# Cryptocurrency Sector Crypto is the sector that bought its own regulatory regime and now operates inside it. The industry that spent $130M+ electing a friendly Congress in 2024 got the [[GENIUS Act]], a pardoned [[Changpeng Zhao]], a [[Strategic Bitcoin Reserve]], and an SEC chair who keynotes Bitcoin conferences — while a brutal 2026 bear market tests whether legitimacy survives a 50% drawdown. This MOC maps the corporate layer; [[Cryptocurrency Ecosystem]] is the umbrella front door, [[Crypto-Political Machine]] covers the influence machinery, and [[Trump Crypto Ventures]] tracks the first family's self-dealing. ## The exchange and infrastructure layer - **[[Coinbase]]** — the sector's establishment flagship: first crypto-native S&P 500 member (May 2025), the $2.9B Deribit derivatives acquisition, and a conditional OCC national trust bank charter (April 2026). [[Brian Armstrong]] put another $25M into [[Fairshake PAC]] for the midterms. - **[[Binance]]** — still the offshore giant; Trump's October 2025 pardon of founder [[Changpeng Zhao]] — two years after his money-laundering guilty plea, and after Binance wrote the code for World Liberty's USD1 stablecoin — is the sector's starkest pay-for-play data point. - **[[Kraken]]** — filed confidentially to IPO at a targeted $15–20B, then paused in March 2026 when the market turned. - **[[Gemini]]** — the [[Winklevoss Twins]]' exchange IPO'd on Nasdaq in September 2025. - **[[Ripple]]** — closed the SEC war in August 2025 (XRP ruled not a security on exchanges), bought prime broker Hidden Road for ~$1.25B, and pushed its RLUSD stablecoin past $1B. - **[[Galaxy Digital]]** — [[Mike Novogratz]]'s digital-assets merchant bank; redomiciled to Delaware and listed on Nasdaq (GLXY) in May 2025, then pivoted its Texas mining campus into AI data-center hosting. Gave $1M to the [[2025 Trump Inaugural Fund]] on an active SEC settlement track. ## Stablecoins: the post-GENIUS land rush The [[GENIUS Act]] (July 2025) turned [[Stablecoin]] issuance into a licensed industry, and everyone came: [[Tether]] (~$187B in assets, ~$10B+ annual profit) launched a compliant US token (USAT) through Anchorage Digital; [[Circle]] rode its June 2025 IPO to $103 before falling ~70% as competition arrived; JPMorgan's deposit tokens run on Coinbase's Base network; and a Stripe/Visa/BlackRock consortium of 140+ firms announced Open USD in June 2026. USDT and USDC still hold ~83% of supply, but USDC's on-chain volume overtook USDT's in April 2026. Non-compliant coins face a ~September 2026 exit deadline as rulemaking lands. ## Treasuries, memecoins, and the Trump layer **[[Strategy]]** ([[Michael Saylor]]) holds ~847,000 BTC as of June 2026, the corporate-treasury trade's anchor — increasingly strained with bitcoin at ~$65K, down from its $126K October 2025 peak. The crash (~52% peak-to-trough by February 2026, ~$890B in market cap erased in H1) is the sector's stress test. The Trump family operation — mapped in [[Trump Crypto Ventures]] — spans [[World Liberty Financial]] (Tier 1 super-watch since 2026-10-08; see [[World Liberty Financial Dossier]]) (WLFI tradeable since September 2025, USD1 stablecoin), [[American Bitcoin Corp]] ([[Eric Trump]] and [[Donald Trump Jr.]] with Hut 8, Nasdaq-listed September 2025 and already reverse-splitting to hold its listing), the collapsed $TRUMP [[Memecoin]] (down 90%+ from its $27B peak), and the bitcoin treasury at [[Trump Media and Technology Group]] (~$1B of a planned $2B deployed). Trump's July 2026 financial disclosure showed ~$1.4B in crypto earnings. Meanwhile [[Justin Sun]], [[Sam Bankman-Fried]], and [[FTX]] remain the cautionary pre-history. ## Regulation as an owned asset [[Paul Atkins]]'s SEC has reclassified most token categories as non-securities and runs a tokenization sandbox (see [[Tokenization]]); the [[CLARITY Act]] market-structure bill cleared Senate Banking in May 2026 but awaits a floor vote, hung up on — fittingly — an ethics provision about officials' crypto holdings. [[Fairshake PAC]] entered the 2026 cycle with a $193M war chest ([[Coinbase]], [[Ripple]], [[Andreessen Horowitz]]), making crypto the largest corporate political spender of the midterms. [[David Sacks]] runs both AI and crypto policy from the White House. See [[Bitcoin]], [[Cryptocurrency Lexicon]], and [[GENIUS Act]] for foundations. ## Coverage gaps Now built: [[CLARITY Act]], [[Ethereum]], and [[Galaxy Digital]] (with [[Mike Novogratz]]). Still missing: Hut 8 (American Bitcoin's majority owner), Anchorage Digital, Paxos, Bullish, and eToro. Highest remaining value: Hut 8 — it completes the Trump-family mining money map. ## See Also - [[Coinbase]] · [[Binance]] · [[Kraken]] · [[Gemini]] · [[Ripple]] · [[Circle]] · [[Tether]] · [[Strategy]] · [[Blockstream]] · [[Galaxy Digital]] - [[World Liberty Financial]] · [[American Bitcoin Corp]] · [[Trump Media and Technology Group]] · [[Trump Crypto Ventures]] - [[OCC Charter Wave]] — the federal charters now being handed to the sector - [[GENIUS Act]] · [[CLARITY Act]] · [[Strategic Bitcoin Reserve]] · [[Paul Atkins]] · [[Fairshake PAC]] · [[Crypto-Political Machine]] - [[Bitcoin]] · [[Ethereum]] — the two anchor assets - [[Cryptocurrency Ecosystem]] — the umbrella front door - [[AI Sector]] — the rival claimant on the same political money · [[Chipmakers Sector]] — sibling sector MOC