US Crypto Strategic Reserve Confirmed, Altcoins Included!

Gm friends,

Just when crypto was looking down and out, along comes a post from Donald Trump that immediately prints FOMO-triggering green candles across the charts, so let’s catch up with all the latest details and developments.

Now, here’s what’s in today’s issue:

• Chart of the day: Memecoin total market cap.
• David shares his thoughts on Trump announcing a crypto strategic reserve, BlackRock adding IBIT to model portfolios, CME adding Solana futures, MetaMask’s 2025 roadmap & the Ethereum Foundation announcing EF Silviculture Society.
• Today on chain.
• Altcoin Alpha.

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Chart of the Day

When bitcoin takes a hit, altcoins take a bigger hit, and memecoins get whacked hardest of all, while there’s also been a lot of negative commentary around memecoins.

First there was the disruption caused by the TRUMP token drop, which split opinion in the trenches, then came MELANIA coin, which didn’t split opinion, everyone just hated it, and recently the infamous Javier Milei-related LIBRA rug pull.

Memecoins total market cap

The upshot then is that meme tokens are down bad in both reputation and price, with the total market cap of the whole memecoin sector dropping from $127 billion at the start of December to $56 billion right now, which is a huge 56% decline in just three months.

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News Now

Trump Announces Crypto Strategic Reserve

A quiet Sunday, low liquidity, crypto not sure which way to move after last week’s dump… in other words, the perfect moment for the President of the United States to announce that the nation will be moving forward with a Crypto Strategic Reserve.

That was the story of the weekend, with President Trump posting on Truth Social about plans “to move forward on a Crypto Strategic Reserve that includes XRP, SOL, and ADA”, which was enough to immediately fire up price action on the charts, with the coins mentioned in the post reacting most explosively.

However, it didn’t go unnoticed that Trump’s announcement made no mention of BTC, but don’t worry, a follow-up post soon followed, stating that, “obviously, BTC and ETH, as other valuable cryptocurrencies, will be at the heart of the Reserve”, although a lot of commenters (including Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong) have subsequently been arguing that a reserve should be BTC-only.

There was also then an X post from Trump admin crypto czar David Sacks drawing attention to Trump’s posts, confirming the crypto plans, and finishing with, “more to come at the Summit”, which refers to a White House crypto summit taking place on March 7th.

That event will be opened and spoken at by President Trump, led by David Sacks, and attended, according to a White House statement released last week, by “prominent founders, CEOs, and investors from the crypto industry, as well as members of the president’s Working Group on Digital Assets”.

BlackRock Adds IBIT to Model Portfolios

Besides announcements from the White House, there are further bullish developments, one of which is that BlackRock has just announced it will be adding IBIT–its spot BTC ETF–to some of its model portfolios.

Model portfolios are built by BlackRock and marketed at financial advisors who can use them to meet client investment needs, so when BlackRock decides to include a fund in a model portfolio, it can result in a more widely followed trend. So what we’re seeing here is BlackRock exerting influence in favor of BTC, which is especially significant since–for Wall Street at least–BTC is a novel asset still on the path to adoption.

BlackRock is to add a 1% to 2% IBIT allocation to model portfolios that allow for the inclusion of alternative assets, and it will be interesting to see whether this is a first step towards the fund becoming included more widely in future.

BlackRock’s products didn’t escape last week’s crypto gloom though, as prior to this news IBIT had experienced a record outflow of $418 million in one day–last Wednesday–and this was followed by negative days the rest of the week.

CME to Add Solana Futures

Even before the Crypto Reserve announcement, SOL had been recovering relatively well after crashing hard, and that first improvement in price may have been partly down to news that derivatives marketplace CME is to introduce the trading of SOL futures contracts as of March 17th.

According to the CME Group press release, this is still pending final approval but will include two kinds of product: micro-sized contracts of 25 SOL, and larger-sized contracts of 250 SOL, and the Solana products will join the CME’s existing BTC and ETH contracts in its crypto range.

One question now is whether this is a marker on the route to spot SOL ETFs, with several filings for such products currently being processed by the SEC, including from Franklin Templeton, Bitwise, and VanEck. This pattern was followed in the cases of both BTC and ETH, for which futures trading was allowed before spot ETFs were eventually launched.

MetaMask Posts New Roadmap for 2025

Top wallet MetaMask, which started as an Ethereum product and now supports multiple chains, sometimes catches flak for not having a smooth enough user experience, and to be fair, it isn’t the most intuitive interface around. However, the MetaMask team last week announced a new roadmap for 2025 that includes plans to launch various user-focused integrations and upgrades.

In a post titled Reimagining Self Custody, MetaMask explained plans that include:

• Batched transactions that combine actions
• Introducing Bitcoin and Solana support
• Removing the need to switch between networks
• Redesigning the home screen
• Managing multiple Secret Recovery Phrases
• Paying for gas with any token you’re swapping (so you don’t need additional ETH)

Also, the wallet will debut a physical metal MetaMask Mastercard that allows holders to bypass the bank and spend directly on their crypto. This will be available to users in supported regions–including most of the US, the UK, and the EU–with a waitlist now open if you’re interested, while the virtual version is already available.

Ethereum Foundation Announces EF Silviculture Society

Speaking of Ethereum-related entities that have been catching flak, the Ethereum Foundation last week announced the formation of a new advisory group that it calls the EF Silviculture Society.

Google AI informs me that silviculture means “the practice of managing and cultivating forests to meet society’s needs”, which sounds very positive and I’m all in favor of natural conservation, but what exactly does that have to do with shifting tokens around on blockchains?

Well, according to a post from the Ethereum Foundation that continues the forestry metaphor, the Silviculture Society will “provide informal counsel to the Ethereum Foundation in tending to the (dark or otherwise) forests in the infinite garden of Ethereum, to make sure we sustain the core values of open source, privacy, security and censorship resistance”, while the new team appears to be made up of fifteen individuals from outside the Ethereum Foundation itself.

This looks like a positive development for Ethereum, which is sticking to its principles, but at the same time, the Foundation immediately got criticized anyway for being unnecessarily vague and not laying out what the new group will do in practical terms.

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Today On Chain

We already looked at how badly memecoins have slumped, and it’s a similar story when it comes to AI Agent tokens, while there’s a connection between the two as so many new AI tokens launched through meme platform Pump.fun, and then traded similarly to memes.

As an example (although it launched on Base, not through Pump.fun), Virtuals Protocol is a leading AI Agent launchpad project, but a look at its revenue shows a harsh correction when it comes to on-platform activity, with revenue dropping from over $1 million on January 2nd, to just a little over $25,000 last Friday, which is around a 97.5% decrease.

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Altcoin Alpha

• Layer-2 Base has implemented Flashblocks on testnet. This technical change–which Base claims makes it the fastest EVM chain–speeds up block times by a factor of ten, from two seconds to 200 milliseconds, and is scheduled to go live on mainnet sometime in Q2.
• DeFi protocols Pendle and Gearbox have both launched on Sonic, while the chain–which is a rebranding of Fantom–saw its S token hold up well amid recent crypto volatility.
• In collaboration with fintech provider Rain, the Avalanche Foundation has launched a Visa credit card. With both physical and digital versions, the Avalanche Card allows users to spend against AVAX, wrapped AVAX, USDT and USDC.
• According to a post last week from founder Justin Sun, Tron will this week launch a feature enabling USDT transfers without the need for TRX to cover gas. This follows criticism about high fees on the network.
• NEAR, Coinbase and several other crypto teams, including Eliza Labs, Aethir, and Frax Finance, have joined forces to launch the Open Agent Alliance, an organization focused on delivering open AI services.

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Wealth Mastery (Lark Davis, and the Wealth Mastery writing team) are not providing you individually tailored investment advice. Nor is Wealth Mastery registered to provide investment advice, is not a financial adviser, and is not a broker-dealer. The material provided is for educational purposes only. Wealth Mastery is not responsible for any gains or losses that result from your cryptocurrency investments. Investing in cryptocurrency involves a high degree of risk and should be considered only by persons who can afford to sustain a loss of their entire investment. Investors should consult their financial adviser before investing in cryptocurrency.

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