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- 🤑 Hold $TRUMP, get Trump
🤑 Hold $TRUMP, get Trump
Plus, 🚀 BTC ETF inflows spike, 🪂 Zora fluffs token drop, 🧹 Solana purges weak validators, 📜 market structure bill update, 💰 Bitcoin ETFs recoup losses, and more!
Juan Aranovich
April 24, 2025
Hi! In today’s edition:
🍽️ $TRUMP dinner: Pay to play?
📊 Bitcoin ETFs rake it in
😵💫 Zora’s messy airdrop backfires
🧹 Solana boosts decentralization
🏛️ EXCLUSIVE Crypto market draft bill set for release
📈 BTC funds nearly erase YTD losses
The Financial Freedom Report explores the role currency and banking play in the civil liberties and human rights struggles of those living under authoritarian regimes and how Bitcoin is used to push back.
By Tikta, Veronica Irwin, and Steven Ehrlich
U.S. President Donald Trump will host a private dinner on May 22 at his Washington, D.C.-area Trump National Golf Club for the 220 people with the biggest and most sustained holdings of his memecoin, TRUMP.
The top 25 holders among the 220 will receive an additional invitation to a special VIP reception with Trump before the dinner.
The VIP reception had previously been marketed as a “Special VIP White House Tour,” but the White House reference has now been removed from the website.
The invitations are based on the individuals’ average holdings of TRUMP tokens from April 23 to May 12, with rankings determined by both the amount held and the duration of holding.
After the announcement, the TRUMP token surged 75% to an intraday high of $15.47.
TRUMP was launched just before the president’s January inauguration, and the project is partly owned by Trump-affiliated companies.
“Let that sink in: Trump, his family, and his businesses control the coin, so he’s essentially telling people to pump his asset if they want a seat at his table,” market commentator Brian Krassenstein said on X.
“It’s a pay-to-play scheme dressed up as a meme, and it’s everything America is supposed to stand against.”
“Oh and the lock-up period for insiders to dump the coin ended last week,” he said.
U.S. spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds saw a dramatic surge in inflows on Tuesday, totaling 16,898 BTC worth around $1.6 billion at current prices.
“Year-to-date, the average daily inflow across all U.S. spot ETFs stands at just 23 BTC,” onchain analytics firm Glassnode said. “This places yesterday’s figure more than 500x above the 2025 daily average.”
Crypto investment fund Swissblock noted that Tuesday marked the second-biggest day of inflows for spot bitcoin ETFs, second only to the day that immediately followed U.S. President Donald Trump’s election victory in November.
André Dragosch, Bitwise’s head of research, said that bitcoin ETF issuers had now become marginal buyers of BTC.
“They can actually determine whether you see negative or positive net buying volumes on BTC spot exchanges,” he said.
Zora, a Coinbase-backed onchain social platform, launched its native ZORA token on Wednesday and initiated a major airdrop targeting early adopters and active users.
However, the rollout triggered widespread confusion due to the lack of a formal announcement and the absence of an official claim portal at launch, forcing users to manually check and claim their allocations.
Eligible participants needed to manually verify their allocations and claim tokens by interacting with the contract on Coinbase’s layer 2 network, Base. The process was not intuitive for many, especially those unfamiliar with smart contract interactions, leading to frustration and confusion in the community.
X user @aadvark89 labeled the airdrop “a grift masterclass,” while another user with the handle @0xJohannes asked why the token had been airdropped to 2.4 million wallets when Zora had a total of just 508,000 users.
“Kind of insane how trading/airdrop already went live on multiple [centralized exchanges] but Zora has not made any announcements about allocations, claiming, etc. in two days,” blockchain sleuth ZachXBT said on X, noting that he had already sold his entire ZORA allocation and donated the proceeds to the Save the Children charity.
The Solana Foundation has introduced an update to its delegation program specifically designed to enhance network decentralization and reduce reliance on foundation support.
The new policy includes a validator rotation rule, under which every new validator admitted to the foundation’s delegation program will see three existing validators removed, provided that the existing validators have received foundation delegation for at least 18 months and have less than 1,000 SOL in external — non-foundation — stake.
The policy targets long-standing, underperforming validators who have not attracted a sufficient community stake. Remaining validators must demonstrate both technical reliability and the ability to attract an external stake.
The new measures took effect immediately. According to Blockworks data analyst and Solana validator Psilodelic, the foundation’s delegation program stake has dropped to around 10% of total network stake, down from 23% in the fourth quarter of 2022.
Psilodelic said: “Approximately 150 [Solana validators] currently meet the conditions to be off-boarded unless they can get more than 1,000 SOL delegated to them from other sources.”
Members of the U.S. House of Representatives Financial Services Committee may release a new discussion draft of a market structure bill as soon as this week, according to seven sources who have met with congressional staff working on the text.
The bill is expected to be largely similar to the Financial Innovation and Technology for the 21st Century Act, apart from a core difference in how it defines decentralization, a requirement for crypto tokens to be regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission rather than the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Congress is still working out final details, according to three sources who have met with staff or with the White House, which is taking an active role in shepherding the legislation along, in recent days.
But with influential firms shaping the definition of “control,” will the new bill favor founders, or finally draw a real distinction between securities and commodities?
BTC exchange-traded funds lost almost $17 billion as U.S. President Donald Trump’s trade wars spooked markets, but they are now staging a surging comeback.
Bitcoin started 2025 riding high on the back of Trump’s inauguration and his plan to make America a “bitcoin superpower.” However, the asset mostly went downhill after reaching a high of $108,786 on Jan. 20, the day that Trump retook the White House.
In the ensuing months, BTC dropped more than 26% as it got caught up in Trump’s trade wars and tariff threats.
So, with ETFs nearly back to even, can bitcoin finish what it started and break through to new all-time highs?
🚀 Strike founder Jack Mallers will lead Twenty One Capital, a Tether-backed firm launching with $3.6 billion in bitcoin and planning to go public via a special purpose acquisition company, creating the third-largest BTC treasury among public companies, alongside capital contributions from SoftBank, Bitfinex, and a $585 million raise.
🏛️ Russia’s central bank and finance ministry are reportedly launching a regulated crypto exchange under an experimental regime for wealthy investors, marking a shift toward formal crypto infrastructure despite the country’s ban on digital asset payments.
⚙️ Ethereum layer 2 Scroll announced on Wednesday that it had launched its Euclid upgrade, making it the first zero-knowledge rollup to reach Ethereum’s “stage 1” decentralization milestone, even as its total value locked dropped 94% from peak levels.
🔚 The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission this week dropped its fraud lawsuit against HEX founder Richard Schueler, a.k.a. Richard Heart, after a judge ruled that the agency had failed to present sufficient evidence connecting him to activities in the U.S., although he remains wanted in Europe on separate charges.
🎯 Ethereum layer 2 ZKsync recovered nearly $5.7 million in stolen ZK and ETH after the hacker behind its airdrop exploit accepted a 10% bounty offer, returning funds within the project’s 72-hour safe harbor window.
📲 PayPal will offer U.S. users 3.7% annual yield on its PYUSD stablecoin starting this summer, distributing rewards monthly to promote usage as competition in the stablecoin market heats up.
💵 SOL Strategies raised $500 million through a convertible note deal with ATW Partners to accumulate and stake solana tokens, boosting its validator network while its share price surged more than 25% following the announcement.
🔗 Symbiotic secured $29 million in a Pantera-led round to expand its staking protocol beyond Ethereum, aiming to secure more than 35 networks using a modular framework that allows any asset to back any chain.
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