Crypto
Trump coin post on Truth Social
A Trump coin post on Truth Social (Shutterstock)
Bigly news

Trump doubles down on crypto with launch of Truth.Fi

Trump Media announced the launch of its financial services project, sending the stock soaring.

Yaël Bizouati-Kennedy

Today, Trump Media — the parent company of Truth Social — announced the launch of the financial services and FinTech brand Truth.Fi, which will focus on bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, as well as “customized” ETFs and separately managed accounts.

Investors loved the news, and Trump Media & Technology Group stock shot up nearly 17% in premarket trading and is up 6.6% as of 10:55 a.m. ET. 

The company’s board approved “up to $250 million, to be custodied by Charles Schwab,” according to the press release. CEO and Chairman Devin Nunes said:

“Developing American First investment vehicles is another step toward our goal of creating a robust ecosystem through which American patriots can protect themselves from the ever-present threat of cancellation, censorship, debanking, and privacy violations committed by Big Tech and woke corporations.”

President Trump is doubling down on his crypto endeavors despite what some perceive as a potential conflict of interest. This latest venture follows the launch (just before the inauguration) of crypto tokens trump and $MELANIA. 

Last week, a group of senators, including Sen. Elizabeth Warren, wrote a letter to Congress about their concerns around these coins, “including the threats from consumer ripoffs, corruption, and foreign influence, and President Trump’s conflicts of interest,” a statement read.

Crypto Twitter seems mostly bullish on this latest announcement. 

Sid Powell, CEO and cofounder of Maple, told Sherwood News that this shows that Trump’s inner circle “is serious about crypto” and that the move is positive for the industry.

“It benefits the sector by bringing it more into the mainstream and shows that companies are increasingly considering holding crypto assets on their balance sheets,” Powell said. “It reinforces the narrative that it is strategically important for the US to win in this sector."

Some experts have had more muted reactions, noting that this underscores both the growing importance of digital assets and the dangers of having high-profile endorsements.

“While it is a great idea that major political figures are bringing the crypto space into the mainstream, it also brings transparency issues, regulatory risks, and potential market instability,” Patrick Gruhn, former head of (now defunct) FTX Europe and founder of Perpetuals.com, told Sherwood.

According to Gruhn, while market sentiment is always very sensitive to high-profile endorsements, trust, security, and sensible regulation are essential for long-term success.

“The future of crypto should be about technological advancement and financial democratization,” Gruhn said, “not the temporary high hype and speculation can bring.”


Yaël Bizouati-Kennedy is a financial journalist who’s written for Dow Jones, The Financial Times Group, and Business Insider

More Crypto

See all Crypto
crypto

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.

crypto

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.

Latest Stories

Sherwood Media, LLC and Chartr Limited produce fresh and unique perspectives on topical financial news and are fully owned subsidiaries of Robinhood Markets, Inc., and any views expressed here do not necessarily reflect the views of any other Robinhood affiliate, including Robinhood Markets, Inc., Robinhood Financial LLC, Robinhood Securities, LLC, Robinhood Crypto, LLC, Robinhood Money, LLC, Robinhood U.K. Ltd, Robinhood Derivatives, LLC, Robinhood Gold, LLC, Robinhood Asset Management, LLC, Robinhood Credit, Inc., Robinhood Ventures DE, LLC and, where applicable, its managed investment vehicles.