• Stock markets rose for the fourth consecutive day as tech companies saw gains and investors interpreted President Donald Trump’s Friday comments on tariff negotiations.

Stock markets rose slightly Friday on the back of gains in tech stocks like Alphabet and Nvidia as well as conflicting messages from President Donald Trump on tariffs. The S&P 500 was up 0.75%, the Dow Jones was flat, and the tech-heavy Nasdaq jumped 1.25%. The rise caps off a positive week for markets. The S&P 500 is up 5.6% from Monday morning.

On Thursday, Alphabet, the parent company of search giant Google, beat analysts’ predictions for its first quarter and grew its top line year over year in Q1 by 12% to $90.2 billion. From market close Thursday to Friday afternoon, its stock rose 1.5%. AI chipmaker Nvidia saw an even bigger jump of 4.3% after an executive said Thursday that the tech giant hasn’t seen a pullback in demand for its chips.

Meanwhile, in a wide-ranging interview with Time published on Friday, Trump promised potential relief to investors when he said he’s made “200 deals” on tariffs. He declined to say which countries and promised that initial negotiations would end in three to four weeks.

Conversely, in what could be a bearish signal for global markets, he stated that he would consider it a “total victory” if tariffs on foreign imports were anywhere between 20% and 50% in one year.

The small Friday surge in the stock market follows three days of positive jumps as markets look to regain their losses after Trump’s “Liberation Day.” On April 2, the president unveiled a base 10% tax on all countries’ exports and targeted China through a crescendo of tariffs, which culminated in a 145% tax on Chinese exports. Trump’s tariff plan prompted markets to tank amid investor fears of an all-out trade war.

Xi Jinping, the president of China, retaliated against the U.S. with reciprocal tariffs, and Trump has since broadcast that taxes against China will “come down substantially.” In his interview with Time, Trump said that he’s been in touch with Xi. Chinese officials, however, have repeatedly denied that they’ve been in negotiations with the Trump administration, though they have recently exempted some U.S. imports from their own retaliatory tariffs.

Markets have also closely tracked Trump’s comments on the Federal Reserve, the U.S. central bank. The president has repeatedly criticized Jerome Powell, chair of the Fed, for not cutting interest rates quickly enough. Trump’s criticisms reached a boiling point when he suggested last week that he had considered firing Powell, undercutting the Fed’s long-standing independence from the executive branch. The 47th president has since walked back his rhetoric and said he had “no intention” of firing the Fed chair.

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Abhi Pingle is a savvy trader. For a year and a half, he worked at Optiver, one of the top high-frequency trading firms. HFT shops employ traders known as quants who are highly skilled in programming and quantitative analysis. Mom-and-pop investors can’t hope to compete with quants’ trading know-how, but Pingle wants to change this. He and his two cofounders, brother Arijit Pingle and TK Kwon, have raised $20 million across two funding rounds to launch Theo, a trading platform that lets users earn money from strategies usually reserved for top-tier HFT firms. 

The trio drummed up $4.5 million in March 2024 in a seed round led by Manifold Trading, a quantitative investment firm. And, one year later, the three raised $15.5 million in a second round led by crypto investor Hack VC and Anthos Capital. Other investors in their company include Flowdesk and Selini Capital, as well as individuals from firms like Citadel, JPMorgan, Jane Street, and Optiver.

The two rounds were for token warrants, or promised allocations of a yet-to-be-released cryptocurrency. Abhi Pingle, who’s 26, declined to specify his startup’s most recent valuation.

Theo, whose name is inspired by the trading term “theoretical price,” is part of the broader DeFi, or decentralized finance, ecosystem. DeFi apps promise users access to financial services like loans or crypto trading without the need to engage with centralized institutions like banks or brokerages. Investors and traders have parked $95 billion into DeFi protocols and apps as of Thursday, according to DefiLlama. Pingle, however, told Fortune that Theo plans to branch out beyond just DeFi.

He and his other two cofounders went to Northwestern University, where they studied computer science. The trio then went on to work at both Optiver and IMC Trading and left their HFT firms in 2022 to work on a DeFi-focused blockchain called Canto, which notched initial success before flagging during the depths of crypto’s most recent bear market.

In late 2023, the three decided to become founders themselves and start Theo. “We're trying to minimize the actual decision-making or interactivity so that it’s as simple as just depositing—kind of like how you might deposit into your money market fund,” Pingle said.

The cofounders launched their trading platform in June and have let users deposit about $50 million into their protocol. Pingle said that, over the past three months, the average yield users have accrued is between 7% and 8%. And when measured over the last year, users, which include family offices and funds, have accrued between 18% and 20%.

The team plans to uncap the amount of funds investors can deposit by the end of April. And while their protocol has mainly interfaced with other popular DeFi apps like Aave and Hyperliquid, they plan to try out their trading strategies on centralized exchanges like Binance and Bybit. “I think longer term for us, we actually want to get integrated with more traditional markets as well,” he said.

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© Courtesy of Theo

President Donald Trump had the most lavish inauguration week in history, thanks to a record $239 million in donations from corporate supporters and executives, according to a Sunday filing with the Federal Election Commission. A hefty portion came from the crypto industry, which has been one of Trump’s most vocal supporters: Crypto firms and their leaders gave $18 million in inauguration donations to the 47th president. Other big donors include oil companies like Exxon Mobil, big tech firms like Google, and a lobby group for the U.S. vaping industry.

Ripple Labs, which has battled the Securities and Exchange Commission in a long-running court case, led the pack with almost $4.9 million. Ripple’s donation was the second largest among all donors. Pilgrim’s, one of the world’s largest poultry producers, gave the most with its $5 million donation.

Robinhood, the online brokerage that reaps a sizable percentage of its revenue from crypto trading, donated $2 million. Other large donors include some of the top names in the industry, including exchanges Coinbase, Kraken, and Crypto.com. The stablecoin issuer Circle, which recently filed to go public, and venture capital titan Paradigm, which saw its assets under management soar to near highs in 2024, also donated $1 million each.

View this interactive chart on Fortune.com

While many crypto companies had already publicly disclosed their donations to Trump’s inauguration, the Sunday filing shows the full extent to which the industry has showered the president with cash.

Under former President Joe Biden, the SEC led a widespread crackdown on the crypto industry as it alleged that the majority of cryptocurrencies are securities, or financial assets like stocks and bonds that must adhere to strict disclosure regimes. Faced with lawsuit after lawsuit, crypto executives amassed an unprecedented war chest and spent more than $130 million to sway congressional elections and elect pro-crypto candidates.

Crypto CEOs also rallied around Trump, who described himself as a “pro-crypto president.” Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, the cofounders of crypto exchange Gemini, pledged $1 million apiece to Trump’s reelection campaign. And Kraken cofounder and chairman Jesse Powell also donated $1 million.

After he won back the White House, Trump ushered in a crypto-friendly administration. He hired an AI and crypto czar, authorized the creation of a strategic Bitcoin and digital assets reserve, and oversaw the defanging of crypto litigation units at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the SEC, and the Department of Justice.

The SEC has since dismissed lawsuits filed or threatened against donors to Trump’s inauguration fund, including Coinbase, Crypto.com, Uniswap, Yuga Labs, Kraken, and Ripple.

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U.S. crypto exchange Coinbase launched a memecoin. Or rather, its subsidiary issued a “content coin.” Or maybe it just posted “on-chain” content? The distinctions are slippery but, however one defines Coinbase's actions, the response from the crypto industry has been withering—and put the publicly traded company on the defensive.

The controversy began on Wednesday when the social media team for Base, Coinbase’s blockchain, posted a picture that read, “Base is for everyone,” on Zora, an NFT platform that has pivoted to memecoins. When Base posted the image, Zora created a linked cryptocurrency, which soon rocketed to a market capitalization above $14 million before crashing to $1 million. It’s since rebounded to more than $12 million as of Friday evening, according to Dexscreener.

Base is for everyone. pic.twitter.com/gq3lLLuXO1

— Base (@base) April 16, 2025

Crypto industry commentators alleged that the token launch was a “pump-and-dump” scheme, or when influencers push—or ”pump”—up a cryptocurrency’s price only to sell—or ”dump”—the token for profit. “Base will never sell these tokens, and ​​these are not official network tokens for Base, Coinbase, or any other related product,” Coinbase said in a statement. So what exactly happened—did Coinbase actually launch a memecoin? And why are folks so angry? Here's a guide to the controversy:

What is Zora?

Founded in 2020, Zora was originally conceived as an NFT platform where users could turn images into non-fungible tokens others could buy and sell. But, as the NFT market dried up, Zora pivoted to memecoins, or cryptocurrencies that have no utility and have been traditionally based on online jokes.

Memecoins have become all the rage in crypto, so the pivot, which occurred in late February, made sense. “Zora is a social network where every post is a memecoin,” Dee Goens, the cofounder and COO of the startup, told Fortune in a statement.

The company issues its memecoins on Base, a layer-two blockchain built on top of Ethereum that Coinbase has promoted and developed. So, Jesse Pollak, a member of the Coinbase executive team who heads the company’s Base division, began to experiment with the platform.

He made a series of posts on Zora over the past six weeks that generated their own cryptocurrencies, including a picture of granola and an AI-generated image of a baby. “I totally agreed with that change,” Pollak told Fortune, in reference to Zora’s transition from NFTs to memecoins, “because it lets creators monetize better and lets them go viral faster.”

What’s a ‘content coin?’

On Wednesday, the corporate account for Base, not just Pollak, experimented with Zora and effectively launched its own memecoin, or what Pollak called a “content coin.” The term, he said, refers to cryptocurrencies associated with online media whose price can be interpreted as a reflection of a post's popularity.

“It's not just creators who are individuals who deserve to benefit from these technologies,” he said. “It's also brands.”

Traders soon bought up the “content coin” from Base. “People just thought it was a memecoin, and if there's an official memecoin launched by Coinbase, or Base, under that big brand, that everyone knows and loves, that is going to be the sole focus,” Alon Cohen, the cofounder of the memecoin launchpad Pump.fun, told Fortune.

I think there’s a reality where what base did is normal in a few years’ time

but it DEFINITELY isn’t today and that has resulted in hurt

I’m a huge advocate for the vision of “tokenizing everything” but you can’t change current market realities - if you launch a coin AND have…

— alon (@a1lon9) April 16, 2025

However, traders were mistaken that the memecoin would be Coinbase's "sole focus." Base made another post on Zora that generated another cryptocurrency, which prompted the original token’s price to plummet. 

After reeling from one memecoin debacle after another, some in crypto’s very online community felt a sense of deja vu. “When they launched the second coin, people felt quote, unquote rugged, and that's what was reflected in the chart,” said Cohen, referring to “rug pulls,” or when scammers hype up a crypto project only to disappear after cashing out victims’ money. 

What now?

The token’s price, however, recovered, and Pollak said the outrage was misplaced. Coinbase didn’t profit off the token launch, has no plans to sell its memecoin holdings, and is just experimenting with new technology. “This is just for creativity,” he said.

Cohen, whose company Pump.fun has become the standard bearer for memecoins, said he didn’t believe Coinbase and Pollak were acting maliciously. “They just didn't understand the market as well as they should have, and what they should have done,” he concluded.

*even the haters

— jesse.base.eth (@jessepollak) April 17, 2025

Despite the backlash, Pollak remains undaunted. He believes “content coins” are the future for online media. And on Friday, he continued to post on Zora. His most recent “memecoin”—or “content coin”—was connected with a screenshot of one of his recent X posts. “Base is for everyone,” it read. “Even the haters.”

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© Winni Wintermeyer for Fortune