In today’s Finshots, we look at Trump Media’s $6.4 billion bet on an altcoin called Cronos, and why history suggests this story may not end well.

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The Story

Imagine you’re on Dalal Street and someone whispers that a mysterious investor plans to buy up nearly all the stock of Hindustan Unilever (HUL). Not a few shares. A fifth of the company in one shot, and more if possible.

Now, HUL is India’s FMCG giant with a market cap of about ₹6 trillion. So, if a single whale hoovers up that much stock, what happens? At first, prices soar. Traders cheer. “If this whale wants in, there must be value,” they think. The stock jumps, the whale looks richer on paper, and for a while everyone feels smarter.

But the risk is that when one player holds so much, liquidity dries up. Others hesitate to trade. And if the whale ever needs to sell, the very act of selling could crush the price. Worse, if this whale is a listed company, its own stock begins to mirror every tick in HUL’s chart. A reflexive loop emerges. The company’s fate becomes hostage to the very stock it hoarded.

So yeah, the plan sounds reckless.

But Donald Trump’s media company did something eerily similar last week. Not with any listed company, but with a little-known cryptocurrency called Cronos (CRO).

Trump Media & Technology Group Corp. (DJT), which runs Truth Social and where Donald Trump holds a 53% stake, announced a deal with Crypto.com and Yorkville to set up a $6.4 billion “CRO digital asset treasury.” The plan: start with a $1 billion stash of CRO — nearly 19% of all tokens in circulation — plus $200 million in cash, $220 million in warrants, and a $5 billion credit line. In short, a $6.4 billion vehicle worth about as much as the coin it’s trying to corner.

On paper, it isn’t just hoarding. Trump Media says it will run a validator node on the Cronos blockchain. What’s that? Well, think of a validator as a cricket umpire, ensuring that every ball is fair. In crypto, validators confirm transactions and earn new tokens in return. Trump Media calls this proof that CRO can be an “income-generating asset.”

But here’s the problem. 

CRO isn’t positioned like Bitcoin, a store of value. Nor Ethereum, which powers thousands of apps and smart contracts. CRO is mostly tied to Crypto.com’s ecosystem. It’s the fuel that makes the Cronos chain run that supports NFTs and Web3 ecosystems.

As the filing puts it…

Cronos is a high performance, interoperable blockchain designed for speed, scalability, and seamless connectivity between networks, making it a strong foundation for the future American digital economy. It enables low-cost, high-speed smart contract deployment and smooth integration with other major blockchain ecosystems, unlocking widescale adoption of decentralized applications in finance, commerce, and public infrastructure, without the congestion or costs of legacy networks. With its proof-of-authority consensus, robust validator set, and enterprise-grade security, Cronos delivers the performance and reliability needed to power mission-critical applications at scale.

You pay fees in it, you stake it to validators, you secure the network. Which means the more CRO circulates, the healthier the system. Which is why locking away nearly a fifth in a vault is… odd. Simply put, it’s like buying all the fuel in Delhi to prove petrol prices are rising—and then wondering why the traffic stopped.

Now if all of this sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the same playbook American entrepreneur, Michael Saylor, used at MicroStrategy. 

You see, in 2020, MicroStrategy, a struggling software firm, reinvented itself by buying billions of dollars’ worth of Bitcoin. Its balance sheet became a mirror of Bitcoin’s price. Investors treated it like a proxy ETF. But this strategy only works as long as the Bitcoin tide keeps rising. The moment Bitcoin prices dip, MicroStrategy’s leverage cuts both ways. Debt balloons, collateral shrinks, and shareholders panic.

But let me tell you a parable from history.

In the late 1970s, two Texas oil heirs, Nelson and William Hunt, decided silver was the trade of the century. Convinced paper money was doomed, they went all-in. With mountains of borrowed cash, they bought futures, hoarded bullion, and even shipped bars to Swiss vaults to stay ahead of US regulators. By early 1980, they controlled nearly 200 million ounces… or almost a third of the world’s deliverable silver!

At first, it looked unstoppable. Silver shot from $6 an ounce in 1979 to nearly $50 by January 1980. And on paper, the Hunts were worth over billions. 

But corners rarely survived regulators. Alarmed, COMEX and the Chicago Board of Trade made it harder to keep buying silver by asking traders to put up more cash as margins. And since the Hunts had borrowed heavily, they couldn’t meet these demands. On 27 March 1980, known as “Silver Thursday”, silver prices crashed by 80% in just weeks. The Hunts couldn’t pay their debts, creditors went after them and they eventually went bankrupt.

The lesson? You can corner supply, but not demand. If value rests only on hoarding and hype, the market is brittle. And once confidence breaks and the flow of buyers dries up, prices collapse under their own weight.

And that’s what makes Trump Media’s Cronos plan look so fragile. CRO isn’t silver, but the parallels are clear. The Hunts tried to create value by locking up supply. Trump Media wants to do the same by hoarding CRO tokens. But just as silver’s worth depended on jewelers, industrial users and investors continuing to buy — CRO’s worth depends on people actually using the Cronos blockchain. Hoarding about 20% of it in a corporate vault doesn’t make it more useful. It makes it brittle.

To be fair, Trump Media isn’t blind to these criticisms. Running a validator node is a legitimate business activity. It’s like not just hoarding HUL shares, but also running its factories and earning dividends. In theory, staking yields make CRO more than dead inventory. Trump Media has even locked up its investment for years to signal commitment. So if Cronos adoption soars, they could spin this as “skin in the game”. And investors might celebrate the illusion of value. It may even push the adoption of the new asset class we’ve been seeing lately—corporate crypto treasuries or “digital asset treasuries”. If MicroStrategy can hold Bitcoin, why not Trump Media with CRO?

But the contradiction is hard to miss. 

Validators only make sense when tokens are in motion. That is when users are paying fees, staking coins, and keeping the blockchain alive. The more activity, the more validators earn. 

Treasuries work in the opposite way. 

Their bet is that if you lock away a large portion of supply, the token looks scarce, and scarcity can push up its price on paper. So one model feeds on circulation, the other feeds on scarcity. Put them together, and they cancel each other out. And by chaining itself so tightly to CRO, Trump Media isn’t hedging its risks but concentrating them in a coin that already trades with thin liquidity.

Oh and remember, this CRO play is just one act in a larger Trump crypto carnival. The family is building an entire crypto empire: $2.5 billion raised to buy Bitcoin, a DeFi company called World Liberty Financial where they profited $500 million and hold 22.5 billion WLFI tokens, and even memecoins like $MELANIA and $TRUMP, which briefly neared $10 billion before crashing. And the perks weren’t dividends, but dinners with the President.

Seen through this lens, the CRO isn’t the big story. It’s just another ride in a Trump-branded theme park of speculative attractions. They’re not betting on one coin. They’re planting toll booths at every layer of the crypto economy. From crypto coins and infrastructure to wrappers and the crypto hype.

And as always, those closest to the project—the ones with the networks, the tokens, the inside track—stand to make the real money. Still, it risks looking like a pump-and-dump in disguise.

So help us decide, Mr Trump. Can you really corner a cryptocurrency — an asset meant to be open and decentralised — and still keep its fundamentals intact? Or is this just audacity tipping into absurdity?

To us, this sounds nuts. Not because it’s risky or politically flashy. But because it misunderstands the most basic truth about blockchains. You can’t monopolise one without killing it.

Until then…

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