WASHINGTON DC, UNITED STATES – MAY 30: United States President Donald Trump departs at the White House to U.S. Steel’s Irvin Works in West Mifflin, Pennsylvania in Washington D.C May 30, 2025.
Celal Gunes | Anadolu | Getty Images
President Donald Trump‘s new dollar-pegged stablecoin is off to a sluggish start, with muted inflows and little organic demand, new data shows.
The USD1 token — launched by Trump’s decentralized finance firm, World Liberty Financial — has so far failed to break out of a narrow speculative niche, according to Kaiko analyst Adam Morgan McCarthy.
“Trump is trying to launch this stablecoin in a massive, growing market that’s a quarter of a billion dollars in size already, and his token’s only really been successful so far on a niche market of a niche market,” McCarthy said. “It hasn’t managed to make the leap from decentralized staging platforms like PancakeSwap into centralized venues that serve the mass market.”
The U.S. dollar-backed USD1 saw a burst of activity on PancakeSwap, a decentralized exchange built on Binance’s smart chain, with average daily on-chain volumes topping $14 million following its listing on Binance May 22, according to new research from Kaiko. Volume on Binance itself has lagged at $8 million.
The coin’s limited reach is compounded by a lack of real users.
Kaiko’s data confirms that more than half of USD1’s liquidity on PancakeSwap comes from just three wallets — a level of concentration that raises questions about where actual demand is coming from.
“These were the market making wallets, so they’re probably tied to USD1 and the World Liberty Financial team, so not actually an organic volume,” added McCarthy.
Donald Trump Jr. told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” Tuesday that USD1 is a strategic asset, not just for the family, but for U.S. monetary policy.
“I think the stablecoins are actually going to be the savior of dollar hegemony in the world, not a detractor from it,” he said, pointing to companies like Tether, which rank among the world’s largest holders of U.S. Treasurys.
But unlike stablecoin giants like Tether and Circle, USD1 has yet to demonstrate broad-based adoption. Ripple’s new RLUSD token, for example, has averaged around $50 million in daily centralized exchange volume — far outpacing USD1, which remains thinly traded.
According to Kaiko analysts, one major reason that USD1 lags rivals is the absence of institutional partners or promotional incentives that typically generate early traction in the stablecoin market.
Beyond its stablecoin, World Liberty separately launched its own native token called WLFI, which also had a tepid debut but ultimately raised at least $550 million through token sales. World Liberty funnels 75% of profits to family-related entities.
The $TRUMP coin’s failure to generate meaningful traction on Binance is particularly notable, given the family’s ties to the Abu Dhabi–based MGX fund, which used USD1 for a $2 billion investment in March.
Kaiko’s McCarthy told CNBC that this kind of deal would typically boost visibility and volume — especially if paired with incentives like trading fee discounts or promotional listings.
“But with USD1, nothing’s happened with that,” McCarthy said. “It hasn’t caused any sort of velocity of the asset on-chain.”
The Trump family’s crypto ventures continue to draw scrutiny, with the $TRUMP meme token recently holding a contest for top holders to get a “special VIP tour” and have dinner with the president.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., described the winner’s dinner as “an orgy of corruption” and accused the president of using the presidency “to make himself richer through crypto.”
More than $5.2 billion in realized gains in the $TRUMP coin flowed to the top wallets, according to Inca Digital, while over 590,000 collectively lost $3.9 billion.
The gap between winners and losers has raised concerns about wealth concentration and retail trader exploitation — dynamics that critics say mirror the very financial system that crypto is trying to disrupt.
Today was the official start of racing at the Electrek Formula Sun Grand Prix 2025! There was a tremendous energy (and heat) on the ground at NCM Motorsports Park as nearly a dozen teams took to the track. Currently, as of writing, Stanford is ranked #1 in the SOV (Single-Occupant Vehicle) class with 68 registered laps. However, the fastest lap so far belongs to UC Berkeley, which clocked a 4:45 on the 3.15-mile track. That’s an average speed of just under 40 mph on nothing but solar energy. Not bad!
In the MOV (Multi-Occupant Vehicle) class, Polytechnique Montréal is narrowly ahead of Appalachian State by just 4 laps. At last year’s formula sun race, Polytechnique Montréal took first place overall in this class, and the team hopes to repeat that success. It’s still too early for prediction though, and anything can happen between now and the final day of racing on Saturday.
Congrats to the teams that made it on track today. We look forward to seeing even more out there tomorrow. In the meantime, here are some shots from today via the event’s wonderful photographer Cora Kennedy.
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The numbers are in and they are all bad for Tesla fans – the company sold just 5,000 Cybertruck models in Q4 of 2025, and built some 30% more “other” vehicles than it delivered. It just gets worse and worse, on today’s tension-building episode of Quick Charge!
We’ve also got day 1 coverage of the 2025 Electrek Formula Sun Grand Prix, reports that the Tesla Optimus program is in chaos after its chief engineer jumps ship, and a look ahead at the fresh new Hyundai IONIQ 2 set to bow early next year, thanks to some battery specs from the Kia EV2.
New episodes of Quick Charge are recorded, usually, Monday through Thursday (and sometimes Sunday). We’ll be posting bonus audio content from time to time as well, so be sure to follow and subscribe so you don’t miss a minute of Electrek’s high-voltage daily news.
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Tesla has launched its new Oasis Supercharger, the long-promised EV charging station of the future, with a solar farm and off-grid batteries.
Early in the deployment of the Supercharger network, Tesla promised to add solar arrays and batteries to the Supercharger stations, and CEO Elon Musk even said that most stations would be able to operate off-grid.
While Tesla did add solar and batteries to a few stations, the vast majority of them don’t have their own power system or have only minimal solar canopies.
Back in 2016, I asked Musk about this, and he said that it would now happen as Tesla had the “pieces now in place” with Supercharger V3, Powerpack V2, and SolarCity:
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All of these pieces have been in place for years, and Tesla has now discontinued the Powerpack in favor of the Megapack. The Supercharger network is also transitioning to V4 stations.
Yet, solar and battery deployment haven’t accelerated much in the decade since Musk made that comment, but it is finally happening.
Tesla has now unveiled the project and turned on most of the Supercharger stalls:
The project consists of 168 chargers, with half of them currently operational, making it one of the largest Supercharger stations in the world. However, that’s not even the most notable aspect of it.
The station is equipped with 11 MW of ground-mounted solar panels and canopies, spanning 30 acres of land, and 10 Tesla Megapacks with a total energy storage capacity of 39 MWh.
It can be operated off-grid, which is the case right now, according to Tesla.
With off-grid operations, Tesla was about to bring 84 stalls online just in time for the Fourth of July travel weekend. The rest of the stalls and a lounge are going to open later this year.
Electrek’s Take
This is awesome. A bit late, but awesome. This is what charging stations should be like: fully powered by renewable energy.
Unfortunately, it will be much harder to open those stations in the future due to legislation that Trump and the Republican Party have just passed, which removes incentives for solar and energy storage, adds taxes on them, and removes incentives to build batteries – all things that have helped Tesla considerably over the last few years.
The US is likely going to have a few tough years for EV adoption and renewable energy deployment.
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