Crypto Is Flailing

Donald Trump used the White House to pump crypto to unprecedented highs. It’s still collapsing.

By Hadas Thier

April 5, 2026

Source: Jacobin

It feels like just yesterday when crypto markets last crashed hard. Back in 2022, what had been a wildly careening celebrity- and media-fueled hype train suddenly was a smoldering wreckage. Those were the days of Sam Bankman-Fried’s fraud-riddled FTX exchange, which went belly up along with a slew of other big crypto projects. The price of Bitcoin, the largest and most trend-setting of thousands of cryptocurrencies, dropped from its high of over $64,000 in 2021 to barely hitting $17,000 by 2022’s end. Along with Bitcoin, all things crypto sank.

It felt at the time as though we all awoke from a bizarre collective dream in which mass-produced JPGs of cartoon monkeys had sold for prices that rivaled those of an average home, and trading made-up digital tokens on your phone promised to deliver unthinkable riches for the brave of heart. In the wake of crypto’s crash, most people preferred to tune out anything that included words like “blockchain,” “NFTs,” or “Bitcoin.” Even when prices for crypto recovered in 2024, the cringey backwash of 2022 clung on within mainstream public opinion.

And then came Donald Trump.

Trump returned to the White House with a promise to make crypto great again and the United States “the crypto capital of the world.” The crypto industry, in a coming-of-age moment, lavished the aspiring Bitcoiner in chief and other crypto-friendly candidates with mountains of cash during the 2024 elections, organizing the most aggressive fundraising operation it had marshaled yet. According to Public Citizen, nearly half of corporate contributions in that year’s cycle came from the crypto lobby. On the campaign trail, Trump responded in kind and, as a new crypto convert, pledged to help Bitcoin prices “skyrocket like never before.”

The newly forged Trump and crypto-capitalist alliance paid off handsomely for the industry and, predictably, to the Trump family.As of January, the Trump family fortune grew by more than $1.4 billion from its crypto empire, which crisscrosses the digital markets landscape: from TRUMP and MELANIA “memecoins,” to non-fungible token (NFT) Trump trading cards, to a Bitcoin mining company, to the World Liberty Financial crypto platform (including its own WLFI token and USD1 “stablecoin,” both among the top forty cryptocurrencies by market capitalization)

Using his position as the most powerful (and least accountable) politician in the most powerful nation in the world, Trump made quick work of defanging an already barely regulated industry. The president pardoned high-profile crypto criminals (mostly those that invested in his crypto projects), pushed a series of pro-crypto bills in Congress, and announced the creation of a government Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, while his regulatory appointees dropped every major crypto-related investigation and lawsuit meant to rein in fraud, market manipulation, money laundering, sanctions violations, and other basic securities violations.

With regulatory doors flung wide open, crypto was poised to become mainstream and be adopted by the same financial institutions that the crypto movement once claimed to rebel against. Money was flowing into crypto, and prices were booming. Bitcoin prices peaked at an unthinkable $126,000 last October. The size of the crypto market ballooned from a capitalization of $1.7 trillion at the end of 2023, to $3.5 trillion the following year after Trump’s election. It broke the $4 trillion mark by September of 2025.

But four months later, despite having thrown everything but the kitchen sink to power a crypto boom, the market shrunk back to just over $2 trillion. Bitcoin fell to half its peak and is now fighting to clear the $70,000 mark. Despite no-holds-barred boosting from the world’s most powerful and brazen politician, crypto is flailing. What happened?

What Goes Up Must Come Down

Crypto prices first began their recovery in 2024, before Trump returned to the White House. This was largely because President Joe Biden’s Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) had already approved of a trendy Wall Street instrument called exchange-traded funds (ETF) to include Bitcoin and another major cryptocurrency, Ether. ETFs are funds run by asset managers like BlackRock or Fidelity that hold a basket of underlying assets. They issue shares of those funds, which track the value of their assets. In the case of Bitcoin and Ether ETFs, investors gain exposure to crypto price movements without having to set up crypto “wallets” and buy the digital assets themselves.

Wall Street loved it. But ordinary Americans were exposed to them, whether or not they knew it. Nearly a dozen US pension funds and at least a couple of state pensions have invested in crypto ETFs, binding the financial health of millions of working people to the volatility of the crypto markets. Crypto ETF growth drove demand for Bitcoin and Ether and pushed the rest of the industry along with them.

Once in office, and with Wall Street’s entanglement with crypto by now growing, Trump intervened to clear the industry’s path “to the moon” through legal legitimization and deregulation. Crypto companies and traditional financial institutions partied like it was 1929.

The Trump-crypto bloc used three major prongs to get there. First, by issuing pardons and throwing out every major lawsuit and investigation, Trump did more than signal to crypto criminals that they need only drop hundreds of millions of dollars to curry his favor. He also signaled to the whole crypto industry that anything goes, and to banks and traditional finance that they can feel free to play in crypto’s murky waters without worrying about legal consequences.

Second, Trump’s SEC reversed course from Biden’s and recently declared that crypto tokens and assets are definitely NOT securities (tradable financial instruments) — and therefore cannot be regulated as such. (Their all caps, not mine.) Defining tokens as securities had been the linchpin of previous attempts to begin to regulate a thoroughly unregulated field. Now reversing this position essentially gave the message that crypto is “not the SEC’s problem.” The rules that apply to the rest of capital markets don’t apply here.

Last, Trump leaned on Republican lawmakers to draw up legislation (allegedly with middle-of-the-night phone calls) — pulled directly from industry white papers and finessed with closed-door meetings with crypto leaders — to “future-proof” the regulatory about-face. The Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins (GENIUS) Act, passed last summer, enshrines the nearly $300 billion worth of crypto stablecoins as legally recognized, privately issued currency, operating with minimal oversight.

The Digital Asset Market Clarity (CLARITY) Act essentially does the same for other cryptocurrencies. It provides carve-outs to crypto tokens, crypto exchanges, crypto advisers, and crypto funds and portfolios from all existing major securities laws. The CLARITY Act is currently being held up while the crypto industry and banking industry fight over how far stablecoins can go. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong scuppered negotiations, and after he met with the president, Trump took to Truth Social to berate the bankers as well.

Trump couldn’t take total credit for his midnight calls creating congressional compliance. According to FinTech Weekly, “Seven of the forty-six senators currently sitting on the two Senate committees with direct control over the CLARITY Act received a combined $265,500 in direct contributions from individuals employed at or affiliated with crypto companies during the 2025-2026 cycle,” including the CEOs of Coinbase, Ripple, Kraken, and founders of Blackstone.

This all pales in comparison, though, to the money poured in by Fairshake, the crypto super PAC, which has already spent an unprecedented $271 million on the 2026 midterm elections — delivering a not-subtle message to legislators about what will happen if they don’t toe the crypto line.

And yet, with all the might of the White House and billionaire crypto capitalists flexing, the markets are flailing.

The increased participation of traditional finance turned out to be a double-edged sword. Just as quickly as investor cash can flow into the market, it can flow out. And institutional investors, at first sign of market retreat, always dump their riskiest assets (i.e., crypto) first. Beginning last fall, a combination of fears of tightening Fed rates, Trump’s tariff shocks, and war with Iran spooked Wall Street. In early February, investors yanked roughly a billion dollars from ETF funds in one week alone.

The sudden collapse undermined the crypto narrative that it was on an unstoppable flight to the moon, and that Bitcoin in particular was like a “digital gold.” Maja Vujinovic, CEO of digital assets at FG Nexus, told CNBC: ”[The] straight line bull run that a lot of people expected hasn’t really materialized yet. Bitcoin isn’t trading on hype anymore; the story has lost a bit of that plot. It is trading on pure liquidity and capital flows.”

In other words, gone are the days when celebrities could be counted on to whip up extra hype every time the market flags. The crypto market, instead, is dependent on institutional capital flows.

But outside of crypto’s extreme price cycles lies a more long-term and dangerous consequence. The partnership between Trump and the crypto industry is not just one of extreme moneymaking and grift (although it is both). The alliance more dangerously solidified a power bloc of anarchocapitalists, Silicon Valley venture capitalists, and Trump’s burgeoning authoritarian state. Crypto creates easy avenues for that alliance to grow in opaque ways, with the president’s sundry crypto projects giving any criminal or foreign interest that cares to invest in them special access to the president.

That bloc is legitimizing a parallel, almost completely unregulated, financial ecosystem, even more shadowy than Wall Street’s current very shadowy banking system. That legitimacy has the potential to create an even greater proliferation of stablecoins, holding billions — perhaps trillions — of Treasury securities to back their reserves. If those stablecoins collapse, as unregulated financial bodies in particular have a habit of doing, their issuers would need to to sell off high volumes of securities, destabilizing markets.

If the crypto market continues to collapse, Wall Street and their political cronies will lose interest, and the shadowy ecosystem will idle, at least for the time being. But even so, as long as the legislation and regulatory capture continues, crypto will use the new legal framework currently being put in place and pick up where it left off if at the next wild boom.Email

Hadas Thier

Hadas Thier is a writer, journalist, and activist based in Brooklyn, N.Y. She is the author of A People’s Guide to Capitalism: An Introduction to Marxist Economics.

 

Experts uncover why cats are prone to kidney disease

University of Nottingham

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Researchers from the University of Nottingham have uncovered a surprising biological quirk in domestic cats that may help explain why they are so prone to chronic kidney disease.

Unlike dogs and most other mammals, cats appear to accumulate unusual fats inside the cells of their kidneys, sometimes from a very young age.

This new study, published in Frontiers of Veterinary Science, and led by Professor David Gardner and Dr Rebecca Brociek from the School of Veterinary Medicine and Science at the University, shows they are anything but ordinary.

Using advanced chemical analyses, the team discovered that cats accumulate a rare group of modified triglycerides (the most common type of fat in the body, essential for storing excess energy from food), some with unusual chemical bonds or branched structures, that are very rarely observed in other mammals.

Many of these fats have special ether‑linkages that behave differently from typical dietary fats. Dogs did not show this pattern at all, and the feral Scottish Wildcats showed it only occasionally. 

Dr Brociek said: “Why these types of unusual fats accumulate in domestic cat kidneys, even from an early age, may offer an important clue as to why domestic cats are particularly prone to chronic kidney disease, one of the most common and serious illnesses affecting older cats.”

The researchers propose that this distinctive lipid buildup inside kidney cells could be an early sign of long‑term stress within the kidney, potentially contributing to tissue damage over time.

Professor Gardner says: "We are hopeful that soon we will understand why these unusual fats accumulate in domestic cats - we just have to collect the evidence to find the proof. If true, we believe we could develop a supplement or modified diet to help prevent these unusual lipid structures from accumulating, ultimately benefitting the long-term health of our companion animals.”

The discovery opens a new area of investigation into feline biology, suggesting that cats’ unique metabolism may predispose them to kidney problems. It could eventually lead to better diagnostic tools, improved diets, and new treatments for protecting cats’ kidney health.

The full study can be found here.

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Journal

Frontiers in Veterinary Science

DOI

10.3389/fvets.2026.1711591 

Method of Research

Experimental study

Subject of Research

Cells

Article Title

Lipid droplets in felid kidneys: prevalence and composition by lipidomics

 

Researchers create world’s largest dog and cat tumour database

University of Liverpool

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Researchers from the University of Liverpool’s Veterinary Data Science Group and the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria have created the world’s largest open-source database of canine and feline tumours, containing more than one million records. This unique resource aims to help transform understanding of factors influencing the risk of pets getting cancer.

The team brings together expertise in veterinary pathology, epidemiology, data science and clinical practice. By working with veterinary diagnostic laboratories and applying advanced methods for extracting and standardising diagnostic data, they have created a unified resource.

The size of the tumour registry makes it possible to study rare cancers and uncommon breeds in meaningful detail for the first time. Researchers worldwide can now access rich and standardised data to explore patterns previously hidden by fragmented reporting.

David Killick, Professor of Veterinary Oncology at the University of Liverpool, said: “It is important to understand risks for cancers – and this applies to pets too. But for dogs and cats, most cancer diagnosis data sit in private veterinary labs, inaccessible for research. Working through SAVSNET , our Small Animal Veterinary Surveillance Network, we wanted to see whether we could bring together large volumes of these data into one meaningful, research-ready database.

“This tumour registry is a major step towards better understanding cancer risk in pets. In addition to allowing better identification of breed related risk of specific tumour types, early analyses have raised the question of how neutering practices may influence risks of particular cancers. The scale of the data also opens new possibilities for exploring the genetic basis of these cancers.”

Jose Rodríguez Torres, PhD Veterinary Data Scientist at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, added: “Analysing cancer diagnoses is well established in human medicine, but similar work in animals has lagged behind due to fragmented data. This study is a leading step forward. With more than 200 breeds and more than 150 tumour types represented, these data can now be explored by researchers worldwide to better understand cancer risk across many tumour–breed combinations.”

Dr Francesco Cian from BattLab, one of the participating labs, and a co-author on the paper said ” It has been a pleasure to work with University of Liverpool and ULPGC on this project and to see a new use for the data we generate. Typically, our results are used by veterinarians to support owners and their pets. In this research, we were able to collate anonymised results and generate new knowledge about the tumour risk faced by individual pets across a wide range of cancers”.

The team plans to expand the registry by collaborating with additional laboratories and continues to collect data in real-time. As the Registry grows, analysis can be further refined – for example, by better understanding how dogs with tumours compare to the wider UK canine population.

The team have created a publicly accessible summary of the data to allow vets, owners and researchers to better understand tumour risk here.

An element of the team’s work, that focusses on dog tumours, is explored in a newly published paper in Veterinary and Comparative Oncology, ‘Epidemiology of Four Major Canine Tumours in the UK: Insights From a National Pathology Registry With Comparative Oncology Perspectives’ (DOI:10.1111/vco.70056).

The work is funded by Petplan Charitable Trust.

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Journal

Veterinary and Comparative Oncology

DOI

10.1111/vco.70056 

Subject of Research

Animals

Article Title

Epidemiology of Four Major Canine Tumours in the UK: Insights From a National Pathology Registry With Comparative Oncology Perspectives

 

Breaking down the battery problem

A researcher at the Cockrell School of Engineering is continuing a legacy of battery science that began right here at The University of Texas at Austin.

University of Texas at Austin

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Credit: The University of Texas at Austin

Consider the humble rechargeable battery: Many people start their day by unplugging their phone from a charger to check the weather or commute to work, or throw on their favorite podcast. They’ll end the day by plugging in their phone to charge again overnight.

This cycle represents decades of battery research pioneered right here at The University of Texas at Austin. Without the small, energy-dense, and safe lithium-ion battery, our morning routine would be very different.

“Even if you come up with other battery technologies, lithium-ion batteries will still be there,” said Arumugam Manthiram, a professor in the Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering. He has been working on the chemistry that happens inside batteries at the Cockrell School since 1986. “It might be replaced … but that will be a slow [process] if it is ever going to happen.”

His latest research, published in Nature Energy, explores a framework that could be used to advance a crucial part of lithium-ion batteries. Roughly 75% of the cost of lithium-ion batteries is the materials, and the majority of these batteries use expensive oxide cathodes. This is the problem Manthiram and his students are tackling: How do we begin to make these oxide cathodes more efficient?

Texas Engineers are already working on creating batteries made from more abundant—and more environmentally friendly—materials like sulfur or sodium, but this tech is still in the prototype stage. While this tech is promising, “it’s one thing to do something in the lab, and it’s another thing to make it, put it in your hand, and use it,” Manthiram said.

Why Fundamental Research

Lithium-ion batteries dominate the rechargeable market for their safety, power-to-weight ratio, and long cycle life, which means long-term reliability. The lithium-ion battery market was estimated to be worth $60 billion in 2024. That number is expected to triple in the next decade as demand for more efficient electric vehicles and energy storage rises.

Yet, sourcing the materials necessary for these batteries is becoming tougher, not easier, as supply chain disruptions from local conflict, politics, or environmental causes become more common.

A cathode, the positively charged electrode, is one of three essential components to a battery. It’s also the most expensive, usually making up half the total materials cost of a battery. The cathode is composed of nickel, but also lithium and cobalt, which are the mined minerals that are so vulnerable to supply-chain disruptions.

Understanding how these materials mix is crucial to meeting future market demand, keeping costs down, and maintaining safety.

“It involves a lot of fundamental knowledge. That’s where I come into the picture,” Manthiram said, “The cathode needs a lot of fundamental chemistry and physics knowledge to make it behave properly in engineering.”

Manthiram worked closely with Nobel Prize winner John Goodenough at Cockrell, who is credited with inventing cathode materials for lithium-ion batteries in the 1980s and which has revolutionized our morning routines.

Now, he’s working with his own “wonderful” students and postdocs to push the technology forward.

The Nature article breaks down the complexities of oxide cathodes and how machine-learning datasets can become valuable to speed up the development of future batteries.

Manthiram identifies three factors of the oxide cathode that control its behavior and properties: electronic configuration (or, how the electrons are arranged in the atoms of material), chemical bonding and chemical reactivity. Each of these individual parts of a cathode’s equation affects the battery’s performance.

Different chemical bonds can shift operating voltage and alter thermal stability and safety. Chemical reactivity can affect gas generation and cycling stability. Electronic configuration can determine which materials should or shouldn’t be grouped together. Even something as stable as iron can have adverse effects when paired with lithium in an oxide cathode.

That’s a lot of data to handle. Understanding the influence of these factors well would take years of research and significant resources, but the broader materials industry is already training machine learning algorithms to assist experimentalists in their work.

“You cannot depend only on machine learning or artificial intelligence. You also need human intervention. That means whatever comes out of that [research], we better understand what it is.”

Why AI Matters in the Frontier of Materials

There are already examples of AI being used to take advantage of huge datasets and predict promising leads for researchers. Google DeepMind’s GNoME project predicted 528 new compounds that could potentially be lithium-ion conductors. There is some discussion as to just how novel or useful of these compounds could be, but that’s where scientific expertise becomes paramount.

Manthiram’s group is using Texas Materials Institute’s facilities to conduct characterization experiments, which create complex datasets that AI trained by the group can then parse. After that, the experiments are done again, repeating the cycle of creating data to train a ML-model to predict materials to experiment on.

“We invent the materials; we invent the process in academic labs; and then [industry] has to scale up and implement it,” Manthiram said.

Pushing the technology forward, reducing the amount of cobalt used, overcoming the instability concerns of more nickel in the mix. These are all bite-sized solutions for a big challenge that affects everyone.

“I tell my students, we’re all learning. That’s the attitude I have.”

Manthiram hopes this article builds on an educational framework and pushes researchers towards a better understanding of cathodes, which in turn would speed up development while reducing safety problems.

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Journal

Nature Energy

DOI

10.1038/s41560-025-01963-x 

Article Title

Chemical factors controlling the behaviour of oxide cathodes in batteries

A clear view to better batteries

Washington University in St. Louis

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By Leah Shaffer

Lithium-ion batteries are ubiquitous in consumer electronics such as cellphones and in electric vehicles, but the surrounding temperature and speed of charging affects those batteries’ performance, safety and lifespan. Fast charging adds convenience, but it further stresses battery life as it can cause “lithium plating” to occur — a process where the lithium ions that should be jumping from the cathode to the graphite material in the anode instead react only on the surface of the anode and become lithium metal.

Charging in cold conditions also can drive plating and, in addition to lowering the battery’s lithium capacity, the superfluous metal could potentially cause a fire. It would help to see exactly when and how the plating begins to form, but previous attempts to record and analyze this type of battery chemistry in action have fallen short. Now, engineers at Washington University in St. Louis have tried something new: their operando microscopy platform, which allows them to mimic the conditions of a battery, all under glass tubes.

By recording and seeing the plating in action, they now know exactly how and at what voltage to cut off the charge to “avoid the onset of lithium plating,” said Peng Bai, an associate professor of energy, environmental and chemical engineering at the McKelvey School of Engineering.

“Eventually, you will be able to design a new chemistry. By knowing at what capacity you will have plating, you can stop there,” he added.

Bai and his PhD students Rajeev Gopal and Bingyuan Ma recently published their research in the journal Small. 

Their platform also allows for better testing of battery electrolytes, and the experiments confirmed the potential for ether-based electrolytes to improve lithium-ion battery performance.

With a clear view of plating, Bai’s team was able to mark the exact voltage and timing of when and how plating begins, using that data to develop a “performance map.”

This map could provide a key tool to better battery design and development. It can provide quantitative guidance for optimizing fast-charging protocols and enhancing battery performance, Bai said.

Over time, with these tools, battery manufacturers can develop charging technologies that automatically cut off the charge before plating could occur. Until then, consumers should be aware that it might be better to cut that phone charge off at 80%.

“When you do faster charging, depending on the temperature, you’ll want to stop early. Don’t wait for the cut-off voltage,” Bai said.

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Gopal RK, Ma B, Bai P. Mapping Out Fast Charging Safe Limits for High-Loading Lithium-Ion Cells by High-Fidelity Operando Microscopy. Small. 2026 Jan 23:e14619. DOI: 10.1002/smll.202514619.

Study supported by a National Science Foundation grant (Award number 2044932) and is partially supported by Toyota Research Institute through D3BATT: Center for Data-Driven-Design of Li-ion Batteries.

 

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Journal

Small