Digital-asset losses, tokenised gold rules and a CME futures flip
CoinDesk reported Trump Media's half-year digital-asset losses, British work on tokenised gold rules, and a rare net-long shift by leveraged funds in CME bitcoin futures as three separate market layers.
Economics & Markets··Morning
Trump Media's half-year digital-asset ledger
Trump Media and Technology Group, the parent of Truth Social, recorded 360.6 million dollars of losses on digital assets and pledged digital assets in the first half of 2026, according to the quarterly filing CoinDesk covered on Monday. The company held 9,477.16 bitcoin with a fair value of 557.1 million dollars as of June 30. Much of the loss was unrealised. Its holding of cronos, the token linked to Crypto.com, was unchanged at roughly 756.1 million tokens, but fair value fell to 40.6 million dollars from 68 million dollars at the end of 2025. A large share of the bitcoin was encumbered against convertible notes and a bitcoin options strategy as of June 30. The filing landed days after Trump Media, Crypto.com and Yorkville Acquisition said they had mutually terminated their proposed combination to create a publicly traded cronos treasury company, citing prevailing market conditions and shifting business and stakeholder priorities, and abandoned a separate exchange-traded fund servicing partnership.[1]
Britain's draft path for tokenised gold
Separately, the United Kingdom's Financial Conduct Authority is preparing rules for tokenised gold as part of a digital asset strategy meant to keep London the leading global centre for bullion trading, CoinDesk reported on Monday. A spokesperson said the authority is monitoring developments across tokenisation and digital assets, including emerging use cases such as tokenised gold, and will have more to say on its approach to tokenisation soon. Tokenised gold means creating digital tokens that represent ownership of physical bullion held by the issuer. The authority is seeking feedback on the role such tokens could play as collateral in wholesale markets, and the spokesperson said the work is not tied to a particular retail use. London's over-the-counter market represents 70 per cent of the world's notional gold trading volume, according to the World Gold Council, a position CoinDesk reports is increasingly challenged by China. The Financial Times first reported the tokenisation effort on Monday.[2]
Leveraged funds and the CME bitcoin futures basis
In futures markets, leveraged funds trading bitcoin futures on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange have turned net long, according to CryptoQuant chief executive Ki Young Ju, a rare shift after years in which the basis trade kept them structurally short. In that market-neutral strategy funds buy spot bitcoin or exchange-traded funds and sell futures against them, earning the premium between the two rather than any price gain; that is what kept their reported futures positioning negative for years. The trade has become less rewarding: the annualised three-month bitcoin futures basis has fallen to about 3 per cent, below the roughly 3.8 per cent available on two-year United States Treasury notes, which leaves less compensation for funding, margin and execution risks. Bitcoin is trading above 65,000 dollars after bottoming near 58,000 dollars on July 1. CoinDesk notes that part of the shift may simply be basis traders closing shorts, but that crossing into positive territory means the funds' futures longs now exceed their shorts. Corporate fair-value losses, a wholesale market rule project, and leveraged futures positioning therefore sit on separate layers of the digital-asset story and should not be collapsed into a single trading signal.[3], [1], [2]
