It’s time to call crypto’s victory over the US government apparatus. 

Howard Lutnick has now been confirmed as commerce secretary — which officially means the long-time dealer of US Treasurys to Tether is also a direct line to Trump.

If crypto wasn’t technically embedded before, it definitely is now. Meanwhile, Lutnick’s two sons will take over Cantor Fitzgerald, including older brother Kyle, who also DJs under “Kxtz.”

Elsewhere:

• BTC fell to under $93,500 overnight, reaching fortnightly lows before rebounding. Current price: $96,200 — exactly even over the past week.

• LIBRA’s fallen to a $65 million market cap, which is 33% below original Truth Terminal coin GOAT.

• ETH staking yield is hovering at four-month lows of 3.03% APR, down from as much as 3.29% in January.

🥂 Champagne problems

The vibes may be off over on CT, but they’re not off for wrapped asset startup Universal, which exclusively told Empire about a $9 million round it raised led by a16z. 

Universal Protocol was deployed roughly six months ago. According to Universal’s Austin Diamond — who’s also behind Alongside — the team’s been “really excited about the growth it’s seen since then.”

Which is understandable, given the metrics readily available via Dune. Since the launch, users have traded well over $800 million in uAsset volume.

But let me back up quickly: The idea of Universal is kind of baked into the name, which is to make all kinds of tokens “tradable on crypto rails.”

 “The goal with Universal is to make everything that we consider to be a crypto asset tradable with very deep liquidity on crypto rails, such that not only can end users just access any asset that they might be able to access on a centralized exchange but that any developer can use those,” Diamond explained.

So, Universal wraps the assets for users to trade. Taking it outside of crypto, Diamond likened it to bringing analog newspapers online.

“Historically speaking, none of those newspapers talk to each other. And now it's like everything lives on a shared internet,” which is why Universal wants to make assets usable and tradable onchain. 

Diamond explained that this most recent funding round was a chance to once again work with partners — like a16z — and they pursued the round after Universal gained traction. 

“We really reached kind of an inflection point on our growth, it felt like it was the right time to be in a position to pour gas on it, and so we view that money as fuel to be able to expand on what we're doing. To date, we've launched largely through distributing new assets through other dapps. We want to continue to do that, but also want to drive more people to our front-end experience. And I think it felt like a good time for us” to raise now, Diamond explained. 

For the team, it’s “champagne problems” of having to scale up. It hasn’t been an easy road, Diamond noted… well, until they got “sufficient traction.”

“It was a very long and windy path to get there. I think once we've reached escape velocity and … We were lucky to have a long-standing relationship with a lot of our investors, and they trusted us. We were very upfront about the trials and tribulations over the course of the last couple of years. We came to them with [the] growth. There are real numbers here, here’s [what] our plans look like over the course of the next three, six months to six years,” he said. 

Diamond’s dream is to make Universal’s offerings as “ubiquitous as wrapped bitcoin” which he admitted is not a simple task. But the goal is to break folks out of some of the “tribalism” and “divided factions” in crypto. 

Perhaps that’s the next big narrative.

— Katherine

P.S. Help us build a better Empire and complete our short audience survey. Thank you!

With the US entering its most pro-crypto era yet, DAS NYC brings the voices shaping what comes next.

• Joseph Wang (Monetary Macro, FedGuy.com) – Former Fed trader on liquidity, market structure, and the macro forces shaping finance.

• Matt Hougan (Bitwise, CIO) – Leading the charge on institutional adoption of digital assets.

• Rich Widmann (Google Cloud, Global Head of Web3 Strategy) – Defining the infrastructure and legal landscape for crypto’s next phase.

Less than 20 VIP tickets left. Groups of 4-9 still save 15%.

DAS NYC is four weeks away. If you want a front-row seat, now’s the time to lock in.

📅 March 18-20 | NYC

• Are ICOs making a comeback? Cobie hinted at a potential ICO product for private funding platform Echo.

• Reeve Collins, an OG of Tether and now a co-founder of Pi Protocol, is mulling a yield-bearing stablecoin. 

• World Liberty’s co-founder Zak Folkman is giving credit to Tron’s Justin Sun for the success of the Trump-linked crypto project.

👀 Who you know

Trump didn’t take a direct route to Bitcoin — having sold three NFT collections on Polygon long before he met with bitcoin mining executives at Mar-a-Lago last June.

And Trump is obviously no maxi. He and the First Lady have their own memecoins on Solana, not to mention his DeFi project World Liberty Fi has actively courted crypto teams for token swap deals and other types of partnerships.

Still, something clearly happened last year that changed his tune toward bitcoin, which he’d initially called a “scam against the dollar” in the thick of the 2021 bull run.

Turns out that thing was Trump’s former campaign chair Paul Manafort.

On this week’s episode of Empire, David Bailey, CEO at BTC Inc, gave host Jason Yanowitz  the inside scoop on how he and two other Bitcoiners were able to orange-pill Trump heading into election season.

“I was hanging out in Puerto Rico with a friend of mine that lives here and we were sitting around — this is in January 2024 — and like, we’re a company but we are all in on bitcoin, all in emotionally, spiritually, financially. Our mission is hyperbitcoinization and we actually [wonder] all the time, "how do we accelerate hyperbitcoinization?"

“And so, we were sitting around like ‘damn, if we could just get in front of Trump, like we could pitch bitcoin to Trump and get him bought in on it, and it'd be huge for bitcoin.’”

By happenstance, Bailey’s friend could make that connection — through her sister, whose godfather is Manafort. “So she was able to get a call set up with Paul, and so that’s how it got started.”

From there, it took months of Bitcoin education with Trump’s team before getting all the way to the big man, who had one key concern that hadn’t yet been resolved: Bitcoiners say bitcoin is going to destroy the dollar. 

Trump likes the dollar — so what gives?

“And we're like, ‘well, you know, America built Fort Knox and stored the world's gold in Fort Knox — that didn't undermine the dollar; it made the dollar stronger than ever. And if you want the dollar to stay strong into the future, then we got to build the digital Fort Knox and need to have the world's digital gold stored in America as well. That's how we get another 200 years of the dollar being relevant.’”

According to Bailey, Trump instantly understood and agreed to the next step — meeting in person at Trump Tower. And the rest is history.

— David

On our minds: LIBRA’s impact on memecoins