At the high table

Coinbase is set to join the venerated S&P 500 equity index, replacing Discover, about to be acquired by Capital One. COIN's listing goes into effect next Monday. It's a landmark dose of institutional inclusiveness for a company that only months ago found itself part of a lineup of centralized exchanges getting sued by the SEC during the Biden era. Since Trump’s election, the SEC has dropped/paused more than a dozen enforcement cases against crypto firms.

"First they fight you, then they add you to the S&P 500," said Bernstein analysts in a note to clients, referring to the rising significance of Coinbase and the crypto industry in general (The Block).

At the same time, Hong Kong-based Animoca Brands, which boasts a portfolio of big stakes in blockchain-related firms such as OpenSea, Kraken and Consensys, is preparing for a listing in New York. Animoca executive chair Yat Siu told the Financial Times that Trump’s relaxed regulatory stance on digital assets was "a window of opportunity."

Animoca was delisted from the Australian Securities Exchange in 2020 over governance concerns. The company is seeking to invest in a slew of growing trends, such as tokenized real-world assets (RWA), AI and gaming, to name three, according to Cointelegraph.

Meanwhile, just one major coin is sitting pretty today and it's XRP, up 3.4% in 24 hours as of 8 a.m. (EST). All of the other Big Ten coins on the chart were shaded crimson.

Over the past seven days, Official Trump (TRUMP) has ranged between $10.47 and $14.87. We did just observe a multi-day upward trek for the spot price of the crypto connected with the Trump family business. It occurred May 7-10, amidst a spike in bidding on and growing attention over a promotion that saw individuals amassing TRUMP in order to snag one of 220 seats at a dinner with the sitting U.S. President.

Fortune has identified (sort of) a smattering of the top holders, with the leaderboard finalized as of last night. The No. 1 wallet, SUN, sitting on more than $18M worth of TRUMP, is linked to HTX, a crypto exchange for which billionaire Justin Sun serves as global adviser. The No. 2 TRUMP holder, with about $17.5M worth of the memecoin, is the Singapore-based crypto startup MemeCore. Ting Hsu, MemeCore’s chief business development officer, told Fortune that some of the money to snap up TRUMP came from internal treasuries as well as from one of the startup’s anonymous cofounders. That anonymous founder will attend the dinner with Trump at a Trump-owned Northern Virginia golf club on May 22. Hsu wouldn't specify precisely who this person is. Additionally, per the New York Times, some Australian guy, Kain Warwick, is going.

Among the group of 220, the average holder has at least $4.8M worth of TRUMP which is based on President Trump, runs on Solana and promoted on Trump Media's Truth Social network.

As of 8:21 a.m. (EST) today, TRUMP ranked as the 56th-largest digital asset, according to CoinGecko. It has a market capitalization of roughly $2.5B. TRUMP has declined 9% over the past 24 hours, sliding below $13.

Meanwhile, as for the rumors on X that Truth Social is set to launch its own memecoin — do not buy into them. "There's no truth whatsoever about Truth Social launching a memecoin," said Donald Trump Jr., in a post on X, sharing a screen grab of a post on Truth Social (from an official Truth Social account) saying, to be clear, Truth Social is not launching a memecoin.

Bitcoin as of 9:01 a.m. (EST) had a seat at the $103K table. Greater amounts of the biggest crypto are getting into the hands of entities that like to sit tight.

According to Cointelegraph, citing Glassnode, which charts the portion of the BTC supply owned by "hoarders," the total illiquid supply as of this week stands at 14 million BTC. It's the highest total ever. The metric recorded a 30-day rolling illiquid supply increase of 180,000 BTC, which represents the largest jump since December of 2022, a dark post-FTX period that saw BTC flirting with $15,000 before ultimately finding its way back to $20,000 in early 2023.

In addition to a spike in its illiquid supply, BTC, even at six figures, is garnering affection from large and medium-sized entities. BTC’s "shark" and "whale" tiers (holding between 10 and 10,000 BTC) have together now accumulated 83,105 more coins in the past 30 days, Cointelegraph said, citing Santiment.

"Only retail investors appear to be panicking," Cointelegraph added, regarding the current investor appetite.

Per Santiment, the smallest retail holders (holding less than 0.1 BTC) have dumped 387 BTC in the past month.