President Donald Trump has made a dramatic U-turn over a ‘critical industry’ he once described as ‘a scam’.
On social media on Sunday he announced the names of five cryptocurrencies he expects to include in a new US strategic reserve of cryptocurrencies on Sunday, spiking the market value of each.
The announcement marks a complete reversal in Trump’s thinking on the industry which he shared his frustration in 2021 by describing Bitcoin as a “scam” affecting the value of the US dollar.
‘Bitcoin, it just seems like a scam,’ Trump said in June of that year. ‘I don’t like it because it’s another currency competing against the dollar’ while adding that he wanted the dollar to be ‘the currency of the world.’
But on Sunday, Trump said in a post to Truth Social that his January executive order on digital assets would now create a stockpile of currencies including bitcoin, ether, XRP, solana and cardano. The names had not previously been announced.
More than an hour later, Trump added: ‘And, obviously, BTC and ETH, as other valuable Cryptocurrencies, will be at the heart of the Reserve.’
The mere mention of a federal-backed crypto reserve sent the crypto market surging about 10% adding $329 billion to crypto’s market capitalization within hours.
Bitcoin, the world’s largest cryptocurrency by market value, was up more than 9% at $92,700 on Sunday night.
Trump won support from the crypto industry in his 2024 election bid, and he has quickly moved to back their policy priorities.
He is hosting the first White House Crypto Summit on Friday, and his family has also launched its own coins.
Under his Democratic predecessor, Joe Biden, regulators cracked down on the industry in a bid to protect Americans from fraud and money laundering.
Under Trump, the Securities and Exchange Commission has withdrawn investigations into several crypto companies and dropped a lawsuit against Coinbase, the largest crypto exchange in the U.S.
But in recent weeks cryptocurrency prices are down sharply, with some of the biggest digital currencies erasing nearly all of the gains made after Trump’s election win triggered a wave of excitement across the industry.
Analysts say the market needs a reason to move higher, such as signs that the U.S. Federal Reserve plans to cut interest rates or a clear pro-crypto regulatory framework from the Trump administration. – Article James Gordon for DM. 3/3/2025.
PUMP AND DUMP – (P&D) is a form of securities fraud that involves artificially inflating the price of an owned stock through false and misleading positive statements (pump), in order to sell the cheaply purchased stock at a higher price (dump). Once the operators of the scheme “dump” (sell) their overvalued shares, the price falls and investors lose their money. This is most common with small-cap cryptocurrencies and very small corporations/companies, i.e. “microcaps”. – Wiki –
$LIBRA – THE SCALES OF INJUSTICE:
The scandal began with a tweet.
“The world wants to invest in Argentina,” Javier Milei, Argentina’s president, posted at 7:01 p.m. on Valentine’s Day, offering a code to buy a new cryptocurrency.
The digital coin was called $Libra, and it had been created 23 minutes earlier.
Over the next few hours, thousands of people invested. $Libra’s value skyrocketed.
Then it swiftly collapsed. The largest stakeholders had sold their coins, leaving almost everyone else with a collective $250 million in losses.
To cryptocurrency veterans, it was a classic “rug-pull.” A celebrity touts a new digital coin, prices soar and then insiders who own most of the coins pull the rug: They sell their stakes for a big profit at the expense of amateur investors who got in later.
To Argentina, it was a national scandal. The president, critics said, had just scammed his constituents. The opposition called for impeachment. Argentine citizens filed a dozen criminal complaints. A federal prosecutor opened an investigation, with Mr. Milei as a target.
Then Mr. Milei left for Washington. At the Conservative Political Action Conference on Saturday, he gave a combative speech ahead of President Trump, the other president who promoted a new cryptocurrency this year that soared and then crashed. That coin, $Trump, generated enormous profits for insiders and a cumulative $2 billion in losses for more than 800,000 other investors.
Mr. Trump has claimed ignorance. “I don’t know if it benefited” me, he said. “I don’t know much about it.” (The Trump family and its business partners earned nearly $100 million in trading fees alone on the coin.)
Following the ballooning $Libra scandal in Argentina, Mr. Milei took a similar approach. He did not earn a cent, he said. Instead, he blamed a small start-up in Singapore, KIP Protocol, that few in the crypto industry had heard of.
“You’ll notice that the company that organized the launch, KIP, explicitly stated that I had nothing to do with it,” he said in a prime time interview last week.
But Mr. Milei’s story has begun to unravel, showing how crypto and politics have increasingly blended to enrich the powerful and take from most everyone else.
The origins of the $Libra scandal trace back to a conference in Argentina last year, where an American crypto consultant and an Argentine business partner of Mr. Milei tried to sell access to the president, according to interviews and documents reviewed by The New York Times. It eventually led to meetings in the presidential offices and a planned partnership with Dave Portnoy, the founder of Barstool Sports.
Since the crash, evidence has emerged contradicting the president’s claims; critics in Argentina have accused his inner circle of taking bribes; and the American consultant, whom Mr. Milei last month referred to as an adviser, has admitted to amassing $100 million from the scheme.
“This is an insider’s game,” the American consultant, Hayden Davis, said about crypto coins in a video last week. “This is like an unregulated casino.”
Jack Nicas and David Yaffe-Bellany article for The New York Times – 28/2/2025.
– DOGECOIN price declined 12.4% on Friday, trading below $0.19 for the first time since November 2024. DOGE’s latest downturn coincided with spikes in daily active addresses, signaling active sell pressure from retail traders. Despite trending in oversold territories, the DOGE Relative Strength Index indicator continues to slope further downward.
On-chain data trends suggest retail traders’ panic selling is behind the latest DOGE price downturn.
Elon Musk’s collaboration with the Donald Trump campaign bolstered Dogecoin’s momentum as Trump secured re-election.
After delivering triple-digit growth in Q4 2024, DOGE has faced intense sell pressure, with the crypto market entering a retracement phase following Trump’s inauguration on January 20.
Article by Ibrahim Ajibade for FXStreet 02/28/2025
Elon Musk named the newly created Department Of Government Efficiency after DOGECOIN crypto currency in order to promote it without directly promoting it.
Mar 03, 2025 11:30:02 am
