First Mover Americas: Bitcoin Rises to Nearly $70K After Trump’s BTC 2024 Speech

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Bitcoin (BTC) climbed to nearly $70,000 at the start of the European morning, its highest since early June, as the crypto market rallied after Donald Trump’s appearance at BTC 2024 in Nashville on Saturday. The Republican candidate for the presidency revealed plans to build a strategic BTC reserve if he is elected in November. Bitcoin is currently trading at around $69,650, an increase of 2.5% in the last 24 hours. The broader digital asset market has risen by about 3%, as measured by the CoinDesk 20 Index, with bitcoin cash (BCH) leading the gains, adding more than 15% to $453.

Donald Trump pledged to “never sell” the U.S. government’s seized bitcoin, in addition to announcing his intention to maintain a “strategic national bitcoin reserve,” in his speech at BTC 2024. “If we don’t do it, China will do it,” he said of embracing digital assets. Crypto is “the steel industry of 100 years ago, you’re just in your infancy,” he said. “One day it probably will overtake gold.” He added that Democrats keeping the White House would be a disaster for crypto. “If they win this election, every one of you will be gone.” If elected, Trump said his day one plans included firing Gary Gensler, the influential chair of the SEC, who is widely reviled in the crypto industry. The promise drew huge applause from the crowd. “I didn’t know he was that unpopular,” Trump said.

COMP, the native token of the lending protocol Compound, dropped over 6% as the decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) that runs the protocol suffered a possible “governance attack.” A governance attack occurs when an attacker acquires enough voting power in a DAO to manipulate the protocol for personal gain, exploiting the permissionless and tradable nature of governance tokens. The attack on Compound involved a series of coordinated efforts to manipulate the platform’s decision-making process through significant COMP token delegations led by a whale named Humpy, who sought to allocate $24 million worth of COMP to a yield-bearing protocol he controlled called goldCOMP run by a group known as Golden Boys. The group has made multiple attempts, with the latest attempt finally passing.

– Omkar Godbole