“I made a fortune with Trump’s memecoin, but I lost it all the following month,” confesses one investor on X. “It’s a perfect Ponzi scheme,” says another. Donald Trump returned to the White House promising a golden age for cryptocurrency, and thousands of retail investors took him at his word. The age has been golden mostly for one address in Washington.
The figures deserve laying out. The $TRUMP memecoin—backed by no asset, offered purely as a token of support for its namesake—briefly reached a market value above $10 billion before collapsing within hours, leaving most buyers empty-handed. A report by Nansen, a crypto-analytics firm cited in American media, estimates that nearly one million investors who bought it lost at least $3.81 billion. The coin is now down 97% since launch and worth about $600m.
The president’s ledger looks different. His financial disclosure records $1.4 billion in cryptocurrency income in the first year of his second term, of which $635m came from sales of the memecoin through a company called CIC Digital. The beauty of the arrangement, from his side, was indifference to price: he collected fees whenever anyone traded the tokens—trading he encouraged with exclusive dinners for holders and a video game, simulating his life, that ran on the coin.
The conversion was recent and commercial. Candidate Trump once dismissed crypto as a “scam”; President Trump’s children founded World Liberty Financial (WLF), a digital-asset firm that became one of the Trump Organization’s most valuable properties, and the industry became a top donor to his midterm campaigns. The family’s strategy at WLF involved accumulating partners’ tokens as a sort of strategic reserve. A Nansen analysis for Bloomberg found such tokens typically rose 10% to 26% in the 24 hours after WLF bought in—and that an investor buying after those purchases, at the elevated price, would in most cases have lost money when the market turned. Mr Trump reported more than $520m from cryptocurrency sales and another $250m from selling company shares.
Critics across the spectrum have noticed the pattern. “He is enacting policies that benefit the crypto industry. But under the surface of this policy posture is a sweeping self-enrichment scheme,” says the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think-tank, which adds that the profits include “deals with foreign nations”. From the right, the Cato Institute points to Mr Trump’s pardon of Changpeng Zhao, Binance’s co-founder, who had pleaded guilty to violating anti-money-laundering laws; Binance helped develop WLF’s stablecoin. “The undertaking netted Mr. Trump hundreds of millions, part of $1 billion in crypto gains, while most token buyers lost money,” Cato notes.
A detailed Reuters investigation totals it up: the president and his children have increased their net worth by at least $2.3 billion from crypto ventures since his return to office, with little of their own cash at risk, while Reuters estimates other investors lost $2.3 billion—retail buyers of the tokens, of linked shares, and of funds indirectly exposed to the family’s holdings. Social media, where the buyers gather after the fact, has rendered its own verdict. Asked to summarise conversations containing “Trump” and “cryptocurrencies”, Reddit’s artificial-intelligence tool distilled three themes: “Many believe Trump enriched himself with crypto while others lost money”; “Users say Trump’s coins worked as bribes or money laundering”; “Several see the coins as a pump-and-dump or a rug pull that ruined retail investors.”
The industry, at least, has not got everything it paid for. Months into his term Mr Trump dined with more than 200 industry figures and issued a 166-page report promising friendly regulation; he recently hosted Coinbase and Ripple executives at the White House to promote the Clarity Act, a bill the industry wanted. The Senate rejected it—and regulators moved within days to write the rules themselves. California, meanwhile, has taken the precaution of banning its own officials from launching memecoins.
What remains is a double paradox. Crypto was conceived as a rebellion against financial and political power; it has ended up enriching the man at the centre of that power. And a politician who campaigns against elites has concentrated the boom’s winnings around his own household while dispersing the losses among roughly a million believers. Alberto Gerbaudo, a sociologist quoted on the ideology, describes its adherents thus: “They see the individual as the only legitimate actor against powers that always want to control you and take away your freedom.” The rebels paid; the palace collected the fees.