It was another busy week at Coindesk as the new Trump administration continued to roll a pro-crrypto agenda and the industry laid the basis for growth in the new cycle.
Ripple was at the center of the news. Ondo Finance announced that it would offer tokenized treasuries on Ripple’s XRP headbok, Kris Sandor reported. San Francisco Company also said the XRP Ledger would offer clawback features, which improved the liquidity of Ripple’s Dollar-Pegged StableCoin RLUSD, Shaurya Malwa reported.
Meanwhile, CEO Brad Garlinghouse lobbed for the XRP to be included in any national cryptor reserve, and ryled bitcoiners saying the reserve should only be Bitcoin. Omkar Godbole had that news along with several incisive market analyzes (his diary daily update is a must-read).
In other protocol news, Cardano rolled a hard fork (“Plomin”), enabling decentralized governance. And Avalanche said its upgrade of December resulted in a 75% fall in transaction costs for users, a big victory for this project. Meanwhile, movement laboratories revealed a developer Mainnet prior to a highly expected L1 launch in February.
Stableecoins, the most traded form of crypto, rose past a $ 200 million market cap. And Tether, issuer of the leading stableecoin, USDT, announced that it earned $ 13 billion in 2024 profit, a healthy stock for additional investment, Sandor also reported. At the same time, Howard Lutnick defended the administration’s choice of trade secretary, Cantor Fitzgerald’s custodian relationship to bound during a Senate consultation.
Microstratey, pioneering the idea of company’s Bitcoin state boxes, further added its bags and outlined plans to raise more capital, James van Straten reported. In ETFS, Bitwise Won SEC approval for a combined Bitcoin-ETF ETF and filed an application for a Dogecoin ETF, Helene Braun reported. Grayscale opened a new Trust with closed fund offering exposure to Dogecoin and said that Memecoin, which was started as a joke in 2013, had become a tool for global economic inclusion.
There were also plenty of regulatory and political news. Solana’s Memecoin Power Center, Pump.Fun, was hit by a lawsuit on securities violations. Cheyenne Ligon reported the story as well as news that French authorities are expanding a money laundering of money and tax probe against binance. Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev joined Blackrocks Larry Fink in call for tokenized equity. And Jesse Hamilton, deputy CEO editor of legislative, reported on the continued success with Fairshake, a Superpac in Industry.
Meanwhile, Friday saw the parents of the disgraceful FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fred Explore, who sought a presidential pardon for their son. They draw inspiration from the recent pardon that Trump handed over to Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht. But as Shaurya Malwa noticed, the cases are very different, and Joseph Bankman and Barbara Fried are probably facing an uphill.
It’s been an interesting couple of days in crypto and we have much more for Coindesk readers next week. As they say, stay up to date.
