08-27-2025 
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Donald Trump has made his biggest (on paper, at least) crypto deal to date while America’s commodities regulator is getting smaller by the day.
- Trump Media plans $6.4B CRO treasury firm
- WLFI token unlocking schedule
- Canary in the $TRUMP ETF coalmine
- Global securities group warns SEC re tokenized securities
- CFTC down to a single commissioner
- CFTC’s ‘crypto sprint 2’ comes as Pham plots post-CFTC future
- IRS crypto boss pulls ejection seat
U.S. diplomacy took another surreal turn on August 25 as President Trump posted a message to his Truth Social account warning that he will “stand up to Countries that attack our incredible American Tech Companies. Digital Taxes, Digital Services Legislation, and Digital Markets Regulations are all designed to harm, or discriminate against, American Technology.”
Trump went on to say that unless countries drop these “discriminatory actions,” he would use his authority to “impose substantial additional Tariffs on that Country’s Exports to the U.S.A., and institute Export restrictions on our Highly Protected Technology and Chips.”
While Trump’s warning appears primarily directed at the European Union’s Digital Services Act, it could also target countries that impose what he views as onerous taxes or regulations on digital asset operators, traders and holders.
Trump and his family are deeply involved in digital asset ventures, including the decentralized finance (DeFi) project World Liberty Financial (WLF), his $TRUMP memecoin, block reward mining operations, and much, much more.
There’s also the ‘treasury’ operations of Truth Social’s parent company Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG) (NASDAQ: DJT), which is majority owned by the president. TMTG recently acquired $2 billion worth of BTC tokens following a nearly $2.4 billion debt raise and is now following that move with an even bigger treasury gambit with a far less prominent token.
On August 26, TMTG announced that it had entered into an agreement with Yorkville Acquisition Corp and the Crypto.com digital asset exchange to form Trump Media Group CRO Strategy, a new ‘treasury’ firm that will hold Crypto.com’s native CRONOS (CRO) token.
The $6.4 billion deal will see CRO Strategy acquire 6.3 billion CRO tokens worth $1 billion, representing ~19% of the total supply. CRO Strategy will also have $200 million worth of cash and $220 million worth of cash-in mandatory excise warrants. The plan is to use “substantially all” of its cash to acquire more CRO.
CRO Strategy will also be given $5 billion in an equity line of credit from a Yorkville affiliate called YA II PN, Ltd, which will purchase up to 9.9% of Yorkville Acquisition Corp’s Class A shares.
Yorkville Acquisition Corp is a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) that aims to rebrand its Nasdaq-listed shares under the symbol MCGA (‘Make CRO Great Again’), with the symbol transferring to CRO Strategy at some unspecified date.
TMTG previously hooked up with other Yorkville affiliates on deals involving crypto-focused exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and Truth Social-branded separately managed accounts. The Yorkville entities appear connected to Florida-based ‘America-First asset management firm’ Yorkville America Digital, which appears to be an offshoot of New Jersey-based Yorkville Advisors.
Crypto.com is linked to TMTG via the latter’s ETFs being sold through Crypto.com’s broker-dealer offshoot Foris Capital. TMTG has also applied for an ETF based on a basket of tokens that includes BTC and CRO.
The new CRO treasury deal follows the reissue in March of 70 billion CRO tokens that Crypto.com claimed to have burned in 2021. Crypto.com said the controversial reissue was intended to drive “institutional adoption of CRO.” (Mission accomplished.)
Crypto.com CEO Kris Marszalek tweeted that the deal separately involved TMTG acquiring $105 million worth of CRO while Crypto.com acquired $50 million of TMTG. TMTG previously hinted at plans for a Truth Social ‘utility token’ that would allow users to earn rewards and Marszalek revealed that CRO “will become the PLATFORM TOKEN of Truth Social as part of this broad, strategic partnership.”
Marszalek further claimed that CRO Strategy “will hold the CRO it acquires FOREVER” and “stake the CRO it holds to further boost its CRO holdings and generate ROBUST REVENUES for $MCGA.” Not sparing the hyperbole, Marszalek claimed CRO will become “the backbone of all financial services, including powering payments for AI agents.”
The three partners in CRO Strategy have agreed to a one-year initial lock-up period for their shares, followed by a three-year restrictive release schedule.
TMTG’s share price got a modest bump from the news, rising 5.2% to close Tuesday at $18.12. The CRO token’s fiat price fared better, spiking by more than one-third following Tuesday’s announcement.
WLF unleashed
CRO Strategy is the second major ‘treasury’ gambit that a Trump-linked entity has announced this month, following WLF’s $1.5 billion deal with ALT5 Sigma Corporation (NASDAQ: ALTS) to build a treasury based on the WLFI token. But the real monetization of WLFI is just getting underway.
Following this summer’s governance vote, WLF says WLFI is set to become tradable and transferable on Monday, September 1, at 8am EST. Early WLFI holders need to initiate a ‘Lockbox’ process (an on-chain unlocking contract) that will see 20% of the WLFI offered in the project’s first two funding rounds become available to sell/trade.
The Lockbox process opened on August 25, and WLF says the “vast majority” of WLF presale wallets are already approved to connect and activate immediately. “Only a limited number that don’t meet compliance requirements are restricted from using the Lockbox.” WLF also says founders, team members, and advisors “are excluded from the initial unlock.”
This unlocked 20% represents ~5% of WLFI’s total supply. The remaining 80% of the tokens sold in these rounds will remain locked pending a later governance vote. New buyers can acquire WLFI via DeFi and “major centralized exchanges.”
WLFI tokens were originally put on sale for just 1.5¢ but the tokens ranged as high as $0.41 in pre-market perpetual futures trading over the weekend on Binance, Bybit and OKX. Their value has since retreated somewhat but were still hovering around $0.26 as of late-Tuesday.
WLF CEO/co-founder Zach Witkoff and COO/co-founder Zak Folkman recently sat for an interview with journalist Colin Wu, with Folkman saying WLF’s goal was to “provide people with financial transaction tools while preventing them from being terminated by banks.”
Folkman added that WLF wants to “provide a simple application, similar to Cash App, WeChat or Venmo, that allows users to easily store and send funds, while also integrating cryptocurrency transactions such as swaps, staking, yield farming, etc.”
Witkoff claimed WLF was “actively building a very powerful asset tokenization platform focused on RWA (real-world asset tokenization).” Starting with real estate, Witkoff claimed WLF is also “exploring the oil and gas industry, as well as the broader commodities sector,” in the belief that “every asset in the world” should be tokenized.
It bears mentioning that WLF has yet to do any of the above. Its sole activities to date have been to issue WLFI and the USD1 stablecoin, while amassing a variety of other tokens for purposes as yet unclear. A year after its launch, the WLF website features a host of promised apps and features, all of which still bear the tag ‘soon’ (possibly WLF’s equivalent of Trump’s ‘two weeks’).
Canary in the $TRUMP ETF coalmine
Even entities unaffiliated with the Trumps are getting in on this action. On August 26, Tennessee-based digital asset investment firm Canary Capital Group filed an application with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for a new ETF based on the president’s $TRUMP memecoin.
The Canary Trump Coin ETF seeks to “provide exposure to the price of $TRUMP Coin held by” Canary by allowing investors to access this market “through a traditional brokerage account without the potential barriers to entry or risks involved with acquiring and holding $TRUMP directly.”Believe it or not, this is actually the third proposed ETF seeking to profit off $TRUMP, following applications by Tuttle and a group comprised of Osprey Funds and Rex Shares (although these latter two aim to do so by a less direct route). The SEC cleared the decks for this kind of product in February by announcing that memecoins like $TRUMP aren’t securities.
In the immediate aftermath of $TRUMP’s release ahead of the president’s January inauguration, the token’s fiat value peaked at $73.43. But it quickly crashed and currently sits ~$8.40.
Global securities regulator push back on SEC tokenization plans
New SEC filings reveal that staff at the regulator’s Crypto Task Force met with representatives of the Kraken exchange on August 25, with the subject of tokenization of real-world assets front and center. Kraken’s agenda included proposals for a tokenized trading system, the legal and regulatory framework for operating such a system, and the potential benefits thereof.
The SEC’s recent ‘Project Crypto’ mission statement made it clear how much has changed since the SEC’s previous leadership went after Kraken hard. New SEC chair Paul Atkins recently directed SEC staff to “work with firms seeking to distribute tokenized securities within the United States and to provide relief where appropriate.”
Not everyone is wild about the SEC’s tokenization embrace. Citadel Securities has urged the SEC not to hand crypto operators any special favors, insisting that all securities activity must be subject to the same rules, regardless of what type of platform is flogging them.
On August 25, Reuters reported that the UK-headquartered World Federation of Exchanges (WFE) had sent a letter to multiple global securities regulators—including the Crypto Task Force, the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA), and the International Organization of Securities Commission’s (IOSCO) Fintech Task Force—expressing many of the same concerns as Citadel.
Without naming names, the WFE claimed to be “alarmed at the plethora of brokers and crypto-trading platforms offering or intending to offer so-called tokenized U.S. stocks. These products are marketed as stock tokens or the equivalent to stocks when they are not.”
On August 26, the WFE made its views public, saying it was alarmed by “growing investor protection risks linked to the third-party tokenization of mostly US equities by unregulated brokers and crypto-asset trading platforms.”
Such third-party tokens “may mimic equities without necessarily providing the same rights or trading safeguards and may be marketed to overseas and retail investors without the same protections as for domestic ones.”
The WFE’s key concerns include third-party tokens draining liquidity from traditional exchanges, thereby “harming price discovery and market integrity.” Holders of third-party tokens could be deprived (without them being aware) of ordinary shareholder rights, including voting or dividends.
Should the third-party platforms fail, token holders’ claims on the underlying assets are unclear. Meanwhile, the actual issuers of the underlying equities could suffer reputational and legal exposure based on activities beyond their control.
Like Citadel, the WFE wants a level playing field, aka “technological neutrality,” including “equivalent standards for disclosure, trading, and settlement.” The WFE urged cross-border cooperation to “prevent loophole exploitation” and clarification of legal frameworks to resolve “uncertainty around ownership, rights and custody.”
WFE CEO Nandini Sukumar said the federation supports innovation but “what we are seeing is a blatant attempt to circumvent regulation, with some firms seeking ‘no action’ relief from regulators or deliberately operating through legal grey areas … Investor protection must remain paramount, and regulation must evolve to ensure that new technologies are not used as a mask for risk and opacity.”
CFTC-ya
The corridors of power at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) will be looking even emptier than usual next week. On August 26, Commissioner Kristin Johnson announced that her last day on the job will be September 3. Johnson’s departure, which was announced in May, will leave just a single member (Caroline Pham) of the five-person commission still toiling away.
Pham is serving as the CFTC’s acting chair due to Brian Quintenz, Trump’s nominee for that role, having yet to be confirmed by the Senate. Quintenz had two hearings before the Senate Agriculture Committee cancelled due to last-minute lobbying by Gemini co-founders Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, who accused Quintenz of being “not in line with [Trump’s] stated goals and policy.”
A group of crypto industry associations subsequently penned a joint letter to Trump in support of Quintenz’s nomination, calling him “the right person at the right time to lead the CFTC.” But it remains to be seen whether Trump will press GOP senators to fast-track Quintenz’s hearings once they’re back from their month-long August break.
The CFTC is set to be handed primary responsibility for digital asset oversight once the Senate passes its version of the market asset structure bill approved by the House this summer. But with the CFTC headcount down by 15% since Trump began thinning the federal government (and CFTC leadership now down by 80%), one hopes the staffing situation improves before those oversight duties become official.
Johnson’s farewell message noted this coming storm by saying it is “critical to ensure that we commit resources to upskill Commission staff to ensure a robust workforce proficient in the technology that will define the future of financial markets and journey ahead for our nation’s economy … In a moment when such significant changes to markets and market structure are contemplated, I am concerned that the expert staff at the Commission receive the support and investments needed to be successful.”
CFTC’s crypto sprint 2… right out the door
Despite the regulator’s financial and personnel shortcomings, Pham recently announced plans for the CFTC’s next ‘crypto sprint.’ Said sprint is intended to implement the goals detailed in the White House’s 166-page report on its roadmap for the digital asset sector.
The mad dash follows the initial sprint just a few weeks ago that sought some immediate wins, like okaying spot crypto trading on CFTC-registered futures exchanges. The second sprint is basically just soliciting feedback on everything else in the White House report. Stakeholders have been given until October 20 to submit their feedback.
Pham has signalled her own intention to leave the CFTC once Quintenz is approved, and it seems she’s already got her sights on where she might land. On August 25, Crypto in America journo Eleanor Terrett tweeted a rumor that Pham “will join” crypto fintech Moonpay after she pulls her CFTC ripcord.
While Pham is perhaps deserving of praise for being the last to remain at her CFTC post, not everyone considers it proper for a sitting commissioner to be making decisions that directly impact companies on whose payroll she might soon be sitting.
IRS crypto tax boss quits
Also moving to the private sector is Trish Turner, the 20+-year veteran of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), who headed up the agency’s digital assets division. In her exit announcement last Friday, Turner said she was proud to have helped lay “the groundwork for the IRS’s digital asset strategy as it shifted from niche to mainstream.”
Turner assumed control of the taxman’s Office of Digital Assets in May following the departures of Sulolit ‘Raj’ Mukherjee and Seth Wilks. That duo, both crypto sector vets, assumed their executive advisor roles in February 2024 but took deferred resignation offers during this spring’s DOGE-purge of the federal ranks.
Turner didn’t indicate why she was leaving the IRS and also offered no clues as to where she was headed. However, she was announced as the new Tax Director of the Crypto Tax Girl tax firm later that same day. Her replacement as the IRS’s crypto point person has not been named.
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