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For crypto’s offshore giants these days, there’s nothing more important than figuring out their Trump playbook. Most are succeeding, as President Donald Trump’s pardon of Binance co-founder Changpeng Zhao today demonstrated. The pardon of Zhao, who was convicted of violating anti–money-laundering laws and served a four-month sentence last year, could ease Binance’s path to taking on the U.S. market. Other offshore crypto firms, notably Tether and Polymarket, have already overcome obstacles to set up shop in the U.S.
In fact, all these companies have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to move past their checkered regulatory history and expand in the U.S., thanks in large part to the Trump family’s interest in crypto. Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, has been a key supporter of the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial crypto venture. Tether, the biggest stablecoin issuer, which announced a U.S. launch in September after years of regulatory scrutiny, has partnered with U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s old firm, Cantor Fitzgerald. And Polymarket, the largest prediction market, recently got blessings from regulators to return to the U.S. after a regulatory settlement prompted it to ban U.S. users three years ago. Polymarket has added Donald Trump Jr. to its advisory board and received investment from 1789 Capital, a venture capital firm at which Trump Jr. is a partner.
Domestic crypto companies must have some mixed feelings. Coinbase, for example, has run a more conservative and smaller business than Binance and spent millions advocating for crypto regulation. Kalshi went through a lengthy lawsuit with its regulator before gaining the right to launch election bets. And all of a sudden, their offshore competitors are rushing in, with deep pockets they have filled based on years of aggressive expansion outside the U.S. regulatory boundary. For now, investors don’t seem to be too worried. Coinbase’s stock was up slightly today. Tether’s main rival, Circle, has seen its stock rise despite word of Tether’s U.S. launch.
The next prize for offshore crypto giants could be a U.S. IPO. Crypto exchange OKX is now contemplating such a move after settling its lawsuit with the Justice Department. Polymarket recently raised up to $2 billion from Intercontinental Exchange, parent company of the New York Stock Exchange. Tether is also fundraising. They are all moving fast to solidify their legitimacy while the Trump tailwinds last. One company that should take notes from all of these is Hyperliquid, the fast-growing decentralized exchange I profiled this Monday. The two-year-old platform, run by an 11-person team in Singapore, is thriving on crypto fans’ love for anonymity and leverage. It currently doesn’t allow U.S. users, but its founder—Jeff Yan, Harvard grad and former quant trader—is not exactly hiding his ambitions. “We think the U.S. is a super important market, obviously—it’s, like, the financial center of the world,” he told TBPN yesterday.
Eight Sleep Users’ Nightmare
We may have gone too far in our dependency on smart home devices when an outage at a cloud provider can disrupt our internet-connected beds—and our sleep. That’s the upshot of Eight Sleep’s acknowledgment today that the Amazon Web Services outage earlier this week interrupted its users’ rest. CEO and co-founder Matteo Franceschetti apologized on X, adding that “all devices are currently working, with some experiencing data processing delays.”
Data processing delays—for a mattress topper. O-K. What that anodyne language translates to is the stuff of nightmares for anyone who values their sleep. In fact, one user tweeted earlier this week that his bed was “stuck in an inclined position” thanks to the outage. Someone else responded to Franceschetti’s post on Thursday to say Eight Sleep’s products weren’t “minimally viable” if they can’t work offline, possibly the understatement of the year. Franceschetti promises to “build an outage mode.”
This is the same company, remember, that raised money to “supercharge its AI road map.” People, it’s a mattress. To sleep on. Neither artificial intelligence nor the cloud need to be involved!—Martin Peers
In Other News
• Anthropic on Thursday said it plans to use up to a million Google tensor processing units to power its AI, implying the startup would spend tens of billions of dollars renting TPU servers. The announcement is a show of confidence in Google’s chip as an alternative to Nvidia’s graphics processing unit, which dominates the AI server market.
• OpenAI on Thursday said it had bought Software Applications Inc. for an undisclosed sum. The two-year-old AI startup develops Sky, which allows Mac users to take action on their screens and within apps using text-based prompts.
• President Trump has called off plans to send the National Guard on Saturday into San Francisco, after he said friends who live in the area urged him not to go ahead with it.
• HongShan, the Chinese VC giant formerly known as Sequoia Capital China, is leading a funding round in AI agent Genspark that will value the startup at more than $1 billion, according to two people with knowledge of the deal.
• The Ellison family’s Paramount Skydance has made three offers for Warner Bros. Discovery in the past month, at steadily rising prices, The New York Times reported on Thursday. All the offers were rejected.
• The current coach of the NBA’s Portland Trail Blazers and a guard for the Miami Heat were among dozens of arrests Thursday morning as part of a sprawling nationwide probe by the FBI into illegal sports betting and gambling schemes. The government alleges that current and former NBA players and coaches conspired with others to defraud major sports-betting companies.
• The Trump administration is in talks to take equity stakes in quantum computing companies in exchange for federal funding for those firms, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Today on The Information’s TITV
Check out today’s episode of TITV in which we discuss the likelihood of Apple and SpaceX doing a deal together one day for satellite connectivity.
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