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Feb 16, 20262 hours ago

Trump Truth Social Files for Bitcoin, Ether and Crypto ETFs

R
Rand@cryptorand

AI Summary

This market bulletin offers a sharp look at the forces currently shaping the intersection of crypto, finance, and technology. It leads with the notable news that Trump Media's Truth Social unit has filed for two novel crypto ETFs, aiming to offer exposure to Bitcoin and Ether with staking rewards, as well as a yield-focused product for Cronos. This move deepens the political brand's ties to digital assets and enters a crowded regulatory pipeline, highlighting the ongoing institutionalization of crypto.

Welcome to today’s market bulletin! We’ve gathered the most relevant trends and developments shaping the crypto and finance world, all in one place. Clear, concise, and focused, here’s what you need to know to stay on top of the markets this week. Let’s begin:

Surfing the Market, with the BNB and TAO.

Don’t miss about Trump Media’s new BTC–ETH–CRO ETF filings and CZ’s warning that weak privacy is still holding back everyday crypto payments!

Sapien is under the spotlight.

A short article about CapEx: the weapon of Wall Street’s new arms race.

BNB continues ranging and defending the main $600 support. Really important level:

Magnificient TAO bounce over the main horizontal support which has been active during the last 3 years. Pushing with strength to breach the confluence of resistances at $220:

Trump Media’s Truth Social Unit Files Bitcoin, Ether an

Trump Media & Technology Group, the company behind Truth Social, has filed with the SEC for two new crypto exchange-traded funds: a combined Bitcoin–Ether vehicle and a Cronos “Yield Maximizer” ETF. The BTC–ETH fund would track both blue-chip coins while scooping up ETH staking rewards, and the Cronos product aims to capture CRO price performance plus on-chain yield. The proposals, developed with Crypto.com and Yorkville America Equities, still need regulatory approval before they can list.

Highlights

Dual-product launch: One ETF targets a BTC–ETH basket with Ether staking income; the other focuses on Crypto.com’s CRO token and its staking yield.

Partner stack: Crypto.com would handle custody, liquidity and staking, while Yorkville America Equities serves as investment adviser and Foris Capital US as broker-dealer.

Fee structure: Both products are slated to charge a 0.95% management fee, in line with many newer, actively structured crypto ETFs.

Political backdrop: The filings extend Trump Media’s growing crypto footprint, from CRO treasury deals to prediction markets on Truth Social, deepening links between the Trump brand and digital assets.

Crowded ETF pipeline: The proposals join a long queue of crypto ETPs awaiting SEC decisions, entering a landscape already dominated by spot Bitcoin funds and pending Ethereum products.

If approved, the Truth Social ETFs would give U.S. investors another way to access BTC, ETH and CRO with staking features baked in, while further cementing the crossover between politics, social media and crypto investing.

CZ: On-Chain Transparency Is Choking Everyday Crypto Payments

Binance co-founder Changpeng “CZ” Zhao says the lack of real privacy on public blockchains is one of the main reasons crypto still isn’t widely used for salaries, bills and day-to-day spending. He argues that fully transparent ledgers expose sensitive business data, like payrolls and vendor rates, making companies reluctant to settle expenses on-chain. With AI making it easier to mine block explorers for insights, CZ and other industry voices are calling for stronger privacy tech to unlock institutional-grade payment use cases.

Highlights

Corporate deterrent: CZ notes that if a firm pays staff on-chain, anyone can click its wallet and infer who gets paid what, which is a non-starter for most enterprises.

Security worries: He warns that detailed on-chain footprints, combined with off-chain leaks, could create physical and cyber-security risks for high-value targets.

Cypherpunk revival: The debate is reigniting crypto’s original privacy-first ethos, with more builders pushing for tools that hide transaction details while preserving verifiability.

AI as a force multiplier: Analysts say advances in AI-driven blockchain analytics will only make it easier to map relationships and spot weaknesses, heightening the need for privacy-preserving designs.

Adoption hinge: Many see practical, user-friendly privacy layers as a prerequisite for crypto to move from speculative asset to mainstream payment rail for businesses and institutions.

Project Research: SAPIEN

ORIGIN

Sapien is a decentralized data protocol that connects human knowledge with AI development by rewarding contributors for producing high quality, human verified training data. The project was developed to solve a critical bottleneck in the AI lifecycle: the lack of scalable, trustworthy, and diverse data that real world models require.

By combining blockchain incentives, reputation systems, and gamified participation, @BuildOnSapien creates a global workforce of contributors whose collective insights train and validate AI models.

OPERATIVE

Sapien operates as a decentralized AI data foundry where users worldwide called contributors earn rewards by completing tasks that help train AI systems. These tasks range from data labeling and verification to answering human insight requests tailored by expertise, language, and experience.

Contributors can sign up quickly and begin earning immediately, completing microtasks according to their skills and interests. Sapien’s process matches workers with appropriate tasks, creating a scalable way for enterprises and AI teams to access high-quality human input without centralized intermediaries.

Central to the protocol is Sapien’s Proof of Quality (PoQ) system: contributors stake $SAPIEN tokens to signal commitment and earn reputation. Peer review and validation ensure outputs meet quality standards, good work boosts reputation and rewards, while poor results risk token slashing. This alignment of incentives helps maintain data integrity and reliability, which are essential for training trustworthy AI.

The Sapien network runs onchain, making participation transparent and verifiable. Contributors earn rewards in a mix of stablecoins and $SAPIEN tokens. Users can track rewards, performance, and quality metrics in real time, creating a community driven labor market for data work.

The native $SAPIEN token powers the ecosystem. It is used for staking to access tasks, signaling commitment, earning rewards, and participating in governance as the protocol evolves. With a total supply capped at 1 billion $SAPIEN, the token is designed to align long term community engagement with network utility.

SUMMARY

Sapien is a decentralized protocol that crowdsources human intelligence to improve AI training data, creating a scalable, incentivized labor layer onchain.

Its Proof of Quality mechanism ensures that contributors are rewarded for accuracy and penalized for low-quality outputs, aligning tokenomics with data integrity. The protocol’s gamified interface, onchain tracking, and transparent reward system make participation accessible, with contributors earning stablecoins and $SAPIEN tokens for verified work.

Built on the Base network, Sapien combines blockchain incentive design with a global community of contributors, enabling enterprises and developers to obtain reliable human-verified data at scale.

COMPETITORS

Sapien operates in the emerging space of decentralized AI data markets which includes protocols that aim to tokenize human knowledge contribution and verification.

While some centralized platforms sell labeled data, Sapien’s unique edge is its onchain Proof of Quality system, decentralized incentives, and reputation mechanisms that ensure data trustworthiness without a centralized intermediary.

CapEx: the weapon of Wall Street’s new arms race

In recent months there’s been a lot of talk about AI, GPUs, agents, models… but behind all that noise there’s a metric that will determine who dominates the market in the coming years: CapEx. Let’s break it down.

What is it?

CapEx (Capital Expenditure) is the money a company invests in physical assets or infrastructure: data centers, chips, robots, buildings, factories, cables, servers… whatever.

It’s not operating expense: it’s heavy investment, the kind that changes the future size of the company. It can be maintenance or growth CapEx.

In tech, CapEx is basically the fuel that allows you to train models, store data, and scale AI services.

Why does it matter?

Because it’s the clearest signal of where a company is heading. It’s not marketing, not a promise: it’s real money on the table. Nothing more and nothing less than how much they are willing to invest to be better.

Right now, this translates into a global (or arms) race to build the largest network of data centers and advanced chips on the planet… and soon, in space!

Mag7

The Magnificent Seven are projecting a record CapEx in 2026 of over $700B, almost double 2025 and triple 2024. And this was the metric most heavily emphasized in earnings presentations for two reasons: on one hand, it implies the company won’t fall behind in the AI race; but on the other, it means huge amounts of cash will be sunk into this race without a clear idea of how profitable it will be.

AI

Generative AI does not scale like traditional businesses. Every new model:

Needs more GPUs

More nodes

More data centers

More energy

And users are starting to use AI for absolutely everything, from search to productivity, advertising, commerce, or software. Companies are building infrastructure not for today, but for 3–5 years from now, where they expect massive inference demand.

New data centers will require so much energy that the only way they’ll be economically viable may be by putting them in space, kicking off a new era of development.

The big winner?

$NVDA, without a doubt. There’s a joke on fintwit: your CapEx is my revenue. Never more true. There are very few companies providing these AI chips, and NVDA dominates the market by far.

With limited supply, the only way to win this race is to buy more, earlier, and long-term. Result: skyrocketing CapEx.

And if you add the fact that NVDA updates chips every 12 months, you get the perfect combo for an upward spiral.

Fear

2023 and 2024 proved that an infrastructure advantage becomes a product advantage, and even more, that without the ability to scale, the best model becomes useless.

And that’s why we’re seeing this kind of AI arms race among these companies, trying not to fall behind even when they’re investing more than they probably should.

Conclusion

CapEx is one of the metrics defining the future of the tech sector, and it’s not about who spends the most, it’s about who manages to survive.

2026 will be the explosion point, where the speed of AI makes projections obsolete extremely fast, sometimes before they even come true. And whoever leads CapEx will lead the market.

Investing in CapEx doesn’t guarantee success, but not investing in it guarantees absolute failure in a world moving at the speed of light.

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