Pres. Trump Pardons Binance Founder: "The Biden Administration’s War on Crypto is over."

Trump Pardons Convicted Binance Founder

President Trump has pardoned Changpeng Zhao, the convicted founder of the crypto exchange Binance, following months of efforts by Zhao to boost the Trump family’s own crypto company.

The president signed the pardon on Wednesday, people familiar with the matter said. Trump recently indicated to advisers that he was sympathetic to arguments of political persecution related to Zhao and others, one of the people said.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said that Trump had “exercised his constitutional authority by issuing a pardon for Mr. Zhao, who was prosecuted by the Biden Administration in their war on cryptocurrency.” She added: “The Biden Administration’s war on crypto is over.”

SEC Chair Says Regulation Continues Despite Shutdown

The ongoing government shutdown reportedly hasn’t completely shut down the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

The regulator is still monitoring the markets for signs of manipulative behavior, SEC Chair Paul Atkins said in a Wednesday (Oct. 22) CNBC interview.

“Even during the shutdown, as we conduct our surveillance on the marketplace, we have stopped trading on eight foreign companies on Nasdaq that showed indicia of manipulative behavior — ramp and dump, we call it,” Atkins said.

“So we are monitoring the market for the behavior that indicates, you know, hanky-panky going on in the marketplace,” he added.

The commission, Atkins said, is searching for signs of suspicious trading activity, like sudden and unexplained jump in stock prices despite no news, or anomalous trading surrounding company announcements that could point to insider trading.

“We have a lot of different tools that we can use to analyze this, and we work closely with the self-regulatory organizations, the exchanges and so forth, because they are the immediate ones looking at their markets and doing surveillance over that,” he added.

The SEC’s Regulatory Whiplash: How Shifting Agendas Undermine Stability for Investment Advisors

In recent years, the SEC’s approach to critical issues like ESG disclosures (Environmental, Social, and Governance), cryptocurrency regulation, and market protections has not just shifted but swung radically with changing administrations. These aren’t minor policy tweaks, but full reversals that leave firms absolutely scrambling to keep up.

Everyone has seen the whiplash around the SEC’s crypto regulations. Does it want to be crypto’s regulator? Does it not? Does it think it can be? It’s all over the place. But I actually consider ESG investing as the poster child for this regulatory instability. I’ll show you why.

SPACs Are Back. And MAGA Is Fueling Their Growth

The final year of Donald Trump’s first presidency kicked off a boom in so-called special purpose acquisition companies, with hundreds reaching the market. When Joe Biden moved into the White House and cracked down on the murky investments, the frenzy subsided, but with Trump’s return to power SPACs are back. Founders have raised more than $24 billion since the November election, easily exceeding the past two years combined.

A sizable number of them have ties to Trump’s inner circle. Brandon Lutnick, son of the US secretary of commerce; Devin Nunes, chief executive officer of Trump Media & Technology Group Corp. and a former GOP representative; and Chamath Palihapitiya, a big-time donor who hosts a podcast with the president’s crypto czar, have all founded SPACs. And Trump’s two eldest sons are listed as advisers on a SPAC that’s yet to sell shares but is targeting a manufacturer that will reinforce “America’s economic foundation.”

JPMorgan to Allow Bitcoin, Ether as Collateral in Crypto Push

JPMorgan Chase & Co. plans to allow institutional clients to use their holdings of Bitcoin and Ether as collateral for loans by the end of the year in a significant deepening of Wall Street’s crypto integration.

The program, offered globally, will rely on a third-party custodian to safeguard the pledged tokens, according to people familiar with the matter. It builds on JPMorgan’s earlier move to accept crypto-linked ETFs as collateral.