💜 Perpl Rain

Just because the President and First Lady of the United States launched their own memecoins doesn’t mean that the President’s media company is taking that route.

At least, according to President Donald Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., who took to X yesterday to set the record straight. 

“There’s no truth whatsoever about Truth Social launching a memecoin,” he wrote. 

The rumor started after Ran Neuner told his 944,000 X followers that he heard that Truth Social was potentially tapping a “similar gang” to launch a Trump Social memecoin. 

You just can’t make up these brief news cycles.

Meanwhile:

• Bitcoin’s trading around $103,000 this morning, a 10% increase over the past week. 

• TRUMP is down 9% this morning, trading around $12.90.

• DEX volume’s up to $15.1 billion, a 15% increase in the past day.

🏗️ Just keep building

A new perps DEX is entering the chat. 

The team exclusively told me that Perpl, a decentralized perpetual futures exchange, raised $9.25 million from Dragonfly to build on Monad. 

Other participants in the round include Ergonia, Brevan Howard, Breed, L1D and CMS. 

I had a chance to speak with co-founder PB, who told me that he and his cofounder — both Americans — left the US to build Perpl in London. They’ve since hired a London-based team. Surprise, surprise, the decision came due to the lack of regulatory clarity in the US. 

PB isn’t writing off the US entirely, though, noting that if the laws change, Perpl would consider opening up to the market — it’s just not currently in the cards. 

Perpetual futures, or perps, are becoming more of a popular product, especially in crypto. Just last week, Coinbase teased that 24/7 perps were “coming soon” after announcing 24/7 futures trading. 

“I think the thing with perps, specifically, is how simple it is. With options, there's just a lot of complexity. There are expirations, there's just a lot more math for users to be aware of. But perps, it's very simple, never expires,” PB explained. 

“You just have to keep track of liquidations. And then that also helps with getting all the liquidity in one place. With options, since you have expirations, you have liquidity each month, but with perps, all liquidity for the assets is in the same place. More liquidity, better trading experience.”

What PB noticed is that crypto traders like the ease of access that perps offer. There’s also the added benefit that a project like Perpl can move faster on a token listing than, say, a Coinbase. 

“With perps, you just need an oracle price and USDC, and you can start immediately taking a position. If you were to rewind back to maybe a couple of years ago, you needed a Binance or one of these central exchanges to actually list perps, but with DEXs, they're able to list these tokens faster,” he explained. 

Perps DEXs are “broken in a very interesting way,” PB told me. Basically, there are infrastructure and engineering issues and then the DEXs make some trade-offs to account for them, but Perpl claims to be different. 

“What Hyperliquid has done with a cloud-based perp DEX has shown that the market appetite is there for something that has a deep liquidity. What we're really excited for is to see how the composability angle plays out with that,” he added. 

Perpl plans to utilize the EVM architecture from Monad to build its onchain central limit order book. But the downside is that, since it’s on Monad, it won’t be able to launch mainnet until Monad itself goes live. It does, however, plan to launch testnet by the end of the year. 

“We've raised enough money to help us sustain ourselves if testnet or mainnet takes longer, but we want to get it onto testnet by the end of this year, just because we want people to try it,” he said. “There are going to be bugs that they're going to be able to find. No matter how much we test internally, [nothing beats] user testing, so we want them to be able to get their hands on it.”

But PB and the team aren’t too worried if Monad’s mainnet takes longer than anticipated; they’ll just be building up the features on Perpl in the meantime.

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• The DOOD token may not have had the best launch, but the Doodles team expected the drop and is focused on the future. 

• Coinbase is joining the S&P 500, replacing Discover Financial before May 19 after Capital One finalizes its Discover acquisition.

• Anchorage is acquiring Mountain Protocol to start offering institutional stablecoin services, but Mountain will shutter USDM.

Robinhood’s making some moves. 

Specifically, it’s snapping up WonderFi, a Canadian crypto firm. The all-cash deal is valued at roughly $178 million, or C$250 million. The deal is expected to close in the second half of this year. 

The acquisition will help to open up the Canadian market for Robinhood Crypto, and it reaffirms the focus Robinhood has in expanding crypto offerings to different jurisdictions — remember the Bitstamp acquisition?

Last year, Robinhood set up a Toronto hub with 140 employees, and the announcement says that it’ll fold the WonderFi leadership team into Robinhood Crypto. 

“WonderFi has built a formidable family of brands serving beginner and advanced crypto users alike, making them an ideal partner to accelerate Robinhood’s mission in Canada,” Robinhood Crypto’s Johann Kerbrat said. 

Between this announcement and Anchorage’s acquisition, M&A szn is starting to get pretty spicy.