

Yes, but: There are so many rules and so much work required around earning airdrops these days that pretty much everyone is frustrated about them.

The big picture: Another reason to be disappointed by most new tokens is that they don't tend to hold onto their value anyway, according to a study of new projects by Coin Metrics.

What they're saying: "While airdrops provide a nice windfall, most airdropped tokens lose their long-term value," the report notes.

• However, rank-and-file fans of new initiatives have been demanding that as much of the supply of a new cryptocurrency as possible go to its early fans.
• "There's kind of this idea that the more tokens you release to the public, the more likely that the token will retain its value," Victor Ramirez, from Coin Metrics' data team, tells Axios.
• But their research doesn't back it up, he notes.

Community distributions have shrunk, in fact. Bitcoin was designed 15 years ago to give 100% of its supply to users. Not too long ago, 40% to 50% of new tokens were going to users.

• These days, it's dropped to more like 5 % to 15%.

Friction point: In theory, this should be good for believers in a project. If the team behind it holds onto more, and the token goes up in value, they can use the supply held back to pay for more work going forward.

• That said, most people would rather get a bigger windfall now.

The bottom line: Setting airdrops aside, though, the simple fact is that most new tokens peak right after launch and never grow meaningfully again after that, which suggests that worrying about new tokens might not be the best use of time.

⛓️ Ethereum is cheap because everyone is using the Layer-2 chains now. (Unchained)

💎 Lots of traders are betting on $4,000 ETH in September. (CoinDesk)

🦑 The very weird Certik-Kraken drama has ended with funds returned. (The Defiant)