In an effort to strengthen U.S. President Donald Trump’s connections with the cryptocurrency industry, Trump Media & Technology Group and Crypto.com reached an agreement with a blank-check acquisition firm on Tuesday to establish a new business that will employ a treasury-style approach to acquire the cryptocurrency platform’s native token CRO.
The two businesses are the most recent to attempt to adopt Michael Saylor’s Strategy, which was first used by MicroStrategy, a software company that started hoarding bitcoin in 2020. Based on current pricing, the company’s bitcoin assets are currently valued at almost $100 billion. In 2024, its stock increased fivefold in tandem with the price of bitcoin.
Tuesday afternoon, Trump Media’s stock was up 6.6% at $18.36.
The new business, Trump Media Group CRO Strategy, will be listed on the Nasdaq with the ticker MCGA after going public through a merger with blank-check firm Yorkville Acquisition Corp.
CoinGecko reports that after the news, the CRO coin surged 29.6% to 20 cents. Yorkville’s stock was trading at $10.42, down 2.2%.
Cronos is worth $6.8 billion, which is a small portion of the $3.9 trillion global cryptocurrency market capitalization, according to CoinGecko.
Trump Media, the company behind Donald Trump’s social media and streaming platform Truth Social, said earlier this year that it was collaborating with Crypto.com to introduce exchange-traded funds and products under the Truth.Fi brand.
Through the anchoring of Truth Social’s corporate reserves and incentives system in CRO, Trump Media is successfully institutionalizing the token. However, Alice Liu, head of research at cryptocurrency data firm CoinMarketCap, said it’s another instance of a business using a native token as part of their treasury strategy.
BOOM IN BITCOIN TREASURY
The latest action by Trump Media follows weeks after holders of digital tokens issued by World Liberty Financial, one of the Trump family’s cryptocurrency ventures, voted to allow for their widespread sale and purchase, potentially increasing the value of the president’s holdings.
In the United States, the cryptocurrency business has been growing recently, helped in part by the Trump administration’s supportive laws.
An exchange-traded fund that tracks the price of the $TRUMP meme coin—the cryptocurrency whose fortunes are linked to Trump—was listed on Tuesday by digital asset management Canary Capital.
In recent months, a handful of other corporations with substantial bitcoin or other cryptocurrency holdings have entered into deals comparable to Trump Media’s CRO endeavor.
As markets priced bitcoin at a premium, most firms followed a similar approach of pursuing listings on U.S. exchanges through agreements with Special Purpose Acquisition firms (SPACs).
In April, Cantor Fitzgerald-backed blank-check firm partnered with Tether and Japanese technology titan SoftBank Group to form a $3.6 billion corporation dedicated to bitcoin accumulation.
The Trump Media crypto business will be financed with $200 million in cash, $220 million in warrants, $1 billion in Cronos tokens, and a $5 billion equity line of credit from a Yorkville subsidiary.
Additionally, Trump Media committed to buy $105 million worth of Cronos for its balance sheet, while Crypto.com said that it will buy $50 million worth of Trump Media’s ordinary shares.
On Tuesday, the investment firm 1789 Capital, founded by former Bank of America executive Omeed Malik and included Donald Trump Jr. as a partner, also committed to invest in Polymarket, a platform for predictions markets. Trump Jr. is joining the advisory board of Polymarket as part of the agreement.
