BUSINESS

Donald Trump is pushing back against claims that he’s profiting from the TRUMP memecoin, his official cryptocurrency that launched days before his presidential inauguration.

Chainalysis recently reported that the TRUMP token earned $900,000 in fees in a two day span for its backers.

The wallets of the largest holders of the token are controlled by CIC Digital LLC, an entity also used for his NFT collection, and Fight Fight Fight LLC, which is co-owned by CIC Digital. Collectively, they own 80% of the TRUMP tokens.

“I’m not profiting from anything,” Trump said during an interview with NBC News, adding that he hadn’t looked at the token’s performance and that any financial benefits would be incidental. “If I own stock in something, and I do a good job, and the stock market goes up, I guess I’m profiting,” he said.

The TRUMP token has seen strong market activity in recent weeks. It’s currently trading around $11.20, a significant drop from its all-time high of $44.19, but still up 20% over the past month.

Recently, the White House announced that the largest 220 holders of the $TRUMP token would be invited for dinner with the President.

Eric Trump, the son of President Trump, will be a headline speaker at Consensus 2025 in Toronto.

The Solana Foundation has disclosed a previously unknown vulnerability in its privacy-focused token system that could have allowed attackers to forge fake zero-knowledge proofs, enabling unauthorized minting or withdrawals of tokens.

The vulnerability was first reported on April 16 through Anza’s GitHub security advisory, accompanied by a working proof-of-concept. Engineers from Solana development teams Anza, Firedancer, and Jito verified the bug and began working on a fix immediately, per a post-mortem published Saturday,

The issue stemmed from the ZK ElGamal Proof program, which verifies zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) used in Solana’s Token-22 confidential transfers. These extension tokens enable private balances and transfers by encrypting amounts and using cryptographic proofs to validate them.

ZKPs are a cryptographic method that lets someone prove they know or have access to something, such as a password or age, without revealing the thing itself.

In crypto applications, these can be used to prove a transaction is valid without showing specific amounts or addresses (which can otherwise be used by malicious actors to plan exploits).

The bug occurred because some algebraic components were missing from the hashing process during the Fiat-Shamir transformation — a standard method to make zero-knowledge proofs non-interactive. (Non-interactive means turning a back-and-forth process into a one-time proof anyone can verify.)

A sophisticated attacker could forge invalid proofs that the on-chain verifier would still accept.

This would have allowed unauthorized actions such as minting unlimited tokens or withdrawing tokens from other accounts.

As such, the vulnerability did not affect standard SPL tokens or the main Token-2022 program logic.

Patches were distributed privately to validator operators beginning April 17. A second patch was pushed later that evening to address a related issue elsewhere in the codebase.

Both were reviewed by third-party security firms Asymmetric Research, Neodyme, and OtterSec. By April 18, a supermajority of validators had adopted the fix.

There is no indication that the bug was exploited, and all funds remain secure, according to the post-mortem.

Central Asian country Kyrgyzstan plans to debut the Gold Dollar, or USDKG, the gold-backed stablecoin pegged 1:1 with the U.S. dollar in the third quarter, project’s advisor Gabriel Guerra told CoinDesk at the Token2049 conference in Dubai.

The stablecoin, backed by $500 million in gold from the Kyrgyz Ministry of Finance, is designed to facilitate seamless cross-border transfers in a country where remittances account for 30% of the GDP.

The Ministry aims to expand the gold reserves to as much as $2 billion, with independent audits planned to ensure trust and transparency in the collateral backing.

Gold has long been regarded as a highly liquid, risk-free store of value. However, its occasional price swings pose a potential risk to the stability of the stablecoin.

To mitigate this, the stablecoin will be overcollateralized, Guerra noted, adding that its primary use case would be moving capital across borders.

“The stablecoin will be used in cross-border transactions and international trade with an initial focus on Central Asia and expansion into Southeast Asia and the Middle East planned for later,” Guerra said.

Note that USDKG is not intended to track gold prices like USDT or PAXG. Instead, it will be solely backed by gold reserves and issued and redeemed on a 1:1 basis with USD, maintaining a stable value tied directly to the global reserve fiat currency widely used in international trade.

USDKG holders can redeem their stablecoins for physical gold and other crypto assets or withdraw them as fiat currency.

Honeymoons and luxury vacations could soon be outpaced by crypto as the main draw for the island nation of Maldives.

A Dubai-based family office plans to invest up to $8.8 billion in a blockchain-focused financial hub in the Maldives, part of an effort by the island nation to expand beyond its reliance on tourism and fisheries and address mounting debt obligations.

The investment, led by MBS Global Investments, will be deployed over five years and is structured around a new joint venture with the Maldives government.

The planned capital outlay exceeds the country’s GDP of around $7 billion. It will be funded through equity and debt, with preliminary commitments already exceeding $4 billion.

Finance Minister Moosa Zameer described the initiative as a step toward economic diversification in an FT interview. Zameer said the Maldives faces “the biggest challenge” in repaying external debt maturing over the next two years and that the project “could help ease some of the financial pressures we are facing.”

Under the proposed masterplan, the Maldives International Financial Centre will span 830,000 square meters, accommodate 6,500 residents, and generate employment for up to 16,000 people. It is being pitched as a global financial free zone centered on blockchain and digital asset services.

MBS Global Investments manages $14 billion in assets and is the family office of Qatari royal Sheikh Nayef bin Eid Al Thani. The hub is one of the first major forays of the island-nation into the crypto and blockchain ecosystem.

Bitcoin (BTC) opened the trading week flat above $94,000 as traders waited for news from Beijing on the progress of a trade deal with the U.S.

The CoinDesk 20 (CD20), a measure of the performance of major digital assets, was down 1.5%, trading below 2,700.

“XRP and Bitcoin bounced back from the tariff shocks in April, but have yet to make a significant movement upwards,” Nick Ruck, director at LVRG Research, told CoinDesk in a Telegram message. “Investors may be overly cautious about risk assets such as crypto due to the current US macroeconomic climate, despite Bitcoin’s trend breaking away from its correlation with US equities.”

Major markets in Asia were closed on Monday, with Hong Kong, mainland China, Japan, and Korea closed, leading to thin liquidity and trading volumes.

A potential thaw in U.S.–China trade relations dominated macro headlines. Over the weekend, China’s Commerce Ministry said it was reviewing a U.S. proposal to resume negotiations, while President Trump hinted Beijing “wanted to do a deal.”

“We remain optimistic that crypto prices will surge to new highs in the long term as institutional adoption continues to deepen with Real World Asset (RWA) launches and integrations with crypto-native platforms,” Ruck added.

Polymarket bettors are skeptical, however, with prediction markets giving a 21% chance that a trade deal will be reached by June, and a 47% chance the White House will lower tariffs by the end of May.

Although details were vague on this potential trade deal, markets took notice. The Chinese yuan strengthened to a six-month high near ¥7.19, while regional currencies rallied.

The standout mover was the New Taiwan Dollar (NTD), which surged to a two-year high around NT$29.6 per U.S. dollar as last week ended.

The spike was driven by $1.4 billion (NT$42.9 billion) in foreign equity inflows and surging confidence in Taiwan’s tech sector after TSMC reported a 60% jump in quarterly profits. Taiwan’s central bank intervened to curb volatility but denied political pressure, calling the move market-driven.

BTC range bound?

Further compounding BTC’s relative stagnation is that its encountering significant resistance as it tests key technical and on-chain levels, according to a recent report by Glassnode.

Bitcoin is struggling to break through the $93,000–$95,000 range, an area aligned with both the short-term holder cost basis and the 111-day moving average, marking a crucial battleground for market momentum, the report argues.

“These levels represent a critical inflection point that must be upheld. Failure to stabilize above these levels would push the price back into the consolidation range, and return many investors to a state of meaningful unrealized loss,” the report reads.

However, above $100,000, there is less sell-side pressure due to a smaller volume of coins in that range. If bitcoin can overcome the resistance around $95,000-$98,000 it could enter a relatively clear path toward new price discovery and possibly a new all-time high, the report added.