🇺🇸 Weekly Recap: Presidential Candidates Compete For Crypto Votes

Happy weekend Defiers!

Candidates for the upcoming U.S. presidential election are courting the crypto community.

Former president, Donald Trump, vowed to promote innovation within the U.S. cryptocurrency industry a protect the right to self-custody, marking a seismic pivot from calling Bitcoin a “scam” just three years ago. However, many in the web3 community are skeptical of his newfound support for crypto.

Robert F Kennedy Jr. is also seeking support from crypto users. RFK told an audience at Consensus 2024 that embracing Bitcoin would form a key part of his deficit management strategy, building on the plan to partially back the U.S. dollar with BTC he articulated last year.

Despite garnering support from front-running candidates, digital assets posted a weak performance after surging in response to the sudden approval of spot Ether ETFs last week. The move was largely driven by U.S. inflation data showing a rise in April, which paused global market momentum.

The Department of Justice is paying close attention to web3, with the DoJ publishing its first-ever risk assessment looking at NFTs. Brian Nelson, the Treasury’s undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, also warned that unregulated stablecoins pose a threat to U.S. national security.

In other regulatory news, SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce threw her support behind a proposal from U.K. financial authorities advocating for establishing a joint sandbox for fintech and digital asset firms with their U.S. counterparts.

Drama persists in the memecoin markets. A spate of celebrity-endorsed memecoins has some analysts sounding the alarm on a top signal. Caitlyn Jenner notably joined the party, but some sleuths believe a shady middle-man orchestrated the launch of JENNER alongside at least four other influencer tokens in the past fortnight.

On Ethereum, PEPE continued surging to new heights, with the frog-themed meme token overtaking MATIC by market cap and eclipsing the 30 largest NFT collections combined.

Uniswap postponed the governance vote on activating its long-awaited fee-switch, with the project’s foundation citing concerns from a prominent stakeholder.