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Justin Sun
Justin Sun (Jiang Xin/Getty Images)
Here comes the sun

Largest $TRUMP holder buying $100 million more of the meme coin

Tron founder Justin Sun, who is also an adviser to Trump-connected World Liberty Financial, announced his plans on X.

Sage D. Young

Justin Sun — founder of the Tron blockchain, largest holder of trumpexpensive banana buyer, and adviser and investor of President Trump-backed crypto project World Liberty Financial — announced plans to purchase another $100 million worth of the sitting president’s namesake meme coin. 

Trump’s meme coin has jumped 4.5% in the last 24 hours, while the native cryptocurrency of the Tron network has remained flat. 

The announcement comes less than two months after Sun attended a dinner dedicated to $TRUMP meme coin whales.

Sun’s plans to acquire more $TRUMP is “plainly corruption,” says Carlos Mercado, an economist and architect of blockchain protocol True Freeze. “Buy $TRUMP and get access, and also get your SEC lawsuits closed up. It’s naked bribery and corruption,” Mercado told Sherwood News. 

In 2023, the SEC charged Sun and three of his companies for the unregistered sales of crypto asset securities and the fraudulent manipulation of TRX in secondary markets through wash trading. 

A few weeks after Trump won the 2024 presidential election, Sun invested $30 million in World Liberty Financial, becoming “its largest investor” at the time, he posted on X. The crypto project would name Sun an adviser a day later. 

In January, Sun announced an additional $45 million investment in World Liberty Financial, while World Liberty purchased $2.6 million worth of TRX. The Trump-backed crypto project currently holds nearly 40.7 million TRX tokens, or about $12 million, making it the sixth-largest holder of TRX, on-chain data from blockchain analytics firm Arkham Intelligence shows. 

In February, the US Securities and Exchange Commission and Sun jointly requested a federal judge to pause the agency’s regulatory actions “to allow the parties to explore a potential resolution.” 

Instead of a way to “buy favors,” Nicolai Søndergaard, a research analyst at crypto data firm Nansen, sees Sun’s further acquisition of $TRUMP as an “expensive networking event.”

“The minimum intention I infer is that Justin Sun and in extension TRON is positioning in a way that will benefit his/their existing bags and bets,” Søndergaard told Sherwood.

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OP token rises after payments card provider Ether.fi finalizes migration to the layer 2 network

OP, the governance token for OP Mainnet, has increased as much as 5% since Tuesday night following news that Ether.fi, a decentralized finance protocol known for providing noncustodial crypto payment cards, completed its migration to the ethereum layer 2 blockchain network. 

Ether.fi’s move resulted in around $220 million in total value locked coming to OP Mainnet, the largest single TVL event in the network’s history, as well as over 70,000 payment cards and more than 300,000 accounts, according to a blog post from Ether.fi

Originally on alternative layer 2 network Scroll, Ether.fi made the switch to OP Mainnet due to lower median transaction fees of $0.00001 and sub-250-millisecond finality times. 

“To ship what comes next, we needed infrastructure that could handle real-time payments at consumer volume,” Ether.fi CEO Mike Silagadze told Sherwood News. “OP Mainnet delivered on every dimension. Three days to migrate $220M with no downtime answered the question. Now we get to build.” 

The migration comes about two months after Coinbase-incubated blockchain Base announced moving away from Optimism’s OP Stack. 

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Ethereum climbs to highest point since end of January

Ethereum has rallied 8% in the last 24 hours to trade just under the $2,390 level, liquidating over $151.7 million worth of ethereum short positions in the period. 

The last time ethereum was at its current level was the last day of January, data from CoinGecko shows.

According to Jim Hwang, COO of investment company Firinne Capital, ETH has been acting as a risk asset: declining in times of heightened uncertainties such as the conflict in Iran, inflation expectations, and diminished rate cut hopes.

“Only in the last 24+ hours when these uncertainties have diminished are we seeing prices lift again. We can feel a bit of optimism but to the extent that this cease fire remains tentative, we should probably view the current ETH price gains with caution,” Hwang told Sherwood News. 

A GlassNode senior analyst, who maintains the pseudonymous X account CryptoVizArt, said on X that ethereum has “reclaimed the one-to-three month holder cost basis at around $2,300. So far, this structure is consistent with a bear market relief rally, comparable to the bounces observed in Q3-Q4 2022, rather than a structural trend reversal.” 

Tom Lee, chairman of ethereum treasury firm BitMine Immersion Technologies, said ethereum’s performance since the start of the Iran conflict demonstrates how the cryptocurrency is a “wartime store of value,” per the firm’s press release on Monday, in which it announced acquired 71,524 additional tokens worth $170.5 million. That brings its total stockpile to nearly 4.9 million tokens, or 4% of the total supply of ethereum. 

That said, the founder of venture capital firm Kenetic, Jehan Chu, told Sherwood, “It’s clear that regaining ATH [all-time high] will take real-world revenue-generation, and not just a Tom Lee narrative.” 

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