More news of Trump tariffs on Japan and South Korea led to some weakness in the market, however with BTC still at $108k it’s clear investors don’t view the ongoing trade war as posing a much of a risk. All eyes are now on the Solana ecosystem though with the launch of pump.fun’s presale in just a few days. Generating $800M in revenue in the last year, pump.fun has been the backbone of Solana for this cycle as it was responsible for the launch of almost every successful memecoin. For anyone that missed the announcement, here are the details: the presale begins in 5 days, with a duration of 3 days or until the goal has been met. Their target is to raise $600M at a $4B valuation, which leaves $400M left out of the rumored $1B total raise that likely went to venture funds. To put this raise in perspective, the $600M portion alone would be the third largest round in crypto history – second if you discount TON’s $1.7B raise which it was forced to later return to investors.

It will be interesting to watch the price action here, as we are used to seeing high FDV launches from tokens with major VC allocations at much lower valuations. Those stories always end the same, with charts that keep going down and retail investors left in the dust. Pump.fun, on the other hand, has sold very little equity to funds at lower valuations, which should mean the main selling pressure will come from the eventual airdrop distribution rather than a systematic dumping by early investors. Up until very recently pump.fun dominated the coin launchpad mindshare, however the success of Bonk’s new launchpad has begun to shift some attention. Will this be enough to slow the growth of the PUMP coin, or is bonk.fun just a temporary distraction?

Ben Pasternak’s girlfriend seems to be a systemic risk to the launchcoin flywheel

The Beluga intern has been hard at work gathering all the most important crypto news stories so you have them in one place!

The Majors

• AI giant CoreWeave to buy Bitcoin miner Core Scientific in $9B deal

Alt Coins and Stocks

• Solana-based memecoin generator pump.fun plans to list its upcoming PUMP token on July 12

• Robinhood’s OpenAI-linked token drop triggers demand debate

Regulatory

• US Appeals Court allows battle over Tornado Cash sanctions to come to an end

Random

• Trump is making bank on crypto: Do voters care?

• Polymarket embroiled in a $160M controversy over whether Zelensky wore a suit at NATO

Beluga is excited to offer a brand new Starter Pack with our partners at Sapien, a gamified data-labeling protocol built to service the future of enterprise AI.