Begin forwarded message:
From: Cryptopolitan <cryptopolitan@mail.beehiiv.com>
Subject: âď¸ Trump takes off to Beijing, in style
Date: May 13, 2026 at 8:30:46 AM PDT
To: "ali@droplinked.com" <ali@droplinked.com>
Reply-To: Cryptopolitan <newsletter@cryptopolitan.com>
âď¸ Trump takes off to Beijing, in style
PLUS: Morgan Stanley Bitcoin Trust defies ETF volatility with zero outflow first month streak
Trump just touched down in Beijing with Elon Musk, Tim Cook, and Larry Fink. Jensen Huang barely made the flight.
The guest list is a veritable who's who of the American corporate brass. The executives traveled to the fiefdom of Elon Musk, Tim Cook, Larry Fink, Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg and dozens more. Jensen Huang almost did not.
A noticeable omission from the administration's initial delegation list was Nvidia co-founder and CEO Jensen Huang, who has attended every major Trump state visit in 2017, including those to Saudi Arabia and the U.K. As the coverage spread, Trump apparently got on the phone and called Huang himself. Shortly after, the Nvidia CEO jetted to Alaska and got on Air Force One mid-flight. A spokesperson said Huang was in attendance "at the invitation of President Trump to show support for America and the administration's agenda."
That last-minute development says more about what this summit really is than any official agenda item.
What is actually on the table
Time's official itinerary has Trump sitting down with Xi Thursday and Friday in Beijing to discuss trade, Taiwan, AI, and the Iran war. His team will organize a state banquet for Xi. From one inside this realm, two new structures have been floated from the White House to come out of the summit: a Board of Trade for non-sensitive goods and, as an economic spasium, a Board of Investment. The Americans hope for purchase promises on aircraft from Boeing and soybeans and agricultural items.
Those, however, will be the tougher conversations in person.
The Iran war that you mentioned did not hit China's economy. The Middle East accounts for around half of China's crude oil imports, and the closing Strait of Hormuz has affected energy supply chains for Beijing.
That gives Trump real leverage. He wants China to put pressure on Iran to return for negotiations and he wants its support in the reopening of the strait. Beijing desires stability with economic predictability and to do so without losing face by appearing subservient to Washington.
Iran's foreign minister was in Beijing only last week. A few days after Trump leaves, Putin is scheduled to visit. Xi is welcoming the most critically important run of international leaders in a single 14-day period that Beijing has played host to for years, and he is doing it from a place of actual power. Iranian yuan toll system entered through the strait managed by IRGC collected (in Bitcoin and $USDT), turning China into the financial winner of the largest energy supply shock on Earth. Even if Xi wanted to, it would not be easy to walk away from that leverage.
Trump threatened with 50% tariffs on the Chinese after reading reports that China was getting ready to send weapons to Iran in April. Xi reportedly told him bluntly that China was not doing that, and he backed off. One of the main questions on this trip, whether that assurance is to be taken at face value.
The must-see chip angle
The reason Jensen Huang's on stage is the most telling sign of what America Inc. wants out of this summit.
For years, Nvidia's high-end chips have faced restrictions on sales to China. US Exports H200 to China approved by Trump late in 2025, but it still have not reached the clearing ports of entry for Nvidia's China-approved versions. Huang has called the China market a $50 billion opportunity. For months, he has been arguing in Washington that restricting chip sales does not prevent China's AI development; it merely takes American companies out of the picture and fills the breach with Chinese alternatives like Huawei's Ascend chips.
It is one thing, not symbolic at all, to have Huang on Air Force One next to the president as they approach a summit concerning AI and semiconductor policy. This is lobbying at the top level of all possible levels.
And Tim Cook matters for the same reasons. Almost all of Apple's manufacturing is done in China. Cook has worked for years building relationships with Chinese officials as one of the quieter voices in Washington calling to de-escalate trade tensions. Adding him to the team sends the unmistakable signal that business community message to the White House remains unchanged: A trade war with China is reason American businesses face on ways too complicated to communicate to voters who are now charged $1,200 for a phone.
What to watch this week
Analysts are keeping expectations measured. Structural tensions that have been building for a decade render anything other than a thin trade deal unlikely. A partial truce on tariff pauses, purchase pledges and rare earth export deals is more realistic â along with sufficiently vague language for both leaders to sell amid public discontent.
The question of Iran is arguably the one with the most immediate consequences for the world. If Beijing agrees to push Tehran toward a deal, oil markets will react even before the ink is dry. The fact that Hormuz carries 20% of the world oil supplies is not theoretical.
That is all of the gasoline prices, inflation and Fed rate path talk going on this week in Beijing.
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đ Market Watch
1ď¸âŁ With that, Ethereum has just made it so that you can finally read what you are signing.
On Tuesday the Ethereum Foundation said it is removing so-called blind signing, which is a model that allows users to approve unreadable raw hex strings created only by developers.
The new clear signing standard being adopted by Ledger, Trezor, MetaMask, WalletConnect and Fireblocks so users review a non-technical description of what they approve a transaction for.
Both the $1.5 billion Bybit hack and the $235 million WazirX theft had signers approve transactions that they could not really see. At the technical level, two existing proposals (ERC-7730 and ERC-8176) are leveraged, with descriptors kept in a neutral registry at clearsigning.org allowing existing contracts to adopt the standard without deployment.
2ď¸âŁ Base just turn crypto payments into fast & cheap enough for AI agents to use it at scale.
The x402 protocol by Coinbase now supports batched settlement on Base, which aggregates multiple transactions and divides the blockchain fee across them. Base already had costs of fractions of a cent at per-transaction level.
Executing many thousands of such API calls, data feeds or inference requests in a single session for any rational agent makes sub-fraction-of-a-cent pricing viable only through batching and exploratory scaling to capital costs associated with batch submission.
In year one x402 sent over 169M payments with roughly $48M of volume, and 95% of that processed via Base. There are already AWS, Cloudflare and Coinbase's x402 Bazaar integrations. Are competing systems being built by Stripe and Circle's Nanopayments. x402's unique selling proposition: since payment authorisation resides within standard HTTP requests (as opposed to an extra payment layer), it's native to what the web already does.
3ď¸âŁ The first Hyperliquid ETF in the United States launched on Tuesday.
On Tuesday, 21Shares brought the THYP to Nasdaq, allowing investors exposure to Hyperliquid's HYPE token without directly holding the asset. Day one net inflows for the fund reached $1.2 million and trading volume totaled $1.8 million. The open was "very, very solid," said Bloomberg ETF analyst James Seyffart, as in "better than your average ETF launch" but nothing dramatic. To put that in context, the first XRP ETF attracted $58 million upon launch and Bitwise's Solana ETF raised $57 million: both for assets over four and seven trillion dollars respectively at the time of their naval gazing. THYP has a 0.30% management fee, with 21Shares set to stake part of its HYPE holdings, paying out quarterly starting June 30. Both Bitwise and Grayscale are racing to bring competing products to market. At time of writing HYPE was trading at $40.20, down around 4% on the day.
Are you watching this?
Morgan Stanley Bitcoin Trust just wrapped its first month on the market without a single day of net outflows. Since it started trading on April 8, MSBT has seen $193 million flow in, with total assets now topping $240 million.
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