In June so far, crypto investment products saw $2 billion in inflows, bringing the five-week total to $4.3 billion. Bitcoin and Ether-based products led the inflows, supported by the recent approval of spot Ether ETFs by the SEC. Meme coins had more mixed results, with Iggy Azalea's MOTHER token surging after a recent announcement, while others like PEPE and BONK declined. Additionally, the Ethereum layer-2 network Base reached a total value locked (TVL) of $8 billion, but it is dealing with challenges like increased scams and controversies involving the meme coin Normie.
June Sees $2B in Crypto Inflows
Digital asset investment products had a very positive start in June, with almost all providers seeing inflows. CoinShares published a weekly fund flows report on Jun. 10 that revealed that crypto investment products gathered more than $2 billion in inflows. These initial inflows for June brought the five-week total to $4.3 billion.
Additionally, trading volumes for exchange-traded products (ETPs) surged to $12.8 billion during the first week of June, which is a 55% increase compared to the previous week. CoinShares also revealed that almost all providers of crypto ETPs saw inflows, which is considered rather unusual, but is likely a response to weaker macroeconomic data. The asset manager also suggested that this shift in sentiment might be due to expectations of an earlier monetary policy rate cut in the U.S.
Flows by provider (Source: CoinShares)
Positive price action led to total assets under management (AUM) rising above $100 billion for the first time since March 2024. Among digital asset investment product providers, only Grayscale Investments and CoinShares XBT recorded outflows for the week. The iShares exchange-traded fund (ETF) in the United States recorded the highest inflows, with $948 million, followed by Fidelity ETFs with $680 million.
Bitcoin continued to dominate the ETF space with $1.97 billion in inflows for the week. Ether-based products also set records, with CoinShares reporting a total inflow of $69 million, the best week since March.
Flows by asset (Source: CoinShares)
This surge is likely because of the recent approval of spot Ether ETFs by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on May 23. Altcoin-based ETPs also saw some positive activity, with XRP showing inflows of $1.2 million.
MOTHER’s Surge
Certain meme coins also had a very successful start to June. The price of Iggy Azalea’s recently launched Mother Iggy (MOTHER) token surged after a recent surprising announcement. Holders of the MOTHER meme coin will now be able to buy mobile phones and monthly cellphone subscription plans as Azalea relaunches her old telecommunications company.
Azalea announced the relaunch in an X post, stating that phones and month-to-month cell plans could be bought using MOTHER or SOL tokens. After this announcement, the MOTHER token’s price rose by more than 30%, which caused it to trade at $0.1958 according to CoinMarketCap data. Since then, the price of the meme token has fallen to $0.1644.
Azalea added that the ad campaign for the mobile company’s relaunch will begin this week, which could increase the social media hype and upward momentum for the memecoin.
Despite MOTHER’s recent successes, some other meme tokens have been hit by double-digit drops over the past week . PEPE saw its price decline by more than 19% in the past seven days, and was trading at $0.00001163 at press time. Additionally, BONK and WIF saw their prices fall by 18.9% and 22% respectively.
Unlike most of the largest cryptocurrencies, meme coins have no intrinsic utility or underlying value. Retail supply and demand mechanics for meme tokens are widely based on social media hype, which then leads to very high price volatility.
Most of the recently-launched celebrity meme coins are in the red, aside from Azalea’s MOTHER token. The Caitlyn Jenner (JENNER) meme coin, which was launched by American media personality Caitlyn Jenner, is down more than 63% since its launch.
Base Hits $8B TVL
Things have been going rather well for the Ethereum layer-2 network Base as well. In fact, the total value locked (TVL) on Base passed $8 billion just days after overtaking Optimism’s OP Mainnet.
According to L2Beat data, Base's TVL stood at $8.05 billion on Jun. 10. Since then, Base’s TVL has dropped slightly to $7.87 billion. The Coinbase-supported chain recently became the largest chain within the Superchain ecosystem and is now the second-largest Ethereum scaler in TVL, behind Arbitrum One’s $18.27 billion.
Base was able to reach the $1 billion TVL mark on Feb. 27, just about seven months after its launch in August of 2023, and has seen huge growth over the last 104 days. It also leads all Ethereum layer-2s by transactions per second over the last month at 30.36, surpassing Arbitrum One at 23.52. Base processed 64.86 million transactions over the last 30 days.
Base has generated some very impressive on-chain profits over the last three months as well, including a record $16.9 million in March, according to Dune Analytics. Although profits fell 58.6% to $6.98 million in May, Base still leads OP Mainnet, which recorded $1.57 million in profits last month. Much of these profits came from the meme coin mania in early 2024.
However, Base's popularity with meme coins has also attracted scammers, leading to an 18-fold increase in funds stolen from phishing scams from January to March.
Normie Fires Intern
Base is also attracting attention for less impressive reasons. The memecoin project Normie on the blockchain Base, announced that it will be firing an intern after an offensive video was posted to its official X account.
The Normie team stated that they removed the video and apologized for any offense caused. The video was released on Jun. 10, showed a blue-skinned cartoon chef dancing with exaggerated features, which drew criticism from the crypto community. One user questioned how the intern alone could be responsible, and suggested that it was rather a failure in the oversight process.
Normie explained that the video's intended message was about finding a way out of difficult situations and promoting positive change, not trivializing sensitive topics.
Just last month, Normie faced a big setback when a smart contract exploit resulted in hackers stealing 225 Ether ($881,686) of users’ funds. This then ended up causing a $41.7-million drop in the token’s market cap in three hours. The project later agreed to the hacker’s offer to return 90% of the stolen tokens on the condition that Normie uses the recovered funds and its development wallet to launch a new token to reimburse holders.
On Jun. 7, Normie reported that it was able to recover 192 ETH from the incident and that it completed its token launch at a new address. Since Apr. 1, 372,642 new tokens have been launched on the Ethereum network, with 88% of them on Coinbase’s layer-2 blockchain Base.
