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President Donald Trump wants to “elevate” the crypto industry with a crypto strategic reserve. 

Trump’s posts about such a reserve kicked off a hornet's nest of questions, including a few about the potential crossover between the assets in the reserve and the personal portfolio of crypto czar David Sacks.

Sacks took to X to clarify that he sold off all of his crypto — including BTC, ETH and SOL — before Trump took office. 

Phew. 

Elsewhere:

• Crypto’s marketcap is up over $3.1 trillion, marking an almost 10% increase over the last day per Blockworks Research data. It’s good to be back.

• PYUSD’s total value is down 3% in the last week to $761 million, per rwa.xyz.

• DEX volume’s up 19% in the past week to $13.5 billion, per Blockworks Research.

🌱 Green shoots

It’s hard to deny that crypto is having a moment, especially when the President of the United States posts about crypto on a Sunday morning. 

While that’s currently the bullish force pushing us forward to start the week — after a less than stellar time last week — it’s hard to say whether the positive momentum is enough to last. 

Here’s the good thing though: We don’t necessarily need to just rely on posts from world leaders to legitimize the space, we’re seeing that happen in a myriad of ways.

Take PayPal, for example.

“I think that the ultimate goal is that whatever you see a way to move money around, on the PayPal side, you should have an option to do that with digital currencies,” PayPal’s Jose Fernandez da Ponte told me.

He thinks that this is the year of overlap between crypto and traditional payments becomes a bigger focus. Clearly, stablecoins are the “killer application of blockchains for payments” right now, he noted. The sector has a market cap of $220 billion, according to rwa.xyz.

PYUSD, PayPal’s stablecoin offering, has a market cap of roughly $760 million which puts it in the top 10 stablecoins, but it’s nowhere near Circle and Tether — the two whales in the space.

For da Ponte though, market share isn’t the main focus. 

“I think that the obsession with market cap is because that's an artifact of how stable coins get monetized. Today, a lot of the large issuers basically make money out of the deal done on the reserves. We think that over time, that's going to be less relevant, that monetization will move away from interest rates and more toward transaction fees, and that stablecoins are going to be monetized by consumer flows,” he explained. 

Now that doesn’t mean that they don’t want PYUSD to grow, da Ponte clarified, adding “we want to be bigger than we are today.” But rather than obsess over market cap, da Ponte and his team are focused on chain transfer volume.

What’s interesting is that da Ponte thinks we’re going to see more of what he calls a “stablecoin sandwich,” which is “fiat on one side, and then the stablecoin as a sort of settlement layer and then you see fiat on the other side.”

“We have seen that in our own remittance flows. So when we are settling with partners in the Philippines and other markets in stablecoins these days, the consumer sees fiat, the sender sees fiat, the receiver sees fiat, and we are capturing the advantages of stablecoins on the infrastructure side.”

Obviously, being the payments giant it is, PayPal has to straddle the line of being focused on both fiat and digital currencies and allowing for the customers to have that choice when interacting on the platform. 

Full disclosure: I did ask if PayPal would consider a yield-bearing stablecoin offering if the conditions were right. Da Ponte was a good sport about it, telling me that it’s “difficult to talk about hypotheticals,” but they haven’t really considered it. That doesn’t mean it’s totally off or on the table — just not on the radar of the payments giant at this time.

The way da Ponte explained PayPal’s focus is simple: Weave traditional payments seamlessly with crypto. But more than that, make it effortless for non-crypto native folks and crypto natives alike. 

And that’s the kind of adoption we need.

— Katherine

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ZKsync is accelerating institutional blockchain adoption and the rise of tokenization. Institutions choose ZKsync to move tokenized assets securely across enterprises while preserving privacy and governance. With gasless transactions, seamless onboarding, and scalable ZK infrastructure, enterprises can transfer financial products and data privately using ZK Stack — an open-source, trustless blockchain platform designed for speed, low costs, security, and interoperability without sacrificing control.

Learn more at ZKsync.io/empire.

• The White House is set to host a crypto summit at the end of the week, and President Trump is expected to speak at the event co-hosted by Sacks and Bo Hines.

• Coinbase’s Brian Armstrong has entered the chat: The CEO thinks that the strategic crypto reserve should probably just have bitcoin, but he’s still forming “an opinion on asset allocation.”

• Vitalik Buterin thinks that a life sentence for Roger Ver is “absurd” and potentially “politically motivated” as the latter faces tax fraud charges.

📅 Wen altszn?

We saw a bit of a rally yesterday as folks digested the posts from President Donald Trump, who said that we could see SOL, XRP, and ADA — combined with bitcoin and ethereum (and perhaps other, unnamed tokens) — in a strategic reserve. 

For Pantera’s Paul Veradittakit, the move helps to further crypto’s “credibility” and reinforces the “store of value” narrative — though it left some folks on the CT timeline a bit concerned about the additions of XRP, ADA and SOL. 

Before we argue if this is bad or good for crypto, the truth is that not a whole lot has changed. 

We still need regulatory clarity. And we probably need to hear more about the plans at the reserve — something we can hopefully get later this week at the White House’s crypto summit.

As for why we haven’t already seen an altseason? Well, Empire co-host Jason Yanowitz has a few ideas of what’s going on. 

Folks became aware of a game underfoot and some went straight to the memes to get away from not only trying to predict the cycle but also to escape the “venture games” of tokens with low float and high FDV. 

But Reflexive Capital’s David Kalk thinks that people also remember the scars of last cycle, which means that they’re unlikely to go back to some of the names. This could lead to a different market structure. Kalk thinks that potential regulatory clarity and the belief in the utility of some of these tokens could be a gamechanger for folks.

At the end of the day, retail is “somewhat playing defense,” Kalk said. 

VanEck’s Pranav Kanade agreed with Kalk, saying that he thinks that the “gambling” retail is back, not the “investing retail.”

And perhaps that’s leading us to a spot where we have “microcycles,” Kanade noted.

If the retail crowd that’s interested in memecoins exhausts itself, then perhaps that opens the door for a different set of folks who are looking for projects to support. Or, maybe we’ll see more institutions at play outside of bitcoin and ether.

Either way, it doesn’t seem like we’re quite ready for an altszn…yet.

— Katherine

Brought to you by:

ZKsync is accelerating institutional blockchain adoption and the rise of tokenization. Institutions choose ZKsync to move tokenized assets securely across enterprises while preserving privacy and governance. With gasless transactions, seamless onboarding, and scalable ZK infrastructure, enterprises can transfer financial products and data privately using ZK Stack — an open-source, trustless blockchain platform designed for speed, low costs, security, and interoperability without sacrificing control.

Learn more at ZKsync.io/empire.

On our minds: Strategic crypto reserves