President Donald Trump earned $57.7 million from token sales by the crypto firm he and his sons helped launch last year, according to his required federal financial disclosure forms.

The financial disclosure, released Friday by the Office of Government Ethics, provided details on his sprawling empire, including hundreds of millions of dollars in income from his hotels, golf resorts and cryptocurrency ventures.

The $57.7 million came from sales by World Liberty Financial, the crypto firm launched last year before the election. Trump and his three sons, Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump and Barron Trump, are among the company’s founders, according to its website. 

That haul wasn’t the largest source of the president’s income from private holdings. Trump Endeavor 12 LLC, a Miami-based company that owns golf courses and a resort, produced $110 million. His Mar-a-Lago Club generated more than $50 million in resort-related revenue.

Trump, who’s worth an estimated $4.8 billion according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, valued 22 assets at more than $50 million, including Mar-a-Lago, his Turnberry, Scotland, golf resort and his stakes in World Liberty Financial and Trump Media & Technology Group Corp., which owns his Truth Social platform. Officials disclose the values of their holdings in broad ranges with “over $50 million” the highest, which means that they can’t be used to calculate an individual’s net worth. Trump Media, for example, is currently worth $2.2 billion.

Fight Fight Fight LLC, which sells Trump’s meme coin, was launched in January and wasn’t included in the disclosure, which covers 2024. The company hosted a dinner that Trump attended for the 220 largest holders of the $TRUMP coin in May. The event, when announced in April, caused the coin’s price to shoot up 56%.

CIC Digital LLC, the entity that earns money through licensing Trump’s image on nonfungible tokens, produced income of $1.1 million in 2024. It also holds a wallet holding Etherium worth at least $1 million.

The 234-page disclosure also lists hundreds of trademarks Trump owns across the world, including in China, Taiwan, South Korea, Venezuela and other countries, and details his personal investments that aren’t part of his business empire, as well as first lady Melania Trump’s holdings.

Trump listed 11 outstanding debts on the form, including two judgments against him won by author E. Jean Carroll involving allegations of sexual assault and defamation and one owed from the criminal fraud case for which he was convicted of 34 felonies. Those debts were stayed pending the outcome of appeals Trump has filed. 

He did not list any outstanding debt to lawyers or law firms stemming from the criminal and civil cases. Save America, his leadership political action committee, has paid most of those fees. 

Trump had seven outstanding real estate loans, including mortgages in amounts of more than $50 million on Trump Tower, Trump National Doral and 40 Wall Street. He also listed debt on his American Express credit card of at least $15,000. 

Vice President JD Vance also disclosed assets for him and his wife, Usha Vance, worth at least $6.5 million.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

© Kenny Holston—The New York Times/Bloomberg via Getty Images

A man who says he was kidnapped by two crypto investors for his Bitcoin was seen in photos and videos “laughing and smiling” and moving about Manhattan freely during the days he claimed he was tortured in captivity, lawyers for the two suspects said in court Wednesday.

William Duplessie, 32, and John Woeltz, 37, pleaded not guilty and were ordered held in custody until their next court date on July 15. Prosecutors argue the man was clearly in distress because he ran barefoot and bloodied to the nearest police officer after escaping 17 days in captivity.

However, Duplessie’s lawyer said Wednesday that videos show the accuser participating in group sex and smoking crack cocaine while “laughing and smiling the whole time.” In other photos, Sam Talkin said, the accuser is seen visiting an eyeglass store with one of the defendants and could have fled or sought help at any time.

“The story that he is selling doesn’t make sense,” Talkin said in Manhattan criminal court as the defendants were formally arraigned.

Woeltz’s lawyer, Wayne Gosnell, added that witnesses told him the accuser came and went as he pleased from the upscale town house where he says he was held — going to church, clubs and dinners.

The accuser, a 28-year-old Italian national, has not been named by officials. Prosecutors say the defendants have known him personally for years.

In court Wednesday, Assistant District Attorney Sarah Khan argued that someone who supports the defendants was selectively leaking videos to present a counternarrative of the events.

In reality, she said, the accuser was constantly watched, was not permitted to leave the house without being guarded and was subjected to violence, including being pistol-whipped and cut with a small chain saw.

The defendants also took photos of the man in various poses and acts to create the impression that he was not being held against his will, Khan said.

Police searching the town house found evidence corroborating his story, including a loaded pistol, chain saw and other instruments purportedly used to torture him.

They also located photographs, including one where the defendants point a gun to the accuser’s head, another where the accuser is tied to a wheelchair, and still another showing the accuser being set on fire.

When prodded by the judge, Khan explained that the man didn’t actually sustain any burn injuries because the defendants would quickly douse the flames, sometimes by urinating on him.

What’s more, she said, prosecutors believe this is not the first time the defendants have held a person against their will. They are aware of two other potential victims in two other locations, according to Khan.

Lawyers for the two men, meanwhile, sought their release on $1 million bail and home confinement with their parents. They rejected suggestions from prosecutors that their clients could flee the country.

“He’s so far from a flight risk here. He’s ready to fight this case. He’s not going anywhere,” Talkin said of Duplessie.

The two appeared handcuffed in prison uniforms and didn’t speak in court other than to formally enter their pleas. They are charged with kidnapping, assault, unlawful imprisonment and criminal possession of a weapon and face up to life in prison if convicted.

Prosecutors say that on May 6, the two men lured the victim to a town house in Manhattan’s posh SoHo neighborhood by threatening to kill his family.

The man said the two investors tormented him with electrical wires, forced him to smoke from a crack pipe and at one point dangled him from a staircase five stories high.

The man said he eventually agreed to hand over his computer password, then managed to flee as his captors went to retrieve the device.

Khan said Wednesday that last month’s kidnapping was at least the third instance in which the two had convinced the man to meet them in person, only to threaten him and take his electronic devices in order to obtain his cryptocurrency.

To date, Khan said, he hasn’t received his money or electronic devices back.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

© Kava Gorna—AP

Big Tech’s fever for stablecoins won’t stop. The e-commerce giant Shopify announced Thursday that it was rolling out stablecoin payments to all users on its platform later this year in its largest crypto play yet.

The publicly traded tech company lets merchants—including vintage clothes sellers, cosmetics businesses, and electronics companies—set up their own online marketplaces. By late June, Shopify will let a select group of users accept payments in USDC, a stablecoin issued by the crypto company Circle, which recently had one of the year’s hottest IPOs. 

“In our own philosophical framework, we are extremely aligned with everything that crypto stands for,” Tobias Lütke, the CEO of Shopify and a Coinbase board member, said on stage at a Coinbase conference on Thursday.

Shopify will then gradually expand access to merchants across its network in the U.S. and Europe before opening up stablecoin payments to every merchant who uses its platform. The e-commerce company worked with Coinbase to develop a payments protocol to handle chargebacks, refunds, and the other intricacies of retail payments on Coinbase’s blockchain, Base. It also collaborated with fintech giant Stripe, one of Shopify’s payments processors, to integrate stablecoins into the e-commerce company’s existing software stack.

“I think other payment processors will look at what Shopify is building and be like holy crap,” Jesse Pollak, a Coinbase executive who oversees the crypto exchange’s wallet and blockchain divisions, told Fortune. 

Stablecoin buzz

Shopify’s plunge into crypto comes as stablecoins, or cryptocurrencies pegged to assets like the U.S. dollar, become one of the buzziest sectors outside of AI in Silicon Valley. Rather than wait days for a bank wire to clear, advocates say that stablecoins reduce cross-border transfer fees and speed up transactions.

Tech giants like Meta, Apple, X, Airbnb, and Google have taken notice and have all been in talks with crypto companies to explore stablecoin integrations. Moreover, the Senate is poised to pass legislation that regulates the crypto assets. And Stripe has acquired two crypto startups in the past year as it looks to carve out its own crypto payments strategy.

“This will be the beginning of a lot of dominos falling,” Pollak, the Coinbase executive, told Fortune, in reference to Shopify’s own stablecoin play.

That being said, this isn’t the first time the publicly traded e-commerce company has dipped its toes into crypto. Shopify, headquartered in Ottawa, Canada, has long let third-party software developers like Crypto.com and Strike provide plugins for merchants to accept cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and even USDC for payment.

However, these integrations came from developers outside of Shopify and were opt-in, meaning that merchants had to explicitly choose to integrate crypto payments into their online marketplaces.

Shopify’s most recent stablecoin play is opt-out. Merchants will have to adjust their settings to not accept payments in USDC, a Coinbase spokesperson told Fortune. Moreover, the payments protocol Coinbase developed with Shopify is the product of executives and developers from both companies collaborating over the past nine months, Pollak said. 

Shopify will give merchants who accept USDC up to 0.5% cash back in the U.S. and other countries, and it plans to also give customers who decide to pay with USDC an unspecified percentage of cash back later this year. 

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

© Dustin Chambers—Bloomberg/Getty Images

Financial institutions have attempted to integrate digital asset technology for more than a decade with little to show for their efforts. As it stands today, the total value of blockchain-based finance comprises less than one percent of the $300 trillion global system.

The finance industry talks a good game about embracing blockchain, but the truth is much of the sector hopes crypto will prove to be a fleeting technical fad like Blu-Ray, so it can stick to business as usual. My colleagues and I at Franklin Templeton (a nearly 80-year-old, publicly traded financial institution) understand the sentiment. 

For legacy financial firms, the task of embracing digital asset technology is a daunting one. It means altering our fee structures and potentially losing revenues associated with intermediary functions, rethinking our product offerings and, quite possibly, disrupting our near-term balance sheets as we learn to operate on blockchain and hold cryptocurrencies to pay for block space.

There’s also the awkward reality that financial institutions made tentative efforts to experiment with blockchain in the past, and it did not go very well. We discovered the hard way there was more hype than substance, and that the tech was incapable of delivering at an institutional-grade level. In the past 2-3 years, though, the situation has changed profoundly.

Public blockchains are evolving into hyper-efficient coordination machines poised to replace aspects of legacy financial infrastructure, while unlocking new forms of value for investors. Solana, one of the first institutionally focused blockchains, has demonstrated an ability to process almost 65,000 transactions per second, a figure on par with the Visa network. Sui, a newer blockchain, has shown an ability to process transactions at almost double that rate. With forthcoming upgrades, public blockchains may soon be able to increase their throughput to hundreds of thousands – and even millions of transactions per second.

Decentralized exchanges, like Uniswap, that allow peer-to-peer market-making without a custodian are nipping at the heels of their centralized counterparts in the legacy world, processing trillions of dollars of transactions each year. As these systems become faster, their verification and security features have experienced significant improvements that make them not only resistant to hacks but also better at proving identity and asset ownership. Indeed, proving who owns what and when they came to own it is no small feat. Just ask hedge fund managers who need to rapidly unwind positions across multiple, disparate accounts. 

All these changes are poised to benefit investors and traders. Here are some further examples: 

Today’s markets are geographically siloed, which leads to fractured liquidity and diminished investor access to quality assets. Decentralized exchanges can help to integrate global markets – making them more efficient and accessible. 

Currently, the process of finalizing transactions can take a day or more, creating imbalanced, and often unfair, outcomes. Consider, for example, that securities are generally only available to trade during market hours. Shareholder ownership records are only updated after trading for the day has been concluded. Investors eligible to receive dividends or interest are determined only once daily based on a start-of-day snapshot of shareholders, and then typically paid their yield at the end of the month. Blockchain-based systems can instead calculate and pay out intraday yield if a tokenized security is transferred or traded throughout the day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, uninterrupted – enabling more accurate and ideally more reliable cash flows. 

We believe that the portfolios of the future will increasingly move away from today’s account-based system and rely instead on digital wallets that can hold a limitless number of tokenized assets in a single place – all of which can be transferred instantly, as well as lent out or staked for additional yield. 

In the future, blockchains are also poised to offer new financial options for homeowners. Those will include, for instance, portions of home equity—an illiquid asset—to pay premiums on an income-generating annuity product, smoothing the path to retirement. Adapting to, and innovating with, these rapid technological changes will require meaningful — and at times uncomfortable — adjustments to how legacy institutions conduct business and make money. There will be winners and losers. Perhaps sooner than expected, some slow-footed legacy players may face a situation akin to Blockbuster, the once dominant video rental chain wiped out by Netflix and other new streaming services

The advantages of blockchain are so compelling that we don’t foresee the shift to digital asset technology being slow or incremental. Indeed, we expect our industry will evolve more in the next five years than in the last 50. The pressing question is whether financial institutions will choose to embrace the digital asset wave (and the disruption coming with it), actively fight it or bury its head in the sand. 

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

OneBalance, a London-based crypto software company, has raised $20 million in a Series A led by venture capital firms cyber•Fund and Blockchain Capital, the company announced on Wednesday. The round included participation from Mirana Ventures and L2IV and brings the company’s total funding to $25 million. OneBalance declined to disclose its valuation in this round. 

OneBalance, founded in 2024, aims to build software that will make it possible for non-crypto native software engineers to build applications that use crypto, CEO Stephane Gosselin told Fortune. The company’s main product, which launched on Wednesday, is a toolkit—a collection of software tools and libraries—that lets developers integrate into applications the ability to trade memecoins, swap tokens, and facilitate peer-to-peer payments, among other things. 

“They [developers] can focus on their product and how to create the user experience, while having a reliable way to do transfers, swaps and earning yield,” Gosselin said.

With an increasing number of non-crypto companies—including Meta and Google—considering integrating stablecoins in some manner, Gosselin says software like his will make it easier for companies to add blockchain technology to their services. 

“They don’t necessarily know how to be able to execute reliability on-chain and the last thing they want to do is start to expose a lot of that complexity to their users,” Gosselin said.

The toolkit launched with support for Ethereum, Polygon, and other ethereum-virtual machine blockchains. OneBalance will introduce support for Solana at the end of this month, the company said. 

OneBalance will charge a fee on each transaction processed by a platform that integrates the toolkit, Gosselin said. “We want to make money when our customers make money,” Gosselin said. “If our customers decide to monetize and to do this with us, then we will keep a small fee on top of that.” 

OneBalance is among a number of crypto companies seeking to make application development simpler. Reown and Privy, for instance, both offer standard developer kits, or SDKs, that aim to make it easier for engineers to integrate crypto wallet functionality into their applications. Another example is Helius, a developer platform focused on eliminating complexities for application engineers trying to build on the Solana blockchain. 

Gosselin says his company will use the money raised in this round to expand the capabilities of its flagship product by integrating functionality for additional blockchains.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

© Felicia Sewerinsson

An increasing number of mainstream companies are experimenting with blockchain technology, according to a new report. 

Around 60% of Fortune 500 executives say their companies are “working on blockchain initiatives,” according to a new survey published by crypto exchange Coinbase on Tuesday, in partnership with GLG Research. That’s a 4% increase from last year. Many of these crypto projects are related to the use of blockchain technology for payments and settlements, supply chain management, and blockchain infrastructure. 

GLG Research and Coinbase did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Fortune.

The latest data comes as a new political climate has made the idea of blockchain more interesting to mainstream U.S. corporations. President Donald Trump has supported the idea of a clear regulatory framework for crypto, and has been much more supportive of the industry than President Biden. 

The industry has also experienced a recent IPO boom. This month, Circle—a major company that issues a stablecoin called USDC, which is pegged to the value of the U.S. Dollar—went public with an $8 billion valuation. Other crypto companies have also recently filed to go public or are reportedly considering it, including crypto exchanges Gemini and Kraken.

Since the start of the year, a number of financial companies have announced that they are using or experimenting with stablecoins including asset manager Fidelity, global payments company Visa and fintech company Stripe. 

Other tech companies are jumping on the stablecoin trend as well. Social media platform X, AirBnB and Google are all in early conversations about integrating stablecoins into their business operations. And in May, Fortune reported that Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta—which has unsuccessfully experimented with blockchain technology in the past—has been in discussions with crypto companies to introduce the use of stablecoins for payouts. 

An increasing number of mainstream companies are experimenting with blockchain technology, according to a new report. 

Around 60% of Fortune 500 executives say their companies are “working on blockchain initiatives,” according to a new survey published by crypto exchange Coinbase on Tuesday, in partnership with GLG Research. That’s a 4% increase from last year. Many of these crypto projects are related to the use of blockchain technology for payments and settlements, supply chain management, and blockchain infrastructure. 

GLG Research and Coinbase did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Fortune.

The latest data comes as a new political climate has made the idea of blockchain more interesting to mainstream U.S. corporations. President Donald Trump has supported the idea of a clear regulatory framework for crypto, and has been much more supportive of the industry than President Biden. 

The industry has also experienced a recent IPO boom. This month, Circle—a major company that issues a stablecoin called USDC, which is pegged to the value of the U.S. Dollar—went public with an $8 billion valuation. Other crypto companies have also recently filed to go public or are reportedly considering it, including crypto exchanges Gemini and Kraken.

Since the start of the year, a number of financial companies have announced that they are using or experimenting with stablecoins including asset manager Fidelity, global payments company Visa and fintech company Stripe. 

Other tech companies are jumping on the stablecoin trend as well. Social media platform X, AirBnB and Google are all in early conversations about integrating stablecoins into their business operations. And in May, Fortune reported that Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta—which has unsuccessfully experimented with blockchain technology in the past—has been in discussions with crypto companies to introduce the use of stablecoins for payouts. 

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

© Illustration by Fortune Staff

It’s one of crypto’s hottest trends: publicly traded companies buying bitcoin and then buying even more.

President Donald Trump’s media company just announced a plan to raise $2.5 billion to buy bitcoin, joining a growing number of so-called “bitcoin treasury companies” as the world’s most popular cryptocurrency hits all-time highs.

The companies buy bitcoin for different reasons: Some hold it as a hedge against inflation or to signal support for the cryptocurrency industry, while some firms have made using debt and stock sales to buy bitcoin their primary business strategy.

“The world at large has no idea what’s happening and they’re in for a big shock,” Dylan LeClair, an executive at the Japan-based Metaplanet, which recently went from being a budget hotel firm to a bitcoin treasury company, said at a recent crypto conference. “This is a one-way train, nothing is going to stop this.”

The massive increases in some firms’ stock price may seem to validate LeClair’s bravado, but there are plenty of warnings that a downturn in bitcoin’s prices could lead to large selloffs.

Here’s a look at bitcoin treasury companies by the numbers:

582,000

That’s how many bitcoins owned by MicroStrategy – the undisputed goliath of bitcoin treasury companies.

With nearly 3% of the total bitcoin supply, MicroStrategy owns more bitcoins than every other bitcoin treasury company combined. It also owns more bitcoin than every nation state combined, according to the tracking site bitcointreasuries.net.

Now called Strategy, the software company first started buying bitcoin in 2020 with reserve cash. Now, its software business is a small part of a perpetual bitcoin-buying machine that uses a variety of strategies – like selling shares or issuing debt – to keep growing its bitcoin holdings.

More than 3000%

That’s how much MicroStrategy’s stock price has increased in the last five years, compared to around 1,000% gain in bitcoin and the 1,500% jump for chipmaker and stock market darling Nvidia during that same period.

The company’s success has boosted the profile of MicroStrategy’s founder and chairman, Michael Saylor, who has visited Trump at Mar-a-Lago and the White House while becoming bitcoin’s enigmatic high priest.

“Bitcoin is a swarm of cyber hornets serving the goddess of wisdom, feeding on the fire of truth, exponentially growing ever smarter, faster, and stronger behind a wall of encrypted energy,” Saylor said in a social media post.

Saylor’s success has also spawned many imitators.

“It’s kind of shocking … that it took someone four years after Michael Saylor started doing it to finally do it and pull the trigger and now it feels like everyone’s pulling the trigger,” said Eric Semler, the chairman of Semler Scientific, a healthcare company that started acquiring bitcoin last year.

$90,000

That’s the average purchase price of bitcoin for half of the 61 publicly traded bitcoin strategy companies, excluding bitcoin mining companies and bitcoin exchange-traded funds, according to a recent analysis by Standard Chartered.

Geoff Kendrick, the bank’s head of digital assets research, said in the report that restrictions on investors buying bitcoin directly help explain the popularity of bitcoin treasury companies, as their stocks can serve as bitcoin proxies. But as crypto becomes more mainstream, the case for investing in bitcoin treasury companies becomes weaker, Kendrick said.

He added that bitcoin’s volatility could force some newer bitcoin treasury companies to sell their holdings to satisfy their debts if it falls under the purchase price.

“The question then becomes, how much pain can companies withstand before being forced to sell their BTC?” Kendrick said, referring to the symbol for bitcoin.

Triple digits

That’s how much of a one-day percentage increase in stock prices firms have seen after recently announcing plans to hold other types of cryptocurrencies as corporate treasuries, highlighting how the appetite for such companies extends beyond bitcoin.

SharpLink Gaming, a gambling marketing firm, saw its share price increase by more than 400% after it announced plans to buy up to $425 million in Ethereum, the second most popular form of cryptocurrency. And crypto firm Upexi saw its stock price soar more than 300% after it announced plans to buy $100 million of Solana, a cryptocurrency popular in the meme coin ecosystem.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

© Mark Humphrey—AP

The story of a stereotypical startup founder has a familiar arc: Drop out of college, launch a startup, raise billions, go public, and then ride off into the sunset as an angel investor in your 40s. That’s not Thijn Lamers. A former executive at the $60 billion fintech giant Adyen, Lamers, who’s in his 50s but declined to specify his exact age, announced on Tuesday he is now president and cofounder of stablecoin startup Noah. “I get so much energy from building,” he said. “I feel like I have the energy of [when I was] 25.”

Lamers’s announcement coincided with news that Noah has raised $22 million in a seed funding round led by LocalGlobe, a veteran venture capital outfit in Europe. Other participants include Felix Capital, FJ Labs, as well as angel investors like Palantir cofounder Joe Lonsdale and Alexander Matthey, a former CTO at Adyen.

Noah cofounder and CEO Shah Ramezani, a 33-year-old former UBS analyst, declined to disclose the valuation for the startup but did say, in a nod to Lamers’ decades of experience, “there was a Thijn premium.”

The pair join a crowded field. Stablecoins, or cryptocurrencies pegged to real-world assets like the U.S. dollar, have become a buzzy technology among VCs. Investors have piled into a suite of startups who promise to use the digital tokens to speed up cross-border transactions and reduce fees from banking transfers.

Even large fintechs like Stripe and Big Tech stalwarts like Meta are taking notice. And with a gangbuster IPO from stablecoin issuer Circle, others may be looking to replicate its success.

Still, Lamers and Ramezani believe they have an edge. “I would say the most important thing in payments, and that’s why a dropout from MIT [finds it] hard to compete, is the network,” Ramezani said.

His comment underscores how fintech giants build competitive moats through relationships with regulators, customers, and banking partners. And Lamers, who led global sales at Adyen, certainly brings a network with him, including relationships with former executives at Big Tech firms like rideshare giant Uber. “Everything is credibility,” Lamers said.

In fact, the most successful tech founders are, on average, 45 years old, according to a 2018 analysis from Harvard Business Review.

Investor to cofounder

Lamers, who left Adyen in 2018, originally met Ramezani as an investor, not a cofounder. In 2022, Ramezani began exploring how to use cryptocurrencies for payments. He first toyed around with Bitcoin before he decided to raise money for a startup that sells access to an API, or application programming interface, which lets software developers easily transfer funds with stablecoins. 

“We’re really building ‘Noah’s ark’ to save everyone from the mass currency inflation,” Ramezani said, explaining the reasoning behind his startup’s name.

Lamers became so interested in Ramezani’s venture that, instead of just investing, he joined as cofounder in June 2024. Now, the pair have grown Noah’s product offerings to let users convert between 50 currencies and transfer money between 70 countries in real-time—as opposed to waiting perhaps days for bank wires to clear. So far, the company has processed more than $1 billion in transaction volumes, according to Ramezani.

“This guy has so much energy, I’m, like, actually blown away,” said Ramezani, in reference to his cofounder. “Thijn is really like a beast.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

© Courtesy of Noah/Hadewych Veys

BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT), the largest Bitcoin exchange-traded fund on the market, has attracted $70 billion in total assets more quickly than any other ETF, adding a new milestone to its long list of accomplishments. 

BlackRock’s IBIT, the most popular of 12 available Bitcoin ETFs, set the record on Monday, 341 days after its debut, according to Bloomberg analyst Eric Balchunas. IBIT reached that mark, “5x faster than the old record held by GLD of 1,691 days,” Balchunas wrote on X, referring to asset manager State Street’s famous gold ETF. 

While other asset managers like Fidelity and VanEck also offer Bitcoin ETFs, BlackRock’s version is the largest by far. After IBIT’s $70 billion in total assets, Fidelity’s FBTC comes in second with $20 billion and Grayscale’s GBTC comes in third with just under $20 billion. 

ETFs are a type of investment vehicle, traded on the stock market, that track the price of one or more underlying assets. The fees ETF issuers charge are usually less than mutual funds and offer a simple way to diversify an investment portfolio. Before the introduction of crypto ETFs last year, Invesco’s QQQ trust ETF, which tracks the Nasdaq, and Vanguard’s VOO ETF, which tracks the S&P 500, were among the most popular. 

IBIT and 10 other Bitcoin ETFs from various companies launched at the beginning of last year after gaining long-awaited regulatory approval from the Securities and Exchange Commission. The debut of the first Bitcoin ETFs showcased strong investor demand for access to the cryptocurrency’s price movements, with IBIT accumulating over $1 billion in assets under management within its first four days on the market. 

By November, BlackRock’s Bitcoin ETF had surpassed its gold fund in total assets, becoming the largest of the 1,400 funds the asset manager offers globally. 

But, the record-breaking did not slow down after that. In December, IBIT became the fastest ETF to hit $50 billion in assets under management, five times quicker than BlackRock’s iShares Core MSCI EAFE ETF which took nearly four years and invests in companies outside of the U.S. and Canada, according to Balchunas.  

“IBIT’s growth is unprecedented,” Bloomberg analyst James Seyffart told the outlet at the time. “It’s the fastest ETF to reach most milestones, faster than any other ETF in any asset class.” 

Since their launch last January, increased flows into Bitcoin ETFs have coincided with increases in the currency’s price. For example, as Bitcoin hit an all-time of $111,900 in late May, the total net assets across all twelve Bitcoin ETFs reached an all-time high of over $134 billion. 

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

© Michael Nagle/Bloomberg—Getty Images

Bitcoin leapt to $108,000 on Monday, after hovering near $105,000 for most of the weekend, as top U.S and Chinese officials get ready to meet in London this week in the hopes of salvaging a fraying trade deal. 

Bitcoin gained 2% on Monday, according to Binance, briefly touching $108,900 before falling slightly. The bump comes as investors express optimism about the potential for a resolution of trade disputes between the U.S. and one of its largest trading partners. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and China’s vice premier for economic policy He Lifeng will lead their respective delegations in negotiations that are expected to begin Monday and continue into Tuesday, according to the New York Times.

This week’s talks are part of President Donald Trump’s ongoing campaign to force U.S. trading partners to concede to various demands by threatening to impose hefty tariffs on foreign imports. After Trump announced a sweeping tariff policy in April that would affect nearly all U.S. trading partners, the president authorized a 90-day pause to allow time for negotiations. 

However, the pause did not include tariffs on China, which were raised to 145%. The policy triggered retaliatory levies from China and led many investors to flee American markets, fearing the consequences of a potential trade war. Bitcoin fell to a yearly low of $75,000 as tensions between the nations escalated.

After a summit in Geneva last month, Trump reversed course and announced on May 12 that the U.S. and China had reached an agreement in which the two nations would temporarily lower their tariffs and hold additional talks to reduce tensions. Bitcoin surged to an all-time high of $111,000 on May 22, following news of the deal. 

But the truce did not last long. Trump accused China of reneging on the deal over a dispute about Chinese exports of rare earth magnets. Trump wrote on Truth Social on May 30: “China, perhaps not surprisingly to some, HAS TOTALLY VIOLATED ITS AGREEMENT WITH US. So much for being Mr. NICE GUY!”  

In an effort to salvage the fraying trade deal, Trump and Xi talked over the phone for the first time in months last week. Following the 90-minute call, Trump announced that top officials from both countries would meet in London this week to resume negotiations. 

Other factors that may be contributing to Bitcoin’s price surge are an increase in crypto-related IPOs. Last week, stablecoin giant Circle went public on the New York Stock Exchange and saw its shares pop over 168%, jumping from $31 to $69 within the first day of trading. Gemini, a crypto exchange founded by the Winklevoss twins, also filed for an IPO on Friday, in another example of the crypto industry becoming more intertwined with traditional finance. 

“While the IPO bump is likely short-term excitement, the long-term institutional positioning leads us to be bullish about Bitcoin’s continued performance in 2025,” David Siemer, CEO of crypto asset management company Wave Digital Assets, told Fortune. 

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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Crypto infrastructure companies were all the rage during the last crypto bear market in 2022 and 2023. Investors threw millions at startups that promised to make the development of crypto applications less clunky and more user-friendly. While some firms have quietly closed up shop, others have now matured—and are raking in new rounds of capital. That includes New York-based Turnkey.

Founded in 2022, Turnkey creates low-level infrastructure for digital wallets where users store and manage their cryptocurrency. On Monday, the startup announced that it had raised $30 million in a Series B funding round led by Bain Capital Crypto. Other investors included Sequoia Capital, Lightspeed Faction, Galaxy Ventures,  Wintermute, and Variant.

CEO and cofounder Bryce Ferguson said Turnkey’s appeal lies in its ability to add and streamline advanced features to wallets.

“We’re moving from this world of these slow, clunky systems that were designed for buying and holding crypto to very high throughput, machine-based transactions,” he added.

Like many crypto startup founders, Ferguson and his cofounder, Jack Kearney, are alumni of Coinbase, the U.S.’s largest crypto exchange, and worked at the company’s division dedicated to holding assets for big institutional investors.

After Ferguson left Coinbase in 2021 and started a job as leader of the crypto division of Trade Republic, a broker based out of Berlin, he realized there were “a lot of rough edges” around the infrastructure that companies use to hold their crypto.

So, he teamed up with his former colleague Kearney, who was then working for the vaunted crypto VC Polychain, to launch Turnkey. The company offers APIs, or application programming interfaces, where developers can plug into the startup’s software to easily create and manage crypto wallets for their users. Many well-known firms in the crypto industry use Turnkey’s product, including the prediction market platform Polymarket, the NFT marketplace Magic Eden, and Bridge, the stablecoin startup recently acquired by fintech giant Stripe.

The startup’s competitors include crypto infrastructure companies like Fireblocks as well as Privy, another company that lets companies easily create and manage users’ crypto wallets. Still, Ferguson says business is booming. Over the past year, the number of transactions it’s processed has increased 200 times over. And while his startup is not in the black, it does “have a clear path to profitability,” he said.

Investors in the round received stock as well as token warrants, or promised allocations of a yet-be-released cryptocurrency. Ferguson, however, said his startup has no plans to launch its own cryptocurrency and the warrants are common additions to most crypto deals.

He and his cofounder plan to use the new injection of cash to grow his staff of currently 35 employees, especially his engineering team. 

“Most of the UX [user experience] challenges that people have talked about over the past five years in crypto have been solved,” he said. “Ultimately, the building blocks are there.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

© Courtesy of Turnkey

Dotting the roadside in what is widely considered Africa’s largest urban slum are typical stands selling vegetables. What isn’t typical is their acceptance of bitcoin as a form of payment.

Around 200 people use bitcoin in Soweto West, a neighborhood of the Kibera slum in Kenya‘s capital. It’s part of an initiative to extend financial services to one of the country’s poorest and most under-banked areas.

Its promoters say the adoption of crypto fits with the ideals of bitcoin as an accessible, democratic technology — but experts say it also has major risks.

Bitcoin came to Soweto West via AfriBit Africa, a Kenyan fintech company, through its nonprofit initiative to improve financial inclusion.

“In many cases, people in Kibera do not have an opportunity to secure their lives with normal savings,” said AfriBit Africa co-founder Ronnie Mdawida, a former community worker. With bitcoin, “they do not need documentation to have a bank account … that gives them the foundation for financial freedom.”

Bitcoin, the first and largest crypto, was created in 2009 in the wake of the global financial crisis as a decentralized digital asset that could act as an alternative method of payment.

The asset has found more popular use as a store of value, like a digital form of gold. Bitcoin has attracted enthusiastic supporters as prices have climbed almost 1,000% in the last five years. But its volatility and lack of regulation are concerns.

AfriBit Africa introduced bitcoin into Soweto West in early 2022 through crypto-denominated grants to local garbage collectors, who are often funded by nonprofits. The groups are made up of dozens of young people, who Mdawida says are more likely to be open to new tech.

After gathering on a Sunday to collect trash, garbage collectors are paid a few dollars’ worth of bitcoin. AfriBit Africa estimates that it has put some $10,000 into the community, with garbage collectors acting as the main agents of spreading bitcoin in Soweto West. In Kibera, many people earn about a dollar a day.

Now a small number of other residents hold bitcoin, and some merchants and motorcycle taxis accept payments in crypto.

Damiano Magak, 23, a garbage collector and food seller, said he prefers bitcoin to M-PESA, the ubiquitous mobile money platform in Kenya, because M-PESA transaction costs are higher and the network can be slower.

There are no fees for M-PESA transactions between individuals or businesses up to 100 Kenyan shillings (78 cents), but after that the fees increase with transaction size. Fees for the Lightning bitcoin network where transactions take place are free if people use a platform that AfriBit Africa introduced into the community.

Onesmus Many, 30, another garbage collector, said he feels safer with his money in a bitcoin wallet instead of in cash because of crime.

Some merchants have found benefits to accepting crypto, including Dotea Anyim. She said around 10% of customers at her vegetable stand pay in bitcoin.

“I like it because it is cheap and fast and doesn’t have any transaction costs,” she says. “When people pay using bitcoin, I save that money and use cash to restock vegetables.”

The possibility that crypto prices could keep rising also appeals to residents of Soweto West. Magak and Many said they now have around 70% to 80% of their net worth in bitcoin, a far higher level of exposure than most people.

“It is my worth and I’m risking it in bitcoin,” Magak said.

That concerns Ali Hussein Kassim, a fintech entrepreneur and chair of the FinTech Alliance in Kenya.

“In an extremely volatile asset like bitcoin, it’s overexposure. I can’t afford to lose 80% of my wealth. How about a guy in Kibera?” Kassim said. “You are exposing a vulnerable community to an ecosystem and to financial services that they can’t necessarily afford to play in.”

Kassim acknowledged the potential benefits that digital assets could bring, particularly in facilitating cheaper cross-border payments like remittances, but failed to see the benefit in Kibera.

Bitcoin’s volatility could negate the benefits of cheaper transaction fees, Kassim said, and bitcoin does not have the same protections as other financial services due to a lack of regulation.

Mdawida disagreed, calling bitcoin’s unregulated nature a benefit.

“We don’t shy away from the risks involved,” the AfriBit Africa co-founder said, noting the group’s investments in bitcoin education in Kibera, including financial literacy training and crypto courses in the community.

Efforts to introduce bitcoin into developing countries have faced challenges. Bitcoin was adopted as legal tender in El Salvador and Central African Republic but both countries have reversed their decision.

In Kenya, the digital asset sector has faced legal and regulatory challenges, including crackdowns on cryptocurrency giveaways. This small project, focusing only on Soweto West, has been allowed.

“On my phone I put notifications on when bitcoin rises … and it’s all smiles,” Magak said. “Whenever it fluctuates up and down, I know at the end of the day it will just rise.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

© Gerald Anderson—Anadolu via Getty Images

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