Weekend wrap: Trump pumps, Tornado Cash on MegaETH, solo miner wins $266K and more

TRUMP token rallies after President Trump says it’s “SO COOL”The Official Trump (TRUMP) memecoin linked to US President Donald Trump soared over 12% to $12.25 in 40 minutes on March 23, after the president called it “The greatest of them all” on social media.“I LOVE $TRUMP — SO COOL!!! The Greatest of them all!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” Trump said on Truth Social on March 23 at 2:33 am UTC.Nearly $250 million was added to the TRUMP token’s $2.5 billion market cap by 3:11 am before the memecoin fell back down to $11.38 about 90 minutes later, CoinGecko data shows and is now trading at $11.82.Despite being the 53rd largest coin by market cap, Trump’s post contributed to it being the eighth most-traded token over the last 24 hours with $1.4 billion in trading volume.Not everyone who bought TRUMP walked away a winner on March 23.One whale who previously banked around $108 million on TRUMP lost $207,000 from a recent trade; blockchain analytics firm Lookonchain pointed out.The TRUMP token has traded mostly downward and sideways ever since it reached a peak market cap of $14.6 billion on Jan. 19.Tornado Cash goes live on MegaETH testnetA largely unknown crypto developer who goes by the name “GUNBOATs” on X has launched crypto privacy mixer Tornado Cash on MegaETH testnet — a new Ethereum layer 2 blockchain looking to resolve Ethereum’s scalability issues. The crypto developer showed a command-line interface (terminal window) of the Tornado Cash smart contract “0x0cB…65142” deployed on the MegaETH testnet at block 1,397,845 — which was timestamped on March 21 at 5:41 pm UTC, according to the MegaETH explorer.The integration occurred shortly after the US Treasury Department removed Tornado Cash from its sanctions list on March 21 and two months after a US appeals court said the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control couldn’t sanction Tornado Cash smart contracts because they are not the property of a foreign national.MegaETH also launched its testnet on the same day the Tornado Cash sanction was lifted.While it isn’t clear if and when a full launch will occur, the company behind the MegaETH public testnet claims it offers “unparalleled performance” with 10 millisecond block times while processing around 20,000 transactions per second.Solo Bitcoin miner wins BTC block, banking $266KA solo Bitcoin miner believed to have been using a miner with less than one terahash per second (TS/s) has solved one of the blockchain’s blocks and earned a $266,552 reward.“Another solo miner found a block!! This time on a self hosted Public Pool. We can’t be sure but the guess is it was a miner with less than 1 TH/s,” Nerdminer Store said in a March 23 X post.The Bitcoin miner snared a total of 3.15 BTC for solving block 888,989, which was timestamped on March 23 at 1:30 am UTC, mempool.space data shows.That bounty included the current 3.125 Bitcoin subsidy and another 0.027 Bitcoin ($2,254) from transaction fees.If Nerdminer is correct in believing a miner with less than 1 TH/s was used to mine the block, the machine likely would have been a hand or pocket-sized rig that possesses a fraction of the hashrate that industrial-scale application-specific integrated circuits (ASIC) have.For context, the Bitcoin mining marketplace estimates that the odds of the 1.2TH/s rig mining a solo block on any day is one in 4.6 million chance.It comes after a 0.48 TH/s mining machine solved Bitcoin block 887,212 on March 10, banking $263,000 in total rewards.No, the IMF did not say Bitcoin is “digital gold”Bitcoin was mentioned several times in the International Monetary Fund’s seventh edition of its “Integrated Balance of Payments and International Investment Position Manual,” which was published on March 20 — but none of which referred to it as “digital gold,” contrary to some reports. The IMF provided classifications on “crypto assets” such as Bitcoin as a “medium of exchange” while stating that many new digital assets are designed to also act as a “store of value.”“This is a massive stretch to jump to: ‘IMF says bitcoin is digital gold,’” Satoshi Action Fund CEO Dennis Porter said in a March 23 X post.“[It’s] a good sign that the IMF is recognizing this but definitely not an endorsement of Bitcoin as ‘digital gold.’”The IMF also distinguished fungible tokens from non-fungible tokens and classified the latter as either a token designed to act as a medium of exchange or as a security.Bitcoin and “crypto assets” were among nine “major changes” to the seventh edition, which comprised 1,076 pages.The IMF’s seventh edition was released as it continues to negotiate with El Salvador over narrowing the scope of the country’s Bitcoin activities.Other news: Stablecoin issuer Tether is reportedly engaging with a Big Four accounting firm to audit its assets reserve and verify that its Tether (USDT) stablecoin is backed at a 1:1 ratio. The auditing of Tether’s $143.5 billion worth of assets is expected to be more straightforward under US President Donald Trump, Tether’s CEO Paolo Ardoino reportedly said.The CEO of Pakistan’s Crypto Council, Bilal Bin Saqib, has proposed using the country’s runoff energy to fuel Bitcoin mining at the Crypto Council’s inaugural meeting on March 21. It is reportedly exploring comprehensive regulatory frameworks to attract more foreign crypto investment into the country and potentially become a crypto hub.