09-03-2025 
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President Trump’s crypto ventures are worth a few billion more this week, and federal authorities keep finding new blockchain-based guardrails to dismantle.
- WLFI trading debut a mixed bag
- Eric Trump says U.S. winning global crypto fight
- CFTC/SEC okay crypto products for non-crypto exchanges
- Small Banking Administration rebanking
- Everybody wants to be a prediction market
- Gemini, Figure Tech issue IPO details
On September 1, the WLFI token of the Trump-linked decentralized finance project World Liberty Financial (WLF) began trading on centralized digital asset exchanges, including Binance, Bybit, HTX, OKX, and more. Stateside, Coinbase (NASDAQ: COIN) (which applied its ‘experimental’ tag to the token), Gemini, and Kraken all listed WLFI on its opening day. The token is also available via decentralized exchanges on several networks.
Opening with a price of $0.20 (after trading at $0.30 last week on some exchanges’ futures markets), the token nearly doubled its value straight out of the gate before swiftly plummeting back to $0.21. While the token staged a few minor rallies during its first day of public trading, it remains mired at ~$0.23 as of late Tuesday.
The rapid sell-off convinced WLF to announce plans that same day for a buy-and-burn strategy that might restore WLFI’s sorely needed mojo. WLF’s official X account declared that the proposal, which will be subject to a governance vote, would see “100% of fees earned by WLFI’s protocol-owned liquidity be used for buyback & burn of $WLFI.”
This process would reward long-term holders “by removing tokens from those not aligned with WLFI’s future.” Assuming the proposal is approved, WLF says it will form “the foundation for a broader buyback & burn program, with room to expand as the protocol grows.”
Critics noted that the small percentage (3.7%) of the overall WLFI supply being released for public trading had helped fuel the early demand. Most WLFI is controlled by a handful of insiders, who can cast the deciding votes on future token unlocks, constraining or relaxing availability as they see fit.
Mixed debut aside, WLFI’s public trading is said to have boosted the Trump family’s net worth by $5-6 billion. This sum represents a paper gain on the token’s highest recorded price, as the bulk of the family’s WLFI holdings are locked up, although they also earn the majority of the net proceeds from WLFI token sales.
Crypto is now the single largest financial pillar propping up the Trump empire, exceeding even the family’s formerly mainstay real estate portfolio. Small wonder then, that WLF Co-Founder Eric Trump tweeted that the WLF’s public debut was “a huge moment for the future of money.” Eric claimed that the token’s out-of-the-gate success was “just the beginning.”
(The president’s burgeoning crypto portfolio hasn’t gone unnoticed by his most prominent troll, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who last week told Pivot podcast host Kara Swisher that his team is “about to put a memecoin out” called ‘Trump Corruption Coin.’ Newsom positioned his token as a direct rival to the $TRUMP memecoin, saying, “We’ll see how well your coin does versus our coin.”)
Justin Sun, who controls the HTX exchange on which WLFI was available, tweeted that the token sale “will be one of the biggest and most important projects in crypto,” adding that he and his team “have no plans to sell our unlocked tokens anytime soon.”
Sun added that his TRON blockchain is also “committed to increasing the total circulation of [WLF-issued stablecoin] $USD1 on #TRON to $200 million.” Andrei Grachev, a WLFI investor and head of the DWF Labs market-maker, tweeted on September 1 that he would “move $250m of DWF’s reserves to USD1 shortly.” USD1’s market cap currently sits at $2.65 billion, up ~$200 million since August 30.
Eric Trump says West, not Asia, ‘winning digital revolution’
At last week’s BTC Asia conference, Eric Trump praised “the Bitcoin community” for having “embraced my father unlike anything I have ever seen before.” Eric added, “and I hope that’s paid off in spades.” (We assume he meant to add ‘for the community’ rather than for his own family.)
Eric rejected the view that the Trumps were using the presidency to enrich the family, saying there was “no conflict of interest” since Eric “had nothing to do with the government” and WLF was formed before his father being sworn in as president for a second time in January.
Eric painted his father’s conversion to crypto true believer as geopolitical in nature, claiming that “the U.S. right now is winning the digital revolution.” This is despite China remaining “a hell of a power” in crypto.
In an interview with Nikkei Asia, Eric claimed the family’s USD1 stablecoin was part of “the fastest-growing crypto project in the world. We are rolling that out all around Asia, the Middle East and obviously around America.”
Eric also revealed that he and WLF co-founder Zach Witkoff had met with a stablecoin issuer who had been allowed to participate in Hong Kong’s stablecoin sandbox. Eric added that talks were underway on a possible ‘collaboration’ to see USD1 play a role in Hong Kong’s regulated stablecoin market.
CFTC / SEC find more guardrails to lift
Tuesday saw the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) issue a joint statement detailing their shared view that CFTC- and SEC-registered exchanges can basically go nuts on crypto product offerings.
The regulators say their “cross-agency initiative” is intended to help realize the goals established in the 166-page report issued last month by the White House’s Presidential Working Group on Digital Assets. That report included a call for federal agencies to promote ‘regulatory clarity’; thus, the CFTC/SEC are coordinating to issue guidance “regarding the listing of leveraged, margined, or financed spot retail commodity transactions on digital assets.”
The gist of their guidance is this: CFTC-regulated designated contract markets (DCM) and foreign boards of trade (FBOT), along with SEC-regulated national securities exchanges (NSE), “are not prohibited from facilitating the trading of certain spot crypto asset products.”
Notably, U.S.-based digital asset exchanges are neither DCMs nor NSEs, meaning other entities—like the Nasdaq, New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE), Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), etc.—could soon be offering crypto products to their customers.
Entities looking to engage in these products should be ready to provide “public dissemination of transactions” and share “reference pricing venues” to enhance “public market surveillance.” The ability to offer “efficient executions and transparency promote[s] trading opportunities and competition among market participants.”
Those market participants can check with CFTC or SEC staff if they’re unclear on what will be allowed, but, given recent policy statements issued by both agencies, few products will likely prove out of bounds.
SEC Chair Paul Atkins emphasized this new laissez-faire approach, saying “market participants should have the freedom to choose where they trade spot crypto assets.” CFTC acting chair Caroline Pham echoed this view, saying the joint statement was “the latest demonstration of our mutual objective of supporting growth and development in these markets, but it will not be the last.”Not everyone was impressed with the news. Former SEC Commissioner Amanda Fischer tweeted a lengthy thread detailing her view that the joint statement “doesn’t actually answer any questions.” Fischer called it “thirsty behavior from regulators—some of whom are actively looking for crypto jobs. It undercuts the rationale for legislation while actually leaving more questions than answers.”
Meanwhile, Congress is back in session after its August recess, offering hope that Brian Quintenz, Trump’s nominee to lead the CFTC, will finally get his vote from the Senate Agriculture committee before a full Senate vote. No vote has yet been scheduled, and Pham is (as of September 3) the sole remaining commissioner on the five-member panel.
Rebanking now a thing
‘Debanking’ has been a cause célèbre among the crypto set for years, with multiple operators—and even Donald Trump following the January 6th Capitol riot—claiming to have lost access to banking services due to ‘reputational’ concerns.
Those concerns are now largely a thing of the past, with Trump ordering federal banking authorities to ignore such concerns and banks largely falling in line rather than falling on the president’s bad side. This movement continued last week with the Small Business Administration (SBA) issuing an order to its network of over 5,000 lenders “instructing them to end politicized or unlawful banking practices.”
The SBA is going one step further by “requiring all lenders … to reinstate otherwise qualified customers who were wrongfully denied access to financial services on the basis of political, religious, or ideological beliefs. Lenders who fail to comply with these directives will lose their good standing with the SBA and will be subject to additional punitive measures.”
The SBA says this step is necessary to comply with the executive order Trump issued last month directing the SBA to tell its lenders to “make reasonable efforts to reinstate clients and potential clients” who’d been unfairly debanked.
SBA Administrator Kelly Loeffler—a longtime Trump ally who for a year served as a Senator from Georgia and was appointed by Trump to the SBA role in February—claimed “right-leaning businesses, non-profits, and people—including Christian, pro-life, and Second Amendment organizations” had been the primary victims of debanking. Loeffler added that any bank that fails to abide by the new rules “will be held to account.”
Predictions marketed
Rumors of President Trump having suffered some kind of medical emergency circulated over the weekend—rumors that Trump sought to dispel by holding a brief press conference on Tuesday. Regardless, the rumors may have contributed to the crypto-friendly Kalshi and Polymarket prediction markets offering bets on whether he’ll still be president by year’s end. (The markets are overwhelmingly stacked towards him still being president come New Year’s Day 2026.)
These are politically sensitive markets on which to wager, given that the president’s firstborn son, Donald Trump Jr. is an advisor to both Kalshi and Polymarket, and a venture capital firm linked to Don Jr. took a “double-digit millions” stake in Polymarket last week.
The surge in popularity in prediction markets among American ‘predictors’—coupled with Polymarket’s imminent return to U.S. shores following leadership turnover at the CFTC—apparently convinced the Trump-linked Crypto.com exchange to announce a team-up with fantasy sports operator Underdog to offer “sports events contracts” to U.S. customers.
The deal between Underdog and Derivatives North America (CDNA)—Crypto.com’s CFTC-registered exchange and clearinghouse—will allow customers in 16 U.S. states to “express and trade their opinions on sports event contracts across all major sports leagues, including NFL, college football, NBA, MLB, and more.”
Underdog has gaming licenses that allow it to offer sportsbook and fantasy sports products, but efforts by Kalshi to enter into direct competition with U.S. sportsbooks have been challenged by gaming operators. Last month, a derivatives-focused offshoot of brokerage Robinhood (NASDAQ: HOOD) sued gaming regulators in Nevada and New Jersey over their efforts to prohibit new betting competition (via Robinhood’s partnership with Kalshi).
States like California and Texas have yet to legalize sports betting, and the Crypto.com/Underdog offering intends to target those not-yet-betting-legal states. This will almost certainly result in more legal challenges, particularly in states where tribal groups control and zealously defend their gaming operations.
But Crypto.com has friends in high places, having recently struck a multi-billion-dollar deal with Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG) to launch a new crypto ‘treasury’ firm based on the CRO token of the Crypto.com-powered Cronos network. Crypto.com’s Foris Capital broker-dealer subsidiary also handles sales of TMTG’s various crypto-based exchange-traded funds (ETFs).
Gemini, Figure Tech issue IPO details
Finally, the Gemini exchange has released details of its planned initial public offering on the Nasdaq under the symbol GEMI. The SEC filing indicates the company will issue 16.67 million shares at a range of $17 to $19. An option exists for the underwriters to acquire an additional 2.4 million shares should demand exist.
That share price is below other recent crypto IPOs, including rival exchange Bullish (NASDAQ: BLSH), which opened last month for $37 and closed its first day’s trading at nearly double that figure. In June, USDC stablecoin-issuer Circle (NASDAQ: CRCL) opened trading at $31 and closed its first day at nearly $81.
Gemini’s lower share price partly reflects its low trading volume ($133 million over the past 24 hours versus $1 billion for Bullish, $1.5 billion for Kraken, and $3.4 billion for Coinbase). There’s also Gemini’s recent financial disclosure, which showed the company losing $282.5 million in just the first half of 2025, despite a raging bull market for digital assets.
Gemini’s filing was submitted as an “emerging growth company,” exempting the company from disclosing additional financial figures, including anything older than two years (which could hint at the possibility that Gemini has never been profitable).
Other off-limits data includes “certain executive compensation-related items such as the correlation between executive compensation and performance and comparisons of the chief executive officer’s compensation to median employee compensation.”
Also prepping IPO plans is blockchain-based lender Figure Technology Solutions, which aims to sell 26.3 million shares at a range of $18 to $20 (pricing will be set on September 10) under the symbol FIGR. Figure’s latest financials show it generating revenue of $191 million in the first half of 2025, resulting in a profit of $29 million.
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