The President Made $1 Billion From Crypto

Plus: 💵 140 companies launch a stablecoin to challenge Circle | 📋 SEC reevaluates for crypto and prediction-market ETFs structure and listing | ⚖️ Miles Guo gets 30 years

July 01, 2026

Hi! In today’s edition:

  • 💰 Trump filed his 2025 financial disclosure and his crypto earnings are likely to intensify ethics debates

  • 💵 140 companies, including BlackRock and Coinbase, just formed a coalition around a stablecoin that gives reserve earnings back to its partners

  • 📋 The SEC is asking whether some crypto and prediction-market funds should even be registered as investment companies 

  • ⚖️ A Chinese businessman who pitched followers on a gold-backed crypto token just got a long sentence

Trump's Crypto Gains Hit $1 Billion

President Donald Trump earned more than $1 billion from crypto in 2025, according to his annual financial disclosure released Tuesday by the Office of Government Ethics. 

Trump collected $635 million in royalties from his $TRUMP memecoin business, which launched days before his return to the White House, and more than $500 million from token sales tied to World Liberty Financial, his family's DeFi project, according to the disclosure. He also disclosed more than $50 million each in bitcoin and ether, $25 million in USDC, and stake in a stablecoin holding company under DT Marks SC LLC that generated over $196 million in revenue reportedly tied to an Abu Dhabi investment.

The disclosure arrived as bitcoin trades roughly 50% below its October all-time high, and as Senate Democrats push to include an ethics clause in the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act barring senior officials from holding personal crypto interests.

140 Companies Launch a Stablecoin to Rival Circle

More than 140 companies including Coinbase, Visa, Stripe, Mastercard, BlackRock, BNY, Google, and Shopify announced Open USD on Tuesday, a forthcoming dollar stablecoin built around a structure no major issuer has offered before: businesses mint and redeem for free, and partners receive all reserve earnings, less a small management fee. Open Standard, the independent company running the project, is led by founding CEO Zach Abrams, co-founder of Bridge, which Stripe acquired for $1.1 billion last year.

Circle (CRCL) fell roughly 13% on the news, hitting its lowest price since late February. Coinbase, which earns a share of USDC reserve revenues under its agreement with Circle, slipped about 4% even while signing onto the new coalition. Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire said the company welcomed "continued innovation and competition."

SEC Opens ETF Rulemaking for Crypto, Prediction Markets

The SEC opened a 60-day public comment period Tuesday on how to regulate "novel" exchange-traded funds, asking whether products built assets such as crypto and event contracts should count as investment companies under the Investment Company Act, and whether they should be listed according to the agency's standard listing pathway. 

The request for comment, issued under Chair Paul Atkins, follows a stretch in which the SEC cleared bitcoin, ether, Solana, and Dogecoin funds while blocking a queue of prediction-market ETF applications.

TD Cowen analyst Jaret Seiberg wrote to clients that the SEC appears to be laying groundwork for a broader lineup of fund types, including event-contract and single-stock strategies, with a potential rule change arriving as soon as 2027.

Miles Guo Gets 30 Years for Fraud, Including H-Coin

A federal judge sentenced Chinese businessman Miles Guo, also known as Ho Wan Kwok, to 30 years in prison Tuesday for leading what prosecutors called $1 billion in interrelated fraud schemes against thousands of victims across the U.S. and abroad. 

Guo, 57, had a long-standing relationship with former Trump adviser Steve Bannon. In 2021, Guo launched Himalaya Coin, or H-Coin, which he falsely claimed was 20% backed by gold with full downside protection. A jury convicted him in 2024 on counts including racketeering, fraud, and money laundering.

Guo was ordered to forfeit nearly $900 million in proceeds, along with a New Jersey mansion, a Rolls Royce Phantom, and a Bugatti.

🔊 Wednesday's Back-to-Back Lineup 📢

Strategy's STRC preferred just hit a record low below par, its at-the-market machine has stalled, and the company has already sold bitcoin to cover preferred dividends. Anchorage Digital Head of Research David Lawant joins Steven Ehrlich at 3pm ET to read what trading desks and market flows say about how far STRC can fall—and whether the digital-asset-treasury funding model is cracking or just repricing.

Then at 4pm ET, Kain Warwick and Taylor Monahan take on the fight over the ENS DAO's Security Council: is Nick Johnson protecting the protocol, or capturing it? They also dig into Open USD, the SecondFi hack that left Cardano users unable to rescue their funds, and the hidden code found inside Claude Code.

Join us on X, YouTube or PumpFun.

  • ⚖️ Binance and its founder Changpeng Zhao face a $200 million suit from nearly 1,700 UK investors over allegations it sold unauthorized derivatives products since 2019. The claimants say Binance kept offering the leveraged products even after the FCA banned retail crypto derivatives in 2021. 

  • 🏛️ The FCA set landmark crypto rules requiring exchanges, custodians, and stablecoin issuers to secure UK authorization, with the regulator cutting stablecoin capital buffers to 1% of issued value, below the EU's 2% threshold under MiCA. The mandatory regime takes effect in October 2027. 

  • 🏛️ 🇹🇼 Taiwan's Legislative Yuan passed a sweeping crypto law requiring all virtual asset providers to obtain FSC licensing, hold 100% stablecoin reserves, and face up to seven years in prison for unauthorized operations. President Lai Ching-te is expected to sign the bill within ten days. 

  • 🏦 MetaMask launched a Money Account paying up to 4% variable APY on mUSD balances while letting users trade, send, and spend from one self-custodial wallet built on Monad. The account rolls out first on mobile, with card spending and one-tap funding via mUSD, USDC, USDT, or DAI. 

  • ⚖️ Kalshi was hit with an order temporarily blocking its sports prediction markets in Michigan, after the state won a motion to keep the case in Ingham County Circuit Court. Attorney General Dana Nessel in the case filed in March alleges Kalshi has offered unlicensed sports betting disguised as event contracts. 

  • 🔒 StarkWare unveiled a post-quantum roadmap for Starknet, arguing its STARK-based proofs and native account abstraction give it a smoother migration path than Bitcoin, Ethereum, or Solana. The first phase, swapping Pedersen hashing for quantum-resistant BLAKE2, goes live on mainnet early this month. 

  • 🤖 OKX launched a marketplace where autonomous AI agents can hire each other and settle payments in USDT or USDG under a shared onchain reputation system. The platform launches with support from providers including CertiK and GenLayer. 

  • 📈 Sharplink bought 10,000 ETH at an average price of $1,611, bringing its total holdings to 886,725 ETH, and repurchased more than 2.1 million shares of its own stock. The Nasdaq-listed firm raised $75 million last week to fund the buys. 

  • ⚖️ The SEC won a $5.5 million judgment by default against four entities and two individuals behind the alleged NanoBit crypto trading platform scam. The scheme allegedly used WhatsApp groups posing as financial professionals to route more than $2 million to Hong Kong bank accounts. 

  • 🤫 Carl Rinsch, director of "47 Ronin," was sentenced to 30 months for stealing $11 million from Netflix and reportedly turning it into nearly $27 million on a Dogecoin bet before spending it on Rolls-Royces and a $388,000 watch. He must pay $11 million in restitution.

  • 🏦 New York Life Investment Management made its tokenization debut, partnering with Centrifuge to launch a tokenized U.S. high-yield corporate bond fund settled in USDC. NYLIM manages roughly $807 billion in assets.