Markets
Bitcoin Soars After Trump’s BTC 2024 Speech
Bitcoin (BTC) scaled at nearly $70,000 in early European morning tradingthe highest value since early June, following the cryptocurrency market rally following Donald Trump’s appearance at BTC 2024 in Nashville on Saturday. The Republican presidential candidate has revealed plans to build a strategic reserve of BTC if elected in November. Bitcoin is currently trading around $69,650, up 2.5% over the past 24 hours. The broader digital asset market is up about 3%, as measured by the CoinDesk 20 Index, with bitcoin cash (BCH) leading the gains, adding more than 15% to $453.
Donald Trump has pledged to “never sell” bitcoin seized from the US government, as well as announcing his intention to maintain a “strategic national bitcoin reserve,” in his speech at BTC 2024. “If we don’t do it, China will,” he said of digital asset adoption. Cryptocurrencies are “the steel industry of 100 years ago, you’re just getting started,” he said. “They’ll probably overtake gold one day.” He added that if Democrats retained the White House, it would be a disaster for cryptocurrencies. “If they win this election, you’re all gone.” If elected, Trump said his first-day plans included firing Gary Gensler, the influential SEC chairman who is widely despised in the cryptocurrency industry. The promise drew huge applause from the crowd. “I didn’t know that was That unpopular,” Trump said.
COMP, the native token of the Compound lending protocol, dropped more than 6% as the decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) that runs the protocol suffered a possible “governance attack.” A governance attack occurs when an attacker gains enough voting power in a DAO to manipulate the protocol for personal gain by 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 delegations of COMP tokens led by a whale named Humpy, who attempted to allocate $24 million worth of COMP to a yield protocol he controlled called goldCOMP run by a group known as the Golden Boys. The group made several attempts, with the latest attempt finally being defeated.