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That’s right, the Justin Sun who spent $6.2 million on a banana artwork (Peter Parks/Getty Images)

Justin Sun’s Tron plans to go public via a reverse merger with SRM Entertainment

Shares of SRM Entertainment surged over 253%.

Tron, the blockchain network founded by crypto billionaire Justin Sun, aims to go public with Nasdaq-listed SRM Entertainment via a reverse merger, according to a Financial Times’ report, which included that Eric Trump is expected to take a role in the firm, though Trump himself later denied he would be involved on X.

SRM Entertainment itself announced early Monday its strategic investment to jumpstart a Tron treasury strategy. The firm entered into a securities purchase agreement with a private investor for $100 million to “acquire up to an aggregate of 220 million shares of common stock at an exercise price of $0.50 per share,” the press release said. 

It continued, “The strategic investment, valued at $210,000,000 upon full exercise of the warrants, enables SRM to build a substantial TRON Treasury Strategy.”

The price of TRX, the native cryptocurrency for the Tron blockchain, has increased 3.2% in the last 24 hours, while shares of SRM Entertainment have skyrocketed, jumping nearly 300%. SRM Entertainment will change its name to Tron Inc., and Sun has been named as an adviser to the company.  

The announcements come almost one month after Sun said he was the top holder of the $TRUMP meme coin, getting him an invite to President Trump’s gala dinner. On top of his meme coin holdings, Sun owns a substantial amount of the native token from World Liberty Financial, a crypto venture that sends 75% of its net protocol revenue to DT Marks DEFI LLC, an entity connected to the sitting US president.

In February, roughly one month after the Tron founder announced he was purchasing an additional $45 million worth of World Liberty Financial’s WLFI token, bringing his total investment to $75 million, the SEC and Sun jointly asked a federal judge to pause the agency’s enforcement action on its civil fraud case against him, requesting the court to consider the interest of both parties as well as the public’s interest. 

In 2023, the SEC, tasked with regulating financial markets in the US, charged Sun and three of his companies — Tron Foundation Limited, BitTorrent Foundation Ltd., and Rainberry Inc. — for the unregistered sales of crypto asset securities and the fraudulent manipulation of TRX in secondary markets through wash trading.

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Hyperliquid reclaims all-time high

HYPE, the native token powering perpetuals exchange Hyperliquid and its underlying blockchain, rebounded to reclaim its all-time high previously set at the start of the month.

Treasury firms Hyperliquid Strategies and Hyperion DeFi have also rallied as the token increased double digits in the last 24 hours to trade as high as $76.70, rising past its record price set nearly two weeks ago, according to CoinGecko. In the interim between all-time highs, HYPE pulled back to around $53.

The token has several tailwinds, the first coming from ETF flows. Since their inception in May, HYPE ETFs have yet to record negative weekly outflows, posting a cumulative total net inflow of $171.8 million, per SoSoValue.

The second comes from Hyperliquid spending basically everything it earns in fees to buy HYPE, a mechanism embedded into the protocol’s codebase.

The venue’s buyback funding mechanism is set to add a new source of yield. Validators of the network activated “AQAv2,” which means stablecoin deployers will share about 90% of reserve yield revenue on their supply within the protocol.

Around $6.1 billion of Circle’s USDC resides in Hyperliquid, per DefiLlama. Accrual begins on August 26 and the first payment is made on October 3, the network announced in its Discord channel last week.

A substantial amount of capital is riding on different positions of HYPE. In total, a move down to under $53 would result in the liquidation nearly 1.8 million HYPE worth of leveraged long positions on the on-chain perps venue, or $131.7 million, data from CoinGlass shows. For the upside, a climb above $100 results in the liquidation of more than 3 million worth of leveraged HYPE short positions, or $221.5 million.

HYPE’s rebound to all-time high comes after Michael Selig, chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, defended his agency’s decision to approve regulated perpetuals, or futures contracts without expiration dates, CNBC reported on Monday.

Last month, the CFTC approved bitcoin perpetual futures trading in the US through regulated prediction markets firm Kalshi and an affiliate of centralized exchange Coinbase.

“Perps are highly likely to become lightly regulated and thus approved in the US,” said David Pakman, head of venture investments at CoinFund.

“We expect to see perps for many different types of assets, from commodities to equities,” Pakman told Sherwood News.

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Crypto market snaps back as sentiment lifts, with altcoins from ethereum to XRP soaring

The market capitalization of the crypto industry has jumped around $83.2 billion in the last 24 hours, with privacy-focused token Zcash and worldcoin, the native cryptocurrency of the network backed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, leading market gains, jumping over 22%.

But the last 24 hours have been good across the board:

Investors have been eager to see some positive signs around the Iranian conflict ending, coupled with hopeful outlooks around the CLARITY act, both breathing some life into assets, Kairos Research cofounder Ian Unsworth told Sherwood News.

Simon Shockey, a crypto strategist at crypto wallet infrastructure firm Privy, said the upswing stems from several things converging. He pointed to how alt markets broadly were very oversold following the bug found in Zcash that shook confidence.

Friday, Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox said Anthropic didn’t find any more serious bugs with the Zcash protocol after Shielded Labs requested the AI firm run a security audit of the network with Mythos.

Shockey added that the pool of willing sellers has dwindled. Even if structurally, AI is a much more compelling and asymmetric bet in the eyes of allocators, many of these crypto assets have simply run out of marginal sellers despite some shorter-term narrative-driven pumps. The only people left to sell at this point are the teams themselves and VCs.

Net-net: oversold conditions plus exhausted seller bases plus a macro backdrop thats stabilized equals a snapback, especially in names that have real usage or community conviction behind them,” Shockey told Sherwood.

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