Crypto_Bilawal

Nhiều người đã hy vọng, nhưng ít người nghĩ rằng Ủy ban Thị trường Mở Liên bang của Cục Dự trữ Liên bang sẽ cắt giảm lãi suất quỹ liên bang chuẩn vào thứ Tư, ngày 28 tháng 1. Nó đã không xảy ra.

Giữ mọi thứ phẳng phiu dường như là lựa chọn tốt nhất. Như luôn luôn, Cục Dự trữ Liên bang phải đối mặt với hai nhiệm vụ kép của mình về giá tiêu dùng ổn định sẽ tăng trưởng với tỷ lệ tương đối thấp và đều, và về việc làm tối đa, trong bối cảnh kinh tế hiện tại. Có quá nhiều điều chưa biết về tình trạng hiện tại của nền kinh tế, các lực lượng và thị trường vĩ mô toàn cầu, chi tiêu của chính phủ Hoa Kỳ, và tình trạng của lực lượng lao động trong nước.

Đường trên cùng
Bộ Tư pháp đã công bố hàng triệu tài liệu liên quan đến nhà tài chính Jeffrey Epstein vào thứ Sáu, hơn một tháng sau khi thời hạn của chính quyền Trump để công bố các tài liệu Epstein theo luật liên bang đã qua.

“Melania” được coi là không có “tính nghệ thuật hoặc báo chí,” nói với New York Times rằng khoản chi lớn của Amazon là “không bình thường đối với một bộ phim tài liệu, vì vậy tôi nghĩ điều đó cho thấy Amazon đang mua một cái gì đó khác cho số tiền của họ. Đó là một vấn đề lớn.”

Doanh thu phòng vé trông như thế nào cho “melania?”
Mặc dù Amazon đã đầu tư 75 triệu đô la vào bộ phim, nhưng có vẻ như nó sẽ không thu hồi được tiền tại phòng vé. Variety dự đoán bộ phim tài liệu sẽ kiếm được từ 3 triệu đến 5 triệu đô la trong dịp cuối tuần mở màn, trong khi Deadline dự đoán 5 triệu đô la và Boxoffice Pro dự đoán từ 2 triệu đến 5 triệu đô la. Doanh thu vé ở nước ngoài được cho là yếu, với chuỗi rạp chiếu phim ở Vương quốc Anh, Vue, nói với The Guardian vào đầu tuần này rằng doanh số bán vé cho “Melania” là “nhạt.”

According to CoinMarketCap data, the global cryptocurrency market cap now stands at $2.8T, down by 5.99% over the last 24 hours.

Bitcoin (BTC) traded between $81,118 and $88,182 over the past 24 hours. As of 09:30 AM (UTC) today, BTC is trading at $82,434, down by 6.36%.

Most major cryptocurrencies by market cap are trading lower. Market outperformers include SENT, 币安人生, and ROSE, up by 18%, 17%, and 8%, respectively.

Crypto Market Watch – Today:

Binance Reports 2025 Achievements and Plans to Convert $100 Million SAFU Fund to Bitcoin

Gold–Silver Market Cap Ratio Mirrors Bitcoin–Ethereum Dynamic, According to Analysts

Hong Kong to Propose Legislation for Crypto Asset Reporting Framework

Fed Balance Sheet Reduction May Pressure Gold, Crypto and Bonds: Analyst

Gold, Silver, and Copper Prices Plummet, Triggering $120 Million Token Sell-Off

Bitcoin Declines as Kevin Warsh's Fed Chair Prospects Rise

USD/JPY Surpasses 154 with Daily Increase of 0.61%

Bitcoin's Implied Volatility Reaches Highest Level Since Last November

Gold Experiences Largest Daily Market Cap Swing in History

Bitcoin Falls Out of Top 10 Assets by Market Capitalization

Market movers:

ETH: $2726.29 (-7.56%)

BNB: $838.85 (-7.26%)

XRP: $1.7407 (-7.11%)

SOL: $115.01 (-6.59%)

TRX: $0.2896 (-1.86%)

DOGE: $0.11357 (-6.67%)

WLFI: $0.1493 (-6.45%)

ADA: $0.3219 (-7.87%)

WBTC: $82278.92 (-6.32%)

BCH: $543.9 (-6.14%
#BTC
#ETF
#BNB

Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer has issued a warning regarding the nomination of Walsh. According to BlockBeats, Schumer stated on January 31 that Republicans should not proceed with Walsh's nomination if the Department of Justice does not drop charges against Powell.

Indonesia Đẩy Nhanh Cải Cách Để Khôi Phục Niềm Tin Của Nhà Đầu Tư Sau Sự Sụt Giảm Của Thị Trường Chứng Khoán thúc đẩy các cải cách thị trường để khôi phục niềm tin của nhà đầu tư sau đợt sụt giảm thị trường chứng khoán kéo dài hai ngày đã gây ra sự từ chức của CEO Sở Giao dịch Chứng khoán Indonesia Iman Rachman và Chủ tịch Ủy ban Dịch vụ Tài chính Mahendra Siregar.

Chỉ số Jakarta Composite đã giảm hơn 10% vào thứ Tư và thứ Năm—đợt bán tháo tồi tệ nhất kể từ cuộc khủng hoảng tài chính châu Á—sau khi Morgan Stanley Capital International cảnh báo về khả năng hạ cấp thị trường chứng khoán Indonesia trừ khi các nhà quản lý tiến hành mở rộng quyền sở hữu trong các công ty địa phương. Cổ phiếu đã phục hồi một phần thiệt hại vào thứ Sáu sau khi chính phủ hứa hẹn sẽ thúc đẩy cải cách.

Luigi Mangione sẽ không phải đối mặt với án tử hình vì bị cáo buộc đã giết CEO của UnitedHealth, Brian Thompson, khi vụ án của anh ta được đưa ra xét xử vào cuối năm nay, một thẩm phán liên bang đã thống trị vào thứ Sáu, bác bỏ hai cáo buộc chống lại nghi phạm mà nếu không sẽ làm tăng khả năng trừng phạt cho các tội ác bị cáo buộc của anh ta.

Các Thông Tin Chính
Câu chuyện này đang diễn ra và sẽ được cập nhật.

tổng cộng 40 triệu đô la, được cho là đã đánh bại các nhà thầu khác bao gồm Paramount và Disney. Studio đã chi thêm 35 triệu đô la cho marketing và phát hành rạp, với bộ phim dự kiến ra mắt tại hơn 3,000 rạp trên toàn thế giới vào thứ Sáu. Mặc dù chi tiêu khổng lồ, “Melania” được dự đoán sẽ kiếm được từ 3 triệu đến 5 triệu đô la trong cuối tuần ra mắt, Variety đưa tin. Số tiền lớn mà Amazon đã chi đã khiến nhiều người ngạc nhiên, với cựu giám đốc phim của Amazon Ted Hope nói với New York Times rằng đây phải là “bộ phim tài liệu đắt giá nhất từng được thực hiện mà không liên quan đến bản quyền âm nhạc,” và thêm vào đó: “Làm thế nào mà nó không thể được coi là cách lấy lòng hoặc một món hối lộ công khai?” Bộ phim tài liệu theo chân Melania Trump trong vài tuần giữa chiến thắng bầu cử tổng thống lần thứ hai của chồng cô và lễ nhậm chức của anh. “Melania” lần đầu tiên được trình chiếu tại Nhà Trắng vào tuần trước, trong một sự kiện đầy sao với sự tham dự của các vị khách bao gồm CEO Apple Tim Cook, CEO Zoom Eric Yuan, Nữ hoàng Rania của Jordan và võ sĩ Mike Tyson.

In the world of cryptocurrency, where billion-dollar fortunes can be made overnight, speed is everything--and CZ is the fastest of them all. From closet-size offices in Tokyo--"I would touch four people if I turned around in a circle"--the 41-year-old Chinese-Canadian coder runs Binance, a cryptocurrency exchange that has gone from a standing start to the largest on the planet in just under 180 days. CZ (born Changpeng Zhao) cut his teeth making high-frequency trading systems for Wall Street's flash boys, and he built Binance to be a Ferrari. His exchange can process a blazing 1. 4 million transactions a second and on a peak trading day in January processed 3.5 billion new orders, cancels and trades. Speculators (some 25% of them from the U.S.) use Binance to trade 120 different coins, generating $200 million in profits for CZ's exchange last quarter. BNB, the virtual coin CZ created in August that gives holders a 50% discount on trading fees, has a market cap of $1.3 billion. His stake in Binance and his coins give CZ a personal fortune worth as much as $2 billion.

He is hardly alone in becoming insanely and instantly rich from crypto. Chris Larsen, a longtime tech exec known for cofounding a string of fintech apps, saw his net worth flirt with $20 billion at the height of cryptomania in early January, based on his ownership of 5.2 billion XRP, the tokens of Ripple, the company he founded. XRP has since crashed 65%, but Larsen still tops Forbes ' first crypto rich list, our (necessarily inexact) accounting of the 20 wealthiest people in crypto.

There are now nearly 1,500 crypto-assets in existence, valued at an aggregate of $550 billion, up 31 times since the beginning of 2017. While the prices of individual cryptocoins continue to swing wildly--Bitcoin is down almost 50% from its peak--it's clear that blockchain-based currency is here to stay and that these virtual assets have real, albeit volatile and speculative, value. Black-market transactions, tax avoidance by individuals and sanctions-dodging by countries like North Korea fuel part of the demand, but so does a widespread excitement over the technology and an ideological desire for money to be free from the whimsies of nation-states.

The winners of this digital lottery differ from those in previous manias. The shadowy beginnings, at once anarchistic, utopian and libertarian, drew an odd lot of pioneers who ranged from antiestablishment cypherpunks and electricity-guzzling "miners" to prescient Silicon Valley financiers and a larger-than-usual assortment of the just plain lucky "hodlers" (the typo-inspired crypto jargon for "buy and hold" investors). As in any gold rush, selling the pans and pickaxes--in this case running exchanges--is proving a more reliable path to riches than speculation. And, of course, easy money--especially if it's viewed as a bearer asset--attracts scam artists and thieves.

Banking heir Matthew Mellon, whose $2 million investment in XRP blossomed into some $1 billion, learned that firsthand in January. The morning after a big bash, the 54-year-old recent divorcé says he discovered four people rooting around his $150,000-a-month Los Angeles party pad. (He didn't report it to the police.) The unwanted guests were probably after his XRP and they stole four laptops and two cellphones. They didn't get Mellon's crypto-fortune--anyone with enough assets to make our list long ago figured out how to secure it. (Sorry, thugs.) In Mellon's case, the private keys are divided up and safely scattered in cold storage around the country in other people's names. But the incident underscores the weirdness that separates cryptomania from bubbles past.

Identifying the biggest crypto winners and estimating the scale of their wealth is no simple task. The virtual currencies exist almost entirely outside the global financial system, and the newly minted crypto rich live in a strange milieu that blends paranoid secrecy with ostentatious display. Take CZ's Binance exchange. It has no real headquarters: Employees are scattered across several countries, and CZ himself seems to change locales the way others change clothes. "We dont want to be in one place right now because of regulatory uncertainty," says CZ. Last we heard, CZ and his trademark black hoodie had just popped up in Taiwan.

And CZ is downright normal by crypto-billionaire standards. Former child actor Brock Pierce ( The Mighty Ducks, First Kid ) dresses like a cut-rate Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean and is given to making grandiose statements from the balcony of his penthouse in Santa Monica, California. "This is an opportunity to be a trillionaire--someone who is positively impacting a trillion living things on this planet," he tells Forbes. Pierce once raised $60 million from Goldman Sachs with the help of Stephen Bannon, President Trump's former chief strategist, to fund a company that sold virtual swords, chain mail and horses to role-playing videogamers. He also once got into trouble with his partners in a 1990s-era dot-com startup after they were accused, in civil lawsuits, of sexual abuse of underaged boys. (Pierce has always denied the accusations and was never charged; one of his business partners, however, pleaded guilty to transporting minors across state lines for the purpose of sex.)

Pierce was early into the crypto game, first mining Bitcoin and then financing blockchain startups and investing in dozens of initial coin offerings. Although he publicly proclaims he is pledging a billion dollars to charity, he refuses to provide documentation that proves he has anywhere near that much money.

Given this opaqueness and crypto's hyper-volatility, we are presenting our net-worth estimates in ranges. We based our numbers on estimated holdings of cryptocurrencies (a few provided proof), post-tax profits from trading crypto-assets and stakes in crypto-related businesses. We've also categorized our crypto rich list into five groups: idealists, builders, opportunists, infrastructure players and establishment investors. Many fit into more than one category.

It's a near certainty that we've missed some people and that some of our estimates are wide of the mark. But this was equally true when we launched the first Forbes 400 list of America's richest people in 1982. At the time, many people said we couldn't--or shouldn't--publish it. We did so anyway. And we firmly believe we made the world a better place by shining a light on the invisible rich. Just as crypto has evolved from the days of the Silk Road drug site and the Mt. Gox digital hijacking, fortunes of this magnitude should never be allowed to lurk in the shadows

Justin Sun loves a publicity stunt. But in bailing out Donald Trump's crypto venture--netting the president and his family $400 million--Sun has boosted his efforts to create a global payment system using his Tron platform, with 300 million users and counting.
Cheat Code Chief

With his boyish looks, bad behavior and billions, Sun is the crypto O.G. industry ideologues love to hate. "In my 20s I was just trying everything," he says. "Why not?"

The reality show did a lot more than teach him how to pronounce Trump's "You're fired!" catchphrase. The precocious Sun says he was captivated by the American tycoon's lessons in cutthroat competition, showmanship and, of course, ego--anathema in a society steeped in the principles of Confucianism and Chinese socialism. But it was the early 2000s, and the reforms set in place by Deng Xiaoping had opened China to capitalism--especially in booming Shenzhen, which borders Huizhou. "It was natural for The Apprentice to become popular in China," Sun says.

So it felt like fate--perhaps now a four-letter word for opportunism--that Sun heard late last year that the Trump family's crypto venture, World Liberty Financial (WLF), was faltering despite the fact that the patriarch, listed as the company's "chief crypto advocate," had just been elected president of the United States.

It was easy to see why. World Liberty Financial's so-called white paper (crypto's version of a business plan) was dubbed "Gold Paper" and adorned with a portrait of Trump on its cover looking like a superhero and dripping gold. World Liberty was going to be another decentralized finance platform, of which there are hundreds already, but it offered no equity, lacked credible management and its tokens would be illiquid. The fact that the Trumps could have easily self-financed the $30 million needed to launch, but chose against it, underscored why no one else wanted to either. (Donald Trump more than three decades ago had pivoted his empire toward using other people's money rather than risking his own.)

But the 34-year-old Sun couldn't miss the potential dividend sitting in front of him. Since March 2023, Sun has been facing a Securities and Exchange Commission lawsuit alleging fraudulent market manipulation and selling unregistered securities. Now he had come across a way to single-handedly enrich the person about to lead the executive branch of the U.S. government, the SEC included.

In late November, just three weeks after Trump's election, Sun plunked down the $30 million ostensibly needed to cover operating expenses. "I see WLF as a strong player in the financial technology space," Sun says, unconvincingly. He's more eloquent when discussing the idea of Trump as a one-man "cheat code" for crypto, "and then your development will be so much better than before."

That $30 million ignited a buying frenzy that primarily benefits the Trump family. As if Sun's actions weren't helpful enough, a few weeks later he invested another $45 million into World Liberty Financial, 75% of which went directly into Trump's pocket, per a disclosed stipulation that the Trump family takes three-quarters of everything raised above the initial $30 million. Then, when the president launched his meme coin, $TRUMP, in January, Sun invested a few million more. All told, Sun's actions yielded a small return for him on paper--even worse, his entire position in WLF was locked up indefinitely--while generating an estimated $400 million windfall for the Trumps. (Taking note, Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy on the floor of the Senate in early March said that "this is essentially Trump posting his Venmo for anyone to secretly wire him as much money as they want.")

Sun's tributes seemingly paid off. Almost immediately he was named an advisor to World Liberty. Then, in early 2025, after Trump took office, the SEC dropped virtually all of its lawsuits and investigations against alleged crypto violators, including exchanges Coinbase, Kraken and Robinhood. It would also "pause" its lawsuit against Sun and his firms.

Such is life for crypto's most transactional billionaire. If you want an idealistic discourse on Satoshi Nakamoto's promise of a new financial system governed by peers, outside the control of central banks and greedy tech giants, you won't get it from Sun. He's a pure opportunist. He has limited computer programming skills, and nearly all the entities he has created or controls have famously copied the business models of other first movers.

As of right now, it's working. Ethereum was a crypto darling--a blockchain with functionality--so Sun created a faster and cheaper version, Tron, which now has a market cap of $22 billion. Watching the successes (and failures) of Binance and FTX, he bought cryptocurrency exchanges Poloniex, based in Panama, and HTX (formerly known as Huobi), which focused on Asia. And seeing Uniswap's growth as a decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol, he created SunSwap.

Moving fast and copying things has made Sun extraordinarily rich, extremely fast. Like his childhood idol Trump, he apparently covets what Forbes says about his net worth and tells us his number exceeds $40 billion, including large holdings of cryptocurrencies like bitcoin and ether, as well as fine art including a Picasso and a Warhol, plus an Airbus 330 jet.

As with Trump, it's hard to take anything Sun tells you at face value, at least when it comes to his holdings. He has a dizzying maze of wallets and keeps some of his assets in other people's names. We applied sizable discounts to several of his claimed assets--such as the exchange HTX, where he says he stores a large amount of his personal cryptocurrency stash--and left out many of his smaller unverified holdings altogether.

But even given that large dose of skepticism, Forbes estimates Sun's net worth at $8.5 billion, with an acknowledgement that it could be much larger. And with the SEC giving him a reprieve, that number is poised to surge.

Born in 1990 in the remote Qinghai province bordering Tibet, Sun moved with his family when he was 4 to bustling Guangdong. He was immersed in words. His mother was a sports journalist for Huizhou's daily paper; his father covered politics in Qinghai. Literature was his first love, inspired by the works of Chinese novelist Mo Yan, a Nobel laureate, and French philosopher Michel Foucault, whose writings explored how power defines and controls knowledge. In 2007, Sun won a national writing competition, securing a place at prestigious Peking University, where he initially set out to study literature and become an important writer. Once there, he switched his focus to global history. "Because of this, I see the world as a unified place," he says.

Like many ambitious Chinese students, he looked to the U.S. for his next step. In 2011, he enrolled at Trump's alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania, where he pursued a master's in political economy. Then, in 2012, a New York Times article about Bitcoin changed everything. "People told me this is the money for the future and the internet," Sun recalls. He downloaded a Bitcoin wallet, a friend sent him some, and he was hooked. Days and nights disappeared into Bitcoin forums, where he devoured everything he could find on the emerging technology.

One of those forums led him to Stefan Thomas, then-CTO of Ripple Labs, which was attempting to build a decentralized alternative to global bank messaging network SWIFT. Ripple's XRP cryptocurrency aimed to serve as a bridge between global fiat currencies, requiring a network of gateways in different countries. In 2013, Thomas asked Sun to become Ripple's chief representative to China.

Pretty good for someone still in his early 20s, but from the beginning Sun ruffled feathers. "He always said he had connections to the Chinese Communist Party and the government, but to be honest, I don't think any of those connections were helpful at all," recalls a former colleague at Ripple who requested anonymity. "Imagine an early-stage startup, and here comes Justin--Prada shoes, Gucci shirt. He is money-hungry. You could tell he was going to do whatever it took to be wealthy."

Not long after Sun joined Ripple, Ethereum, a blockchain that supported more advanced functions thanks to smart contracts, became the new rage. Sun invested in Ethereum's 2014 ICO but ultimately came to believe that, even as it processed transactions much faster than Bitcoin, it remained too slow. Ripple, on the other hand, wasn't succeeding at integrating smart contracts. That's when lightning struck: a new blockchain with the speed of XRP and smart contracts. "We needed something cheaper and faster but with Ethereum compatibility," says Sun, who left Ripple in 2015 and launched Tron two years later.

From its inception, Sun's new blockchain was dogged by allegations that its white paper plagiarized the documentation of Ethereum and another blockchain. Juan Benet, founder of Protocol Labs, the team behind the data-storage blockchain Filecoin, alleged in a 2018 tweet that Tron's paper lifted nine pages directly from his white paper. Vitalik Buterin, the Russian-born Canadian cofounder of Ethereum, trolled Sun, writing a 2018 response to a Sun tweet listing differences between Ethereum and Tron. "Better white paper writing capability: (Control+C + Control+V much higher efficiency than keyboard typing new content)."

Undeterred, Sun insisted that the similarity to Ethereum was intentional. "At that time, Ethereum compatibility was very important," he says.

No one has been more instrumental to Sun's early success than Changpeng "CZ" Zhao, Binance's billionaire founder, whom Sun says he first met in 2015 while he was still at the predecessor to Blockchain.com. In August 2017, Binance handled Tron's $70 million ICO just a few days before China banned the speculative offerings outright.

In November 2018, after the ICO bubble had burst, Zhao launched Binance's Gold Label Project in an effort to support floundering crypto offerings and "raise the industry standard for quality of information" by encouraging the projects to post regular updates on their development. Tron was one of the first to receive that blessing, and because Tron became the default option for Binance's 10 million users who wanted to use Tether's USDT stablecoin for U.S. dollar payments, its business swelled. In late 2019, Binance juiced Sun again, offering holders of Tether's stablecoin on Tron a 16% annual percentage rate on balances. It also quietly began offering free withdrawals and internal transfers, which gave Tron a big competitive edge over Ethereum transfers. According to research from Messari, from October to December 2019, the supply of Tether's USDT coin on Tron jumped from around $100 million to almost $1 billion, representing around 30% of the stablecoin supply at the time.

CZ and Binance were headed for trouble--in 2023 Binance agreed to pay over $4 billion to the U.S. government in response to money laundering and other charges. In mid 2024, CZ served four months in prison after he pleaded guilty to failing to maintain an effective anti–money laundering program. But Binance's boost for Tron had already taken: Tether's USDT has become the most actively traded cryptocurrency on the planet, and Tron has become its main blockchain home. Part of it is liquidity: People and businesses in emerging countries are desperate for dollars to facilitate trade and payments. They use Tether's digital dollar as a substitute. In fact, Tron already has 300 million users worldwide and its monthly transaction volume exceeds $500 billion, making it indispensable for peer-to-peer payments.

"Any time I refer to stablecoins, you can just assume that about 70% of it is USDT on Tron," says Chris Maurice, a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree and the cofounder and CEO of Yellow Card, which specializes in payments and remittances in 20 African countries.

Low fees have been another driver for Tron. Sun gobbled up market share by offering trades at 30 cents at a time when Ethereum charged $50. "You're talking about some of the most cost-sensitive markets on earth," Maurice says. "In some of these countries people will spend eight hours of their day to save a couple of bucks, and $50 versus a few cents is a pretty tremendous difference."

USDT boasts a circulation of $144 billion; Tron accounts for almost half of it. Its dominance established, Tron's fees have jumped at least tenfold. In 2024, Tron's blockchain revenue of $2.2 billion was second only to Ethereum's at $2.5 billion.

Rapid growth in the Wild West of crypto: What could go wrong?

Well, the same features that make USDT on Tron appealing to legitimate users have attracted terrorists, drug dealers, money launderers and scammers. Blockchain intelligence firm Inca Digital found that terrorist organizations including Hamas and Hezbollah have used Sun's blockchain to move more than $2 billion in funds. According to TRM Labs' Crypto Crime report, 58% of all illicit crypto transactions last year, almost $10 billion, occurred on Tron--more than Ethereum and Bitcoin combined.

Sun claims he's working to make Tron safer. In September, Tron, Tether and TRM Labs announced a partnership to root out illicit activity on Tron, called the T3 Financial Crime Unit. Since its launch T3 says it has frozen $130 million.

For the most part, those in the United States seem skeptical. Stablecoin maker Circle has stopped doing business with Sun's blockchain altogether. Moreover, in December 2024, blue-chip exchange Coinbase delisted a version of bitcoin known as "wrapped bitcoin" (wBTC) that runs on the Ethereum blockchain and is widely rumored to be controlled by Sun. Said Coinbase in a court filing over the matter, "Mr. Sun's affiliation with--and potential control over--wBTC presented an unacceptable risk to its customers and the integrity of its exchange." Sun declined to comment on the matter.

The SEC charges, though on hold, are serious. Sun and the foundations he allegedly controls, Tron and BitTorrent, were not only accused of selling unregistered securities but also of propping up his blockchain's token, TRX, through bogus "wash" trading in 2018 and 2019. Sun allegedly directed his employees to set up multiple accounts and make hundreds of thousands of trades, giving the appearance of heavy demand. The SEC also alleges that Sun further pumped up his token's price by paying celebrities including Lindsay Lohan and Jake Paul to tout them, without disclosing the payments. (Sun declined to comment on the SEC's lawsuit.)

All of which makes the timing of the Trump partnership all the more convenient. While Sun says he has never met the president, he has recently spent time with sons Eric and Donald Jr., who are partners in WLF with the son of Trump's friend and Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff.

Fully aware that crypto requires public trust, Sun has latched himself to the idea that the president of the United States, in jumping into this market, can enhance its credibility among retail investors. "$TRUMP really breaks the boundaries between Web3 and the traditional world," Sun says. "Even my mom asked me about the token."

"I think Trump got elected and started to push lots of crypto business, [which] actually benefits the whole industry a lot more in this supercycle," he adds. He cites the global reaction to $TRUMP after it launched, claiming that his exchange, HTX, registered 1 million new users within a week of Trump's coin offering, many of whom came from China, where crypto is technically banned. Even more telling, according to Sun, was that Chinese authorities let the meme coin trend on social media for days.

"The Chinese government doesn't want to be seen as banning Trump," he says. "I think they are afraid of somebody telling Trump that the Chinese government is banning your coin."

Sun might not have met Trump, but he has embodied the lessons of America's greatest marketer. While many crypto leaders crave anonymity, Sun has embraced the opposite, eagerly throwing millions at stunts that catch the public eye.

In 2019, he paid $4.6 million to have lunch with Warren Buffett as part of Buffett's annual charity auction. That attracted attention. Then Sun compounded it by canceling three days before the planned meetup. (He ultimately dined with Buffett in Omaha, Nebraska, a year later.) Sun ran that playbook again in 2021, bidding $28 million to be the first paying passenger on Jeff Bezos' spaceship Blue Origin, then garnering still more attention by missing the launch because of "scheduling" conflicts.

In November, as he was finalizing his Trump investment, Sun spent $6.2 million at Sotheby's for a work of conceptual art: The Comedian, a banana duct-taped to a wall by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan. Ten days later he ate the banana onstage in front of a group of reporters in Hong Kong.

He identifies himself with the title "His Excellency," owing to his recent World Trade Organization ambassadorship of the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada. He also holds the position of prime minister of the Free Republic of Liberland, a "micronation" claiming ownership of territory along the Danube River in Croatia. So what does His Excellency, a Chinese native--who in addition to these dubious posts seems to spend most of his time in Hong Kong and lists his location as Switzerland on his X profile--consider as his citizenship? "I think we can put St. Kitts, probably," he says.

"Most people probably think I do these things because I want to get everybody's attention," he says. "But actually, when I do things in crypto that come to reality, that is when I get most of it."

Indeed, such theatrics distract from what seems a very cunning growth focus. His copycat DeFi exchange SunSwap, built on the Tron blockchain, saw its trading volume explode in 2024, using the low intro-fee strategy he employed for USDT, with more than $4 billion of trades of the "wrapped" token in December 2024. Likewise SunPump, Sun's copy of the Solana-based meme coin factory, is churning out the trendy whimsical tokens at a rapid rate. Though the 97,000 tokens it has minted since inception in August have produced only $37 million--compared to Solana's 2024 total of $600 million--Sun believes Asia is the next big market for meme coins, and he's positioning SunPump to be a leader. "I think meme coins are capitalizing the internet itself," he says.

So what's next? "These days, I'm thinking about AI agents," says Sun, who, ever the bandwagon jumper, now cites Elon Musk as his chief role model. He wants Tron, with its fast transactions, to serve as the underlying payments infrastructure for a world powered by intelligent machines.

"For example, if you need to get a job done and one AI agent hires another, which hires ten more within a minute, that's impossible in the traditional systems, where you need payroll, bank accounts. That's gonna take probably six months to do it in the first place," Sun says. "But on a highly scalable network everything can be done in five minutes or five seconds, and that's going to make a lot of things possible. Think global AI employment--and of course a global reliable payment network operating 24/7 is a foundation for that."

Sounds crazy? That's just fine by Sun, who relishes the attention, is used to being underestimated and seems unruffled by the perceived impunity that his partnership with the Trumps may or may not have purchased.

"Regulators have a mindset that everybody needs to comply. But most regulations are from the past and are being used to regulate future activities," Sun says. "I want to be a builder of the future world. But first, we have to imagine what the future world will be."

Additional reporting by Javier Paz.

Chinese blockchain entrepreneur Justin Sun's admiration of Donald Trump began in middle school, while he was living in Huizhou, a city of 6 million in China's Guangdong province just north of

Topline
Former CNN anchor Don Lemon has been taken into federal custody in what his attorney called an "unprecedented attack on the First Amendment,” in connection with an anti-ICE protest inside a church in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Key Facts
Lemon's attorney, Abbe Lowell, said in a statement that Lemon was taken into federal custody in Los Angeles Thursday night.

What charges Lemon will face was not immediately clear.

The arrest comes after a federal magistrate judge last week refused to issue arrest warrants for five people connected to the church protest, including Lemon, with one judge writing there was no evidence Lemon or his producer committed any crime.

This is a developing story and will be updated.

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