Valentin Pletnev couldn’t use his ticket for a Mar-a-Lago Trump gala, so prominent crypto figure Ryan Selkis went instead. Neither expected the U.S. policy whirlwind that followed, but even as Pletnev upgrades his DeFi platform to promote ‘Yield for All,’ it still won’t be available in the country.
Valentin Pletnev is far from the best-known name in cryptocurrencies, but a scheduling snafu that kept him away from Donald Trump’s recent Mar-a-Lago NFT gala might’ve dramatically rerouted U.S. cryptocurrency policy.
Only select holders of Trump’s NFT collection were allowed into the exclusive May event. Pletnev purchased one of those tickets as soon as he learned of the gathering – earning it by purchasing 100 Trump “Mugshot Edition” digital trading cards.
“I thought it was hilarious because I’m not American,” Pletnev, the German co-founder of Quasar Labs, which builds a decentralized finance protocol on the Cosmos blockchain, said in an Interview with CoinDesk.
Then the gala was moved to a time when Pletnev wasn’t available, so he gave his ticket to Ryan Selkis, the founder of crypto data and analytics platform Messari and a vocal pro-crypto policy advocate.
Selkis ended up on stage and touted the crypto revolution. So did Polygon’s Mihailo Bjelic.
Trump gave his own full-throated endorsement of crypto at the Palm Beach, Florida estate. The former U.S. president had previously derided cryptocurrencies as playthings “based on thin air.”
Pletnev insists that his NFT purchase – which let Selkis speak – played a key role in the events that followed: Within a few days, a vocal contingent of the crypto and blockchain industry rallied around former President Trump and then the notoriously crypto-averse U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission granted a surprise approval to the first exchange-traded funds that own Ethereum’s ether (ETH).
Following the gala, a widely circulated meme on X identified “Trump NFTs” and “Ryan Selkis Goes to Mar-a-Lago” as the first two dominoes to fall in a chain that ultimately culminated in the long-awaited approval of ether ETFs, a watershed moment for the melding of digital assets and traditional finance.
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