Polymarket contracts price less than a 1% chance that President Donald Trump will resign today, as traders position into a 2 P.M. ET Oval Office announcement reported by multiple outlets citing a White House advisory.

The Oval Office announced the planned appearance, though the topic was not disclosed. According to his schedule, Trump spent Labor Day golfing with no public appearances, and his day ended at 5:39 P.M. ET.

Trading around Trump’s tenure and health has drawn sizable volume. As of early afternoon on Sept. 2, a same-day “resign today” market on Polymarket showed <1% odds with roughly $1 million traded, based on live market boards shared with CryptoSlate.

Broader timeframes price low single-digit probabilities: the year-end contract “Will Trump resign in 2025?” traded near 6%, while “Trump removed via 25th Amendment in 2025?” sat near 7%.

Amid a near-record low approval rate of 44% and a -7.6% net approval, a separate contract resolves on Trump’s polling floor, “How low will Trump’s approval rating go in 2025?,” priced a 40% approval or lower outcome at about 19%, with resolution tied to Nate Silver’s Silver Bulletin aggregator.

Market rules frame why odds cluster at the low end.

The resignation market pays out on an announcement alone by Dec. 31, 2025, irrespective of the effective date, per Polymarket’s rule set for the 2025 resignation contract.

Removal via the 25th requires a successful Section 4 process, meaning a Cabinet determination sustained by two-thirds of both chambers, per the 25th Amendment market. The approval market resolves to the green trend line published by Silver Bulletin.

Trading flurry follows online speculation about Trump’s health.

The White House disclosed on July 17 that the president was diagnosed with chronic venous insufficiency after leg swelling, with testing ruling out deep-vein thrombosis and cardiac issues, per an official physician memorandum posted by The White House.

Viral claims that Trump has “six to eight months to live” have been surfacing online based on “internet doctors’” assessment of the bruises on his hands. However, on Monday, Trump was reportedly photographed golfing near Washington, D.C., which added a fresh data point against “missing from public view” narratives, as People reported from the press pool.

In odd timing (for those indulging in conspiracy theory), VP J.D. Vance recently asserted that he is ready to be President should anything happen to Trump. Some have also claimed the images of Trump from this weekend are either a lookalike, fake, old, or show the president in very frail shape.

By 2 P.M. today, much of the social media weekend Zeitgeist will be solved, and millions will be paid out to those betting on the outcome via crypto’s always-present Polymarket prediction markets.

Rumor-driven markets can move fast, then mean-revert when new reporting lands. Today’s setup centers on the Oval Office announcement window and whether it alters the information environment that underpins these contracts.

Until that catalyst arrives, Polymarket’s same-day resignation line remains priced as a tail event, and the year-end resignation and removal contracts trade in the single digits.

Mentioned in this article

Our friend, collage artist Winston Smith, known for creating the iconic Dead Kennedys logo, is recovering from a heart attack that struck the day after his 73rd birthday, forcing him to postpone his planned San Francisco solo exhibition.

Smith, who illustrated album covers for Dead Kennedys, Green Day, and Pearl Jam, was hospitalized for three days and spent two weeks in rehabilitation. Now back at his cabin in the woods, he faces new health challenges, including a Type 2 diabetes diagnosis that requires significant lifestyle changes.

“As grim as this could’ve been, I’m weirdly grateful,” Smith said on his GoFundMe page, which has raised over $29,000 toward medical expenses and show rescheduling costs. The artist’s remote living situation — 500 feet down a steep canyon — has necessitated special emergency preparations, including a portable stretcher system for potential future evacuations.

The postponed exhibition “I Saw but I Did Not See” has been rescheduled as a one-night pop-up show at 111 Minna Gallery, featuring both new works and rarely seen classics. His wife, Chick, is helping manage his recovery and ensure compliance with doctors’ orders for a slower pace and dietary restrictions.

“Once you’ve had a heart attack the chances of having another, worse heart attack are greatly increased,” Smith says. “From the bottom of my heart, thank you for your generous donations, kind words, and thoughtful messages. Those have lifted my spirits in a big way.”

Previously:
• San Francisco: Winston Smith studio show and art sale
• Art of Punk videos: Winston Smith and the Dead Kennedys
• Dead Kennedy artist Winston Smith’s art exhibition in SF 4/4/2014
• Tote bag with Winston Smith’s iconic Alternative Tentacles logo
• San Francisco art show: Winston Smith, Penelope Rosemont, Dennis Cunningham
• Ronald Reagan collage art show by Winston Smith and friends
• George Orwell’s 1984 to be rewritten from a female perspective

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Fifteen years after he first committed code to Bitcoin Core, Jeff Garzik still thinks the protocol will “outlast everything,” yet he no longer believes its flagship scaling project can keep pace with user demand. During a conversation with Bitcoin historian Pete Rizzo, the Hemi founder dismissed the Lightning Network as a “red herring” and laid out a roadmap in which programmable Layer-2s, not payment channels, bring the next billion users to BTC.

Bitcoin Lightning Is A Dead End

“Lightning is a failure. Very few people are using it, and it kept BTC locked on a bad sidetrack,” Garzik said, adding that the network “was a way to pump Lightning instead of alternate working solutions like layer-twos.”
He pointed to hard numbers: “Look at the outcome. We have roughly 5,000 BTC on Lightning after seven years. Wrapped Bitcoin on Ethereum alone is 25 × that. Capital has already voted.”

Garzik blames Lightning’s limited traction on what he calls Bitcoin’s “vetocracy”—a governance culture in which any one faction can veto consensus changes. That culture, he argues, has “o-ified” the base layer since the 2017 block-size stalemate: “Bitcoin development basically stopped after 2017. OP_CAT, covenants—perfectly safe opcodes—have been studied to death, but the politics won’t let them in. So builders left. They went where they could ship.”

According to the former Core maintainer, the flight is measurable. Public Lightning capacity hovers near 5,300 BTC, or roughly $500 million, while Wrapped BTC and related bridged tokens now exceed 130,000 BTC—over $14 billion in raw collateral. Node counts tell the same story: about 16,000 publicly visible Lightning nodes versus more than 600,000 addresses holding Wrapped BTC.

Garzik’s critique is philosophical as well as technical. He repeated a line that startled the live audience: “Bitcoin is a social network first and a monetary network second. Its value comes from people coordinating around it, not from any single line of code. But that same social layer can veto innovation, and that’s how we got stuck.”

Because the social consensus resists base-layer change, Garzik sees the future in sidechains like his own project, Hemi. The platform embeds a fully validating BTC node inside an Ethereum-compatible roll-up, secured by proof-of-proof mining and BitVM fraud proofs. Smart contracts can “read and act on Bitcoin Layer-1 without custodial bridges,” he said, calling the design “EVM trial-by-fire grafted onto Bitcoin super-finality.”

“All the things built in the past fifteen years—stablecoins, DeFi, identity—are coming to Bitcoin. The only question is whether Lightning zealots will stand in the way.”

Lightning proponents note that capacity figures exclude private channels and that routing revenues are beginning to attract professional operators. Yet even bullish research from Fidelity Digital Assets concedes that public capacity has plateaued between 4,400 BTC and 5,600 BTC since 2022, growing far more in dollar terms than in coins.

Garzik argues that stagnation is structural: “Lightning is great if you want to move a coffee-cup’s worth of Bitcoin at light speed. It’s useless if you want autonomous lending, derivatives, or billion-dollar settlement. For that you need programmable trust, and Lightning doesn’t have it.”

But Bitcoin Will Outlive Everything

Despite the criticism, Garzik underlined that BTC’s monetary role is secure. “Bitcoin will live alongside gold. It’s the trunk; everything else is the foliage,” he said. The inevitability thesis rests on network effects, regulatory clarity, and deep-pocketed holders such as sovereign wealth funds: “Every incentive in the system points back to Bitcoin. That won’t change.”

But inevitability, he warned, is not growth: “Bitcoin isn’t going away, but it isn’t upgrading either. If we want self-sovereignty for eight billion people, we have to extend programmability without compromising the asset the world already trusts. That means Layer-2s—and that means leaving Lightning in the rear-view mirror.”

Whether the broader ecosystem agrees may hinge on tangible metrics in the coming year: capital allocated to Lightning versus emerging BitVM roll-ups, node counts versus wrapped-BTC supply, and, ultimately, the fees users are willing to pay for each path. For now, Garzik’s message is blunt: Bitcoin’s future is assured, but Lightning is not.

At press time, BTC traded at $108,838.

Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com

Editorial Process for bitcoinist is centered on delivering thoroughly researched, accurate, and unbiased content. We uphold strict sourcing standards, and each page undergoes diligent review by our team of top technology experts and seasoned editors. This process ensures the integrity, relevance, and value of our content for our readers.

• 63% of Trump meme coins have dropped more than 90% from their all-time highs.
• 57% not only crashed in price but also saw trading volume fall below $1,000 over the past 30 days.
• The Official Trump token peaked just after the inauguration but is now down nearly 90% in price.

Trump-themed meme coins flooded the market in early 2025, riding the wave of political momentum. But just months later, most of them crashed in price, lost liquidity, and were abandoned by traders.

Cryptonews analyzed Trump-related tokens and found that the vast majority have already failed. The Trump meme coin market shows how risky and messy political crypto can be — with coins rising and crashing fast, and signs that insiders might be cashing out.

Over Half of Trump Meme Coins Have Lost 90% From Their ATH

Our analysis shows that 63% of Trump-themed meme coins have fallen more than 90% from all-time highs (ATH). 58.5% of the tokens also recorded less than $1,000 in trading volume over the past 30 days — a sign of fading trader interest.

​​Most Trump meme coins are traded on decentralized exchanges (DEXs), where a single token can be split across multiple liquidity pools. This setup often results in wild swings in both volume and liquidity. A boom-and-bust pattern is common and is often driven by social media hype and speculative trading. A token’s trading volume might reach several million in one month and fall to just a few thousand the next.

This pattern is less visible in larger tokens like Official Trump (TRUMP), which maintains more consistent trading activity.

One example is TRUMP MAGA (MAGA), which was launched in the middle of the U.S. presidential campaign season. According to GeckoTerminal, its trading volume peaked in December and January, averaging around $105 million per month.

By March 1, the volume had declined to $59.3 million, and by April 1, it dropped to $5.9 million. This represents a decrease of approximately 94.38% over that period.

Abbass Abdul Sater, Head of Sales at Capital.com, told Cryptonews what affected the price of Official Trump. His comments also reflect broader trends seen across similar meme coins in this category:

The coin soared in value almost immediately, drawing in Trump supporters, speculators, and curious retail investors. But the excitement didn’t last long—within weeks, $TRUMP had lost nearly half its value. Reports pointed to insider sell-offs at the top, fueling accusations of a pump-and-dump scheme. With no real utility behind the token, many began to question whether the coin was ever more than a flashy fundraising tactic.

Q1 2025 Sees Spike in Trump Meme Coin Launches

Most Trump-themed meme coins were launched in Q1 2025, particularly in January and February. This timing highlights the strong influence of political context on their creation. The U.S. presidential inauguration took place in January, which likely contributed to the spike in token launches. On Jan. 17, Official Trump was deployed and remains one of the most actively traded Trump-related tokens to date.

The frenzy kicked off in early January, just ahead of Donald Trump’s inauguration, and quickly turned into a gold rush. February brought more of the same, as traders tried to mimic the success of Official Trump. But despite the flurry of new tokens, none managed to capture the same momentum. The trend spilled into March, yet the coins launched that month struggled to draw the kind of attention or trading volume seen in January.

However, some Trump-themed tokens were launched one or even two years earlier. For example, FreeTrump(TRUMP) was created over two years ago and listed in a Uniswap V2 pool on a DEX. The token is now considered inactive or “dead,” as its price has dropped nearly 100% from its all-time high of $0.0755 on May 31, 2024.

Final Thoughts

The Trump meme coin trend has shown to be highly sensitive to political sentiment and headline events. The first quarter of 2025 saw a surge in new token launches, especially in the run-up to Donald Trump’s inauguration. But while the hype was real, staying power wasn’t. Most of these tokens failed to hold attention, with many already seeing trading volumes collapse and prices drop more than 90% from their highs.

Official Trump hit its all-time high of $75.35 on Jan. 19, at the peak of public interest. While the token still sees relatively strong trading activity, its price has fallen to $7.80 as of April 8 — a nearly 90% decline. The sharp drop highlights just how fleeting the momentum can be for politically themed meme coins.

Abbass Abdul Sater pointed to deeper structural concerns:

Its structure raised red flags too, particularly around campaign finance rules, as it allowed for anonymous, unlimited contributions — potentially opening the door to a new kind of political dark money. The fallout has prompted calls for tighter regulation, and legal consequences may follow, from SEC investigations to potential lawsuits. While early participants and insiders walked away with gains, latecomers were left holding the bag. In the end, even though the coin crashed, it kept Trump’s base energized — and may have quietly helped fund other ventures behind the scenes.

In the end, Trump-themed tokens have largely acted as speculative vehicles rather than lasting assets. Without real utility or stronger ecosystems behind them, most are unlikely to bounce back — or remain relevant.

How We Did the Research

The analysis is based on open-source on-chain data, primarily from GeckoTerminal and CoinGecko. The majority of the tokens were traded on DEXs, where Trump-themed meme coins are most commonly found. Prices were tracked from each token’s launch until April 2, 2025.

Trump meme coins are highly fragmented. A single token may have several liquidity pools or duplicates. GeckoTerminal lists around 250 such tokens, but no official or complete registry exists.

Duplicate and overlapping pools were removed, resulting in a final dataset of 119 tokens, which provides a representative view of the current market. For the purpose of this analysis, tokens that had dropped more than 90% from their all-time high were categorized as “dead.”

The post Research: Over 60% of Trump Meme Coins Are Dead appeared first on Cryptonews.

Plus: Fake GitHub repos are hiding crypto-stealing malware

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I’m already getting ready to pack my bags and go back home from my vacation, but I’m still somewhere in the middle of a desert rn.

I saw a mirage, and it made me think of a chart – so I’m here to give you a quick update before I melt.

Market flavor today

News drops

Here’s the news that left me thirstier for answers than I was for water after hiking miles through the sand:

No backdoor for Bybit hackers

Chainflip just dropped a major security update, blocking the $1.4 billion Bybit hackers from using its platform to cash out. Brokers now have the power to reject flagged BTC, ETH, and ERC-20 deposits, instantly bouncing them back. And forget waiting on regulators – Chainflip says crypto platforms have all the necessary means to stop stolen funds on their own.

GitVenom is slithering through GitHub, watch out

Hackers are planting sneaky malware in fake GitHub projects to swipe crypto and login info. They dress them up with AI-generated instructions and fake contributions to seem legit. Kaspersky says this has been going on for years, so yeah… don’t trust random code on the internet.

AI bots quit speaking human mid-chat

Mid-conversation, two AI bots recognized their own kind and ditched English for “Gibberlink mode,” an exclusive machine-only dialect. This system, cooked up by Meta, runs on GGWave, a sound-based tech that gives off serious dial-up modem nostalgia. While some doubted it, ElevenLabs verified the viral video, according to Starkov.

CBI goes full detective mode to track down $800M scam

The CBI just hit 60 spots across India, digging into the massive $800 million GainBitcoin scam. The scheme lured people in with promises of 10% monthly Bitcoin returns, only to swap their rewards for much less valuable crypto. Now, India’s Supreme Court wants mastermind Ajay Bhardwaj to spill the beans on his wallets so they can track down the missing funds.

Read more on these and other stories here.

Juicy meme