A shareholder from one of the world’s biggest digital asset companies has sued U.S. President Donald Trump for alleged crypto corruption.
The lawsuit, filed on Thursday by shareholder and former Circle employee J. Benjamin Greenberg, alleges that a member of the United Arab Emirates ruling family agreed to pay half a billion dollars into the Trump-backed World Liberty Financial business — in direct violation of the Constitution.
Circle is the fintech company behind the stablecoin, USDC. Regulators in the U.S. are fast pushing ahead with pro-crypto rules despite lawmakers last month blocking landmark digital asset legislation, which President Trump backed.
A number of lawmakers didn’t back the draft legislation — the Clarity Act — because they said that the Trump family had illicitly cashed in on crypto ventures.
“The corruption at issue is not subtle, and it is not hidden,” the lawsuit alleges. “Since returning to office, President Donald J. Trump and his family have built a cryptocurrency business and invited foreign states to route money to him by paying into it. Foreign money has answered.”
The lawsuit goes on to allege that an investment fund created by the government of Abu Dhabi also gave the president $2 billion via World Liberty Financial’s USD1 stablecoin product.
World Liberty Financial is a decentralized finance project co-founded by the president and his sons.
President Trump stopped being involved in the project after taking office in 2025.
Thursday’s lawsuit adds that the president allegedly gave the Emirati leadership access to advanced artificial intelligence chips and pardoned a convicted felon in turn for the crypto investment. It references a February Wall Street Journal article that reported the deal.
“Although the President has dressed his corrupt arrangements in the language of new technology — tokens and stablecoins, holding companies and reserve yields — that vocabulary must not obscure what this is: the oldest form of public corruption, a public official taking money from a foreign power,” the lawsuit further says.
It alleges that the president has “corruptly” profited from $2 billion via the deals.
President Trump, World Liberty, and U.S. Middle East Special Envoy Steve Witkoff are named as the defendants in the lawsuit.
The president campaigned on a ticket to help the crypto industry and received major financial backing from the space but some Washington lawmakers have criticized the way the Trump family has profited from digital asset ventures.
Trump and the White House have always denied any conflicts of interest. The president in August, ahead of the crypto Clarity Act vote, said that Democrats criticizing his family crypto ventures had made money from stock trading.
Siebert Financial sees Bitcoin reaching $175K within the next 12 months, and Strategy hitting $350 a share along with it. Brian Vieten, head of digital assets research at Siebert Financial, joins Grace Remington and Sean Hagan to explain his path to $175K, starting with the June low near $58K that he says marked exhaustion across miners, exchanges, treasury companies, and lenders. He then breaks down Siebert’s Buy rating on Strategy and its $350 price target, which is based on that $175K Bitcoin forecast and doesn’t assume any mNAV expansion. He also explains why Strategy’s digital credit engine, sticky ETF demand, and the GENIUS Act give Bitcoin “a clean runway” from here
Chapters: 0:00 – Siebert’s Brian Vieten on His $175K Bitcoin Price Target 0:27 – Why the $58K June Low Marked Seller Exhaustion 3:04 – How Big Banks Changed the Bitcoin Lending Complex 4:22 – ETFs: Sticky Capital and Bitcoin’s Biggest Market Structure Shift 5:10 – Strategy at 1x mNAV and the Digital Credit Tax Advantage 6:36 – The GENIUS Act, Stablecoins and Tokenization as New Demand 8:42 – Does the Four-Year Cycle Still Matter? 10:21 – What Institutions Need Before Increasing Bitcoin Allocations 12:12 – How the GENIUS Act Could Spark Institutional FOMO 16:11 – Strategy’s $350 Price Target and How It Compares With Younger Treasury Companies
DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this show are those of the participants and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of BTC Inc., Bitcoin Magazine, or any affiliated entities. This content is provided for informational and educational purposes only and should not be construed as investment, legal, tax, or accounting advice. Nothing contained in this show constitutes a solicitation, recommendation, endorsement, or offer to buy or sell any securities or financial instruments. Viewers should consult their own advisors before making financial or business decisions.
Prices are down roughly a third from the top. Dollar supply onchain is down 4.5%. That gap is the most important chart in crypto right now.
Two lines that used to move together. In 2026 they stopped.
Bitcoin’s record close was $128,198 on 6 October 2025. In late September 2026 it trades near $84,000.
Ethereum peaked at $4,953 in August 2025. It now sits around $2,670.
More than $810 billion of market value came off the board during the 2026 selloff.
Now look at the dollars.
Total stablecoin supply peaked at $322.4 billion on 17 May 2026. By 13 August it was $308.0 billion. That is a 4.5% drawdown, set against a price drawdown of roughly a third.
For a decade those two lines moved together. This year they did not.
Stablecoin supply vs crypto prices in 2026: what the numbers actually say
The gap is wider than most people realise. Here is the 2026 scoreboard.
Global crypto market capitalisation sat near $2.98 trillion in late September, with Bitcoin dominance around 56.5%
Bitcoin is roughly 34% below its October 2025 record
Ethereum is roughly 46% below its August 2025 record, and touched a 60% drawdown earlier in the year
Total stablecoin supply is still up 14.3% year over year, from $269.4 billion in August 2025 to $308.0 billion in August 2026
Stablecoins now account for around 13% of the entire crypto market by capitalisation
Roughly 269 million onchain addresses held a stablecoin balance as of mid-2026
Drawdown from cycle peak. Prices lost a third to a half. Dollar supply onchain lost 4.5%.
One more number makes the point properly. June 2026 set a record for adjusted stablecoin transfer volume at $1.79 trillion, in the same quarter that supply was falling.
Balances shrank. Usage grew. Those two things are not supposed to happen at once.
The 2022 to 2023 contraction was a structural exit. The 2026 pullback is a rotation.
There is also a rehearsal worth noting. Between December 2025 and February 2026, supply contracted by roughly $9 billion, then recovered to a fresh record. Short contractions have become normal. Structural collapse has not.
So what changed? In 2022, most stablecoin balances were trading collateral. They existed to buy the next thing. When the next thing stopped looking attractive, holders redeemed and went home.
In 2026, a large share of those balances have a job that has nothing to do with the next trade.
What broke the link between stablecoin supply and the crypto cycle?
Three structural shifts, all of which landed inside eighteen months.
Regulation split the category in two
The GENIUS Act, signed in July 2025, prohibits payment stablecoin issuers from paying yield to holders, with the framework taking effect no later than 18 January 2027.
Hold a plain payment stablecoin and you are lending the issuer a dollar for free. That is now the law, not an accident of market structure.
Balances became working capital
Stablecoins are settling payroll, cross-border invoices, card spend and treasury operations. That demand does not care what Bitcoin did last week.
Yield replaced price expectation as the reason to hold
When a dollar onchain can generate a return from a transparent, verifiable source, the holder has a reason to stay through a drawdown.
That third shift is the one most commentary still misses. For scale: yield-generating instruments make up somewhere between 55% and 65% of traditional financial markets.
In crypto, the comparable figure has sat closer to 8% to 11%. The gap is not a quirk. It is a queue of capital waiting for a legitimate route.
If the money did not leave crypto, where did it actually go?
The capital did not exit crypto. It moved from balances that pay nothing to balances that do.
This is the distinction that makes the headline number misleading. “Stablecoin supply fell” describes an average of two categories moving in opposite directions.
USDS is a useful illustration of the entry point, and sUSDS of the destination. USDS is the fully backed unit of account. sUSDS is the yield-generating version of it, redeemable at any time, with no lockups.
Why a governance-set savings rate behaves differently in a drawdown
Here is the part that actually explains the durability.
It is funded by Net Protocol Revenue generated when the Sky Agent Network, a set of independent capital allocators, draws USDS liquidity from Sky Protocol and deploys it into diversified strategies under public risk limits.
How the Sky Savings Rate is funded. No issuer marketing budget, and no dependence on funding rates staying positive.
Read that again with a market crash in mind. The rate does not depend on funding rates staying positive.
It does not depend on token prices. It depends on whether a diversified allocation network keeps generating revenue.
In 2026, it did. Per Sky Frontier Foundation:
Protocol Collateral grew 18.2% year over year to $11.10 billion at the August close
Sky Agent Network vaults expanded from $5.63 billion to $6.06 billion during August alone
Sky Protocol stablecoin supply closed August at $9.53 billion, up from $9.41 billion in July
Q2 2026 delivered $107.35 million in Gross Protocol Revenue and $33.29 million in Net Protocol Surplus, the fifth consecutive positive quarter
sUSDS supply grew 149% year over year to $5.52 billion at the Q2 close
Growth rates inside a shrinking market. The top line contracted. The savings layer underneath it did not.
A market shrinking 4.5% at the top line. A savings layer inside it growing at triple digits. That is the decoupling, in one comparison.
The question stopped being “where is the price going” and became “who is paying me to wait”.
Who is backing the structural demand argument with real money?
Sky Agent Network exposure to Galaxy moved from $27 million at the Q2 close to roughly $304 million by 1 September.
An 11x increase in Sky Agent Network exposure to Galaxy in a single quarter, in the middle of a price drawdown.
Sky.money reported $7.1 billion across its full product suite on 19 August, of which $4.92 billion sat in the Sky Savings Rate.
None of that is speculative positioning. It is a treasury decision made during a drawdown.
Is falling stablecoin supply still a bearish signal for crypto prices?
Less than it used to be, and that is the honest answer.
Stablecoin supply was once a single-purpose gauge. It measured dry powder waiting on the sidelines. Today it measures at least three different behaviours at once:
Dry powder waiting to buy
Working capital moving through payment and settlement rails
Yield-generating balances that have no intention of leaving
When one number tracks three behaviours, the number stops being a signal and starts being noise.
A 4.5% drawdown tells you almost nothing about whether the next leg is up or down.
Better things to watch:
Net issuance split by category, payment versus yield-generating
Adjusted transfer volume rather than parked balances, and the underlying supply data behind both
Collateral composition and backing ratios, which you can verify onchain rather than infer
Whether protocol revenue holds up when prices do not
What this actually means for the next cycle
The stablecoin market has stopped being a mirror of crypto prices. It has started behaving like a savings layer that happens to live onchain.
That changes what the metric is good for. Supply used to tell you about sentiment. Now it tells you about allocation.
And allocation, unlike sentiment, tends to be sticky.
If you want to check any figure in this piece rather than take my word for it, Sky Ecosystem publishes protocol collateral, revenue and supply data continuously.
So here is the question worth arguing about in the comments. If stablecoin supply no longer tracks the crypto cycle, what is the honest replacement metric for onchain liquidity? Net issuance by category? Transfer volume? Something else entirely? I do not think the market has settled on an answer yet, and I would rather hear a good disagreement than a consensus.
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