Almost a year after announcing one of the most ambitious corporate crypto tie-ups of 2025, Trump Media and Crypto.com are pulling back.

Together with Yorkville Acquisition, the companies have terminated plans to create Trump Media Group CRO Strategy — a publicly traded company designed primarily to accumulate and manage Crypto.com’s CRO token. They cited “prevailing market conditions” and shifting business priorities. Plans for several related digital-asset products have also been dropped, while the proposed integration of Crypto.com prediction markets directly into Truth Social is being reduced to a marketing arrangement.

The news is interesting beyond Trump Media itself because the deal emerged at the height of another major 2025 trend: digital asset treasury companies, or DATs.

The treasury boom behind the deal

The idea was largely inspired by 🟠 Strategy’s Bitcoin playbook: raise capital through public markets, use it to accumulate crypto and give investors equity-based exposure to the underlying asset.

In 2025, the model spread rapidly beyond Bitcoin. More than 200 companies had adopted DAT strategies by September, with their combined market capitalization reaching roughly $150 billion, up from around $40 billion a year earlier. Companies increasingly experimented with ETH, SOL and smaller ecosystem tokens as well.

Trump Media and Crypto.com took that logic particularly far:

Their proposed CRO treasury company was expected to launch with $1 billion in CRO, $200 million in cash, $220 million from warrants and access to an additional $5 billion equity line. At the time, the partners described it as the first and largest publicly traded CRO treasury company.

So this was not just another company adding some crypto to its balance sheet. Accumulating CRO was supposed to be the business model itself.

How the partnership became so ambitious

The relationship actually began before the treasury announcement.

In early 2025, Trump Media selected Crypto.com to support planned digital-asset ETFs under its Truth.Fi brand. By August, their cooperation had expanded considerably.

Trump Media and Crypto.com planned to:

• build the $6.42 billion CRO treasury structure;
• integrate CRO and Crypto.com wallet infrastructure into Truth Social and Truth+ rewards;
• allow users eventually to use CRO for subscriptions and other services;
• develop additional digital-asset products through Truth.Fi.

Trump Media also directly acquired 684.4 million CRO worth about $105 million, while Crypto.com received $50 million in DJT shares. Trump Media planned to custody and stake its CRO through Crypto.com.

At the time, Crypto.com CEO Kris Marszalek called it “the first of many steps to driving utility and value for CRO.”

Then came Truth Predict, announced in October 2025, with plans to integrate Crypto.com-powered prediction markets directly into Truth Social.

In less than a year, one partnership had expanded across treasury management, ETFs, token utility, wallets and prediction markets.

A year later, the economics look different

The problem with a crypto treasury model is that its strongest advantage in a rising market can quickly become its weakness in a falling one. Trump Media’s latest results show how quickly that exposure can work in reverse:

the company posted a $238.1 million net loss in Q2 2026, more than 10 times its loss a year earlier, with much of the decline tied to unrealized losses on digital assets and securities.

CRO tells a similar story. Trump Media had acquired roughly $105 million worth of the token as part of the partnership, but by the end of Q1 that position was valued at only around $53 million. The decline doesn’t make $CRO itself a failed asset, but it does show how much additional volatility a treasury strategy can absorb when it is built around a single ecosystem token.

That makes the decision to abandon a separate CRO-focused public company much easier to understand.

However, none of this means Trump Media has abandoned crypto. It still holds a sizeable digital-asset portfolio. What has changed is how aggressively the company wants to keep expanding around it. Interim CEO Kevin McGurn summarized the new strategy simply:

We wanted to get focused.

This is not happening only at Trump Media

The CRO vehicle is part of a broader reassessment of last year’s treasury boom.

1. Bitcoin Standard Treasury Company: in July, Cantor Equity Partners I and BSTR abandoned their original merger terms and began negotiating a new structure designed to better reflect current market conditions.
2. Prenetics: in May, its board authorized the complete sale of its approximately 510 BTC treasury, shifting capital back toward its core operating business.
3. Strategy: even the company that popularized the Bitcoin treasury model has become more flexible. It introduced a BTC monetization program and has sold Bitcoin to fund preferred-stock distributions and replenish its dollar reserve.

These cases don’t mean DATs are finished, but rather show what happens when a strategy designed during a strong market finally meets a very different one. And the Trump Media case should not be read as proof that ecosystem tokens themselves do not belong in corporate strategies.

• BNB is the obvious counterexample: what began closely tied to Binance now functions as the native gas and staking asset of BNB Chain, alongside its exchange utility.

• WBT follows a similar model as both an exchange ecosystem asset and the native coin used for transaction fees on Whitechain. WBT rose 160% in 2025 and reached an ATH of $64.11

So the CRO lesson is narrower: there is a difference between a useful ecosystem token and building an entire public company around accumulating that token.

From crypto exposure to crypto utility

That may be the bigger signal behind the Trump Media–Crypto.com reset.

During strong markets, simply holding crypto can become a compelling corporate story. Higher asset prices increase treasury values, higher equity valuations can make fundraising easier, and new capital can finance further accumulation.

When the cycle turns, that mechanism becomes much harder to sustain.

At the same time, crypto partnerships built around something a business actually uses — payments, custody, settlement, trading infrastructure or tokenized services — have a different reason to exist. Their usefulness is not entirely dependent on whether one asset appreciates.

The market may simply be becoming more selective about what kind of adoption makes sense.

In 2025, one of the big questions was how much crypto a company could put on its balance sheet. And today, the more interesting question may be what crypto can actually help that company do.

Disclaimer: This is not financial or investment advice. DYOR before making any decisions. Use at your own risk.

Trump Media and Crypto.com Are Breaking Ties. What Happened to the 2025 Crypto Treasury Boom? was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A market maker’s job looks simple from the outside: keep buy and sell orders in the book and update them as the market moves.

What is less visible is everything that has to happen before those orders can be updated correctly. The strategy needs to receive the latest market data, decide how its prices should change, send instructions to the exchange and learn what happened to its previous orders. All of that can happen through different connections with different speed, delivery and recovery characteristics.

So when a market maker evaluates an exchange, “Does it have an API?” — is only the starting point. The more useful question is whether the entire path from a market event to the next order is reliable enough to trade on.

What happens before an order reaches the book

A simplified market-making cycle looks like this:

market event → order-book update → pricing decision → order entry → execution → inventory update → next order

Every step depends on the one before it. If market data is late or incomplete, the pricing decision is based on the wrong market. If an order reaches the venue later than expected, the price may already be outdated. If a fill is not reflected quickly enough, the strategy can continue quoting without an accurate view of its inventory.

That is why connectivity is part of the trading system itself, not simply the technical work required to connect the system to an exchange.

Three Layers Behind Every Quote

The stack can be simplified into 3 main layers:

1. Market data. The strategy needs a current view of bids, asks and order-book changes. With incremental feeds, that usually means building a local book from a snapshot and applying every subsequent update in the correct sequence.
2. Order entry. New orders, cancellations and amendments need a channel with low and, importantly, predictable latency. A strategy that cannot estimate when an instruction reaches the venue has a harder time controlling its exposure.
3. Execution state. Acknowledgements, fills, partial fills and cancellations need to flow back quickly enough to update inventory and trigger the next quote.

Different venues may expose these functions through WebSocket, FIX, REST, drop-copy feeds or other channels. What matters is not having the largest number of protocols, but using the right channel for each part of the trading cycle.

Why state consistency matters at scale

Raw latency gets most of the attention, but synchronization can be just as important.

Consider an incremental order-book feed. If one delta is dropped and the consumer misses the gap, later updates can continue arriving normally. The connection still looks healthy, but the local book is now being updated from the wrong state.

That creates one of the most dangerous situations for a market maker: the strategy keeps quoting, but the market it is quoting against is no longer the market the venue sees.

Recovery therefore has to be part of the design. The system needs to detect missing sequences, stop relying on corrupted state, retrieve a valid snapshot and rebuild the book before normal quoting resumes.

Three connectivity stacks in practice

There is no single architecture used by every venue. Current institutional offerings show several ways to separate market data, order entry and account or execution events.

WhiteBIT Market Making Program

• rebates and discounts are based on the market maker’s 30-day maker volume;
• fees can go as low as -0.012% maker on both spot and futures, with taker fees from 0.020% on spot and 0.025% on futures;
• the program includes API access, subaccounts and 24/7 institutional support;
• qualification within the MM grid is based on a share of total volume rather than only a fixed absolute threshold.

Bybit Market Maker Program

• the program covers Spot, Perpetuals/Futures and Options, with market-maker levels reviewed monthly;
• on Spot, qualification starts at more than $25M in 30-day trading volume for MM1, while higher tiers depend on maker-volume share or liquidity requirements;
• current Spot maker rebates range from -0.001% to -0.0075% depending on tier;
• new market makers receive a one-month trial period, while institutional clients also get REST/WebSocket API integration and dedicated support.

Bitget Market Maker Program

• new market makers can qualify for an initial tier through account assets, proof of market-maker status on another exchange or existing maker volume; asset thresholds currently range from 50,000 USDT for Tier 5 to 2M USDT for Tier 1;
• current Spot maker rebates reach -0.010% on Group A and -0.015% on Group B for Tier 1, while Futures rebates reach up to -0.010% depending on the pair group;
• tiers are reassessed monthly using weighted maker volume and market-making performance;
• higher tiers also receive increased infrastructure capacity: Tier 1 UTA accounts can reach 300 API requests per second, alongside an institutional dedicated cluster and technical support.

The comparison is therefore broader than the headline maker rebate. A market maker is also choosing the qualification model, available infrastructure and the operating conditions under which its strategy will have to maintain liquidity.

Evaluate the path, not just the API

For a market maker choosing a venue, a basic API checklist does not go far enough. The better questions are:

How does market data reach us? What happens if an update is missed? How do we send and cancel orders? How do we learn that an order has been filled? How do sessions recover after a disconnect? How quickly can we rebuild a trustworthy state?

Those questions connect infrastructure directly to the job the market maker is trying to do: keep orders in the market while prices, executions and inventory are constantly changing.

A strong connectivity stack does not eliminate trading risk. It gives the market maker the information and execution channels needed to understand that risk fast enough to act on it.

Disclaimer: This is not financial or investment advice. DYOR before making any decisions. Use at your own risk.

From Market Data to Execution: How Market Making Works was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.