Trump’s coin sale misses early targets as crypto project’s website crashes
U.S. President Donald Trump looks at a debit card to be used to distribute Covid-19 relief funds to the public during a cabinet meeting in the East Room of the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Tuesday, May 19, 2020.
Kevin Dietsch | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Donald Trump’s new crypto project is off to a rough start.
World Liberty Financial, which aspires to be a sort of crypto bank, launched its token sale on Tuesday, a day after project co-founder Zachary Folkman said that “well over 100,000 people” are on the whitelist to invest.
But WLF’s website suffered regular and lengthy outages for much of the morning and early afternoon, contributing to a limited number of sales. Only about 4,300 unique walled addresses hold the token as of Tuesday afternoon, according to blockchain data tracked by Etherscan, representing roughly 4% of the total number of people who registered.
The platform says it has sold more than 532 million tokens at 15 cents per token. That’s less than 3% of the 20 billion tokens made available for public sale.
Over the course of the day, the website frequently showed a page saying, “We are under maintenance.”
WLF didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
The glitchy launch is a potential setback to the Republican presidential nominee with just three weeks until the election. Trump and his family have been touting the project since August, branding it as “The DeFiant Ones,” a play on DeFi, which is short for decentralized finance.
Source: World Liberty Financial
In a roadmap given to prospective investors that was first viewed by The Block, the WLF proposal says the coin is looking to raise $300 million at a $1.5 billion valuation in its initial sale. Folkman, who previously had a company called Date Hotter Girls and reportedly helped develop crypto project Dough Finance, has said that 20% of WLF’s tokens would be allotted to the founding team, which includes the Trump family.
The digital coin WLFI will be a Regulation D token offering, following a provision that makes it possible to raise capital without first registering a security with the SEC. Certain conditions must be met, such as limiting the size of the sale and restricting it to accredited investors, defined in part as having a net worth of over $1 million.
While few details have been announced about the project’s aspirations, people involved with WLF have said customers will be encouraged to borrow, lend and invest in crypto. No official white paper or formal business plan has been released to the public, and about all that’s been disclosed is that investing in the project will give users voting rights over the yet-to-be-launched WLF platform.
Last week, WLF began the process of getting its crypto bank approved by the DeFi ecosystem known as Aave.
Aave is open source and, in DeFi, is one of the longest-running and most-trusted crypto lending platforms.
Crypto wasn’t the only dark spot for Trump-related investments on Tuesday.
Shares of Trump Media & Technology Group, the parent company of social media platform Truth Social, plunged nearly 10% at the close after trading was briefly halted when the stock suddenly plummeted.
— CNBC’s Kaan Oguz and Jordan Smith contributed to this report.
The OpenAI app icon displayed along with other AI applications on a smartphone.
Jonathan Raa | Nurphoto via Getty Images
Technology giants are turning to nuclear energy to power the energy-intensive data centers needed to train and run the massive artificial intelligence models behind today’s generative AI applications.
Microsoft and Google are among the firms agreeing deals to purchase nuclear power from certain suppliers in the U.S. to bring additional energy capacity online for its data centers.
This week, Google said it would purchase power from Kairos Power, a developer of small modular reactors, to help “deliver on the progress of AI.”
“The grid needs these kinds of clean, reliable sources of energy that can support the build out of these technologies,” Michael Terrell, senior director for energy and climate at Google, said on a call with reporters Monday.
“We feel like nuclear can play an important role in helping to meet our demand, and helping meet our demand cleanly, in a way that’s more around the clock.”
Google said its first nuclear reactor from Kairos Power would be online by 2030, with more reactors going live through 2035.
The tech giant isn’t the only firm looking to nuclear power to realize its AI ambitions. Last month, Microsoft signed a deal with U.S. energy firm Constellation to resurrect a defunct reactor at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania, whose reactor has been dormant for five years.
The Three Mile Island plant was the location of the most serious nuclear meltdown and radiation leak in U.S. history in March 1979, when the loss of water coolant through a faulty valve caused a reactor to overheat.
Why they’re turning to nuclear
Tech companies are under pressure to find energy sources to power data centers — a key piece of infrastructure behind modern-day cloud computing and AI applications.
Many developers rent out servers equipped with GPUs (graphics processing units), which would typically be too expensive to own outright, from so-called cloud “hyperscalers” — such as Amazon, Microsoft and Google.
These tech giants have benefited from a surge of interest in generative AI applications such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT. But that increase in demand has also led to an unintended effect: correspondingly large spikes in the amount of energy required.
Global electricity consumption from data centers, artificial intelligence and the cryptocurrency sector is expected to double from an estimated 460 terawatt-hours (TWh) in 2022 to more than 1,000 TWh in 2026, according to a research report from the International Energy Agency.
Researchers at the University of California, Riverside, published a study in April last year that found ChatGPT consumes 500 milliliters of water for every 10 to 50 prompts, depending on when and where the AI model is deployed. That equates to roughly the amount of water in a standard 16-ounce bottle.
As of August, there were more than 200 million people submitting questions on OpenAI’s popular chatbot ChatGPT every week, according to OpenAI. That’s double the 100 million weekly active users OpenAI reported last November.
Environmental opposition
Nuclear energy isn’t without its controversy. Many climate activists oppose such supplies, citing their hazardous environmental and safety risks, and the fact that they do not offer a genuine source of renewable power.
“Nuclear power is incredibly expensive, hazardous and slow to build,” the climate charity Greenpeace says on its website.
“It is often referred to as ‘clean’ energy because it doesn’t produce carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases when electricity is generated but the reality is that it isn’t a plausible alternative to renewable energy sources.”
Proponents of nuclear energy, on the other hand, say that it offers a nearly carbon-free form of electricity and is more reliable than renewable sources like solar and wind.
“If it is built and securitized in the right way, I do think nuclear is the future,” Rosanne Kincaid-Smith, chief operating officer of Northern Data Group, a global data center provider, told CNBC at a tech conference in London last week.
“People are scared of nuclear because of the disasters we’ve had in the past. But what’s coming, I just don’t see traditional grids being the sustainable power that’s ongoing in the development of AI,” Kincaid-Smith added.
While Northern Data Group isn’t using nuclear energy — nor is it actively exploring plans to use nuclear as a power source for its AI data centers — the firm does want to “contribute to that conversation because it’s important for the wider ecosystem, the wider economy,” Kincaid-Smith told CNBC.
– CNBC’s Pippa Stevens contributed to this report
(L to R) Eric Trump, former US President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and Donald Trump, Jr. attend a remembrance ceremony on the 23rd anniversary of the September 11 terror attack on the World Trade Center at Ground Zero, in New York City on September 11, 2024.
Adam Gray | Afp | Getty Images
A political action committee supporting former President Donald Trump has raised about $7.5 million in cryptocurrencies.
Contributors to the Trump 47 joint fundraising committee donated bitcoin, ether and XRP, as well as the U.S. dollar pegged stablecoins tether and USDC, to the GOP presidential nominee’s campaign, according to a Federal Election Commission filing submitted on Tuesday.
The PAC said the latest filing covered donations in the period of July 1 through Sept. 30, but numbers included cumulative contributions.
With the 2024 election just three weeks away and the contest in a virtual dead heat according to polling averages, Trump is counting on a hefty dose of funding from the crypto community. The former president positioned himself as the pro-crypto candidate in this election, a reversal from his previous stance during his time in the White House. In May, he became the first major presidential candidate to accept donations in digital tokens.
Nearly half of all the corporate money flowing into the election has come from the crypto industry, according to a recent report from the nonprofit watchdog group Public Citizen. The sum was raised from a mix of contributors, with Coinbase, Ripple, and venture firm Andreessen Horowitz accounting for most of those business donations. The industry has raised roughly 13 times the amount it brought in during the last presidential election year.
At least 18 donors gave more than $5.5 million in bitcoin to Trump 47, the filing shows. Another seven people gave around $1.5 million in ether.
Contributors hailed from more than 15 states, including a few battlegrounds, plus the American territory of Puerto Rico. Their professions include Lockheed Martin software engineer, Duthie Power Services sales engineer, and a producer for Esperanza Entertainment.
David Bailey, CEO of media group BTC Inc., gave more than $498,000 in bitcoin. Bailey was part of a small army of bitcoin fanatics who indoctrinated Trump in all things bitcoin and helped turned him from a skeptic to an evangelist. The process culminated in Trump headlining the biggest bitcoin conference of the year in Nashville in July.
Trump said in his keynote that his campaign had raised $25 million from the crypto industry, though he didn’t specify the split between digital tokens and dollar donations.
Among the new donors is Chase Herro, one of the co-founders of the Trump family’s new crypto project World Liberty Financial. The platform, which has been described as a decentralized bank where customers will be encouraged to borrow, lend and invest in crypto, launched its token sale on Tuesday.
So far, more than $10.2 million worth of WLFI tokens have been sold, far short of the initial fundraise goal of $300 million. The launch was plagued with technical issues, including the repeated crashing of the website where the sale was taking place.
Mike Belshe, CEO of digital asset security company BitGo, has contributed almost $100,000 in bitcoin.
Brian Murray, a partner at Craft Ventures, gave $6,560 in bitcoin. Craft was founded by pro-Trump venture capitalist David Sacks.
Kresus Labs founder Trevor Traina gave over $25,000 in ether, Chainstone Labs CEO Bruce Fenton donated $60,000 in bitcoin, and Gary Cardone of Cardone Digital Ventures contributed over $840,000 in bitcoin.
Ripple legal chief Stuart Alderoty contributed $300,000 in XRP, as CNBC previously reported. Alderoty attended a Trump fundraising event hosted by Sacks in San Francisco in June.
Alderoty is at odds with Ripple’s billionaire co-founder Chris Larsen, who gave $1 million worth of XRP tokens to Future Forward, a super PAC that’s supporting Vice President Kamala Harris’ run for the White House. Future Forward began accepting donations in crypto in September.
While Larsen shares the crypto industry’s criticism of SEC Chair Gary Gensler and the aggressive approach the Biden administration has taken towards companies in the space, the Ripple chairman said he has more confidence in Harris, in part because she’s from the Bay Area.
“She knows people who have grown up in the innovation economy her whole life,” Larsen told CNBC in an interview this week. “So I think she gets it at a fundamental level, in a way that I think the Biden folks were just not paying attention to, or maybe just didn’t make the connection between empowering workers and making sure you have American champions dominating their industries.”
In addition to Larsen, Uniswap legal chief Marvin Ammori gave money to the Harris Action Fund. Like Ripple, Uniswap is battling claims it violated U.S. securities laws.
On the pro-Trump side, billionaire twins Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss have led the charge, with an aggregate contribution of nearly $1.1 million each. Some of that money was refunded in September because it exceeded the maximum allowed.
GM rolled out its new “Next Gen” tactical vehicle prototype at the AUSA conference this week packing electric drive motors at the front and rear axles that enable Silent Drive and Silent Watch technologies to make the trucks harder to detect on the battlefield.
Based on the off-road focused Chevrolet Silverado 2500HD ZR2 pickup frame, the GM Defense version pairs GM’s 2.8L Duramax turbo-diesel engine to a 12-module battery pack that send electrons to the “Silent Drive” electric motors powering each axle. GM says the quiet combo can help the big truck make its way through high threat zones without calling undue attention to themselves, and enable the truck to power a number of battlefield accessories.
“Our Next Gen vehicle is a game-changing mobility solution that delivers tactically significant capabilities by integrating GM’s proven commercial technologies,” said Steve duMont, president of GM Defense. “Our warfighters deserve the latest technology that industry can offer in order to gain and maintain competitive advantage over our adversaries. Our Next Gen mobility solution can be customized and fielded now.”
The GM Defense Next Gen tactical truck is currently being offered at AUSA in two-, four-, and six-seat configurations. The truck is built to support multi-mission capabilities, including command and control, launched effects, network extension, counter unmanned aerial systems anti-armor, casualty evacuation, and other critical missions.
The official press release is otherwise light on specs like kWh, armor levels, cabin filtration specs, and more – but that’s probably smart. Here are some of the features GM did share:
- Silent Drive and Silent Watch, enabling low acoustic and thermal signatures;
- Exportable power capable of charging mission systems;
- Tactically significant range with extended mission duration;
- Designed to be autonomy-ready with manned and unmanned options; and
- Add-on armor capable.
GM also presented the following “sustainment” features:
- Fuel demand reduction;
- The ability to use existing JP8 fuel infrastructure;
- Lower maintenance requirements from reduced parts and subsystems in the overall propulsion system; and
- Reduced logistics tail for fuel, batteries, and vehicle parts.
“Next Gen’s ‘wow’ factor is right behind the wheel,” said John (JD) Johnson, vice president of GM Defense’s Government Solutions and Strategy Division. “Next Gen fundamentally changes the discussion around modern mobility through the tactical benefits delivered by its propulsion system, including its ability to address the power gap in the formation … we encourage customers to test drive it so that we can get these capabilities fielded immediately.”
GM Defense is also showing its new Stable Tactical Expeditionary Electric Power solution, which delivers tactical microgrid capabilities, and its Infantry Utility Vehicle, packaged with a Silent Tactical Energy Enhanced Dismount and Squad Maneuver Equipment Transport to represent an element of the Army’s Human-Machine Integration – Formation initiative.
Electrek’s Take
The new GM Defense Next Gen tactical vehicle isn’t built on the same all-electric chassis as the GMC Hummer EV-based eMCV shown last year. That vehicle featured a 200 kWh and about 300 miles of range with no onboard ICE generator.
That vehicle is still officially in testing with the US Army. The Next Gen diesel EREV however, seems ready for sale now.
SOURCE | IMAGES: GM Defense.
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