Newsletter: Trump’s crypto empire attracts more foreign millions, the FHFA pushes crypto on mortgage lenders, and Mamdani’s mayoral primary win makes billionaires sweat.
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@molly0xfff
That's one way to kill Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (and the federal govt?). Bankruptcy is coming.
@molly0xfff is this new? I literally just sent my mortgage broker at Rocket Mortgage the statements from my CoinBase account..... like 20 minutes ago.
@molly0xfff LOL. The EU's having a new Anti-Money Laundering Authority.
So Trump will have to launder dirty & bloody money using crypto in the United States.
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For all Trump likes to talk about “America First” crypto, his businesses are looking very UAE-first. Trump’s World Liberty Financial has just secured a $100 million investment from the UAE-based Aqua 1 Foundation, which has leapfrogged Justin Sun in Trump’s pay-for-access leaderboard.
![Trump business interests
Aqua 1 Foundation, a United Arab Emirates-based crypto fund, has spent $100 million to acquire WLFI tokens, the token issued by the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial Project, and cultivate a close relationship with the Trumps. They have just surpassed shady crypto billionaire Justin Sun and his $75 million investment to become the single largest holder of WLFI tokens.1 World Liberty also profited massively last month from a deal in which Emirati investment firm MGX used the company’s USD1 stablecoin to perform a $2 billion investment into Binance [I83]. In a press release, Aqua 1 claimed that they and World Liberty would work closely to “jointly identify and nurture high-potential blockchain projects”, and said that World Liberty “plans to support the launch of Aqua 1’s Aqua Fund — a UAE-domiciled investment fund ... dedicated to accelerating the Middle East’s digital economy transformation”.2 For all Trump likes to talk about “America First” crypto projects, his businesses are looking very UAE-first.
World Liberty also just announced a partnership with London-based Re7 Capital, a decentralized hedge fund backed by the Hong Kong multi-family office VMS Group. The partnership aims to increase USD1 uptake on BNB Chain, the blockchain run by Binance.3 Connections between Binance and Trump have already been controversial, with Democratic Senators Warren, Durbin, and Blumenthal writing a May letter requesting information on Trump’s connections to](https://media.hachyderm.io/media_attachments/files/114/779/560/270/449/469/original/87fde2170672ab78.png)
There’s been some reporting that Trump is pulling away from his crypto projects, but this isn’t supported by financial disclosures published on June 13.
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A reporter tried asking Trump directly if he might divest from his crypto businesses, and Trump repeated “I’m president” and rambled about China. So... that’s a no, I guess
FHFA Director Bill Pulte has directed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to “prepare a proposal for consideration of cryptocurrency as an asset for reserves in their respective single-family mortgage loan risk assessments.”
4 media
Judge Analisa Torres has rejected the joint request by the SEC and Ripple to lift the permanent injunction and reduce Ripple’s $125 million penalty to only $50 million. Ripple has opted to walk away rather than continue their ongoing appeal.
![SEC
Federal Judge Analisa Torres rejected the joint request by Ripple and the SEC to lift the August 2024 permanent injunction ordering Ripple to obey securities laws and reduce the $125 million penalty to only $50 million [I63]. This outcome is no huge surprise given Torres’ previous skepticism towards a malformed request to do the same thing [I84]. Torres elaborated:16
Not that long ago, the SEC made a compelling case that the public interest weighed heavily in favor of a permanent injunction and a substantial civil penalty. ... First, a penalty was necessary because Ripple had violated the law. ... Second, the SEC pressed for a permanent injunction because Ripple’s misconduct was reckless and likely to continue. ... None of this has changed—and the parties hardly pretend that it has. Nevertheless, they now claim that it is in the public interest to cut the Civil Penalty by sixty percent and vacate the permanent injunction entered less than a year ago.
Torres essentially left Ripple with two options: accept the earlier penalties and walk away, or continue fighting to have the judgment overturned on appeal. Ripple chose the latter the following day, dropping its cross appeal against the SEC. Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse also wrote that they still expected the SEC to drop their appeal as well, which was filed before Trump took office and which sought penalties closer to the nearly $2 billion originally requested by the agency.17](https://media.hachyderm.io/media_attachments/files/114/779/580/914/112/434/original/a44a71fec5ceb5b0.png)
Crypto super PACs spent $1 million to back Democrat James Walkinshaw in the Virginia special election to replace Rep. Gerry Connolly. While Connolly was a staunch crypto skeptic, Walkinshaw’s promise to “embrace the next generation of technology” earned him the support of the crypto lobby.
