Projects
Which Tokens Are Pumping?
Most of the market is still underwater, but these 8 alts are up 75% to 1,600%+ this month.
Almost all of them are buying back their own token with real revenue, and a lot of that revenue comes from stocks trading onchain.
Pay attention to these:
1. $STONK (@LaunchOnSF): +1,676%
This is the clearest example. StonkFun mixed the launchpad trade with tokenized stocks. Tokens can launch against things like SPYx or NVDAx, volume has already crossed roughly $2.6B, and around 60% of fees go toward STONK buybacks + burns.
It’s riding the memecoin and RWA narratives at the same time, but it’s also the most memecoin-flavored name here, so it’s the one I’d size smallest.
2. $NEAR (@NEARProtocol): +146%
Intents volume has crossed $30B, private perps are live, tokenized stocks are coming through Ondo, and confidential DeFi + AI agents are becoming a bigger part of the network. That activity is also starting to generate real fees.
3. $RAY (@Raydium): +139%
Raydium is benefiting from almost everything hot on Solana right now. StonkFun launches, tokenized stocks, and memecoin activity all push more trading volume through it, and part of those fees goes toward buying back RAY.
4. $ARB (@arbitrum): +114%
Robinhood Chain, Robinhood’s own chain, runs on Arbitrum tech and now sends part of its revenue back to the Arbitrum ecosystem. Add more enterprise chains and RWA activity, and $ARB finally has a value-capture story that’s easy to explain.
5. $VVV (@AskVenice): +91%
Venice is the one AI name on the list. Annualized revenue has crossed $100M, that revenue funds buybacks and burns, and emissions keep getting cut. Most AI tokens don’t have numbers like that behind them yet, so it’s a cleaner setup if AI gets attention again.
6. $BP (@Backpack): +90%
Backpack is moving from wallet + exchange into an onchain stock broker. Its tokenized-equity product already handles 73% of Solana stock-token trading. (It’s Kucoin reported data, not directly taken from onchain.) So BP is becoming one of the cleaner ways to get exposure to that trend.
7. $UNI (@Uniswap): +85%
I’d call this the biggest shift on the list. Uniswap finally has fees flowing back to the token through buybacks and burns, while Robinhood Chain volume and V4 activity keep growing underneath it.
8. $PONS (@ponsdotfamily): +75%
Pons is still one of the biggest launchpads on Robinhood Chain. More launches mean more trading fees, and more fees mean more PONS buybacks.
Around 30% of supply has already been burned, so as long as Robinhood activity stays hot, that loop keeps running.
I don’t think the takeaway is that every alt is about to pump. The Altcoin Season Index is only around 55, and only about 25% of supply across the top 500 coins is sitting in profit, so this still looks selective.
What the market wants first is pretty clear: real revenue from onchain activity going back into the token.
If this rotation keeps spreading, I’d rather follow the tokens where something fundamental just improved than chase whatever happens to be green that day.
Analysis
How’s Circle’s New L1 Chain Doing?
A week in, Circle’s Arc looks like a success on DefiLlama.
$379M in TVL. $120M+ borrowed. Solid numbers for a new chain. Now, if you ask about it in CT, the mood is closer to a shrug.
What’s happening? Circle opened Arc’s public mainnet on September 16. Its an L1 where you pay gas in USDC, and it launched with the best partner list in crypto history: BlackRock, DTCC, Visa, Mastercard, ICE, and six more as founding validators.
Quick 80/20 on week one:
That last one should bug you. So let’s look at where the TVL actually comes from.
The TVL is rented
About 91% of Arc’s TVL sits in two lending protocols, Morpho and Aave.
I used Claude to trace the money in Morpho’s main market (lend USDC, borrow against Circle’s wrapped BTC). Three wallets supply 99.99% of its ~$150M. Everyone else combined has put in less than $1,000 (Claude used Morpho API for it’s analysis).
And the way it arrived is almost funny.
At 3:06 am UTC on launch morning, one wallet deposited exactly $73,000,000. Twenty-five minutes later, a second one deposited exactly $75,000,000. Both had spent the previous five days testing the route with deposits of 50 cents.
That’s not organic activity. Those are signs of rented TVL.
Aave’s public governance proposal also says Aave gets “a minimum of $2m per year in protocol revenue… with any shortfalls covered by certain Arc ecosystem participants for the first five years”. Now, this isn’t some smoking gun. This sort of deal is very common for new chains.
The protocols were paid to show up, and the liquidity was placed. Nothing illegal about it. It’s just how new chains launch. Just don’t mistake it for demand.
“But people are borrowing now.” True. Borrowing on Morpho went from $1.4M on day two to $72.4M today.
Look at who’s borrowing, though. On September 21, Circle launched Bitcoin-backed USDC borrowing inside Circle Mint, its institutional platform. Clients deposit BTC, get cirBTC, and borrow USDC on Morpho.
According to Claude Analysis, there are 86 borrow positions, the biggest between $3M and $18M each, all backed by cirBTC. And the rates? Lenders earn 0.03%. Borrowers pay 0.065% (Morpho API).
That’s not an organic market. That’s Circle-arranged money lent to Circle’s clients at roughly zero. A closed loop trying to fire up the flywheels.
Meanwhile, USDC on Arc fell from $647M to $559M over the same week. TVL went up because BTC collateral came in. Bitcoin pumping also helped. Dollars went out.
How to spot rented TVL on any new chain:
- Who supplies it? A handful of wallets with round numbers = placed, not earned.
- What does it pay? Near-zero yield on a huge pool means nobody’s competing for that money.
- Who borrows it? If it’s the chain’s own partners, it’s a loop.
- Are dollars arriving? Check stablecoin supply on the chain, not TVL.
Arc fails all four. You’ll see this playbook again, so learn to run the checks yourself.
Meanwhile, on the retail side…
If the institutional side was staged, the retail side was chaos.
Within a day, memecoin launchpads flooded the chain. But top tokens like TOLLY, LONG and COOL fell 56–77% from their highs. DEX volume fell 68% by day four.
There was a lot of mess:
- Employees trying to promote memecoins without understanding the nuances of degen culture got them hate across CT.
- Copycats everywhere. Search “TOLLY” on DexScreener, and you’ll find at least five different contracts on Arc.
- A launchpad that billed itself as “unruggable by design”, SharcFun, got flagged by the community for draining wallets.
And then Circle minted the full 10 billion ARC tokens. Airdrop guides went up within hours. Circle’s own line: the mint “is not a commitment to publicly launch ARC, but an important technical milestone” (Circle). No token launch, no airdrop, no eligibility list.
The winning chains bring their own users
Here’s what actually decides whether a corporate chain works.
I looked at 18 chains launched by companies (with DefiLlama API & Claude). The ones whose parent owns retail users and sends them to the chain by default did a median of $13.6M a day in DEX volume. The nine whose parent has no retail users? A median of $0.4M. Not one has ever cleared $10M a day.
Circle has no retail app/website like Coinbase and Binance. Its retail relationship is Coinbase, the partner it paid $412M in distribution costs last quarter, 58.8% of its revenue.
The next time a corporate chain launches with a billion-dollar logo slide, ask who’s bringing the users. At the end of the day, distribution will win.
I’m not writing away the chain completely. A bull market is coming, and there are strategies for Circle to attract users and liquidity. But the above explains the current ambivalence towards Arc.
🚀 DeFi Catalysts
Jumper is getting a token. $JUMP was announced days after a perps waitlist went up.
Pyth won Nasdaq approval to redistribute Nasdaq Basic through its data feeds. That puts licensed US equity prices on the same rails as its crypto feeds.
Trueo is moving its prediction market from Base to Ethereum mainnet, pointing to deeper integrations and its next oracle system. TRUE holders can migrate with no deadline.
Hyperliquid turned on manual borrows. You can now post HYPE or BTC as collateral and borrow USDC or USDT, with rates set by utilization.
ZetaChain holders voted to migrate ZETA to Solana, with 99.4% in favor. The team is folding its L1 and betting everything on Anuma, its private AI app.
StablecoinX‘s 48-month lock-up on its ENA is permanently waived from October 5. Its stack is ~3.03B ENA, about 20% of supply, although any sale still needs Ethena Foundation consent.
Ondo now lets approved institutions mint Ondo Stocks with shares they already hold, through Alpaca’s Instant Tokenization Network. It’s live on Ethereum and BNB Chain.
Polymarket hired Zora’s former CEO Jacob Horne to “make Polymarket DeFi great again.” Shayne admits the onchain product has waned while the team focused on the US.
LONGxyz founder Nate says LONG will act as an incubator, not a launcher, working with top stock-pair teams to build their own moats. Stricter “PVE” protections like ticker locks are coming too.
📊 Signal Check
Hyperliquid flipped Solana in USDC supply, with 7.19B outstanding.
FOMO generated $320k in 7d fees from Hyperliquid Builder integration.
Variational did $3B of daily volume in a single day for the first time, and more than half of it was on swap markets.
Binance Research finds tokenized RWAs grew 85% YTD to $34B+, but only ~12% of that capital is actually used in DeFi.
📰 Industry News
The SEC granted temporary exemptive relief so tokenized securities venues can trade tokenized stocks through permissioned AMMs and liquidity pools.
The CFTC is also writing formal rules for crypto markets, with a rulemaking filed days after CLARITY failed.
The ECB launched Pontes, which lets banks settle tokenized asset transactions in wholesale central bank money.
X/Twitter now lets US users trade straight from cashtags, routing orders to Coinbase, Kraken, Gemini, Interactive Brokers and Moomoo.
Coinbase is going after Robinhood’s playbook with retail IPO access. Users can buy at the offer price before public trading starts.
Kalshi filed to add margin on a subset of long-dated prediction markets, excluding sports and culture, aimed at institutions. They’re also facing wash-trading allegations in the timeline.
🤑 Money Moves
S&P Global agreed to acquire OpenZeppelin. OpenZeppelin’s contracts, which have secured over $37T in value transferred, stay open source and free.
Binance made a $100M strategic investment in Circle, alongside a new five-year deal to expand USDC in emerging markets.
MoonPay is buying North Capital’s tokenization infrastructure and registrations in a $60M stock deal. It still needs regulatory approval.
📉 Down Bad
FomoPeek, a third-party Fomo app, ships an iOS kernel exploit framework that covers iOS 12–18.7 and 26.0–26.1. If you installed it, move your funds.
DarkSword, a leaked Safari exploit, is being used to steal iPhone seed phrases after a single malicious page visit. Update iOS now.
Ostium defaulted on a ~$15M loan from a Hong Kong lender after its $24M July hack. The lender sued in New York federal court.
🚨 Rekt Report
BitMEX ended exchange operations. Leftover balances now pay a 1% p.a. fee (min $50), so withdraw.
Fake Cloudflare CAPTCHA cost a top Axiom trader ~$600K. If a “verification” page asks you to run a script, close the tab.
Linera, an a16z-backed L1, is shutting down after its Sonar token sale fell short of its $1.5M minimum. It raised ~$12M in total.
Switchboard is closing. The oracle blames AI-built oracles, direct data-licensing deals like Hyperliquid x S&P, high costs, and recent exploits.
Fetch.ai paused AGIX-to-FET conversions and its Ethereum bridge after an exploit on the SingularityNET bridge. The team says the attack is contained.
Nostra‘s Starknet money market was drained of ~$3.5M after a manipulated NSTR oracle price let one account borrow against NSTR collateral. The market is paused.
🐦⬛ X Hits
- 14 AI & Crypto projects.
- Easy explanation of Pearl.
- MetaLeX on programmable companies.
- The emerging onchain equity market report
- Beginners guide to the Bull Cycle of 2026
😂 Meme
Until next time,
Edgy
Today’s email was written by Edgy and Yayya.
DISCLAIMER: I’m NOT a financial advisor. This content is for education and information purposes only. Crypto and DeFi are risky and speculative. Please do your research before investing.
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