In the wave of on-chain coins, can exchange tokens rise?

Recently, the cryptocurrency market has shown a trend of diversified development, with Bitcoin's market share dropping from 60% to 55%, marking the arrival of the altcoin season. Various hot projects are emerging in the market, showcasing a hundred flowers blooming. AI Agent-related projects are leading the trend, with a certain protocol's market value once exceeding $300 million; an AI project in a certain ecosystem also surpassed the $1 billion mark; another ecological coin achieved an increase of more than 10 times.

At the product level, the exchange's open interest has also hit new highs, surpassing $4.3 billion. Even the NFT sector, which was once overlooked by the market, has regained vitality, with multiple well-known projects issuing tokens in succession, driving up the prices of many blue-chip NFT projects in the Ethereum and Solana ecosystems.

Although the current market focus is mainly on on-chain projects, this does not mean that the tokens of centralized exchanges have been completely forgotten by the market. In fact, there is another potential catalyst in this bull market that cannot be ignored: Trump may be elected president of the United States again.

Trump's election may further bring cryptocurrency into the public eye. With the improvement of regulations and the relaxation of oversight, more external funds are expected to enter the cryptocurrency market. This trend has already been confirmed by the continuous net inflow of funds into Bitcoin and Ethereum spot ETFs.

It is worth noting that financial projects related to the Trump family have made large purchases of DeFi-related cryptocurrencies in the past month, including ETH, CBBTC, AAVE, LINK, ENA, and ONDO. How have these tokens performed after being purchased? What common characteristics do they share? Which concept coins are worth paying attention to? Let's explore these questions together.

Purchase Record Overview

Starting from November 30th, Trump-related financial projects have invested a total of $44.75 million in purchasing cryptocurrency. As of December 18th, all the coins held are in profit.

Interestingly, unlike traditional institutions that focus more on Bitcoin, the amount of Ethereum held by this project far exceeds that of Bitcoin, which may reflect their optimistic outlook on the future price trend of Ethereum.

As a leader in lending across the entire market, AAVE ranks first in TVL among all protocols, with a deposit size close to $40 billion, setting a new historical high. In the last seven days, the price of AAVE has increased by 35%. Additionally, the project's community has proposed a collaboration with AAVE, which is currently under further discussion at AaveDAO.

LINK is a well-known oracle project. On November 14th, a financial project related to Trump announced that it would adopt Chainlink as the standard for on-chain data and cross-chain connectivity to promote the large-scale application of DeFi in a safe and reliable manner.

The development of ENA is closely related to the current bull market. As its revenue comes from arbitrage between futures and spot markets, the more active the market sentiment, the higher the Ethereum funding rate, allowing Ethena to gain more profits. Recently, its TVL surpassed 6 billion USD, setting a new historical high. In terms of products, they have also partnered with a large asset management company to launch an RWA stablecoin based on government bond yields.

ONDO is the current leader in the RWA sector. After a well-known asset management company announced the launch of a related fund, Ondo Finance invested over $95 million, becoming the largest holder. In terms of compliance, legitimacy, capital scale, and market recognition, ONDO is in a leading position in the current RWA sector.

In addition to the aforementioned coins, COW is also worth paying attention to. The financial projects related to Trump used a certain decentralized exchange protocol for trading when purchasing these coins, which is why COW is also regarded as a related concept token.

Potential Coins to Focus on in the Future

Based on the investment logic of Trump's related financial projects, we can speculate on the coins they may focus on in the future.

The first choice is tokens that have a partnership with the project, such as AAVE and LINK. The second is projects with a "clear business model" and "stable actual returns." AAVE, LINK, ENA, ONDO, etc. all have clear product positioning, a large ecological user base, and actual revenue models. This indicates that they are more inclined to invest in protocols that can bring long-term value rather than chasing "novelty" or "pure concept" tokens.

LDO: Considering the project's significant holdings of ETH, it is evident that they are optimistic about Ethereum's long-term potential. With the maturity of Ethereum's staking mechanism and the possibility that ETFs could introduce Ethereum staking rates, LDO, as the largest liquid staking protocol within the Ethereum ecosystem, may become the preferred choice. Currently, LDO's TVL has reached 37 billion USD, accounting for 30% of the entire Ethereum staking market.

Pendle: Focused on the yield splitting market, allowing users to trade future yield rights. As the staking rates of Ethereum and the yield rates of protocols like USDe rise, the demand for yield trading markets continues to increase, making Pendle a focal point in this bull market. Recently, Pendle's TVL has surpassed $5 billion and it has established partnerships with several mainstream DeFi protocols.

UNI: As a pioneer of DeFi Summer, UNI is currently the most commonly used decentralized exchange, leading the field. Although the recently launched Unichain has failed to generate market buzz, this does not affect users' reliance on Uniswap products.

Summary: The Importance of Blue Chip Projects

Regarding Trump's significant purchase of cryptocurrencies related to financial projects, an analyst from a data analysis platform believes that this may be to gain more trust or to promote the development of his own projects by drawing attention to these assets. If these assets perform well, the project may also benefit from it.

The project actively lays out blue-chip projects, which not only enhances the market's confidence in mainstream DeFi protocols but also injects more institutional funds into the crypto market. This flow of funds further stabilizes the market and drives mainstream projects towards higher market value and development potential.