Episode 20: Trump’s $5B Crypto Gamble: World Liberty Finance Tanks & Crypto.com Deal Explained

00:00

Hey everyone, welcome back. This is JR, founder and CEO of Social Market. And this is Leon. I’m the chief marketing officer at SofaMarket. Yeah, and this is Social Ledger Report, giving you weekly news on the state of crypto, the markets, everything you need to know about where the market’s moving, for like better word. Funny enough, we were just recording now and we fucked up halfway. So this is our second attempt. Little technology problems today. I don’t know what we’re talking or what we’re doing.

00:29

We’ll figure it out one of these days.  For sure. But we do have some interesting stories to go over this for this last week. While  we have very few stories, the  subject of what we’ll be discussing is pretty significant because it affects the president  of the US. So for the first story, World Liberty Finance, which is backed by Trump Media, launched officially its token World Liberty Finance on September 1st  and the price tanked that same day.

00:58

So more on that and then Trump media  and crypto.com. This is the fourth largest exchange in the world, I believe partnered up. So I’m not sure what this indicates for the future, but you know, quite a few things came up for that partnership. So we’ll cover that here in a moment. And then the last topic, we’ll talk about  a more recent attack. I guess it happened today as of the day of recording Monday, September eight.

01:28

Do know what it is? More specific?  it looks like a large scale crypto hack.  It’s supposedly across Twitter. It’s  essentially a issue with like, I guess, wallets. And it’s funny, there’s a Trump-linked project that already under scrutiny too for security issues. So like right now when this is happening, it’s just kind of interesting timing as  like crypto is getting a lot more focused. I think this is about to happen.

01:58

starting to see a more acceptance  towards crypto and stablecoins. So while more people and more volume is moving into the markets, there’s going to be more reason to break these systems. So this is probably part of that. But yeah, before we continue, just a reminder, like this video if you like it, dislike if you dislike it, and give us a subscribe if you like what we talk about. It costs you nothing  and it helps us keep providing you content every week.

02:27

on the state of the markets. But yeah, with that being said, why don’t we talk about the markets, Leon? So this is the social market. We’ve made some updates in the last few weeks. It’s still growing. Right now, the altcoin season index sits at 53 out of 100, which means that we have a mixed market leaning more towards altcoins. And then fear and greed index is sitting at 51%. So it is slightly more on the greed side, but  it’s  more neutral. If I were to give an estimate, we should probably update the labeling here, but

02:58

That’s the state of the fear and greed, which you could kind of put in in tandem with the state of the markets being bear or bull. So it’s about medium neutral. Inflation is sitting right below 3%.  I’ve got  a just a feature thing. Can you click on that all all season index? Yeah, we can see the slide. If you scroll over the chart, I would love for that chart to be like, show me what the previous ones are. You know? Yes.  So funny enough, some of this data here.

03:26

is a little bit inaccurate because we’re in the middle of changing providers. We found a more reliable provider for this market data. So we’ll be making that change as of next week when you tune into the episode. You should see a bigger difference with market data here. So very excited to share that with you, but a good idea on that, Leon. Yeah, like I just, I wanted to go look at something real quick and I was like, oh wait, I can’t pull that. But September is traditionally a really rocky, rocky month.

03:55

for markets in general, it’s always been a slow month. You had September 4th where you had almost $200 million worth of crypto positions were wiped out. Overall though, think fear and grief being at 51, altcoin is still staying somewhat strong. It’s a sign just that the crypto markets are kind of preserving through everything because there was also like optimism around possible Fed Reserve interest rate cuts.

04:25

that jobs report was just abysmal and that I think scared a lot of folks. reports like unemployment reports? Yeah, so the federal job reports, I think it reported the lowest since 2008. In a single quarter, it was like 3,000 4,000 jobs added. So there’s a lot of major issues happening in the world. There’s possibility us…

04:53

Terrifying foreign workers from India and call centers. We’re fighting a drug war with Venezuela, Israel, Gaza is still happening. Ukraine and Russia is happening. You’ve got Russia, China, India, Pakistan, all these countries kind of meeting together. So seeing the fear and greed state at 51, which is relatively neutral, is a good sign. Inflation staying somewhat there is good sign. And then also like

05:22

altcoin kind of staying a little ahead also just shows like hey Ethereum still staying strong bitcoins holding on to its price like what’s the bitcoin price 112 right now like 112 000 yeah what’s eth like 4300 4400 4300 like that’s a really good sign yeah you got xrp which is still holding um binance coins really great solana was hitting all-time highs eta cardano was was doing really good

05:51

ah There’s like a few other emerging coins out there like I you know, Doge is always doing good, but you have like remittance and LB Rat, Little Pepe, Pengu,  all of those are still staying strong. I’d love  to see that.  Look,  my favorite fart coin. Is Trump coin up? Should be. It’s still $8.

06:16

Yeah, we’re having some issues with pulling this data right now, but it should still be… This has been the average in the last month, if I am not mistaken. Yeah. I bought a little high when it was there. I think I bought like $12, unfortunately. Oh, man. bought the wrong side of the hype cycle for him. Believe me too. Looking a little bit more into Bitcoin. Updated some of the UI here, if you haven’t noticed. So we had a bit of a dip between the fifth and the sixth. I think this was like Friday time. It dipped…

06:46

from 113 to just almost 110,000. So now it’s kind of recovered into 112. So that’s the state of Bitcoin. And while we talked about Ethereum, when Ethereum does well, other crypto based tokens do well as well. And if you’re noticing here, if you’re watching this on YouTube, you can see that between the fifth and the sixth again, it did have this massive dip. We’re talking about almost 2,000.

07:16

$200  for the price of Ethereum. You know, it pretty much hit everything like Bitcoin, Ethereum with this price decrease. So it’s really interesting. When was it? This was fifth and sixth. So that must have been Thursday, Friday. I wonder what that lines up to. I’m sure there’s something going on. The fourth is when it all happened. So yeah, that that falls at the 200 million of those positions that that were were out there. So that aligns perfectly. But like you’re seeing a lot of heavy long positions on Bitcoin and then like

07:46

Ethereum’s are pretty neutral, but those spot ETFs have like almost $4 billion of inflows in August. So institutions are moving to like these longs of, guess the blue chips, know, like Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP, BNB, Sol, you know, like they’re kind of putting those in there.  I’m surprised that Link is still such a strong volume right now. Market cap kind of shocked there. think people.

08:16

are just speculating that it’ll do well. Last week I talked about how Link blockchain partnered up with the Department of Commerce to store market data on the blockchain. So  because of that news, Link should have gone up in price. This is relatively recent data, but people are buying. You know, I wouldn’t be surprised if people are holding. They’re speculating that it’ll go up. So that’s the price on Chainlink right now, $22.

08:45

Really interesting. This is pretty much the state of the market. Did you have anything else you wanted to talk about Leon? No, nothing else on this part. I think, you know, we can jump into the topics because  most of the other stuff’s happening outside of there. I really want to talk to the Trump stuff. I’m kind of interested. Yeah. So this is World Liberty Finance. Now what’s interesting is it launched in several blockchains.  It launched on several layer twos like UnitSwapChain.

09:15

Ethereum, Polygon, you name it, which I think is really interesting, but it also launched in Solana  and I’m not surprised on Solana. That’s where most of the trading volume happens. But it’s an ETH, it’s a, DeFi is ETH based, it’s  Ethereum mainnet, right? It should also be on mainnet, Ethereum mainnet chain,  but  it was in Polygon as well, if I’m not mistaken, and Unichain.  So, you know, it’s kind of interesting seeing

09:43

world liberty finance in different networks. something I want to show off on social market, we’ve been working on this filtering system, which should kind of give you an idea of what is happening. So I guess it’ll make more sense if I only filter out Ethereum based tokens with Solana. It’ll say that Solana here, there is a world liberty finance token right here. It’s sitting at 21 cents right now, which it’s a little bit different than the one in Ethereum.

10:12

Oh no, it’s also 21 cents. But I think the there because it hit about 46 cents high and then collapsed to about the 20. Well, when it would collapse, it was like 23 cents within a day, but it was about 46 cents as the high. then, I don’t know why it’s saying all time high is 20, 21, because I’m pretty sure it was 46 cents. Yeah. So this is inaccurate data. So do apologize for this, but we’re still working to.

10:41

fix this for social market. People are actively trading right now based on this recent transactions. say the least, World Liberty Finance did blow up the first day that it launched on September 1st and it reached 46 cents. But because on the launch of the token, early investors and I believe early the developers I believe were only able to sell 20 % of their holdings.

11:09

So that’s why it fell down to as much as 21 cents. If I’m not mistaken, was 20. so, but the team executed like a 47 million token burn, which is about 0.19 % of the circulating supply. And that was supposed to like boost confidence and shrink the supply, but it failed to stop that slide. And then the other part of it is there was a few well investors out here. So I’m looking for the numbers of my…

11:36

Well, okay, the well investors lost one one trader lost 1.6 million on a  3x leverage long that collapsed after 64 hours and then Like in paper value, they lost about 2 billion dollars uh Here so was like it was a hype driven coin and it’s politically branded Yeah, there’s a lot of market pressure out there developers had the blacklist suspicious wallets.  There was this dude I don’t know who he is Justin Sun

12:04

uh… he’s always rather he’s the founder of the tron watching for  uh… justin son  there’s the the other freeze billions of tokens after checking transfers ahead of the block list so  well there there was a lot of things like that but move was actually part of what trigger the fifty percent price drop raised concerns around the centralization and then uh… control of that which is like but the whole thing is

12:32

You know, it contradicts the ethos of like decent defy, like decentralized finance. So this is kind of interesting because the Trump family holds about 25 % of, of, of this and like this public listing puts their value somewhere in the five to $7 billion range. That’s right. Like though they’re locked from selling the, the tokens presence really has like just blew up their, their family wealth and crypto. Yep.

13:02

So this is from BBC. The headline goes Trump and sons  staking crypto firm is worth $5 billion.  So this is probably after, well, this is six days ago. So this is after the launch of the world Liberty finance token. There’s a couple of interesting uh comments made here or I say comments, but you know, things that BBC covers about this, just to kind of glance at this, you know, it talks a little bit about, you know, the context background of

13:31

W  LF  I or W LF if you want to call it that  anyways So as of Tuesday World Liberty Finance was trading around 22 cents on exchanges such as Binance and Coinbase after sinking roughly 50 % Since started the trading on Monday, which was month. I’m sorry, which was September 1st While the fall indicates tepid demand the coin is still trading at a higher price than what many early buyers would have paid initially putting them in a line of profit

14:01

So because of that statement there, it’s pretty clear that  people who sold right away, which they were only based on the contract, they were only able to sell up  to 20 % of their holdings, which was at 46 cents. So  they made a shit ton of money off of that alone. So this was an insider trading as insider trading as against. This is from Eric Schung. He says, we’re setting a new standard for financial freedom built on trust, speed and US values. He wrote that on social media.

14:30

This is a huge moment for the future of money.  then according to financial disclosures, Trump himself um is the president. Trump himself holds roughly 15.75 billion World Liberty Finance tokens worth more than 3.4 billion, making crypto the most significant source of his fortune, which I think is really interesting.  And then the Trump’s overall control just under a quarter of roughly 100 billion World Liberty Finance tokens that it created last year.

14:58

giving them claim to holding worth roughly 5 billion as of Tuesday’s I think it was that much.  It was sitting still at around 20 cents. Yeah, so that was BBC, which I think it’s a really interesting article. We’ll leave the link on the description if you’re watching this on YouTube. I have my thoughts and I don’t know if I should share them because,  you I don’t want to make this political. But I think it’s ironic how Trump says this is a huge moment for the future of money. And yet there was a lot of insider trading that happened there, which

15:27

tank the price. Now, it shouldn’t be too surprising knowing that, you know, this happened given the state of the Trump meme coin, especially since a lot of their money is tied to crypto now as we saw in that article. So if you want to invest in anything that Trump releases, I would probably wait. This is not financial advice, but this is what I would do. If I would invest in anything that Trump’s were releasing via crypto, I would probably wait.

15:57

until they sell and then they’re probably going to make some noise as we saw with Trump meme coin where you know a lot of people sold after he got inducted into being president and then maybe like a month or two later they were saying hey you know if you are a Trump meme coin holder you actually get perks to sit down with the president himself the big daddy of this country  and get invited to a

16:25

very intimate and personal dinner. And then after that, we saw the meme coin skyrocket for,  I don’t know, maybe at least 10%. So  just be careful where you put your money, especially when it comes to Trump.  Yeah,  I agree with it. Like there’s no clear path. Like there’s too much centralization on this coin. Like the fact that Trump war goes 25%. It’s just, you know, at any point they could take it,  you know, it’s not in their interest to take it, but there’s just the problems with it.

16:54

Agreed.  So  just put your money  where  you know  your money is going be going to and be careful and do your own research. That’s really all that it goes. But yeah, this has been World Liberty Finance. um I think we will next talk about something that is still relating with Trump and that is Trump Media’s partnership with Crypto.com, the fourth largest exchange in the world, I believe. So this is Crypto.com slash US, their latest and newest

17:53

So CRO is the  proprietary token for Crypto.com. The fact that they’re having a treasury of that volume is pretty significant.  If I click on tap more  or tap for more, it takes you to  mcga.com slash news slash the name of the article, which is talking about the  strategic 6.42 billion treasury. Just to kind of go over it, you can.

18:21

Read this article if you’re watching this on YouTube via the link in the description below. But it says as of August 26, 2025, West  Palm Beach, Florida, Yorkville Acquisition Corp  of NASDAQ, York.  That’s the ticker Trump Media and Technology Group Corp and that’s DJT and Crypto.com today announced they have entered into a definitive agreement for business combination uh on parentheses, the business combination to establish Trump Media Group CRO strategy.

18:51

A digital asset treasury company focused on acquisition of the native cryptocurrency token of the Kronos ecosystem. That’s CRO, which is Crypto.com’s proprietary token. Yorkville Acquisition Corp is a special purpose acquisition company, SPAC, sponsored by Yorkville Acquisition. So that’s kind of a disclaimer. And this is kind of like the meat of potatoes of what’s happening. So it says at the close of the business combination, Trump Media Group CRO strategy will be a

19:19

majority owned by Yorkville Trump Media and Crypto.com together as founding partners. Expected funding for the digital asset treasury will consist of $1 billion in CRO, is about $6,313,212 CRO tokens, which represents 19 % of the total CRO market cap. Essentially, Cronus is becoming more centralized just by this deal.

19:48

And  they’re also going to use those as rewards on their platforms, right? Possibly.  So truth, like uh I thought I read truth, social truth, plus truth, fi, whatever the heck they’re called. Are going to use them as utility rewards on the platform. So use convert platform gems into CRO pay for subscriptions, receive discounted truth plus access if they open up crypto.com account. So kind of like a, making all their stuff,  um, crypto fight.

20:19

you know that’s a point and even know about that  uh… thanks for the  the six point two four you mentioned it i think you mentioned that i was half way with it so that’s the dollars in zero two tokens two hundred million cash two hundred twenty million warrants and five billion equity line of credit so it’s not uh five billion percent or six point four two billion treasury it’s it’s like  it that’s the total out but it’s not the total about that’s going to be in court

20:49

Okay, yeah, no, the actual volume for the treasury itself is one billion, which is in Kronos, which is 684 million CRO tokens right now, which is 105 million. And they did it in cash and stock deal. So there and then crypto.com will invest 50 million into TMTG shares. So like this is a pretty big partnership for them. It is. So this is an on crack in exchange and this is the price of Kronos. It’s sitting at 25 cents.

21:19

and this is what’s the one week yeah did spike oh yeah it’s spiked at 28 cents and then it went down to 25 cents but i that spike was the highest it’s ever been yeah yeah if you look back a month ago it was like 15 16 cents at least and now it it spiked to i’m sorry it’s back to 40 cents as of august 28th

21:44

or just under 40 cents it was 38 and now sitting at 25. The highest it’s ever been was actually almost a dollar according to November. Yeah, as of November 23rd, 2021. that’s big difference. Yeah, that’s huge. mean, 2021 was the time for crypto was blowing everything up. It didn’t matter if it was vaporware. Your token was probably worth a lot back then. So some of the statistics goes follow. It is the 28th market rank as of volume.

22:14

It is a volume market cap  of 8.45 billion, circulating supply of 34 billion, almost 80 million in volume.  The five year high is 89 cents. The five year low is 4 cents and almost 5 cents. The all time high is actually  97 cents. So that’s probably as of 2021 and five year change is just 10 cents. So yeah, I mean it stayed pretty consistent between 5 cents and 15 cents. then recently, yeah.

22:44

so yeah want to like the but by answers you know it’s a foreign exchange they’ve their corners done the best out of any like exchange back token uh… yes circle quasi ways kind of point bases like token but you know it’s a stable points it’s different but i think crypto dot com is trying to make their coin more useful and aligning with what

23:12

You is objectively the person that’s running crypto into this direction is probably a really good deal for them. But, you know, I’m just not sure if this coin has any legs to it on the long term. It’ll be interesting if like the Trump, you know, universe keeps using it. It’s an interesting partnership and I don’t know if it’s going to really like make CRO worth anything in the long run. You know, we don’t even know who the founders are or who the founder is for.

23:40

crypto.com but everyone knows CZ from Binance so I guess that’s why the token could be worth a lot more because a lot more people know Binance it is the largest exchange in the world it was early to market you know its token is worth over $400 right now so yeah there’s several factors. Crypto.com is  a Hong Kong based thing it’s Bobby Bo, Gary Orr, Chris  Marzalka and

24:07

Rafael Melo in 2016. We don’t know anything about him. You know, I don’t know if they have a presence in the media and also I was wrong for Binance or BNB right now. It was not $400. It’s almost at thousand dollars. $878. So pretty high up there compared to 25 cents for this token, which this could be a signal that there might be more demand. There might be more growth. Trump is a very polarizing figure. So

24:37

Only time will tell. But  if people are active, if people genuinely like truth social  and people generally like crypto, then  there could be some demand for this token.  It does have  a finite supply. So it’s not like proof of stake. It’s not infinite cash almost. So I can see it going up. I’m actually going to put some money into CRO. You do what you will with this information.

25:07

It could be worth it. Funny enough, have a friend who is a bit of a conservative.  He’s very political. He was actually talking about buying Kronos because of this. So he already put like a thousand dollars into it and this guy is in banking. So,  you know.  Well,  I think that’s all I have on that one. Let’s talk security then. So as the final topic. And this one’s an interesting one. uh

25:34

So Charles Gilmett, he’s the CTO at Ledger, came out today that there was a large scale and what it’s called is a supply chain attack. NPM. And the reason it’s called a supply chain hack is NPM, it’s node package manager. So it’s is widely used in JavaScript ecosystem? So if you code on the internet today, you’re probably using JavaScript in some capacity. There was malicious code injected into popular packages.

26:03

and collectively downloaded over a billion times. So this is like a huge large scale attack. And what he’s saying, this is one of the most severe supply chain compromises in JavaScript’s ecosystem history. says, anybody with a hardware wallet should avoid on-chain transactions entirely until you can verify a transaction meticulously before signing. Anything out there that essentially uses JavaScript can be affected. And it’s been a billion downloads. It’s huge. This article.

26:33

that he shared actually give a lot of information. And I think, you know, really helps kind of explain it. We’ll put it in the show notes just as a, the one, but it just explains like the popular developer QIX was compromised, you know, all the way to chalk stripped and it says color convert all this stuff.  They’re working on like a resolution to this, but it essentially breaks down  every single thing. And what it was doing was able to swap out.

27:02

your hardware wallet, like ID at the very end. So there was a lot of functions here and essentially, yeah, like I said, address swapping, like you couldn’t know until it was too late sometimes. So really, really big hack out there. Like it, it is just a massive thing and you’re like walk the well watcher, you know, they’re talking about it. Like

27:28

people were kind of speculating like what’s happening.  essentially  any hardware wallet could have been affected.  It’s not just Ledger. It was like any wallet out there. Ledger is just the one to kind of find it. But essentially this was the largest scale attack on crypto. And I think a lot of people were kind of confused at it because it’s like, hey, what’s going on? But specific to hardware wallets because it’s, you know, the interface for it that was, that could have been compromised, but massive attack like.

27:58

This is like Microsoft having a vulnerability in like email. With crowd stack almost? Yeah, like this is the level of like compromise that just happened. Like  rarely do you see something like this. It’s like a zero-day bug in Chrome that every computer has. Like, rare occurrences of this. Yeah, and I guess my only thoughts are  if you’re a developer like me or something and you use JavaScript or  NPM,

28:27

You may just want to update it. There might be an update issued for NPM that fixes it. Hopefully by next week or this week. know, they’re actually, NPM is pretty good about releasing updates. But just to give you an idea of the kind of apps that are crypto based that let you transmit money, make online transactions, on-chain transactions I mean, that are on JavaScript, I’ll give you a list. We have Metamask, we have Phantom Wallet, we have Rainbow Wallet.

28:57

As far as exchanges, have Binance, Coinbase, Kraken. We also have decentralized exchanges like Uniswap, Sushiswap, Pancakeswap. And then as far as NFT marketplaces and decentralized apps, we have OpenSea, Blur, we have Aave, Compound, MakerDAO, Curve. Those are for DeFi apps. And then if you use Toolkits, well, you obviously have

29:25

In libraries on JavaScript you have Web3.js and ethers.js You have truffle, hardhat, so you’re not getting around it. So just be careful what you do out there. Not to spread FUD or fear, but this is a pretty big issue. Just keep an eye out if you’re a developer. Hopefully these companies  give some more updates as far as this goes, because  if it’s affecting ecosystems and applications at the core level of building

29:54

applications,  then this is pretty serious.  And if you need to move your money,  I would just hold on right now just because you don’t want to lose it or you don’t want to risk anything. Yeah, I would just, I would be safe than sorry in this scenario. Like this is a pretty serious like breach of security. And unless you meticulously review every part of your transaction, I wouldn’t move anything. But it also just really shows like  there are some vulnerabilities and

30:24

crypto that I don’t think anybody is able to really quite understand.  Okay, so I was on Twitter  and I found this update from Phantom wallet. So just to kind of give you an idea of the kind of message messages you want to look at. So this is from Phantom and it’s verified. It’s Phantom.  says Phantom is not a risk. We have confirmed Phantom does not use any vulnerable versions of the affected packages. We take a number of steps to guard against these types of attacks, including

30:53

strict version pinning  for all dependencies preventing automatic updates to potentially compromised packages, mandatory security reviews for all packages upgrades before integration, multi-layer dependency scanning and vulnerability monitoring, as well as isolated build environments with integrity verification.  We take the security of our users and their funds extremely serious. So, you you want to look for those kinds of messages. So I guess you’re good to use Phantom. So that’s good.

31:22

Um,  was really good. Um, you know, like it’s just, you know,  one slip up could do it, but NPM, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s used everywhere. Like I use it on a bunch of stuff. I’m sure we use it in social markets and capacity, but we do. It’s probably the most recent version. Most people probably are not using that in production already.  there’s, there’s probably a limited amount to this, but also.

31:48

one slip up of you not getting the news and you push it all live to production could put everybody at risk. So just be careful on what’s happening. And I think more and more apps are going to be like, hey, here’s how  you are securely operating. Yeah, we actually don’t use the latest version  of NPM or Node Package for social markets. So I think we’re good for now. We’ll keep an eye on this. And if we learn anything new, we’ll keep you updated as well. Great. I don’t think…

32:17

We have anything else to cover, do we? No, I don’t think so. Just to follow up, ask if you’ve made it this far. Leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. Leave a comment on YouTube on your thoughts and then like, subscribe, kind of engage. It helps us push out there. But the biggest one is leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. Yeah. Thanks for watching. Leave it a like or leave it a dislike, however you felt. Then subscribe to the channel if you want to see more of this type of content. Thanks again.