Crypto

Bitcoin has lost almost a quarter of its value. The tech-heavy NASDAQ index on Wall Street has started to fall. And even leaders of the industry, such as the Google CEO Sundar Pichai, have started to warn about valuations getting out of control. We already knew that AI was driving a boom in investment. But this week there are worrying signs the market is about to crack. The only real question is whether that turns into a full scale crash. Bitcoin, as so often, is leading the market rout. More than $1 trillion has been wiped off the value of the crypto market over the last six weeks, with Bitcoin itself down by 28 percent since its peak.

“I will make sure the US is the crypto capital of the world,” Donald Trump vowed earlier this year. In July, he signed the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for US Stablecoins (Genius) Act. The Act creates federal guardrails for dollar-pegged stablecoins and regulates who can issue and redeem them. Concerns from law enforcement are also addressed, by making sure anti-money laundering and consumer regulation applies. But what are stablecoins? They are digital tokens built to stay at a stable price, usually one dollar. They sit on the blockchain – the computer protocol that makes crypto work – but what’s underpinning their value are real-world assets, usually cash or government bonds.

After a day where the very alive President Trump bombed a Venezuelan drugs boat, moved Space Force headquarters out of Colorado because that state has mail-in voting, declared he was sending federal troops into Chicago and claimed that AI generated a video of someone throwing a plastic bag of construction debris out of the window of the White House, it became clear that the real action was going on outside the White House walls, with Trump’s very rich sons. As Cockburn reported yesterday in The Spectator, the Trump Brothers, Don Jr, Eric, and the true genius behind the operations, Barron, had somehow amassed $5 billion in paper wealth thanks to savvy investments, based in no way on shady insider information, in WLFI, the family’s nascent cryptocurrency venture.

By one recent estimate, Trump’s foray into crypto has made his family almost $3 billion in six months and now accounts for up to 40 percent of his wealth.At the same time, his administration has been quietly dismantling guardrails around the crypto industry. Trump has slashed funding for key Treasury initiatives, scrapped proposed anti-fraud rules, and even pardoned crypto felons. Much of the hype – and money – comes from $TRUMP and $MELANIA, two so-called meme coins: cryptocurrencies driven by branding, jokes, or online fandom rather than real-world use. Yet despite having little practical function, the pair has already generated over $140 million in trading volume in just four months.

I don’t gamble. But in October 2016, I made a bet. It was obvious Trump didn’t just have skeletons in his closet but a walk-in necropolis. As we stumbled toward November, the question wasn’t whether one of these skeletons would break free, but just how bad the October Surprise would be. It was supposed to be a polling-shifting, election-sealing, reputational nuclear bomb. And if you read the press, that’s what the “Pussy-Grabbing Tape” was. But to me, it was just another example of Trump being vulgar. And Trump had always been vulgar. And voters liked that he was vulgar, or didn’t care that he was vulgar, or liked that he was so unlike other politicians that he could be vulgar.