Latest news with #MargauxNijkerk
Yahoo
14-05-2025
- Business
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The Protocol: Lido Avoids Major Hack
Welcome to The Protocol, CoinDesk's weekly wrap-up of the most important stories in cryptocurrency tech development. This is Margaux Nijkerk and Sam Kessler, CoinDesk's Tech team. In this issue: Hacking Attempt on Lido Results in 1.4 Ether Lost From Oracle Provider Bitcoin DeFi Security Improves as Rootstock Boosts Hashrate Share Ethereum's Next Upgrade 'Fusaka' Could Cut Layer-2 and Validator Costs Telegram Cracks Down on $8 billion Crypto Crime Marketplace Unknown block type "divider", specify a component for it in the ` option LIDO AVOIDS MAJOR SECURITY BREACH: Lido, Ethereum's largest liquid staking protocol, avoided a major security incident after one of its nine oracle keys was compromised in what appears to be a low-impact but serious breach involving validator operator Chorus One. Lido secures over 25% of all ether (ETH) staked on Ethereum, making it one of the most systemically important protocols in the Ethereum ecosystem. The compromised key was tied to a hot wallet used for oracle reporting, leading to the theft of just 1.46 ETH ($4,200) in gas fees. No user funds were affected, and no broader compromise was detected, per X posts from both Lido and Chorus One. — Tim Craig Read more. BITCOIN DEFI BLOSSOMING: Decentralized finance (DeFi) on the Bitcoin blockchain may still be in its infancy relative to Ethereum, but Bitcoin DeFi (BTCFi) is becoming safer and cheaper, crypto analytics firm Messari said in a new report. A central participant is Rootstock, one of the oldest Bitcoin layer-2 projects, crypto analytics firm Messari said in its "State of Rootstock" report. Rootstock is now secured by 81% of Bitcoin's total hashrate, meaning miners that account for amount the hashrate are also approving transactions on the layer 2. The figure was just 56% before the the onboarding of Foundry and Spiderpool, the world's largest and sixth-largest mining pools, respectively, in February. — Jamie Crawley Read more. FUSAKA PLANNING BEGINS: After the successful deployment last week of Pectra, Ethereum's biggest upgrade in more than a year, the network's core developers are already shifting focus to the next major chain upgrade: Fusaka. Pectra, the biggest code change to Ethereum since the Merge in 2022, introduced key changes aimed at making staking easier for institutions, improving wallet accessibility, and boosting transaction efficiency. Developers have already begun planning for Fusaka, the network's next upgrade, and have thus far agreed to include an Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) called "PeerDAS" that could help the network support larger "blobs" of transaction data. — Margaux Nijkerk Read more. TELEGRAM CRACKS DOWN ON CRYPTO CRIME MARKETPLACE: Messaging app Telegram has closed thousands of channels belonging to suspected Chinese crypto-crime marketplaces after new research shed light on the situation, according to Elliptic. The closure follows a report published by the blockchain analytics firm on Tuesday into the fast-growing Telegram-based marketplace called Xinbi Guarantee. The Colorado-incorporated marketplace has processed over $8.4 billion worth of transactions using Tether's USDT stablecoin since 2022. It facilitates services relating to money laundering, operating crypto scam compounds and other illicit services, such as intimidation and sex trafficking, according to Elliptic. — Tim Craig Read more. Unknown block type "divider", specify a component for it in the ` option Robinhood Markets (HOOD), the California-based financial services company, said it agreed to buy Canadian crypto firm WonderFi (WNDR) for $178.98 million. The all-cash acquisition values WonderFi at 36 Canadian cents per share, a 41% premium over its closing price prior to the announcement. — Omkar Godbole Read more. Stock and crypto trading platform eToro (ETOR) debuted at $52 a share on the Nasdaq exchange. The company raised about $312 million from investors by selling 6 million shares at a price of $52 a piece. The listing values the company at $4.2 billion. EToro became the first U.S. crypto company to go public following the market uncertainty wrought by President Donald Trump's tariff actions. — Helene Braun Read more. Unknown block type "divider", specify a component for it in the ` option The Gibraltar government said it plans to establish the world's first rules for the clearing and settlement of crypto derivatives, creating a regulatory framework to improve market integrity and reduce key risks. Working with the Gibraltar Financial Services Commission (GFSC) and crypto exchange Bullish (whose owner, Bullish Group, is also the parent of CoinDesk), the government has built a framework over the past six months that tailors traditional financial clearing regulations to the virtual asset market. — Jamie Crawley Read more. Unknown block type "divider", specify a component for it in the ` option May 14-16: Consensus, Toronto May 19-23: Solana Accelerate, New York City May 20-22: Avalanche Summit, London May 27-29: Bitcoin 2025, Las Vegas May 27-29: ETHPrague, Prague June 8-22: Berlin Blockchain Week, Berlin June 30-July 3: EthCC, Cannes July 16-18: Web3 Summit, Berlin Sept. 22-28: Korea Blockchain Week, Seoul Oct. 1-2: Token2049, Singapore Dec. 11-13: Solana Breakpoint, Abu Dhabi
Yahoo
13-05-2025
- Business
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CoinDesk Weekly Recap: Even ETH Is Up
It was a pretty positive week for crypto as prices rose, big deals were signed, and stablecoins continued to penetrate deep into the financial system. Even ETH, a perennial downer of late, rose sharply, reaching nearly $2300 at press time. The CoinDesk 20, a barometer for the whole market, has risen 15%-plus since Monday. Bitcoin was near ATH levels this week on the back of more positive 'trade' news. Bearish positions were liquidated and ETF flows were up, Omkar Godbole reported. ETH's resurgence may have had something to do with its Pectra upgrade, which went off without a hitch (as Ethereum upgrades tend to). Pectra will make staking easier (and bigger) and boost efficiency. Margaux Nijkerk, our Ethereum reporter, had the news. Coinbase signed the biggest acquisition in crypto history, a $2.9 billion deal for Deribit, a crypto options pioneer. Wall Street analysts said Coinbase is now a genuine player in derivatives, rivaling Binance. Still, the deal couldn't boost Coinbase's stock price, which took a hit on tariff-affected Q1 earnings. Helene Braun wrote about that. About those stablecoins… Meta (formerly Facebook) looks set to join the integration party; as does Stripe. But Senate Democrats are stalling the stablecoin bill, citing concerns about numerous questionable Trump crypto ventures. That delay could in turn affect the timetable for a more comprehensive 'market structure' bill. New Hampshire ('Live Free or Die') signed the U.S.'s first state crypto reserve law. Many more are set to follow, Jesse Hamilton reported. Meanwhile, Strike, which started as a bitcoin wallet, announced plans to get into bitcoin-based lending. Many expect the bitcoin credit market to expand from here. This happened the same week, another bitcoin lender — disgraced Celsius Founder Alex Mashinsky — was sentenced to 12 years in prison for securities fraud related to the last cycle. Hopefully, bitcoin lending will work out better this time in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Yahoo
02-05-2025
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The Protocol: Inside Movement's Token-Dump Scandal
Welcome to The Protocol, CoinDesk's weekly wrap-up of the most important stories in cryptocurrency tech development. I'm Margaux Nijkerk, the Ethereum protocol reporter on CoinDesk's Tech team. In this issue: Inside Movement's Token-Dump Scandal: Secret Contracts, Shadow Advisors and Hidden Middlemen Ethereum Could Supercharge Transaction Speed to 2,000 TPS Thanks to Bold New Proposal Bitcoin Debate on Looser Data Limits Brings to Mind the Divisive Ordinals Controversy Coinbase's Base Network Achieves 'Stage 1' Status, Reducing Centralization Risk Unknown block type "divider", specify a component for it in the ` option MOVEMENT'S TOKEN DUMP SCANDAL: Movement, a buzzy crypto startup supported by Trump's World Liberty Financial, was rumored to be closing a $100M series B round. Instead, following a CoinDesk investigation, the network is now at the center of an insider-dealing scandal that has exposed a seedy corner of crypto deal-making. Movement Labs is investigating whether it was misled into signing a market-making agreement that granted an obscure middleman control over 66 million MOVE tokens, triggering a $38 million selloff after the token's debut. Internal contracts show Rentech, a firm with no digital footprint, appearing on both sides of the deal, once as a Web3Port subsidiary and once as an agent of Movement Foundation, raising questions about self-dealing. Foundation officials initially flagged the Rentech deal as 'possibly the worst agreement' they had ever seen; experts warned it created incentives to pump MOVE's price before dumping tokens onto retail investors. The incident has exposed a rift within the Movement's top leadership: executives, legal counsel and advisors are all under scrutiny for their roles in facilitating the arrangement despite internal objections. — Sam Kessler Read more. ETH PROPOSAL AIMS TO RAISE GAS LIMIT CEILING: Ethereum Foundation researcher Dankrad Feist filed EIP-9698, a plan to let the blockchain's gas limit grow on autopilot over the next four years. The EIP introduces a deterministic 'exponential' schedule baked into client defaults, which nudges the gas limit upward by a tiny preset amount every epoch. These predictable gas limit increases allow current validators to keep their machines up to speed, cutting the need for sudden upgrades. If approved and implemented, the gas limit ceiling would climb from 36 million units to roughly 3.6 billion, allowing an estimated 6,000 simple transfers per block and over 2,000 transactions per second (TPS). Ethereum's current TPS is around 15-20 TPS. — Shaurya Malwa Read more. BITCOIN BLOCKCHAIN DATA DEBATES REIGNITES AS DEVELOPERS WEIGH DATA LIMITS: Bitcoin developers are again at odds over how the world's oldest and largest blockchain should handle storing information on-chain, with a proposal to relax long-standing limits on the size of data held sparking fierce debate reminiscent of 2023's battles over Ordinals. The blockchain's OP_RETURN feature allows people to attach a small piece of extra data to a transaction. It is often used for things like notes, timestamps or digital records. The proposed change would remove the 80-byte cap on such data, a limit originally designed to discourage spam and preserve the blockchain's financial integrity. Supporters argue the current limit is pointless because users are already bypassing it by using Taproot transactions, to hide data inside parts of the transaction meant for cryptographic signatures. Bitcoin Core developer Luke Dashjr called the proposal 'utter insanity' and warned that loosening data restrictions would accelerate what he sees as the degradation of Bitcoin's financial-first purpose. — Sam Reynolds Read more. BASE REACHES STAGE 1 ROLLUP STATUS: Base, the popular layer-2 network from cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase (COIN), is now a 'stage 1' rollup, said the company, setting up its path towards full decentralization. The transition to a 'stage 1' rollup comes as other layer-2s have also reached that milestone, making these networks less reliant on centralized entities. The move means that Base will now have a security council, a network of ten 'independent entities, which we chose from all around the globe,' said Tom Vieira, the head of product at Base, in an interview with CoinDesk. — Margaux Nijkerk Read more. Unknown block type "divider", specify a component for it in the ` option BlackRock is preparing to bring blockchain to the back office of one of its largest funds, filing to offer a digital share class of its $150 billion Treasury Trust money market fund through BNY Mellon. The new 'DLT Shares,' short for distributed ledger technology, won't hold crypto. BNY Mellon, the fund's exclusive distributor, intends to use blockchain to mirror share ownership records, an incremental step that could pave the way for broader adoption of tokenized cash, digital assets, or blockchain-based settlement infrastructure in traditional finance.— Sam Reynolds Read more. Libre, a tokenization firm that works closely with the likes of hedge fund Brevan Howard, investment management firm Hamilton Lane and Nomura's digital assets unit Laser Digital, plans to tokenize $500 million worth of Telegram debt as the blockchain-based Telegram Bond Fund (TBF) on the TON network that's linked to the messaging platform. TBF will offer accredited investors exposure to some of the around $2.35 billion of outstanding bonds issued by Telegram, providing institutional-grade yield products that will also be available as collateral for on-chain borrowing and product development on TON, Libre said. — Ian Allison Read more. Unknown block type "divider", specify a component for it in the ` option Coinbase (COIN) filed a brief in the U.S. Supreme Court case involving an Internal Revenue Service request for data on hundreds of thousands of its customers back in 2016, arguing the court should "protect Americans' privacy interests in digital information stored by third-party service providers." — Jesse Hamilton Read more. Arizona has broken new ground in what's been a race among U.S. states to see which may become first to set up a crypto reserve as a formal part of their fiscal strategy, getting legislation approved with mostly Republican lawmakers in support. It's unclear whether Governor Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, will look favorably on the legislation that was rejected by most Democratic lawmakers. She has vetoed a long list of bills in this session, and if she vetoes this, too, the matter is closed for the year. — Jesse Hamilton Read more. Unknown block type "divider", specify a component for it in the ` option April 30-May 1: Token 2049, Dubai May 14-16: Consensus, Toronto May 19-23: Solana Accelerate, New York City May 20-22: Avalanche Summit, London May 27-29: Bitcoin 2025, Las Vegas June 30-July 3: EthCC, Cannes Oct. 1-2: Token2049, Singapore
Yahoo
16-04-2025
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The Protocol: Nvidia To Manufacture AI Supercomputers in U.S., New Opportunities for Crypto Miners
Welcome to The Protocol, CoinDesk's weekly wrap-up of the most important stories in cryptocurrency tech development. We're Margaux Nijkerk and Sam Kessler, reporters on CoinDesk's Tech team. In this issue: Can Ethereum Be Truly Private? Developers Push for Encrypted Mempool, Default Privacy Nvidia Moves AI Supercomputer Production to U.S., Opening New Avenues for Crypto Miners MIT-Incubated Optimum Raises $11M Seed Round to Build Web3's Missing Memory Layer Noble's New 'AppLayer' Lets Developers Build Stablecoin Tools on Celestia This article is featured in the latest issue of The Protocol, our weekly newsletter exploring the tech behind crypto, one block at a time. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Wednesday. PRIVACY HEATS UP AMONG ETHEREUM DEVS: When the U.S. government sanctioned the Ethereum-based crypto mixing service Tornado Cash in 2022, it ignited a debate within the crypto community that continues three years later. Advocates argued that complying with the sanctions amounted to censorship — undermining a fundamental cypherpunk principle. President Donald Trump supported the cypherpunks and lifted the sanctions on Tornado Cash in March of this year, but for some Ethereum developers, the situation highlighted a flaw within the network that still exists today: Why should users depend on third-party apps to transact privately on the network? Perhaps emboldened by the recent Tornado Cash developments, Ethereum developers and researchers have once again begun discussing ideas for making the Ethereum network private at its core. "Privacy must not be an optional feature that users must consciously enable — it must be the default state of the network," said PCaversaccio, whose post outlined his vision for a privacy-oriented Ethereum roadmap. "Ethereum's architecture must be designed to ensure that users are private by default, not by exception." In response to PCaversaccio's post, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin left a comment on the network's main developer forum with his own much shorter privacy-oriented Ethereum roadmap. Buterin suggested focusing on privacy for on-chain payments, anonymizing on-chain activity within applications, making communication on the network anonymous, and privatizing on-chain reads. To achieve all of this, Buterin listed various steps like integrating certain third-party privacy features into the core network. — Margaux Nijkerk and Sam Kessler Read more. NVIDIA AI SUPERCOMPUTER PRODUCTION PLANS COULD BENEFIT CRYPTO MINERS: Nvidia plans to manufacture its next generation of AI chips and supercomputers entirely in the U.S. for the first time, the company said in a statement. The move reflects rising demand for AI infrastructure and a broader push to localize advanced tech manufacturing — one that could also benefit crypto miners repurposing their facilities for AI and high-performance computing (HPC). Many of these operators already have access to the large-scale power and cooling systems needed for data center operations, making them potential players in the growing AI economy. Crypto miners, once singularly focused on hashing power, are increasingly looking for ways to fit into the AI and HPC supply chain. Their existing access to power-dense infrastructure and logistical experience in running industrial-scale operations gives them a foothold as demand for AI computation surges. Recent tariffs by U.S. President Donald Trump, however, is causing anxiety among miners as the policy changes are expected to raise costs on ASIC miners, electrical components, networking hardware and more.— Helene Braun Read more. MEMORY LAYER OPTIMUM RAISES $11M IN SEED: Optimum, a decentralized, performance-enhancing memory layer for any blockchain, raised an $11 million seed round, inviting its creators from institutions like Harvard and MIT to jump from the world of academia into the commercial crypto arena. The seed round was led by 1kx with participation from Robot Ventures, Finality Capital, Spartan, CMT Digital, SNZ, Triton Capital, Big Brain, CMS, Longhash, NGC, Animoca, GSR, Caladan, Reforge and others. Optimum is building what it calls the missing memory layer of blockchains, making the way data is stored, accessed and propagated, faster, cheaper and truly decentralized, according to a press release. At the core of Optimum's innovation is a method of decentralized coding for distributed systems, known as Random Linear Network Coding (RLNC), developed by Muriel Médard, an MIT professor. — Ian Allison Read more. NOBLE'S NEW 'APPLAYER' LETS DEVELOPERS BUILD STABLECOIN APPS ON TOP OF CELESTIA: Noble, a blockchain for issuing real-world assets (RWA) and stablecoins, announced Wednesday that it will expand its platform by introducing 'AppLayer,' an Ethereum-compatible rollup that allows developers to create their own RWA applications and infrastructure. Noble's AppLayer aims to let developers build new financial tools optimized for real-world assets like stablecoins — digital assets whose value is pegged to another asset, like the U.S. dollar. AppLayer will leverage Celestia, a data availability blockchain that aims to bring down storage costs for data-intensive blockchain networks. Celestia, like Noble, is plugged into the Cosmos blockchain ecosystem and is compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), meaning it can read smart contracts from other Ethereum-based chains. — Margaux Nijkerk Read more. Mantra's OM token fell from over $6 to under $0.45 in a matter of hours on Tuesday with no apparent catalyst. CEO John Mullin said in an X post on Wednesday that he would burn his team's tokens to win back the trust of the Mantra community. Mullin said the price drop resulted from exchanges closing OM positions, but members of the crypto community cast blame on the Mantra team. OKX founder Start Xu referred to the incident as "a big scandal." — Jamie Crawley Read more. Aiming to perhaps replicate Strategy's bitcoin (BTC) playbook, except with solana (SOL), fintech commercial real estate platform Janover (JNVR) has built a SOL stack worth roughly $21 million and seen its share price rise nearly 20-fold in less than a month. The company purchased earlier this week another 80,567 SOL tokens valued at approximately $10.5 million, bringing its total holdings to 163,651. — Krisztian Sandor Read more. DWF Labs is investing $25 million in World Liberty Financial (WLFI), the decentralized finance protocol backed by U.S. President Donald Trump and his family. The crypto market maker is also entering the U.S. market with a new office in New York City as part of its broader expansion plans, according to a press release. — Francisco Rodrigues Read more. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is not yet ready to make a decision on two critical features that issuers of the spot crypto exchange-traded funds (ETFs) are hoping to add to their products. The regulator delayed a decision on whether it will allow in-kind redemptions for WisdomTree's Bitcoin Fund (BTCW) and VanEck's Bitcoin Fund (BITB) and Ethereum Fund (ETHW). It also moved its deadline for a decision in regards to a proposal by Grayscale to allow staking its Ethereum Trust (ETHE) and Mini Ethereum Trust (ETH), which the asset manager's exchange, NYSE Arca had requested in February. — Helene Braun Read more. Seychelles-based cryptocurrency exchange OKX is expanding to the U.S. and establishing a new regional headquarters in San Jose, California. The exchange will rolling out access to its platform and its native OKX Wallet to U.S.-based crypto traders.— Cheyenne Ligon Read more. Search giant Google will only allow cryptocurrency exchanges and software wallets to advertise in the European Union if they hold a license under the EU's Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) regulation, starting April 23, the company announced. Google said advertisers must now obtain a certification from the company and demonstrate they are registered as a Crypto-Asset Service Provider (CASP) under MiCA. The company also requires advertisers to comply with any additional country-specific legal obligations.—Francisco Rodrigues Read more. April 30-May 1: Token 2049, Dubai May 14-16: Consensus, Toronto May 19-23: Solana Accelerate, New York City May 20-22: Avalanche Summit, London May 27-29: Bitcoin 2025, Las Vegas June 30-July 3: EthCC, Cannes Oct. 1-2: Token2049, Singapore
Yahoo
21-02-2025
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The Protocol: Story Protocol Launches Its IP-Focused Blockchain
Welcome to The Protocol, CoinDesk's weekly wrap-up of the most important stories in cryptocurrency tech development. I'm Margaux Nijkerk, CoinDesk's Ethereum reporter, filling in for Ben Schiller. In this issue: Story Protocol launches to let people register IP and get paid for it Ethereum developers release new initiative to simplify cross-chain transactions Ethereum L1 monad joins forces with Orderly Network for DeFi boost How a sitting president became crypto's most sought-after investor STORY PROTOCOL GOES LIVE: Story Protocol launched its intellectual property-focused blockchain and associated IP token last week. The blockchain is positioned as the "world's intellectual property network," providing users with a way to register their IP and track how others use it. The aptly named "$IP" token, which Story announced earlier this month, is used for transaction fees and offers users a vote in the platform's governance system. So far, the IP focused blockchain seems to have had legs — at least with investors. PIP Labs, the chain's primary developer, raised $80 million in a Series B venture funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), bringing the project's total funding to $140 million. PIP has sought to position Story at the intersection of blockchain and artificial intelligence, a way for people to track and get paid for data used to train AI models. The Story mainnet launch accompanies the first unlock event for the just-announced IP token. "Story is unlocking 25% of the initial 1 billion $IP, with 58.4% devoted to the ecosystem and community, foundation, and initial incentives," according to the project. — Sam Kessler Read more. ETHEREUM DEVELOPERS RELEASE NEW OPEN INTENTS FRAMEWORK: A group of top Ethereum developers and leaders released Wednesday a new framework that would simplify and standardize cross-chain token transfers. The initiative, called the Open Intents Framework (OIF), was kickstarted by contributors from the Ethereum Foundation and is supported by 25 projects including teams building layer-2s like Arbitrum, Optimism, ZKsync, and Scroll, according to a press release shared with goal of the initiative is to bring 'intents' to all corners of the Ethereum ecosystem, which is a technological feature that lets a blockchain user accomplish a specific goal by asking an intermediary to fulfill that goal (like a trade or transaction they want to make.) There are some standards out there that are already trying to make cross-chain transactions easier by using intents. ERC-7683, which was introduced by the team behind the decentralized exchange Uniswap and the Across protocol, is one of those standards circulating the Ethereum space lately, and is supposed to address fragmentation and allow more chains in the Ethereum ecosystem to interoperate. But the OIF team claims that they will build on that standard through their framework allowing intents to function at scale. 'By offering shared infrastructure and execution coordination, OIF makes intent-based transactions permissionless, efficient, and accessible for all projects,' the press release said. — Margaux Nijkerk Read more. MONAD AND ORDERLY JOIN FORCES: Monad, an Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) layer-1 blockchain about to launch its testnet, has joined forces with Orderly Network, a decentralized exchange (DEX) infrastructure supporting a range of other chains, as the platforms spread their nets wide in anticipation of a second decentralized finance (DeFi) summer. The arrival of the Monad testnet on Wednesday will provide traders with a fast EVM-compatible building site and the possibility of airdrops on the L1. Orderly's band of 20 or so market makers includes Wintermute, Selini and Riverside, according to a press release. Firms in the decentralized trading industry, which includes major exchanges like Coinbase (COIN), are hoping for surge of DeFi activity in the coming months as the crypto-friendly administration of President Donald Trump gives crypto a regulatory tailwind. The first DeFi summer, in 2020, came hot on the heels of Federal Reserve interest-rate cuts in response to the Covid outbreak. Orderly already offers users a shared order book across multiple blockchains, including Arbitrum, Optimism, Polygon, Base, Mantle and Near. — Ian Allison Read more. TRUMP - CRYPTO'S MOST INFLUENTIAL INVESTOR?: Crypto isn't all that different from politics. According to Rushi Manche, the founder of blockchain company Movement, "Crypto is an attention game."It's fitting, then, that Donald Trump — the master of all things attention — is so at home selling memecoins. But it's not just Trump's inner circle that's managed to capitalize on his crypto ventures, which include the $TRUMP coin and World Liberty Financial. Once a vocal crypto skeptic, the president has become the industry's largest "key opinion leader" — or KOL, in blockchain industry parlance: a trader whose portfolio is closely watched by other investors deciding what to buy and sell. Trump's foray into crypto has created a new go-to-market playbook for ambitious token peddlers like Manche — blockchain founders who realize pumping the price of a token can be as simple as elbowing into a sitting president's crypto portfolio. The president's primary vehicle for blockchain trades is World Liberty Financial (WLFI), a decentralized finance (DeFi) venture he announced with his sons over the summer. After accruing more than $400 million by selling a token, the company, which does not yet have a product, has built up a portfolio containing millions of dollars in the assets of other crypto projects. On Wednesday, it announced it was launching an official "strategic reserve" of crypto investments. The trades have already raised serious concerns about conflicts of interest, insider dealing, and the very nature of how influence is leveraged in the digital asset space. Trump's political opponents are calling for investigations into his growing blockchain empire. But crypto founders like Manche see World Liberty's crypto investments as something different: a once-in-a-generation marketing opportunity. "You need to have a product roadmap that makes sense," said Manche. "But you also need to have a strategy for your token." And what better way to boost the price of your cryptocurrency than by publicly tying it to the leader of the free world? — Sam Kessler Read more. Libra Token's Co-Creator Claimed He Paid Argentinian President Milei's Sister: It was unclear if any money was exchanged between Davis and Milei's inner circle in advance of Libra's launch. Danny Nelson reports. Will Argentinian President Milei's Crypto 'Fiasco' Be a Deathblow for Memecoin Craze?: The latest frenzy that started with U.S. President Donald Trump's TRUMP memecoin launch and saw traders making and losing millions within minutes, might have finally come crashing down with the LIBRA token fiasco. Regulatory and policy: EToro secures MiCA license from Cyprus to offer crypto services across EEA. Feb. 19-20, 2025: ConsensusHK, Hong Kong. Feb. 23-24: NFT Paris Feb 23-March 2: ETHDenver March 18-19: Digital Asset Summit, London May 14-16: Consensus, Toronto. May 27-29: Bitcoin 2025, Las Vegas.
