Trump To Launch Upcoming Crypto Venture On Elon Musk’s X On This Date, Says We’re ‘Leaving The Outdated And Big Banks Behind’

Former President Donald Trump’s hotly anticipated cryptocurrency venture has a launch date, and it has come straight from the horse’s mouth.

What happened: Trump released a video from his official X handle Thursday, announcing that the World Liberty Financial project would be launched on X spaces next Monday at 8 p.m.

“We’re embracing the future with crypto and leaving the outdated and big banks behind,” the Republican, who is running for White House, said.

Trump’s son Eric Trump, who has been promoting the decentralized finance (DeFi) project over the past few weeks, reposted the announcement, saying “Crypto is the future—I’m all in.”

See Also: Peter Schiff Will…

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Our industry is in limbo. What’s going on?

Today, enjoy the On the Margin newsletter on Blockworks.co. Tomorrow, get the news delivered directly to your inbox. Subscribe to the On the Margin newsletter.

What are we really doing here?

“Uli doesn’t care about anything. He’s a Nihilist. Ah, that must be exhausting.” 

— Bunny Lebowski, The Big Lebowski

I’ve been thinking a lot about use cases, adoption in crypto and what we’re really doing here.

Bitcoin is up 30% year to date, and yet the vibes have felt like we’re in a bear market. Every altcoin has sunk under the weight of inflated high-fdv, low-float launch strategies and governance tokens that cannot pass on any value accrual to holders due to the regulatory…

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A publicly-traded holding company is all-in on Solana

Today, enjoy the Lightspeed newsletter on Blockworks.co. Tomorrow, get the news delivered directly to your inbox. Subscribe to the Lightspeed newsletter. 

Toronto-based holding company Cypherpunk Holdings has rebranded to Sol Strategies in a pivot to a Solana-first investment approach, the firm disclosed today.

Following the rebrand, Sol Strategies will begin focusing on staking Solana and investing in the Solana ecosystem’s projects and infrastructure, the company said in a press release. The strategy shift was unanimously approved by the company’s board of directors at its July 30 shareholder meeting, Sol Strategies said in a press release.

Cypherpunk Holdings has been scaling…

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Coinbase introduces wrapped bitcoin competitor ‘cbBTC’

Coinbase is moving forward with the launch of cbBTC, an ERC-20 tokenized bitcoin that will go live on Base and other Ethereum ecosystems.

The new bitcoin token will be backed 1:1 by bitcoin reserves and presumably held in centralized custody by Coinbase.

Coinbase first teased the impending cbBTC on Aug. 14 amid a swirl of controversy surrounding BitGo. Today, it was formally announced.

This marks the first significant competitive threat to BitGo’s wrapped bitcoin (WBTC), which controls a dominant 96.6% market share across the Ethereum ecosystem today, according to Dune.

Read more: BitGo moves to allay fears over WBTC custodial changes

Coinbase’s tweet claims cbBTC will be available…

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Nigeria is undergoing a ‘real crypto dollarization event’: Nic Carter

Stablecoins are having a moment, that much is clear.

As the rest of crypto trades sideways, the market capitalization of stablecoins has steadily increased. It sits now at $170 million, per rwa.xzy, though there has been a slight dip over the past few days.

Castle Island Ventures, alongside Artemis, Visa and Brevan Howard Digital made a new survey that looks into the prevalence of stablecoins in certain emerging markets. The survey looked into roughly 2,500 crypto users in Nigeria, India, Turkey, Indonesia and Brazil. 

“Our survey results contradict the common belief that stablecoins are exclusively used as a tool for the speculative trading of crypto assets. Forty-seven percent of…

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Squid sinks its tentacles into cross-chain abstraction

Cross-chain swaps are getting a boost with the latest version of Squid, launched today.

Squid 2.0 introduces a new architecture that abstracts away chains to simplify even complex transaction flows with multiple hops.

The update includes performance and cost improvements, and expands Squid 2.0’s functionality into new areas such as 1:1 stablecoin transfers, real-world asset (RWA) transactions and advanced routing.

This new approach goes far beyond finding the most efficient bridge routes, according to Fig, Squid’s co-founder.

“We are a bridging tool in a certain way, but we think that we can change the way that swaps are also done,” Fig told Blockworks.

Read more: Squid enables…

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eToro to cease most crypto offerings after SEC settlement

The Securities and Exchange Commission has reached a settlement with eToro.

eToro was charged with operating as an unregistered broker in connection with its crypto trading platform. As part of the settlement, eToro will end most of its crypto trading activity on the platform, according to the Thursday announcement from the SEC.

Earlier this week, eToro announced that it would alter its crypto offerings “due to the regulatory environment.”

US users can only trade bitcoin, bitcoin cash and ether. Other positions will be liquidated in mid-March of next year.

“Proceeds from these liquidations will be transferred to users’ available cash balance in their investment accounts,” the…

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