- Conference goers in Paris this week were dealt rueful volatility.
- Tariff terror has put many business plans and investments on ice.
- For long-time crypto founders, like Charles Hoskinson, the chaos is just another day in the office.
Even by crypto standards, it’s been a volatile week.
As industry enthusiasts and business leaders descended on Paris for a weeklong industry event in the heart of the French capital, token prices whipsawed.
The market’s largest digital assets plummeted by double digits on Monday, only to bounce back on Wednesday after US President Donald Trump announced he would pause harsh tariffs on the world’s largest economy.
Bitcoin, Ethereum and XRP all jumped 8% on Thursday morning.
By Friday, Ethereum dropped another 4%. Other assets are trading flat.
“It’s chaos,” John Nahas, vice president of business development at Ava Labs, told DL News on the sidelines of Paris Blockchain Week.
It’s also not what industry enthusiasts expected from Trump’s so-called crypto embrace.
In his first weeks in office, the president appointed financial regulators that dropped or delayed several high-profile lawsuits against crypto firms, appointed the country’s first-ever crypto czar, and signed a slew of executive orders that prioritise the industry.
And yet prices slump.
Since Trump took office on January 20, the total crypto market has dropped by almost 30%, or nearly $1 trillion, according to CoinGecko.
“The irony is you went from complete regulatory uncertainty to regulatory certainty,” Nahas said.
“But now there’s general market and geopolitical uncertainty.”
Delayed plans
Nahas didn’t concede that Trump has been bad for crypto.
Still, timelines for some crypto firms have changed even as American crypto rules take shape.
Chiliz, the crypto company behind sports-branded cryptocurrencies issued by stalwart soccer clubs like Juventus and PSG, provides a unique glimpse into this dynamic.
Alexander Dreyfus, the company’s CEO, said Chiliz spent $80 million to establish similar partnerships with 27 NBA teams, 13 NFL teams, 13 NHL teams, and the entire MLS in 2021 and 2022.
It eventually left the country in 2024 due to regulatory reasons, among other strategic reasons, according to Dreyfus.
The Securities and Exchange Commission included the company’s token, called CHZ, in a long list of several other tokens that the agency alleged were securities in its lawsuit against Consensys in 2024.
The SEC dropped the lawsuit in April, and Dreyfus says he’s now rekindling those major league relationships stateside.
“Whoever is relevant to what we’ve done in the past and what we want to do in the future, we’re reengaging with them,” Dreyfus said.
The timeline for when the company can reveal anything on this front is still murky due to the Trump-induced market chop, he said.
Supply chain chaos
Reports are also emerging of how Trump’s tariff action has spurred discussions among crypto mining outfits and hardware wallet providers to reroute critical supply chains.
Asked whether Ledger, the industry’s largest wallet provider, was having similar discussions, Ian Rodgers, the firm’s chief experience officer, said it’s still far too early.
Ledger has a partnership with Foxconn, one of the largest electronics manufacturers in the world with factories around Asia.
“We’re not worried yet,” he told DL News. “There will be a sane solution to this. And there are people, like Nike, that are in a much harder place than we are.”
Still, others say that lagging price is underselling what’s been a remarkable sea change for an industry.
“On the crypto agenda in the United States, we’ve probably made more progress in four months in this new administration than in four years,” Dante Disparte, the chief strategy officer of stablecoin issuer Circle, declared on Tuesday.
Ironically, Circle is another company that’s entered a holding pattern amid market chaos.
Days after Circle filed to list publicly on the New York Stock Exchange in April, it moved to delay the listing, according to the Wall Street Journal.
‘First time, huh?’
For still more hardened crypto founders, any complaints about the recent market turbulence are for the birds.
The industry managed to climb to $2.6 trillion with very little government assistance, after all.
Charles Hoskinson, the founder of Cardano development firm Input Output, said that even in the face of plunging prices, many in the industry are showing a remarkable lack of stomach.
“We’ve lived through 90% downturns in crypto,” he told DL News in an exclusive interview.
“It’s like the meme with the guy with the noose on his neck, where he’s, like, ’first time, huh?‘”
Correction: A previous version of this article reported that Ian Rodgers’ title was chief design officer. He is Ledger’s chief experience officer.
Liam Kelly is a Berlin-based reporter for DL News. Got a tip? Email him at liam@dlnews.com.
