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Memecoin Degens Raise Millions for Rare Cancer Research After a Father’s Plea

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A Pump.Fun memecoin zoomed from zero to an $80 million market capitalization on Thursday after a father’s plea for donations into a research study for his daughter’s rare brain cancer attracted swathes of crypto traders.

The token’s prices have since fallen 80% since a Thursday peak and trade at just over a cent as of Friday. But while late buyers are sitting on losses, the effort still raised over $1 million for the cause.

In an X post on Thursday, Runaway founder Siqi Chen said his daughter Mira was diagnosed with a type of brain tumor in September and that research and funding had “been lacking” because of how rare the condition was.

His GoFundMe page has raised 80% of its $300,000 target as of Thursday, with all proceeds going directly to research efforts at the Hankinson Lab at the Univerity of Colorado.

Chen also posted his Ethereum wallet on the X thread after user demand, later putting his Solana and Bitcoin addresses as users asked for more options.

And then Pump.Fun happened.

The platform lets anyone issue a token for less than $2 in capital, after which they choose the number of tokens, theme, and meme picture to accompany it. When the market capitalization of any token reaches $69,000, a portion of liquidity is deposited to the Solana-based exchange Raydium and burned.

A user created the MIRA token attached with a picture of Chen and his daughter, with no apparent objective except it being a token that can be traded just like any other memecoin. The user’s Pump.Fun profile shows MIRA was just one of the several tokens they created that day, with all the others failing to break a $6,000 market cap.

X user @Waddles_eth later purchased 50% of the supply and sent all of it to Chen, who boosted the memecoin on his X account.

That ensured virality for the token and sent prices from fractions of a penny to a peak of 8 cents early Thursday. The value of Chen’s token holdings went from $400,000 to over $18 million as the token went viral. It attracted a peak of $7 million in liquidity (worth in both Solana’s SOL and the memecoin) as the market became widely traded.

It attracted over $85 million in trading volumes and over 130,000 transactions, making it the most popular smallcap in the past 24 hours.

“I have been on the internet for 30 years and have seen some shit, but this is by far the craziest day of my life,” Chen wrote on X as prices rocketed. “I will be liquidating $1,000 worth of $MIRA every 10 minutes, perpetually. If change this schedule, i commit to announcing it 24 hours in advance.”

“If you want to rug it to $0, go for it — at the end of the day we set out to raise $200K and we will end up with at least $1M towards rare disease research,” Chen stated.

Community response to the whole event has been overwhelmingly positive, with several users pointing out how such memecoins can contribute to positive outcomes in the world.

Memecoins are largely based on virality, attention and community hype. They are considered non-serious among professional investors but have seen massive demand and preference in the past year compared to larger venture capital-backed crypto tokens — which are perceived as enriching rich investors at the expense of smaller retail traders.

But MIRA shifted some of the tides.

“I think memecoins are dumb and have no future and I don’t touch them. But if I wanted to make a case for them I would now know where to start,” X user @JaEsf said. “This is beautiful and quite crazy that you can do that with crypto. EVM, Solana or any chain. This is why Crypto exist! Simplify movement of assets,” said @mbaril010, another X user.

Meanwhile, @waddles_eth, the user who originally sent half the token’s supply to Chen, said the overall outcome met their expectations.

“When I saw the story about Mira and her illness, I thought it would be good to buy and send supply to you with the hopes of getting the SOL community behind a good cause on Christmas,” they said in a now-viral X post. “I’m really glad that it worked out the way that it has and I hope that the money helps to find a cure both for Mira and anyone else with her condition.”

Crypto for good may finally become a thing in the new year.

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CoinDesk 20 Performance Update: SUI and POL Rise 7.5%, Leading Index Higher

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CoinDesk Indices presents its daily market update, highlighting the performance of leaders and laggards in the CoinDesk 20 Index.

The CoinDesk 20 is currently trading at 2556.62, up 2.1% (+52.39) since 4 p.m. ET on Monday.

Fifteen of 20 assets are trading higher.

9am CoinDesk 20 Update for 2025-04-22: chart

Leaders: SUI (+7.5%) and POL (+7.5%).

Laggards: FIL (-4.5%) and XLM (-1.6%).

The CoinDesk 20 is a broad-based index traded on multiple platforms in several regions globally.

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Dutch Bank ING Said to Be Working on a New Stablecoin With Other TradFi and Crypto Firms

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Dutch bank ING is working on a stablecoin, looking to take advantage of Europe’s new cryptocurrency regulations that came into force last year, according to two people with knowledge of the plans.

ING’s stablecoin project could take the form of a consortium effort involving other banks and crypto service providers, both people said.

“ING is working on a stablecoin project with a few other banks. It’s moving slow as multiple banks need board approval to set up a joint entity,” one of the sources said.

ING declined to comment.

Europe’s Markets in Crypto Assets regime [MiCA] requires stablecoin issuers across EU member countries to hold an authorization license, while promoting the potential of euro-denominated stablecoins (the vast majority of the stablecoins in circulation are pegged to the U.S. dollar).

MiCA’s stablecoin rules, which also require issuers to maintain significant reserves in banks based in Europe, have strengthened compliant offerings like Circle’s euro stablecoin EURC over its main rival Tether, according to a note early this year from JPMorgan.

Banks like ING entering the European stablecoin space means French lender Société Générale, the first big bank to offer a stablecoin through its SG Forge innovation division, will soon have some competition.

Read more: Stablecoin Market Could Grow to $2T by End-2028: Standard Chartered

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DAO Infrastructure Provider Tally Raises $8M to Scale On-Chain Governance

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Tally, a leader in on-chain governance tooling, has secured $8 million in Series A funding aimed at scaling its governance technology to more crypto-native decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs).

Tally is best known for the Tally Protocol, which powers infrastructure to help leading protocols conduct effective on-chain governance of their DAOs, including Arbitrum, Uniswap DAO, ZKsync, Wormhole, Eigenlayer, Obol and Hyperlane.

«We’ve built this complete stack of software for operating these on-chain organizations,» Dennison Bertram, CEO and co-founder of Tally Protocol, said in an interview with CoinDesk. «We can take you from your idea to launching your token, to distributing your membership or ownership, all the way to the value accrual for your protocol.»

The platform began as a DAO governance tool and has evolved into the most widely adopted software stack for on-chain organizations across the Ethereum and Solana blockchains, it said in a release.

«On-chain governance and capital formation could, in theory, dramatically reduce the complexity and cost of forming and operating organizations by moving these processes entirely into software rather than traditional jurisdictions guided by platforms like Tally,» Bertram said.

One day, on-chain organizations might be seen as a way to compete with nation states, he argued, referencing the costly and lawyer-intensive process of registering foundations and other legal entities typically used for crypto.

«Whoever embraces crypto really fully might actually be embracing fully the future,» he said.

Fixing vote turnout for better governance

One issue that Tally aims to tackle with funding from the Series A is low voter participation and apathy in DAO governance, which has led to sometimes controversial outcomes.

Last year, for example, a group of CompoundDAO token holders, called Golden Boys, successfully passed a controversial proposal to create a yield-bearing product called goldCOMP.

Despite initially gaining traction, the proposal faced significant controversy due to perceived irregularities, low voter turnout and a lack of widespread community engagement.

Ultimately, the Golden Boys agreed to cancel goldCOMP, which highlighted the broader issue of governance apathy within DAOs rather than any technical exploit or malicious intent.

«Many of the people that you should expect to vote ‘no’ on something like this didn’t show up,» Bertram said in an earlier interview. «What it shows is that the democratic process of governing a DAO is imperfect and needs improvement.»

To address this, Tally has developed staking mechanisms designed to reward active governance participants economically. Users can stake their governance tokens to receive Tally Liquid Staked Tokens (tLSTs), earning passive, auto-compounding yields while retaining voting rights within DAOs.

“This fundraise is really about leaning into the original vision,” Bertram said. “Now that we’ve proven that this works, that you can have these large organizations, it’s time to really scale it up.”

Institutions are getting involved in DAOs

Bertram also emphasized that recent regulatory clarity and shifts in attitude toward crypto governance in the U.S. have opened the door for increased institutional participation in DAOs.

“With this clarity, we’re going to get a lot more participation, not necessarily from average Joe token holders, but actually from large organizations that depend on the infrastructure they’re building on,” he said. “These organizations are going to need and want the ability to actually govern the infrastructure that they operate on.”

Ultimately, Bertram sees Tally’s role as pivotal in advancing decentralized governance and unlocking greater economic value for token holders by directly rewarding active, informed participants.

«Given the new acceptance of crypto as a key driver of future value in America, it’s time to scale it beyond crypto and make it a core primitive for creating new organizations,” he said.

The round was led by Appworks and Blockchain Capital with participation from BitGo amongst others.

Tally previously raised $7.5 million in 2021 across two funding rounds.

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