Crypto Kings

[Rideback]

https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/jeffrey- ... irect=true

[mister_coffee]

s/Cryto/Crypto please

I think the transition from "meme coins" to "stable coins" greatly magnifies the systemic risk that crpytocurrencies pose. Kind of like when we went from mortgage-back securities in the 1980s and 1990s to CDOs and synthetic CDOs.

[Rideback]

WSJ
Angus Berwick and Eliot Brown

"In the depths of Donald Trump’s interregnum, his eldest two sons huddled in a Mar-a-Lago conference room with boyhood pal Zach Witkoff to conjure up a new money machine. Two other would-be cryptocurrency entrepreneurs showed up, one in sweatpants.

That pre-election confab sowed the seeds for World Liberty Financial, a crypto venture that, with the senior Trump back in power, is generating cash far faster than the president’s decades-old real-estate business.

While his father Steve Witkoff acts as President Trump’s all-purpose special envoy, 32-year-old Zach Witkoff now heads up World Liberty, which has doled out at least $1.4 billion to both families since the president’s re-election, based on a Wall Street Journal analysis of public disclosures and private documents. Among the payouts: a secret $500 million deal to sell almost half the company to an Abu Dhabi royal and his co-investors.

Witkoff is part of a small cadre of Trump administration offspring who, since their fathers moved to Washington, have metamorphosed into wealthy financial celebrities in their own right.

Key to their transformation has been the crypto sector, where they were all neophytes a few years ago, but now run businesses that raised billions of dollars from investors before the market turned sour. And because they were able to extract real cash from their ventures quickly, they are far less exposed to the current crypto downturn than retail investors who loaded up on digital tokens.

The younger Witkoff now tours the globe alongside a phalanx of aides with an American flag pinned to his suit jacket and counts some of crypto’s most powerful figures as friends, including Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, who Trump pardoned in October. He sports a Richard Mille timepiece worth half a million dollars on one day, a $250,000 rose-gold Patek Philippe on another.

Eric Trump is the public face of a bitcoin company where he holds a $90 million stake, while his brothers, Don Jr. and 19-year-old Barron join him as co-founders of World Liberty. Brandon Lutnick, the 28-year-old son of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, runs his father’s former Wall Street firm Cantor Fitzgerald, a midtier investment bank that has become a top choice for crypto deals."