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Wholesome Solana Meme Coin Dev Hacked for $1.2 Million—But Says He Won’t Give Up

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Ronald Branstetter made a meme coin that skyrocketed to a market cap of $420 million, turning him from a crypto skeptic to a fan of the space. But now, six weeks since his first foray into the industry, he says that he’s lost everything in a wallet hack.

Branstetter launched Unicorn Fart Dust (UFD) from his basement in December, in an attempt to prove to his YouTube audience of gold and silver investors that crypto is worthless—or as he called it, “Unicorn Fart Dust.”

Meme coin gamblers saw this video, however, and bought the coin en masse—causing his token to skyrocket, quickly turning Branstetter’s holdings into $1.2 million worth of UFD.

On the first night the token went flying, Branstetter sold half of his holdings, but told Decrypt three weeks ago that he regretted doing so, wants to buy more, and has no plans to sell—despite admitting that the money would be life-changing. 

However, on Monday afternoon, Branstetter claims that his wallet was hacked, with the attacker selling everything he had in his wallet. 

On-chain data shows that over $1 million worth of UFD was sent to an unknown wallet, and then all of the tokens were sold across approximately 50 transactions before the received Solana was spread across countless wallets. That’s not to mention the approximately $200,000 worth of Solana and other tokens that were drained from Branstetter’s wallet.

Within 20 minutes of noticing the hack, the meme coin community leader started a livestream to explain the situation to his community. In the 10-minute video, Branstetter admitted that he was shook up by the experience. He broke down crying and said that he doesn’t regret creating the token, and confirmed that he wants to continue with the project.

“If I had to go back and do it all over again, I say yes, I’d do it all over again,” Branstetter said, before pausing with tears filling up his eyes. “I’d still do it over again because I know that there are still good people, and that good attracts good.”

UFD is down 24% over the last 24 hours to a current price of $0.123. It’s down 69% from its all-time high mark set just over a week ago.

Branstetter later revealed that he was tricked by a fake reporter from an unnamed organization, who may have gained unauthorized access to his accounts. After clicking the video call link, an interview did occur, but Branstetter said it “felt off from the beginning.”

Almost immediately, he said, the wallet was drained. This, unfortunately, is a common scam in the world of crypto—with some scammers impersonating Decrypt in attempts to try and swindle people in the industry.

“Nothing has changed about Unicorn Fart Dust. Unicorn Fart Dust is still [about] ‘good attracts good.’ I still believe in Unicorn Fart Dust. I still believe in the community,” Branstetter explained.

As the news broke, some people speculated that the meme coin creator had sold the tokens himself and faked the entire hack. This crowd appears to be a minority, however, as much of the UFD community has rallied behind its creator once again, sending over $425,000 of the token to a new mutli-sig wallet—intended to be controlled by the token creator.

“You have touched me very, very deeply through what has probably been some of my darkest hours,” Branstetter said in a livestream following the donations. “You are providing, right now, an example to the world of the good that a community can do.”

Edited by Andrew Hayward

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This Week in Bitcoin: New High Price, Multi-Million Dollar Projections, and Trump Frees Ross Ulbricht

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Bitcoin is again hovering around $105,000 per coin, barely budging since this time last week. Investors shouldn’t complain, though, after an action-packed start to the week led the coin to hit a new high.

The price of the biggest coin by market cap broke a new record of $108,786 Monday ahead of Donald Trump’s inauguration. It has since dropped by nearly 4%, CoinGecko shows.

And despite President Trump not explicitly declaring plans for a Bitcoin strategic reserve in his first crypto executive order, the coin is still sitting comfortably above the $100,000 mark.

Bitcoin soared above $100,000 following Trump’s November election; the President promised to slash regulation and help the digital asset industry. And he is keeping his crypto promises—albeit while annoying some hardcore Bitcoiners in the process.

ETF movements

Money continued to flow into the crypto investment vehicles this week, after investors threw billions at the funds last week ahead of the inauguration.

But it didn’t stop, with $802.6 million hitting the funds on Tuesday alone, data from Farside Investors shows. By the end of the week, over $1.75 billion worth of assets had entered the Bitcoin ETFs.

The bullishness comes as Donald Trump is expected to be a net positive for the industry. The Republican campaigned on a promise to help the industry and now buying Bitcoin has never been easier thanks to the funds.

Ross freed

Bitcoiners had been waiting for it for years. And on Tuesday, President Donald Trump kept his campaign promise to pardon Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht.

The Bitcoin enthusiast and founder of the dark web e-commerce site—mainly used for buying drugs using Bitcoin—was released shortly after and expressed enormous gratitude to President Trump. The crypto community flooded his digital wallets with BTC donations, too.

But Ulbricht—who went to prison in 2013—might already just be sitting on a goldmine: Untouched Bitcoin wallets linked to Ross Ulbricht and Silk Road now hold over $47 million worth of the asset.

Ulbricht has long been considered a hero in the Bitcoin community for creating one of the first marketplaces to accept the cryptocurrency. And though it still can’t be verified that the wallets do indeed belong to him, it’s not beyond the realm of possibility.

Where’s Bitcoin?

Ahead of Donald Trump’s shock November 5 win, the President had promised plans for a Bitcoin strategic reserve. But after signing his first crypto executive order on Thursday, which touched on the possibility of a crypto stockpile, Bitcoiners noticed one thing—there was no mention of their beloved orange coin, just “digital assets.”

“The Working Group shall evaluate the potential creation and maintenance of a national digital asset stockpile and propose criteria for establishing such a stockpile, potentially derived from cryptocurrencies lawfully seized by the Federal Government through its law enforcement efforts,” the order read.

The news has angered ardent Bitcoiners, who have been hurling the usual insults about “shitcoinery,” and who think it may lead the government to building up a stash of other digital coins.

MicroStrategy moves

Software company MicroStrategy shareholders are seemingly all-in on the firm’s Bitcoin strategy: They on Tuesday voted for a 30x increase to the number of authorized Class A common shares so that the company could have more resources to buy the cryptocurrency.

The news came as the company announced its latest Bitcoin buy, bringing its holdings to 461,000 Bitcoin—worth over $48 billion. And on Friday, the firm said that it would redeem over $1 billion worth of its existing debt accumulated early while building up the stash.

Soaring projections

Elsewhere, British multinational bank Standard Chartered, which has come out with very bullish predictions in the past, said in a Wednesday note that Bitcoin would continue to soar as pension funds enter the space.

Analysts at the bank forecasted that institutions enthusiasm for the asset could mean the coin hits $200,000 by the end of 2025.

But there were even bigger price predictions for Bitcoin from major players this week. BlackRock CEO Larry Fink said that growing adoption could push the price of the asset to $700,000, while Coinbase founder and CEO Brian Armstrong projected a price in the “multiple millions” at some undetermined point in the future.

Edited by Andrew Hayward

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White House Crypto Czar David Sacks: NFTs and Meme Coins Are ‘Collectibles’

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Are NFTs and meme coins assets, currencies, or something else entirely? According to White House AI and Crypto Czar David Sacks, they belong in their own category: “Collectibles.”

“Well, when you’re talking about digital assets, it can be multiple things,” Sacks said during a Fox Business interview on Thursday.

“I mean, you’ve got digital assets that are securities, you’ve got digital assets that are commodities, you’ve got digital assets that are collectibles like NFTs or meme coins. So you’re talking about a whole vast area of innovation.”

The distinction as a collectible could alter how NFTs and meme coins are perceived, potentially granting them legitimacy as assets with cultural and commemorative value rather than speculative risks.

Sacks also weighed in on the Solana-based Official Trump (TRUMP) meme coin, a token officially tied to President Trump. “I think the Trump coin is a collectible,” he said, stating it falls under the same category as NFTs or meme coins. 

“It’s like a baseball card or a stamp,” the crypto czar said. “People buy it because they want to commemorate something.”

While acknowledging the token’s purpose as a collectible item, Sacks clarified that this was his personal opinion, not a regulatory stance.

During the interview, the crypto czar outlined his vision for the Presidential Working Group on Digital Asset Markets, which he chairs as part of President Donald Trump’s sweeping executive order to establish the U.S. as a global crypto leader. 

A key focus of the group is defining the market structure for digital assets. By establishing clear categories—such as securities, commodities, and collectibles—the administration seeks to bring regulatory certainty to an industry that has long operated in a gray area.

“The Biden administration would not tell them [crypto firms] what the rules of the road were, and they would then get prosecuted,” Sacks said on Thursday. “And what the industry wants more than anything else is regulatory clarity.

Stablecoins and the U.S.’s stockpiling efforts

The group will also focus on stablecoins, which Sacks called “a really interesting area” with the potential to extend the U.S. dollar’s dominance globally. 

“We can basically create a digital dollar that people all over the world will use,” Sacks said.

The Presidential Working Group will also explore the concept of a national digital asset stockpile, an idea Trump proposed during his campaign as part of a strategy to establish a Bitcoin national reserve. 

While the idea remains in its early stages, Sacks explained, “Yeah, we’re going to evaluate that. We have not decided to do it yet, but we need to study that.”

The issue of whether NFTs should be classified as securities has gained traction in recent months, especially following the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) investigation into NFT marketplace OpenSea. 

Last August, OpenSea CEO Devin Finzer revealed the platform had received a Wells Notice, a precursor to potential legal action from the SEC, over claims that certain NFTs sold on the marketplace might qualify as unregistered securities.

Sacks’ appointment as the White House AI and Crypto Czar marked a significant policy shift for the U.S.’s domestic crypto sector.

Looking ahead, Sacks voiced confidence in the U.S.’s ability to regain its leadership in the global crypto space. 

“We’re going to catch up really fast,” he said. “The innovation was starting to move offshore… but now I think it’s going to change very fast.”

Edited by Sebastian Sinclair

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Did Donald Trump Really Just Drop a Solana Meme Coin?

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Talk about a Friday night surprise. President-elect Donald Trump’s social media accounts shared what appears to be an official Solana meme coin called TRUMP, just three days before he’s set to be sworn in for his second term in the White House.

Degen traders bought in immediately, generating hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of trading volume as on-chain sleuths and security experts hunted for red flags. But with Trump’s X and Truth Social posts still live after more than an hour, and some initial red flags cleared upon closer inspection, it appears that this is a legitimate Trump meme coin launch.

My NEW Official Trump Meme is HERE! It’s time to celebrate everything we stand for: WINNING! Join my very special Trump Community. GET YOUR $TRUMP NOW,” Trump’s official X account posted.

The launch was immediately met with excitement, confusion, and plenty of skepticism. That’s because the project had all the familiar hallmarks of many celebrity meme coin scams that have launched over the last year, with a public figure’s social media account hijacked to promote a pump-and-dump scam.

The Truth Social post went out first, but once the X post followed on his official account, concerns began to subside. Also, the coin has mostly only pumped so far, with no dump as of this writing.

On-chain sleuths pointed to potential red flags, including the apparent fact that the project was seeded with millions of dollars of funds from Binance and Gate—two exchanges that don’t serve U.S. customers. But some other apparent concerns diminished with further sleuthing, not to mention with time as Trump’s social posts remained online.

The coin’s official website looks similar to those used to sell and promote his past NFT collections, and is credited to CIC Digital, the same official Trump licensee behind the NFTs. The meme coin website was “deployed almost identically to his previous NFT website,” noted pseudonymous blockchain engineer cygaar tweeted, following initial suspicions.

“Either this is the greatest cyber heist of all time, or this is legitimate,” he added.

Meme coin traders are buying the coin in droves, pushing it to a price of $7.31 as of this writing. DexScreener lists a market cap of $7.1 billion, which would make it a top 30 cryptocurrency if accurate—though there’s a caveat.

Out of 1 billion coins, the website notes that 80% are locked and will gradually be unlocked over the course of three years. As such, the circulating supply would only be 200 million tokens, putting the market cap closer to $1.5 billion as of this writing. There’s been about $680 million worth of trading volume so far.

Trump ran on a pro-crypto platform, and beyond his previous NFT collections that launched between 2022 and 2024, Trump has also backed a decentralized finance platform called World Liberty Financial.

He’s expected to issue a day-one executive order regarding cryptocurrency that could be the first of many, as Decrypt reported this week, with Trump believed to be readying directives that could reshape the American crypto landscape for builders and investors alike.

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