Justin Sun attends $TRUMP dinner, stablecoin bill faces amendments

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U.S. stablecoin legislation is bracing for debate and possible amendments, while crypto critics are annoyed by President Trump’s memecoin dinner guests.

• GENIUS stablecoin bill awaits amendments
• GENIUS to boost stablecoin market cap to trillions?
• Justin Sun confirms attendance at $TRUMP dinner
• Justin’s name keeps coming up in Capitol Hill hearings
• Wall Street Journal urges Trump to identify dinner guests

On May 21, the U.S. Senate voted 69-31 in favor of proceeding to consideration of the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins (GENIUS) Act. The Act, which aims to regulate ‘payment stablecoins,’ passed a cloture vote on May 19 by a slightly smaller margin, despite largely cosmetic tweaks that some Democrats said had failed to alleviate their concerns about GENIUS’s shortcomings.

While debate on the bill might not happen until after the Memorial Day holiday (May 26), GENIUS will also face a flurry of proposed amendments once senators return to work. Precedent suggests few, if any of these amendments will secure enough support to be included in the final version of GENIUS, but that isn’t stopping some senators from trying.

Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-TN), a GENIUS co-sponsor, told Bloomberg that “we have a large number of amendments to sort through, and my goal is to make certain that the stablecoin legislation passes and that we avoid a situation where it gets cluttered up or bogged down with a number of amendments that could be unrelated to this … we probably have well over a hundred amendments to evaluate, but we will narrow this down and get through it.”

One of these ‘unrelated’ amendments would see GENIUS absorb language from a different bill seeking to reduce credit card swipe fees. The Credit Card Competition Act, a bipartisan effort from Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Roger Marshall (R-KS), has been around for a couple years but never got much traction.

Marshall filed an amendment to add the swipe fee language on May 20. Supporters of the credit card bill say including it in GENIUS could help coax reluctant Democrats into voting ‘aye,’ but the crypto sector—along with the big banks and card issuers—is reportedly lobbying hard to prevent a vote on this amendment going forward.

Semafor quoted Hagerty saying that his party was “trying to keep [GENIUS] as clean and expedient as possible.” Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD), would only say that GENIUS’s co-sponsors were “hearing out members and finding out what kind of amendment votes they want to get.”

Trillions, not billions

Whatever form of GENIUS emerges from this process, it will then make its way to the House of Representatives, which has its own stablecoin bill (STABLE) that hasn’t been spoken of much since it was approved by the Financial Services Committee on April 2.

The House has been preoccupied with passing President Trump’s ‘big, beautiful’ budget bill, but once those cats have been herded, some thought can be given to how to reconcile STABLE with GENIUS before a harmonized version can be sent to Trump’s desk for signing into law.

Delays notwithstanding, the crypto sector is thrilled with the progress they’ve made on Capitol Hill since Trump’s return to the White House. On May 21, Trump’s ‘AI & Crypto Czar’ David Sacks told CNBC that the stablecoin legislation “could create trillions of dollars of demand for our Treasuries practically overnight, very quickly.”

GENIUS requires regulated stablecoin issuers to hold fiat reserves at a ratio of 1:1 with the dollar value of their issued tokens. Acceptable reserves include cash, insured deposits at banks/credit unions, short-dated T-bills, money market funds, repurchase agreements and the like.

On May 20, Bitwise Asset Management’s chief investment officer Matt Hougan issued a note to clients predicting the current $200 billion stablecoin market “will be a $2.5 trillion market in no time.” Hougan asked clients to “imagine a world where JPMorgan and Bank of America issue stablecoins, where Amazon gives you a 2% discount if you buy using stablecoins instead of Visa, and where it’s as common to accept stablecoins as it is to accept Venmo or PayPal.”

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Justin Sun rings the dinner bell

The timing may have been coincidental, but just hours after Monday’s GENIUS cloture vote, Tron founder Justin Sun outed himself as the “top holder” of President Trump’s $TRUMP memecoin. Sun later tweeted his “new title: TOP fan of Trump.”

This status entitles Sun to attend the ‘gala dinner’ going down on May 22 at the Trump National Golf Club in Virginia with the other top 220 $TRUMP holders, as well as the ‘Exclusive Reception before Dinner with YOUR FAVORITE PRESIDENT!’ reserved for the top 25 $TRUMP holders.

The ‘Sun’ wallet topping the $TRUMP leaderboard contains ~$19 million worth of the tokens. Sun previously spent $75 million acquiring WLF’s governance token WLFI, earning him a WLF advisor gig while boosting his total known contributions to Trump-linked ventures to $94 million.

While the Sun wallet bore Justin’s name, it was previously linked with the Seychelles-based HTX (formerly Huobi) 
exchange. Sun has long been rumored to exert operational control over HTX, while Sun himself claims he’s only an HTX ‘advisor.’

Earlier this month, HTX became the first digital asset exchange to list USD1, the stablecoin issued by WLF this spring. On May 20, Sun appeared on a ‘Real Talk with HTX Executives’ live talk show in which he claimed to be “honored to serve as an advisor to the Trump family’s crypto team.”

The show highlighted Sun’s “recent efforts to expand HTX’s reach into the U.S. market,” while Sun himself claimed to be “helping bridge the gap between crypto and traditional politics and, in a broader sense, possibly even between the two major economies [U.S. and China].”

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Congress keeps dropping Justin’s name

Sun’s name came up during a May 20 House Appropriations Committee hearing, at which the featured guest was new Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) chairman Paul Atkins.

Rep. Glenn Ivey (D-MD) noted that in March 2023, the SEC charged Sun with manipulating markets to boost the value of his projects’ tokens. These charges were stayed in February at the joint request of Sun and the SEC.

Citing Sun’s $75 million investment in WLF and his $TRUMP dinner tweets, Ivey said it “smells very bad,” but he found it “especially problematic” given the SEC’s decision not to pursue its legal case against Sun.

Atkins, who wasn’t confirmed until last month, said, “I don’t know anything about” Sun’s case, which he claimed was still technically “active.” Atkins pointed out that the SEC’s current roster of commissioners had basically washed its hands of memecoin oversight in February. Ivey’s allotted time ran out before he could press Atkins for more detailed responses.

That same day, Secretary of State Marco Rubio appeared at a Senate Committee on Foreign Relations hearing at which he was asked about the $TRUMP dinner by Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT). Questioned whether any of the dinner guests might be under U.S. economic sanctions or have ties to terror groups, Rubio said, “I don’t know anything about it. I didn’t even know there was a dinner on Thursday night.”

Pressed further, Rubio held his ground, saying, “I don’t keep the president’s social schedule. It’s not on my phone.” Murphy said this appeared to present a real problem, because “there is clearly a way around the State Department for foreign individuals of significant influence and wealth to be able to directly lobby the president.”

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$TRUMP dinner opponents are strange bedfellows

While a few other names of the top $TRUMP holders have leaked out, the dinner and the VIP reception have otherwise been subject to a disclosure blackout. This led the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board to publish an op-ed saying the dinner should be ‘called off.’ If not, the public has a right to know “who may be trying to buy access to the President.”

Noting previous reporting that 19 of the top 25 $TRUMP holders appear to have purchased their tokens via digital asset exchanges that are supposed to prohibit American users, the WSJ board wondered if these foreigners are “seeking a seat at the President’s table to influence U.S. policy, especially in foreign affairs?”

The WSJ noted that, while the dinner might not technically violate any laws, it nonetheless “creates the risk of ethical conflicts.” The board further noted that Trump previously pledged to make his second stint in the Oval Office the “most transparent in history.” The board suggests that “one way to fulfill that promise is to be transparent about his crypto investors.”

An activist group linked to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), known as Our Revolution, plans to protest outside the golf club on the night of the $TRUMP dinner. Our Revolution director Joseph Geevarghese said Trump’s meme coin “isn’t just unethical, it’s blatant corruption.”

Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR), who recently introduced the End Crypto Corruption Act in a bid to prohibit the president from enriching himself via crypto ventures, reportedly plans to join the Our Revolution protest.

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