Last night, RSR surged by 50.72% to $0.026 before briefly dropping to $0.019, with the current RSR price at $0.023. The RSR concept meme DTF rose from $0.012 to $0.03, experiencing a short-term gain of 235% before dropping to $0.015, and is currently priced at $0.023.
This is because sources said Trump has selected Paul Atkins as the next SEC chair, and Atkins previously served as an advisor for the RSR project. However, the news caused a temporary drop in related tokens when Atkins did not confirm the news and sources reported that his stance was hesitant.
Who is Paul Atkins?
Paul Atkins is a former SEC commissioner from the George W. Bush administration, known for opposing "high fines for companies that violate securities laws" and previously opposing the (Dodd-Frank Act) that strengthened federal regulatory powers after the 2008 financial crisis.
In 2016, Atkins played a key role in Trump's political transition team after his election, significantly influencing Trump's laissez-faire attitude towards financial regulation.
Currently, Atkins is still serving in his consulting firm Patomak Global Partners, which he founded in 2009. Since 2017, he has also held the position of co-chair in the industry association Token Alliance, which advocates for digital assets and the blockchain industry.
The connection to RSR comes from the community discovering that Atkins had served as an advisor for the project.
Reserve founder Nevin Freeman previously explained, "Paul is not actively involved in Reserve's consulting work; he was just an advisor in the early stages of the project. However, the open-mindedness he displayed during our interactions impressed me, and his willingness to publicly serve as a Reserve advisor indicates his commitment and support for the cryptocurrency space."
Therefore, after the news aggregation account db cited Unchained's report stating that Trump chose Atkins as the next SEC chair, the price surged.
The original news from Unchained stated: "According to three informed sources, Trump has chosen pro-crypto Paul Atkins to be the SEC chair. One source indicated that Trump has contacted Atkins but is still waiting for his formal acceptance of the appointment."
Less than twenty minutes later, another major news aggregation account Watcher.Guru reported that "rumors regarding President Trump selecting Paul Atkins as SEC chair cannot be confirmed, and no official statement has been made by Trump's side yet."
According to Coindesk, a person familiar with Atkins' thoughts stated that Atkins is hesitant about whether to leave his global consulting firm to address what he perceives as an unwieldy agency mismanaged by outgoing SEC chair Gary Gensler.
Shortly thereafter, another major news terminal published a push stating that trader GCR indicated in Discord that he had sold RSR a long time ago, although this push has now been deleted.
The process of trading news transmission above led to the rapid rise and fall of RSR and DTF, essentially reflecting the current market sentiment game based on the SEC chair results.
Currently, compliance prediction platform Kalshi shows that the probability of Paul Atkins becoming the next SEC chair has risen to 88%.
Previously, FOX Business reporter Eleanor Terrett disclosed that Trump may announce the successor for SEC chair as early as today, mentioning veteran financial regulator and conservative financial insider Paul Atkins as the most likely candidate. President Donald Trump's transition team has also interviewed Paul Atkins, and two sources close to Mar-a-Lago revealed that among the senior members of Trump's transition team, Paul Atkins has the highest probability of being elected SEC chair.
What SEC chairpersons hype concepts?
RSR
Reserve Rights (RSR) is a dual-token stablecoin platform launched on Huobi Prime in May 2019. Reserve aims to create a stable, decentralized stablecoin and digital payment system, featuring stablecoins that self-adjust supply based on demand and have 100% or more on-chain collateral backing.
The primary issue that RSR seeks to address is volatility, as the volatility of cryptocurrencies limits the market's expansion as a medium of exchange. Due to concerns over potential profit losses during market downturns, merchants have been reluctant to accept cryptocurrencies. The reserve protocol provides the market with a stable store of value, medium of exchange, and standard for deferred payments. Currently, the focus of the Reserve Rights ecosystem is to help individuals, treasuries, and DAOs combat inflation.
The total supply of RSR is 100,000,000,000 tokens, with a current market value of $1,390,407,126 and a TVL of $278,254,588.
DTF
DTF is a meme coin and is not directly related to the Decentralized Token Folios protocol launched by Reserve, with its full name being "Believe In Something," corresponding to DTF's official website's "Stop trading, believe in something."
Currently, the total market capitalization of DTF is $23.9 million, with a 24-hour trading volume of $20 million.
HBAR
Former Binance CEO and Hedera Foundation board member Brian Brooks is also a leading contender for the next SEC chair, thus HBAR has recently been hyped as a concept coin for the SEC chair.
Hedera is designed for fast, fair, and secure applications, leveraging the efficiency of Hashgraph on a trusted decentralized public network. By limiting the number of nodes involved in key functions such as timestamping and transaction ordering, Hedera Hashgraph can quickly achieve finality, thus reducing the likelihood of later changes to the transaction state.
XRP
XRP has surged fivefold in a month, returning its market cap to third place among crypto assets, reaching levels not seen since before the SEC and Ripple lawsuit in 2020, making this classic token one of the strongest performers among altcoins recently.
Related reading: (XRP's market cap returns to third in crypto, what is driving its surge?)
Ripple is a real-time gross settlement system, currency exchange, and remittance network created by the American technology company Ripple Labs Inc. Released in 2012, Ripple is based on a distributed open-source protocol that supports tokens representing fiat currencies, cryptocurrencies, commodities, or other units of value. It claims to enable "secure, instant, and nearly free global financial transactions of any scale, without chargebacks."
Since Trump took office, there has been a continuous rollout of crypto-related policies, and the launch of XRP is closely linked to the current SEC chair's announcement of resignation. The SEC filed a lawsuit against Ripple and its two executives—CEO Brad Garlinghouse and co-founder Chris Larsen—starting in December 2020, accusing them of "conducting a $1.3 billion unregistered securities offering," and this lawsuit remains unresolved.
On December 1, former CFTC chairman Chris Giancarlo stated in an interview that the SEC should reconsider its approach, especially in light of recent legal outcomes and the potentially changing regulatory environment. When asked whether the SEC would abandon the Ripple lawsuit, Giancarlo said, "I think they should... I bet they will."
