October 23, 2025
A lawsuit alleged fraud around the MELANIA token and two prediction market companies were in talks to raise at $10B+ valuations.
Welcome to the Meridian Update, your daily on-chain report. What are your predictions for how much you’ll use prediction markets in the coming years? Let’s dive in.
We are a little late to this, but it needs to be shared
A theme of the on-chain world in 2025 is US law and regulation. Specifically, regulation and deregulation that points toward more things being possible, legal, or likely to happen on-chain. Serious people at the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), serious people in Congress, the President of the United States, and talks around the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) are genuinely attentive to the on-chain world, and generally in a way that makes Crypto Twitter happy, in 2025.
We are really not sure we can emphasize enough how much attention is going toward things like asset tokenization. It’s so much attention that off-chain markets players are doing or saying on-chain things almost constantly.
But the lawmakers and regulators aren’t the only game in town when it comes to, you know, law stuff! People can just, you know, sue people for things!
“A cryptocurrency promoted in January by US first lady Melania Trump was part of a sophisticated fraud that “leveraged celebrity association and ‘borrowed fame’ to sell legitimacy to unsuspecting investors,” a new legal filing has alleged.”
The story behind this story is really…something.
Something you probably do not think of as particularly presidential or First Lady-like (is that the right term?) is promoting a meme coin of oneself, or any meme coin for that matter. But it is 2025 and things are just, you know, happening. And they are happening on-chain. The CEO of BlackRock said we are at the beginning of the tokenization of everything. We at the Meridian Update think he is objectively wrong. We simply cannot be at the beginning. The beginning cannot have been later than the day the incoming First Lady of the United States tweeted that her meme coin was “live”:
“The Official Melania Meme is live!
You can buy $MELANIA now.
https://melaniameme.com
FUAfBo2jgks6gB4Z4LfZkqSZgzNucisEHqnNebaRxM1P”
That was months ago, in January of 2025. The gibberish at the end of the tweet was the mint address for the MELANIA token. You can think of the mint address as a unique identifier for a token on a blockchain, like a token’s phone number or social security number.
This tweet came two days after the US President-elect, Donald Trump, tweeted about his own meme coin:
“My NEW Official Trump Meme is HERE! It’s time to celebrate everything we stand for: WINNING! Join my very special Trump Community. GET YOUR $TRUMP NOW.”
We have not seen anything recently from the SEC, CFTC, or other regulators. We might’ve missed something. The President and First Lady tweeted about them, so it’s probably not an administration regulatory priority. But the law isn’t just about what the regulators do. It can also be about what lawsuits people bring against other people. So, some people are suing the people behind the launch of the MELANIA token, among other tokens.
It’s hard to say this whole story, regardless of how this lawsuit proceeds, will make people feel like things on-chain can be serious, productive, and not scammy. We certainly aren’t, and would never, say that something is a scam. We let stories speak for themselves. We’re just talking about how people might feel when reading a tweet from the incoming First Lady of the United States that includes a mint address for a *checks notes* meme coin centered on *checks notes* her.
Was there a prediction market on two prediction markets raising at the same time?
We don’t usually do reports/rumors…but what the heck, this is fun.
“*KALSHI SAID TO GET INVESTOR OFFERS AT MORE THAN $10B VALUATION: BBG”
Not to be outdone, second:
“*POLYMARKET IS SEEKING FUNDING AT A VALUATION OF UP TO $15B”
These reports were within hours of each other, which is funny. They also were within a few weeks of Kalshi announcing a raise and Polymarket announcing a raise.
We have talked about Polymarket here on the Meridian Update. Here’s what we said:
“We haven’t talked about prediction markets on the Meridian Update. What do prediction markets have to do with on-chain? Glad you asked. Prediction markets can be built on-chain. For example, Polymarket uses USDC, one of the stablecoins we’ve talked a lot about, for its transactions.”
Kalshi is another prediction market company. You might’ve seen their billboards or ads or whatever.
If the Meridian Update did predictions, which it does not, it would probably predict more tokenized prediction market products in the coming months. As a reminder, tokenization is a major theme of the on-chain world in 2025, according to us and the CEO of BlackRock.
That’s a wrap
A lawsuit alleged fraud around the MELANIA token and two prediction market companies were in talks to raise at $10B+ valuations. We’ll see you tomorrow morning.
Think we missed something today? Email email@meridianupdate.com.