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Guys Pretending to Be Lamps Are Making Bank (and Other Crypto Absurdities)

🔷 And ETH treasuries > BTC treasuries?

September 18, 2025

👋 Greetings, anon,

GM. This is The Chain, where you get a pulse on the best narratives and biggest trends in crypto every week, rain or shine.

Here are this week’s highlights:

💊 Pump Fun’s Creator Streams Are Insane
🪙 3 Altcoins That Are Up After Rate Cuts
🌊 HyperLiquid Stablecoin King Vote Is Decided
🔷 Will ETH Treasuries Outdo BTC Treasuries?

This has been a stranger week of sorts, with a whole lot of market anticipation leading up to rate cuts and a pretty boring market response. But there are a few key narratives here that don’t have much to do with rates, so get your notepads out and let’s jump in!

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💊 Pump.Fun Streams Making Strange People Very Rich

First, there were Twitch streams. Then YouTube streams. And now: Pump.Fun streams, crypto’s own take on the individual creator economy.

Except it’s pretty different: Pump.Fun creators are making more money than their Twitch and YouTube friends, and they’re a lot weirder.

Pump.Fun paid out $21 million in creator fees last week alone. To stream, you first launch your coin on the platform, then go live with their stream.

Streamers then earn a percentage of every transaction fee as viewers buy and sell their token.

Credit: Dune

And people are cashing in with all kinds of wild stream ideas. Here are a few that have been making headlines recently:

  • Two guys who are pretending to be lamps until they reach $10M market cap

  • Fitness influencer Bradley Martin slapped a guy on stream, earning him $49,000

  • A creator house talent show where a dude surfed on a piece of wood

  • Two guys earned $83,410 playing allegedly leaked Drake and The Future songs

  • An egg with a cowboy hat that’s just spinning… very slowly

  • Guy who will run on a treadmill till his coin hits a $100M market cap

And it’s working for Pump.fun as a business, too: the platform itself is doing $1 billion in revenue daily. That’s insane.

The model is interesting, and who knows if the current hype will last—but both investors and creators are making money, so content creation strategies may very well continue to evolve on Pump.Fun for a good while at least.

🪙 Market Pulse: 3 Cryptos Rose After Rate Cut

Fed Chair Jerome Powell has been in the hot seat for months as President Trump has berated him for not lowering rates. Now, after finally lowering them by 25 bps yesterday, crypto and stock markets had a pretty lukewarm response.

Why? Probably because the cut had already been priced in for a month or longer. Bitcoin is only up 1.13% in the past 24 hours since the decision. ETH only moved 0.57%. Small changes.

But a few tokens have outperformed majorly.

One of them is a token that has continued to make huge waves in the space as a newcomer this year: Hyperliquid (HYPE), up 6.1% in the past day.
—> Read more

Another is longtime industry staple BNB, which just hit a new all-time high of $1,000. It’s come a long way since the humble ICO price of $0.10 (that’s a 10,000x 😳).
—> Read more

And finally, Avalanche (AVAX) is up 12.42% today. The Avalanche Foundation announced last week that it’s raising $1B to start two AVAX treasury companies.
—> Read more

🌊 Hyperliquid Is All the Rage, and Arthur Hayes Agrees

If you hadn’t heard of Hyperliquid before this newsletter, you’ll probably hear about it a lot more in the future.

The layer 1 chain is designed specifically for perpetuals trading, and man, has it delivered. As a business, Hyperliquid currently makes about $3 million in revenue every day.

And now, the blockchain + business combo is about to have its own stablecoin. Many big names in Web3 were vying for the coveted right to launch USDH, Hyperliquid’s native stablecoin, including:

  • Ethena

  • Paxos

  • Sky

  • Agora

But when it was put down to a community vote earlier this week, none of those names took the cake. The winner was Native Markets by a huge 2/3rds majority.

This result raised questions and scrutiny about how Hyperliquid (and its community) love speed of development, potentially at the cost of safety.

Native Markets is a relative newcomer to the space, according to The Defiant, and doesn’t have the seasoned track record that its competitors do when it comes to stablecoin launches.

Crypto investor Arthur Hayes even put $1M into Ethena before the vote, believing that the Blackrock-backed DeFi protocol would win out. Alas.

But even though the criticisms about moving too quickly still stand, it’s also true that disruptors can’t disrupt anything if they do it all “by the books.” Touché, Hyperliquid.

Side story: Hyperliquid has competition now too in the form of Aster, and Binance co-founder CZ seems to be supporting it.

🔷 Could ETH Treasuries Outdo BTC Treasuries Long Term?

SharpLink gaming just did a buyback of 1M shares. It’s part of the company’s $1.5B stock buyback program.

Companies do buybacks for many reasons, but some common ones are as follows:

  • Signal confidence and that their stock is undervalued

  • Decrease the amount of shares on the public market

  • Increase earnings per share (and thus shareholder value)

Meanwhile, the Geoff Kendrick from Standard Chartered just said that he believes Ethereum DATS (digital asset treasury companies) “have the highest probability of being sustainable, and therefore ETH buying by DATs can continue at pace.”

His reasoning? Very simple: cryptos like ETH and SOL allow for DATs to engage in staking, while Bitcoin doesn’t.

That’s the same reason why a lot of people think institutional appetite will be bigger for ETH and SOL ETFs with staking yields than for BTC ETFs.

ETH = staking. Digital gold rock = no staking. Simple!

📩 Weekly Meme Delivery

⏳ Wrapping Up

In some ways, crypto is looking more like traditional finance—Bitcoin is moving in small amounts like the S&P 500, and institutional appetite is pouring in.

But in other ways, crypto feels as wild as ever, with insane Pump.fun stream ideas and fortunes being made or lost overnight in the form of meme tokens.

Our game plan is to not wish things were like they used be or to fear what they’ll become. Just to learn about what is happening in crypto.

Same time next week? Okay, sounds good.

Until next time,
The Chain Team

Note: This is the Newsletter Formerly Known as FOMOChain!

Farewell, old logo. You served us well.

Sometimes in life, you just need to chain-ge things up.

Looking to impress your crush? Buy a new outfit. Heck, buy two.

Bored with your home’s interior design? Pull a Chip and Joanna Gaines—bust down that wall between your kitchen and living room. It was screaming “open concept” anyway.

And if you’re aiming to become the number 1 weekly crypto newsletter (*ahem* yoohoo!), you need to constantly evolve into the best version of yourself. And thus, we arrive at our lil’ old rebrand!

“FOMOChain” is now The Chain. 🎉 

We want to be not just a chain, but the chain of crypto news for you, our readers. Let us know any way we can continue to make our newsletter better for you, and thank you so much for reading, as always.

- The Chain Team

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