Trump Media and Technology Group (DJT), the media company tied to Donald Trump, has struck a deal with Yorkville Acquisition Corp to form a new cryptocurrency treasury business.
According to a Tuesday filing, the venture will focus on stockpiling Cryptocurrency.com’s native token, CRO, and will operate under the name Trump Media Group CRO Strategy. The company plans to trade under the ticker symbol MCGA and will be majority owned by Trump Media, with Cryptocurrency.com and Yorkville also holding stakes.
Yorkville is what’s known as a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC. The blank-cheque firms raise funds through an IPO and then merge with or buy another business to speed up the process of going public. While they offer a faster route to the market, they also tend to lack the transparency of a traditional listing.
As part of the deal, Cryptocurrency.com will transfer roughly 684 million CRO tokens – worth about $105 million – to Trump Media. In return, it will receive $50 million in cash and 2.8 million shares of Trump Media stock.
The announcement triggered strong moves in both companies’ assets. Shares of Trump Media climbed as much as 10% Tuesday morning, while CRO gained up to 35%.
“We continue to be bullish on cryptocurrency,” Trump Media CEO Devin Nunes said. He added that more companies are building digital asset treasuries to prepare for the future, with assets they expect to gain wider use.
The filing also shows that the stock and tokens exchanged by Trump Media, Cryptocurrency.com, and Yorkville will be locked for one year once the deal closes.
Cryptocurrency.com CEO Kris Marszalek described the deal as unusually large. “The sheer size and structure of this project will encompass more than the entire current market capitalisation of CRO,” he said.
CRO, a relatively lesser-known token, currently has a market value of $6.6 billion. Marszalek later noted on social media that with the addition of a $5 billion credit line, the new company would control more liquidity than CRO’s entire market value. CRO will also be adopted as the platform token for Trump Media’s social network, Truth Social.
The move mirrors a trend among public companies and SPAC-backed ventures that are shifting toward cryptocurrency strategies, much like Michael Saylor’s firm MicroStrategy, which began acquiring Bitcoin in 2020. Since then, more firms have turned to building cryptocurrency treasuries, encouraged in part by Trump’s pledge to make the United States the “cryptocurrency capital of the planet.”
The treasury firms typically raise both debt and equity to acquire large amounts of digital assets quickly. Their shares can end up trading well above the value of the tokens they hold – a gap that has become a point of debate in financial circles.
Cryptocurrency tokens tied to exchanges have also drawn criticism, where sceptics say they lack real-world use and can be prone to sharp losses. The collapse of FTX in 2022 highlighted this risk when its hedge fund affiliate Alameda Research used FTT, the exchange’s token, as collateral.
What makes this deal stand out is its scale. The new company will own about 20% of all CRO tokens – far more concentrated than MicroStrategy’s 3% share of Bitcoin.
The agreement also follows an earlier partnership between Trump Media and Cryptocurrency.com to develop cryptocurrency-related ETFs. And it marks yet another venture connecting Trump’s media business with the digital asset space.
This year, Cryptocurrency.com’s parent company Foris DAX Inc. donated $10 million to MAGA Inc., a Trump-affiliated super PAC, according to recent Federal Election Commission filings.
(Photo by Ewan Kennedy)
See also: SoFi becomes first US bank to use Bitcoin lightning for remittances
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