Memecoin marvel

Memecoins are surging to end a week/month/quarter that was supposed to be wrenched by options-bred volatility in Bitcoin and Ethereum.

So far on this Good Friday, though, as of 7 a.m. (EST), BTC and ETH each remained mostly flat (down 1%) across the past 24 hours. But they were leaning toward flat to semi-green in the one hour since we poured the first of several coffees.

CoinDesk's index of 20 big coins fell 0.56%. CoinGecko tracks some 13,500 coins. Taken all together, they lost 0.5%. This universe has a combined market capitalization of $2.77 trillion.

Around midnight, we were startled by loud barking from dogwifhat (WIF) and, sure enough, it turns out that right around then the Solana-run meme asset had indeed reached an all-time high of $4, a level from which WIF has since retreated as if rebuffed by an electric fence.

Today marks the second day in a row that memecoins have generally outperformed as a category. WIF, 41st-largest token, per CoinGecko, sports a total market cap of $3.6B. It is now the third largest meme-related digital asset behind No. 12 SHIB (down 3%) and No. 9 DOGE (up 1%).

Oh, and here's one last upbeat update: Litecoin is back above $100 on a 7% gain since yesterday. It got there a couple of weeks ago as well but couldn’t hang on.

Last year at this time, LTC was $90.

Note that this past August, the Litecoin network had a rewards-halving event similar to the one that the Bitcoin network will experience in about three weeks.

FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried yesterday was sentenced to 25 years in prison. The 32-year-old fallen crypto titan was convicted of multiple counts of fraud this past November. During his trial, three members of SBF's inner circle testified that their quirky, risk-consequence-agnostic boss encouraged them to join in a conspiracy to defraud clients, backers and counterparties, and to cover their tracks.

FTX was once the second-largest exchange on the planet. SBF was said to be worth billions on paper. He even once portrayed himself as a benevolent crypto overlord willing to backstop or buy out key industry players when they began to teeter during the crypto downturn in the spring and summer of '22 following the implosion of the Terra ecosystem. The subsequent fallout from the Terra debacle sent crypto prices tumbling, ultimately blowing apart the balance sheet of FTX's big-swinging, inadequately hedged trading arm, Alameda, leaving massive holes that ultimately got filled with FTX customer funds.

SBF's attorney Marc Mukasey had asked for a prison sentence in the single digits: "Sam is not a ruthless financial serial killer," Mukasey insisted.

U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan said the sentence reflected the risk that SBF “will be in a position to do something very bad in the future" and that a quarter-century stretch sufficed for “the purpose of disabling him.”

SBF’s social awkwardness led the judge to recommend that he be sent to a medium-security facility.

In a khaki-colored prison uniform, his ankles in chains, the former kingpin, per the Associated Press, had this to say for himself: “A lot of people feel really let down. And they were very let down. And I’m sorry about that. I’m sorry about what happened at every stage.”

He added: “My useful life is probably over.” 

Solana looked eerily flat earlier today (0.0% in the past one day) considering fresh reports that the bankrupt FTX estate has begun to sell a boatload of locked SOL tokens, as much as $7.5 billion dollars’ worth of them. Buying is done in large batches, by exclusive appointment, and at a steep discount.

According to Unchained Crypto, the token sales are being facilitated by Galaxy Asset Management, which is an affiliate of Galaxy Digital Holdings, a firm founded by Mike Novogratz.

"Novo," as we like to call him, is an ex-Goldman Sachs bond trader who two decades ago founded Fortress, a New York-based global macro hedge fund.  

It was Canadian crypto investment firm Neptune Digital that on Wednesday let slip that it had completed a strategic acquisition of 26,964 SOL at a price of $64 per token, representing a 67% discount to the market value as of March 27 when SOL hit $185.

FTX/Alameda once hugely backed the Solana project; after the November 2022 collapse, SOL got decimated, falling to $24 as of the time bankruptcy papers were submitted.

Sunil Kavuri, an FTX creditor, addressed the court during SBF’s sentencing hearing, bitterly pointing out how Sullivan and Cromwell, the FTX bankruptcy estate counsel, should have distributed the value of the tokens in their possession at the current price, as opposed to liquidation-sale prices closer to what SOL was worth around the time of FTX’s bankruptcy filing.

SOL tokens at a 70% discount? Hey, sign us up. But alas we'll have to get in line behind the likes of Galaxy Trading, which is another affiliate of Galaxy Digital Holdings, and which is reportedly making a bid for the locked SOL holdings.