Today I’m flying to Amsterdam. Eleven hours in the air with the family — wish me luck.
It’s our last trip of the season, and once I’m back in September, I’ll fully lock in again. Before I leave, I wanted to get one more crypto and airdrop update out because quite a lot has happened.
And don’t worry: even while I’m traveling, there will still be plenty of new content and airdrops published on AirdropAlert.
The big one for us today is the Pons ATH, but we also have several airdrop claims, Coinbase pushing tokenized stocks deeper into DeFi, more interesting activity from the TRUMP wallets, and a new Cardano accelerator.
Let’s get into it.
1. Pons ATH: $PONS Hits $100M Market Cap
If you’ve been reading our updates over the last month, you know we hold some $PONS.
Today, Pons briefly hit a $100 million market cap and reached a new all-time high.
Obviously, after a move like this, the risk/reward is very different from where we first started covering it. But there are a few fundamental developments behind Pons that are worth watching beyond the price chart. It’s not just riding the recent meme pump wave.
First, 28.52% of the total PONS supply has now been burned. Pons also continues to use roughly 80% of protocol fee revenue for PONS buybacks, with purchased tokens sent to the burn address. That creates an interesting flywheel: activity on the launchpad generates fees, a large portion of those fees buys PONS, and the purchased supply is permanently removed.
Pons is also expanding further into onchain real-world assets (RWAs). The treasury has started providing liquidity around tokenized assets as Pons positions itself as an ecosystem for what it calls “memestocks.” It feels like a natural alignment with the Robinhood app.
Another interesting development is Pons v2. New tokens can be paired against assets beyond ETH, including stablecoins and tokenized stocks. Depending on how a launch is configured, fees and payouts can therefore be denominated in those underlying assets.
That starts making Pons look like more than another meme coin launchpad.
What We Did With Our PONS Position
After this latest Pons ATH, we took another 25% profit.
At this point, almost our entire initial investment has been taken off the table.
That makes the remaining position much easier for me to hold while I’m traveling. If PONS keeps running, great. If it corrects hard after this move, we already managed our risk and locked in profit.
I’d rather enjoy Amsterdam than stare at a PONS chart from the airplane.
2. Airdrop Updates: Claims You Shouldn’t Miss
One of the easiest ways to lose money farming airdrops is simply forgetting about them.
Farming doesn’t always end when the snapshot happens. Projects can add eligibility checks, claim periods, vesting steps or other requirements later. If you’ve been active across dozens of protocols, it becomes surprisingly easy to miss something.
Here are a few worth checking now.
Ethena Season 5
The Ethena Season 5 vesting period has finished, so eligible users should check their dashboard and claim what is available.
Season 6 is also still running.
I actually forgot about part of my own Ethena allocation for a while. With the recent market pump, it ended up being worth more than I remembered. Not the worst surprise to find sitting in a dashboard.
PROPR Genesis Airdrop
Propr has reached its TGE.
The token has a fixed supply of 1 billion PROPR, with 20% of the entire supply allocated to the Genesis Airdrop. That equals 200 million PROPR, and the Genesis allocation is fully unlocked at launch.
If you participated in the Propr ecosystem, this is one to keep an eye on.
Final $ALIGN Claim Reminder
One last reminder for the $ALIGN claim.
The claim is live for eligible ecosystem users, and plenty of active airdrop farmers may qualify without immediately realizing it.
As always: verify that you’re using the official claim page before connecting your wallet. Claim periods are prime hunting season for fake websites and wallet drainers.
Bitcoin Fork Season Again?
We’re also seeing some attention around the upcoming eCash Bitcoin hard fork.
For newer crypto users, forks can sound confusing. But those of us who were around in 2017 and 2018 remember when Bitcoin forks seemed to appear every other week.
Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin Gold, Bitcoin Diamond… it was a whole era.
If you weren’t around back then, we recently put together a beginner-friendly look at the history of Bitcoin forks, including why they happened and how some BTC holders effectively received new coins simply for holding Bitcoin.
3. Coinbase Picks Chainlink for Tokenized Apple and Nvidia Stocks
The tokenized-stock narrative continues to get more serious.
Coinbase has selected Chainlink as the official oracle infrastructure for its tokenized stocks on Base.
That includes tokenized versions of major U.S. equities such as Apple, Nvidia, Meta and Alphabet.
Why does Chainlink matter here?
Because putting a stock onchain is only part of the puzzle.
Imagine you own $1,000 worth of tokenized Nvidia shares and want to use them as collateral inside a DeFi lending protocol. The protocol needs reliable information about what Nvidia is actually worth.
If the stock suddenly drops, the lending protocol needs to know quickly enough to adjust collateral requirements or liquidate a position.
That’s what Chainlink’s oracle infrastructure provides: reliable external market data that smart contracts can use onchain.
Tokenized Stocks Become DeFi Building Blocks
This is where things get much more interesting.
Coinbase’s tokenized stocks are issued on Base and backed 1:1 by underlying shares held in regulated custody.
Instead of simply buying a synthetic representation of Apple and leaving it sitting in your wallet, these assets can potentially become part of the wider DeFi ecosystem.
They can be traded on decentralized exchanges, integrated into structured products, or potentially used as collateral in lending markets.
In other words, tokenized stocks start becoming composable financial assets.
We’ve already been watching this trend closely. Kraken and Solana have been pushing into the same market, which we covered in our guide to tokenized stocks on Solana and Kraken.
For anyone comparing the exchanges themselves, we also recently broke down MEXC vs Coinbase.
For now, Coinbase’s tokenized-stock offering is aimed at eligible users outside the United States and operates under the Abu Dhabi Global Market regulatory framework.
But the direction is becoming pretty obvious.
Stocks are coming onchain, and once they’re onchain, DeFi protocols can start building around them.
4. The TRUMP Team Is Selling Without a Traditional Market Dump
Here’s another interesting piece of onchain activity.
Wallets associated with the $TRUMP team have once again been extracting USDC from liquidity pools — but not through a simple market sell.
Instead, TRUMP tokens are placed into one-sided liquidity positions on Solana.
Traders effectively bring USDC into the pool while TRUMP moves out. As trading happens, the position gradually converts the team’s TRUMP inventory into USDC.
The team can then withdraw the resulting stablecoins.
Recent onchain tracking showed approximately $3.39 million in USDC withdrawn from these liquidity positions within roughly half a day.
Technically, that’s liquidity management.
Economically, though, the result isn’t difficult to understand:
TRUMP leaves the team’s position. USDC comes back.
It’s a much less obvious form of selling than sending millions of TRUMP directly to an exchange and hitting the market with one giant sell order.
Whether you call that smart liquidity management or a more elegant way to offload tokens is up to you.
Remember the New TRUMP Token Rumor?
The timing is particularly interesting because TRUMP recently pumped following rumors that a new Trump token could launch on Robinhood Chain.
That rumored token never appeared.
But the speculation was enough to bring attention and liquidity back toward the existing TRUMP token.
Now we’re once again seeing team-linked wallets turning TRUMP liquidity into USDC.
Definitely one to keep watching onchain.
5. Draper University Bets $70K on Cardano Startups
Cardano builders have a new funding opportunity.
Draper University has launched the Apex Growth Accelerator, working with the Cardano ecosystem and Draper Dragon’s Orion Fund.
The program is aimed at investment-ready startups building around areas including real-world asset tokenization, institutional DeFi and enterprise blockchain infrastructure.
Selected teams can receive up to $70,000 in investment for a target 3.5% equity stake.
But there’s a catch for crypto founders accustomed to building everything from Discord and Telegram:
You actually have to show up.
Ten Weeks in Silicon Valley
Apex is designed as an intensive 10-week in-person residency at Draper University in Silicon Valley, followed by an optional four-week extension.
Only around 10 startups are expected to join the cohort.
The idea is to put founders, mentors and investors physically together instead of running another remote accelerator where everyone appears on Zoom twice a week.
Selected founders get access to mentors, fundraising support and investors from the wider Draper network, with the program ending in a dedicated Demo Day.
Applications are scheduled to close on September 1, with the program currently listed to begin October 5.
The sectors they’re targeting are also worth noticing.
RWA tokenization. Institutional DeFi. Enterprise blockchain infrastructure.
Those are exactly the same themes we’re seeing elsewhere in today’s news — including Coinbase bringing tokenized U.S. stocks deeper into DeFi.
For anyone who needs a refresher on the ecosystem, we recently published our beginner guide explaining what Cardano is and how it works.
Final Words
That’s it from me before the airport.
The Pons ATH is obviously the highlight for our own portfolio today. Hitting a $100 million market cap after we’ve been covering PONS for the last month is nice to see, and taking another 25% profit means the remaining position is now very comfortable.
But I’m equally interested in the bigger trend underneath today’s news.
Pons is moving toward tokenized assets. Coinbase is bringing stocks onto Base and connecting them to DeFi through Chainlink. Draper is specifically funding RWA and institutional DeFi startups.
Tokenized real-world assets are slowly moving from a crypto buzzword into actual infrastructure.
For now, though, I’m switching charts for airports.
Eleven hours to Amsterdam, some family time, and then one final trip before I fully lock back in this September.
AirdropAlert isn’t going anywhere while I’m away. We’ll keep publishing new airdrops, claims, farming opportunities and market updates throughout the trip.
And as always: claim your airdrops, manage your risk, and take some profit when the market gives it to you.
If you enjoyed this blog, you may want to check our other crypto news updates.
As always, don’t forget to claim your bonus on Bybit below. See you next time!
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