Coindesk

Arthur Hayes, the chief investment officer of cryptocurrency venture capital firm Maelstrom, says he doubts Donald Trump’s government will get around to creating a strategic Bitcoin reserve, a policy many crypto enthusiasts are pinning their hopes on.“I don't think Trump will get around to doing a bitcoin reserve,” Hayes, the co-founder and former CEO of BitMex, said in an interview. “At the end of the day, I don't know how borrowing money to buy bitcoin helps on any of Trump's platforms.”Trump certainly sees the benefit crypto can bring him, having launched a couple of lucrative meme coins (crypto tokens with no utility other than to be volatile speculative instruments) prior to his inauguration. For hardline Bitcoin supporters, a U.S. strategic...

U.S. President Donald Trump and his entourage have already made tens of billions of dollars in profits (at least on paper) off of the Official Trump (TRUMP) and Melania Meme (MELANIA) tokens that launched on Solana in the last three days.Now trading at $42, TRUMP has surged to a $8.8 billion market capitalization, making it the 25th largest coin in the whole crypto ecosystem, just behind some CoinDesk 20 coins such as polkadot (DOT) and litecoin (LTC). (The CoinDesk 20 is an index of the top 20 cryptocurrencies by market cap excluding memecoins, stablecoins and exchange coins).MELANIA, for its part, has risen to a $945 million market cap, placing it 121st position among token projects. On-chain data shows that the...

Caroline Pham, one of the Republican commissioners at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, will take over the agency on an interim basis, according to two people familiar with the decision, as the administration of President Donald Trump shifts U.S. policy toward a friendlier relationship with digital assets.The CFTC stands to become a leading federal watchdog for crypto, and Pham takes over as acting chair at a point of major potential transition for the agency. Most of the early legislative efforts to establish a digital assets roadmap envision the CFTC taking over regulation of crypto spot markets for widely traded tokens such as bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum's ether (ETH). Those earlier bills are expected to be the foundation of crypto work...

World Liberty Financial (WLFI), the decentralized finance platform linked to Donald Trump and his family, purchased millions of dollars of cryptocurrencies in a buying frenzy on Monday hours before Trump's inauguration ceremony.The protocol's wallet address bought over $23.5 million of wrapped bitcoin (BTC), $29 million of Ethereum's ETH, $4.4 million of AAVE and $4.5 million of Tron's TRX, blockchain data by Arkham Intelligence shows. The address also purchased $4.5 million of Ethena and $5.5 million of Chainlink's LINK in over a dozen transactions through decentralized exchange CoW.The transactions happened as sales of the protocol's governance token WLFI picked up over the past few days after a lackluster launch last October. Over 21.7 billion of tokens ($1.08 billion) have been sold...

Tigran Gambaryan, the Binance executive who was kidnapped and illegally imprisoned in Nigeria for eight months, said it would be an honor to serve his country again, if asked to do so, fighting crypto crime under the new Trump administration.Gambaryan, who has been the head of financial crime compliance at Binance for the past two years, is a former federal agent and part of an elite group of early crypto tracers in the federal government, which included some high-profile investigations during Trump’s last term in office.“While I am not a political person, some of my most consequential casework occurred during the President-Elect’s previous term,” Gambaryan told Coindesk via email. “If given the opportunity, it would be an honor to serve...