This is a segment from the Empire newsletter. To read full editions, subscribe . Marc Andreessen was right — our timelines really are splitting. Andreessen, on the Joe Rogan Experience in late November, theorized that our timeline had already split twice in the previous four months. If that’s true, our universe has obviously diverged a third time with the launch of Trump’s official cryptocurrency, TRUMP, this past weekend. The first occurred when Trump was shot last July. “And there was that moment where the world was going to head in two totally different directions [if Trump died],” Andreessen said . Instead, we got the “most conspicuous display of physical bravery” he’s ever seen, referring to the almighty fist pump combined with a call to “fight, fight, fight!” — a killer combo now being used to promote TRUMP. “Right at that moment it could have gone, you know, horrifically badly for the entire world after that. So that was timeline split number one. That other timeline’s out there somewhere,” Andreessen said. “And I don’t want to visit it. That’s the bad place.” Trump’s win on election day in November caused the second rift, per Andreessen, paving the way for TRUMP to permanently split our timeline a third time — for better or worse. Melania’s team also appears to have launched a token, which has already flipped AI16Z and WIF. TRUMP’s coin is worldwide news. It was deployed on Solana on Friday evening and took only 90 minutes to hit a $1-billion market cap, and barely another day to break $10 billion — making it a top 20 coin alongside toncoin, sui, litecoin and shiba inu. While only 10% of the total TRUMP supply is currently available to the public, leading to some outcry, it’s hard to say how many people bought TRUMP on its way up. Onchain data points to 110,000 individual addresses acquiring it in its first three hours of DEX trading and over half a million within the first 16 hours. Currently, there’s over 900,000 addresses holding TRUMP, but it’s unlikely that figure maps to that many actual persons. Purple lines show where the timelines would’ve split, going by Andreessen’s theory Still, given volumes ranging in the billions on CEXs — where user holdings aren’t reflected onchain — that there could be a million TRUMP holders isn’t so unrealistic in our brand-new timeline. This universe is only three days old, so the rules aren’t yet clear. But there’s an obvious trend in the markets: Trump is up, almost everything else is down. Except for SOL, which hit a new all-time high after gaining over 20% amid the TRUMP pump, perhaps due to buzz about the next US President launching a token on the network. Since TRUMP was first issued — leading to a monstrous 400x — most major coins have lost value. BTC also jumped to a new record this morning, reaching as high as $108,786. Performance as of 4 am ET. The only other top-25 tokens (not counting stablecoins) to gain were AAVE and LINK, which were up 6% and 7.5% as of this morning. Both coins are tied to projects which are on track to integrate with Trump’s upcoming DeFi platform World Liberty Financial. Meanwhile, the WLF token sale has hugely benefited. It has raked in an additional $200 million overnight, sending total cumulative sales from under $90 million to its targeted $300 million. It’s not outside the realm of possibility that some of the funds that just flowed into the WLF token sale were generated by trading TRUMP on its way up. All this makes TRUMP much bigger than a memecoin. It’s a proof-of-concept that has demonstrated to the world what’s possible in this crypto-enabled timeline. Apparently, that’s creating billions of dollars in onchain capital at the drop of a MAGA hat. Start your day with top crypto insights from David Canellis and Katherine Ross. Subscribe to the Empire newsletter . Explore the growing intersection between crypto, macroeconomics, policy and finance with Ben Strack, Casey Wagner and Felix Jauvin. Subscribe to the Forward Guidance newsletter . Get alpha directly in your inbox with the 0xResearch newsletter — market highlights, charts, degen trade ideas, governance updates, and more. The Lightspeed newsletter is all things Solana, in your inbox, every day. Subscribe to daily Solana news from Jack Kubinec and Jeff Albus.
