价值64亿美元，特朗普媒体集团的CRO囤币计划黄了

Original author: angelilu, Foresight News

A year ago, Trump Media & Technology Group (DJT) and crypto exchange Crypto.com made a high-profile pact to establish a publicly listed treasury company that would stockpile billions of dollars worth of CRO. At the time, this politically connected company joining forces with a top-tier exchange generated enormous fanfare. A year later, this capital game has come to a quiet end.

On August 7, DJT, Crypto.com, and SPAC company Yorkville officially announced the termination of the plan, shelving along with it the previously announced prediction market and ETF custody cooperation. With Bitcoin nearly halved from its peak and treasury-holding public companies retreating across the board, this partnership that began with political proximity ultimately never made it to the implementation stage.

How far had the halted cooperation progressed?

The most significant component of this partnership was the plan to create a publicly listed CRO treasury company. In August 2025, the three parties grandly announced that Trump Media would use SPAC company Yorkville as a shell to establish a company called Trump Media Group CRO Strategy, claiming it would be "the first and largest publicly listed CRO treasury company," with plans to accumulate approximately 6.313 billion CRO tokens—nearly one-fifth of CRO's circulating supply at the time. The entire company was valued at approximately $6.42 billion, built from $1 billion in CRO, $200 million in cash, $220 million in warrants, and a $5 billion equity credit facility.

But for all the fanfare, this treasury plan never actually materialized. What was announced in August 2025 was merely a framework agreement; the reverse merger still required a lengthy SEC filing and approval process that would take the better part of a year. It remained in a "pending" state until being directly terminated a year later, never having been established.

Two accompanying initiatives also fell through. The prediction market product Truth Predict, originally intended to be embedded into Truth Social—allowing users to wager on politics, economics, and sports events—was scaled back to a marketing partnership, with Crypto.com merely promoting its own prediction market to Truth Social users. The arrangement for Crypto.com to provide custody for Trump Media's ETFs was also abandoned.

The only thing that actually materialized—and remains in effect—is a separate independent agreement. In August 2025, Trump Media spent approximately $105 million to purchase CRO for its balance sheet, while Crypto.com in turn bought $50 million worth of DJT stock. This transaction was completed with goods delivered and payment settled, untouched by the termination, making it the only bond that survived this retreat.

Political alignment first, commercial deals second

To understand why this arrangement fell to Crypto.com, we need to look back—it was political proximity that first paved the way for the business relationship.

Around the 2024 U.S. election, Crypto.com had been extending olive branches to the Trump camp: donating $1 million to the inauguration and investing $10 million in the pro-Trump super PAC MAGA Inc. CEO Kris Marszalek also personally visited Mar-a-Lago to discuss crypto policy with Trump face-to-face. In March 2025, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) dropped its investigation into Crypto.com—just shortly after the agency had issued a Wells notice to the exchange regarding potential enforcement action.

With the relationship paved, the commercial cooperation in August 2025 followed naturally. Trump Media wanted a crypto narrative, a batch of tokens it could list on its balance sheet, and an ETF custodian; Crypto.com wanted to leverage Trump's name to back its own CRO token.

For this very reason, the deal carried a whiff of conflict of interest from day one—the Trump administration itself holds regulatory power over the crypto industry, yet a company tied to his family was deeply intertwined with an exchange that had just donated and just received a pass from the SEC. Senator Elizabeth Warren and others publicly demanded investigations into whether political considerations had influenced the SEC's decisions.

Why the retreat? Token prices and market conditions offered no room

The official explanation is quite candid. Crypto.com's CEO Kris Marszalek stated: "After examining these proposed ETFs and DATs from every angle, we reached the same conclusion—continuing to move forward under the current market environment does not make sense." He added that the company would redirect the CRO originally committed to the treasury toward driving revenue, demand, and ecosystem value. According to The Block, sources close to the deal revealed that this pivot was more about changes in the competitive landscape than concerns over the awkward situation of "Trump-affiliated companies being regulated by the Trump administration."

But the market had already written the answer into prices. At press time, CRO was trading at approximately $0.0616, down roughly 70% over the past year—a steady decline that began right after the partnership was announced.

Zooming out, Bitcoin has slid from a high of approximately $126,000 in October 2025 to around $65,000 now—nearly cut in half. The heat around treasury-holding public companies is receding across the board—data from early January 2026 shows that at least 37 of the world's top 100 DATs saw their stock prices fall below their net asset value (NAV) of holdings, with even industry benchmark Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy) trading at a discount and even selling Bitcoin to cover preferred stock dividends.

When the tide goes out, who still wants to build a multi-billion-dollar CRO treasury?

Trump Media's next move: pivoting to nuclear fusion

With its crypto narrative fizzling out, Trump Media has already turned toward a direction completely unrelated to crypto. In December 2025, the company announced an all-stock merger with fusion energy company TAE Technologies, valued at over $6 billion, with both sets of shareholders holding approximately half of the combined company after the transaction closes, which is expected by mid-2026. This fusion company, founded in 1998, will go public via Trump Media's listing vehicle, and the merged entity's focus has clearly shifted from social media and crypto toward clean energy.

In other words, terminating the CRO treasury is not an isolated retreat but part of Trump Media's broader pivot—it is busy rebranding itself from a "Trump-themed crypto player" into a company betting on cutting-edge energy.