Plus: Did a whole country just rug pull?

GM. Some crypto days are sweet strawberries, others are moldy kiwis - and we've sifted through the weird mix so you don't have to.

🤨 Kanye West didn't pull the rug, but DaBaby and the Central African Republic might have.

🍋 News drops: the University of Austin is hopping on the BTC train, Pump(.)fun co-founder responds to allegations + more

🍍 Market flavor today

Find out more about the Fear & Greed Index here.

Name		Price	24H	7D
Crypto Market Cap: $3.22T 0.42% (24H)
	Bitcoin BTC	$97,271.44	0.81%	-0.88%
	Ethereum ETH	$2,673.38	0.55%	-0.18%
	XRP XRP	$2.43	0.62%	-6.32%
	Solana SOL	$203.46	0.67%	-1.29%
	BNB BNB	$610.87	-2.30%	3.72%

Prices as of 12:00 PM EST. Click here to see live data.

Mood of the day: not great, not terrible.

The Fear & Greed Index is still stuck in neutral, at 43 today. Meanwhile, Bitcoin's been bouncing between $96K and $98K since Friday.

Source: BitDegree

Enthusiasm took a bit of a beating thanks to Donald Trump's continued trade battles - he now wants a 25% tariff on any steel or aluminum shipped into the US.

On top of that, he's threatening to match tariffs on countries that charge extra for American goods, and he has plans for new tariffs on the EU, superconductors, oil, gas, steel, and copper.

What does this mean for crypto?

Investors could see Bitcoin as a hedge against economic instability;
On the other hand, if global trade slows down and the economy takes a hit, riskier assets - including crypto - might struggle to attract investments.

And rn, markets are still trying to figure out which way this will go.

Source: @0xNovaSeeds

However, according to economist Alex Krüger, the shock from Trump's tariff plans won't last long - instead, people will start focusing on how his government operates.

Krüger believes Trump is good for crypto in the long run, but the short-term outlook depends on the Fed. Many hope for rate cuts, but the Fed is waiting to see if tariffs cause economic trouble before making a move.

Krüger's best estimate? A rate cut in June.

Source: CME FedWatch

Meanwhile, Bill Barhydt, the founder and CEO of Abra, has some ambitious targets for the current crypto cycle:

Bitcoin around $350K;
Ethereum at $8k;
Solana at $900;
Sui at $25.

And if things go really well, he thinks prices could double these estimates.

His reasoning? The US government is heavily motivated to push interest rates lower because of its $7T debt that needs refinancing. Lower rates make it cheaper to manage this debt.

To push rates down, the government may cut taxes and flood the financial system with liquidity, which essentially means pumping more money into the economy.

Now, here's where crypto comes in: whenever there's an increase in liquidity, risk assets - which include stocks and crypto - tend to benefit the most. That's cuz more money in the system = investors have more capital to deploy.

Source: @naiivememe

That said, not everyone's convinced of a smooth ride ahead. BitMEX CEO Arthur Hayes warns that as people realize Trump's election hasn't dramatically changed US politics, crypto prices could drop back to $70K - $75K.

So, while some see explosive growth, others think a pullback is still in the cards. Either way, volatility is surely here to stay.

🥝 Memecoin harvest

These tokens are the party crashers of crypto - no plan, no invite, but they're the center of attention 🕺

	Name		24H Change
	Central African Republic Meme CAR		▲ 135K%
	TCC TCC		▲ 14.2K%
	Liberland Dollar LLD		▲ 754%
	Solana Social Explorer SSE		▲ 130%

Data as of 06:50 AM EST.

Check out these memecoins and plenty more here.

👎 Ye said nah, CAR said yeh

If you're into hip-hop, you've probably already seen Ye (or Kanye West, if we're talking birth certificates) having… a moment again.

This isn't even about his controversial Grammy appearance (which was wild, btw) - the stuff he's been posting on X has been super unhinged, to say the least (well, before his account was deactivated).

And in the middle of all that mess, he dropped something interesting:

Source: @followin_io

So yeah, apparently, he was offered $2M to launch a memecoin and said no.

I guess kind of surprising that a guy who did all this 👇 drew the line at scamming his fans.

Source: @boldleonidas

But you know who wasn't too good for that? Another rapper, DaBaby.

He launched the BABY memecoin - it immediately hit $27M in trading volume, but then, in five minutes, the price decreased by 33%.

UN-BE-LIE-VA-BLE!! A celebrity pump and dump? No way… who could've seen that coming? 😱

Source: @defi_ayda

Yeah, obviously, we all know the drill with these launches - insiders buy in early, hype builds, people FOMO in, the rug gets pulled, and the insiders walk away with bags while everyone else holds worthless tokens.

Nothing new.

But you know what is new? We just had a whole COUNTRY launching a memecoin.

Yes, the Central African Republic dropped its own memecoin, CAR, except… nobody really knows if it’s legit or not.

The official X account of CAR's president, Faustin-Archange Touadéra, announced that the government had launched an experimental token meant to "unite people" and "support national development."

Source: @FA_Touadera

Naturally, people thought his account got hacked. But here's the thing: the post stayed up for over 15 hours - way longer than most hacked posts before they get deleted 🤨

Then came a video announcement, which some AI tools flagged as a deepfake. But these same tools have also messed up in the past with legit interviews from the president 🤨

So… could it be real? Well, blockchain analysts found that CAR's distribution matched the allocation on its official website.

FYI: for a token launched on Pump(.)fun (where literally anyone can create a fake token), this level of accuracy in distribution is highly unlikely unless it is official.

Source: @bubblemaps

But regardless of whether it's real or fake, the market reaction was insane.

Within 12 hours, CAR hit a $850M market cap. For some perspective, the Central African Republic's entire GDP is $2.4B - so that memecoin briefly reached about 30% of the nation's whole economy.

And it gets even crazier. One X user, @Linkkzyy, claims there was a "test version" of the same token (same image, ticker, description, dev wallet, etc.) launched two days before that was hard rugged - meaning investors got completely wiped out. Then, they apparently launched the "real" version afterward.

So, if that's true, it means we might've just witnessed the world's first memecoin rugged by a country.

...Flying cars, they said.