GeckoPulse: March 13 to 20 Crypto News

In this edition of GeckoPulse, we summarize the key happenings of the crypto space of the week from March 13-20. Subscribe to our free daily newsletter to be the first to receive breaking updates!

Notable Coins of the Week

Bittensor (TAO) & Templar (SN3)

TAO is the native token of the Bittensor ecosystem, a network hub for participants to contribute meaningful AI work. These contributing participants are called subnets, each with their own specialized AI models/tasks. TAO rose to prominence this week as one of their subnets, Templar (SN3), successfully trained their LLM model, “Covenant-72B”, using decentralized excess computational power, their model showcased performance on par with popular Llama models.

This technical accomplishment was even picked up by famed investor Chamath Palihapitiya and Nvidia CEO, Jensen Huang, who praised Covenant-72B’s successful training run in a podcast. TAO indirectly benefitted from this positive news, rising over 40% since the announcement. The main contributor, SN3, tripled in price, reaching over $25.

Official Trump (TRUMP)

Trump’s official memecoin saw a short-lived pump this week, rising 43% in a single day after a second TRUMP-linked dinner event was announced. The top 297 holders are invited for a dinner event with US President Donald Trump, tentatively on April 25, 2026. TRUMP has since cooled off, though remaining at elevated price levels.

Pippin (PIPPIN)

PIPPIN, a Solana-based AI memecoin is down nearly 80% this week after recently being at its peak market capitalization of over $890M earlier in February. The extreme volatility is due to PIPPIN’s heavy insider control, with 120 wallets controlling over 80% of the token supply according to on-chain analytics platform, Bubblemaps. Most recently, Bubblemaps identified 2 whale wallets moving over $500K worth of PIPPIN to Gateio on March 17, presumably to sell their holdings.

DeFi News

S&P500 Is Officially Tokenized. TradeXYZ, the RWA/tokenized stocks project on Hyperliquid has secured an official license from S&P Dow Jones Indices to launch the first official S&P 500 perpetual futures on Hyperliquid.

Tempo Launches Mainnet. The Stripe-backed stablecoin focused blockchain has launched their mainnet with a payments protocol specifically designed for AI agents.

Crypto Layoffs Galore. Amid increasingly challenging crypto market environments, Cryptocom, Messari and Algorand all announced staff cuts this week.

The End of Tally. The DAO infrastructure tool that supported DeFi heavyweights such as Uniswap, Arbitrum and ENS, has announced their closure, cancelling their planned ICO. Tally cited challenging market conditions, as the market moved away from DAO governance structures.

The Launch of Aster Chain. Perp DEX Aster has finally launched its own L1, featuring 50ms block times and a network capacity of up to 100K transactions per second. Aster chain also offers the unique feature of encrypting all transactions such that trade history is hidden from the blockchain explorer, ensuring privacy.

HIP-3 Hits OI Records of $1.43B. Hyperliquid’s HIP-3 market open interest (OI) has surpassed $1.43B on the back of crude oil trades. Currently, among Hyperliquid’s top 30 active markets, only 7 are crypto pairs, with the remainder being tokenized stocks/commodities (HIP-3).

Token Generation Event (TGE) News

DeFi L2 Chain Katana. The L2 chain backed by Polygon has launched their token, KAT. The token launched with 15% of their supply airdropped to their community.

USDai Airdrop Checker Live. CHIP allocations for both ICO and Airdrop are now available on the USDAI app. USDai is a stablecoin backed by real world AI hardware infrastructure such as GPUs.

Regulatory News

Kraken’s IPO Delayed Indefinitely. The long awaited US IPO for Kraken crypto exchange has been put on hold due to “difficult market conditions”.

Wall-street Goes On-chain. The world’s two largest stock exchange operators, Nasdaq and ICE (the parent company of the NYSE) have teamed up with Kraken and OKX, to create and trade tokenized versions of traditional stock on blockchains.

NFT/Gaming News

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Others

Fed Holds Interest Rates Constant. The US Federal Reserve kept interest rates unchanged in the 3.5%-3.75% range in its latest meeting, as widely expected. 

Another Round of FTX Distributions. FTX is planning to distribute another $2.2 billion to creditors beginning at the end of the month. Users are expected to receive their funds within three business days from March 31.