(Bloomberg) – President Donald Trump and his family are interested in almost every corner of the crypto industry.
Most of them read from Bloomberg
There are flexible tokens and digital collectibles. Decentralized finance projects. Proposed stablecoin; Bitcoin mining efforts. And one for the president, a pair of memo coins for First Lady Melania Trump.
Taken together, Bloomberg’s calculations based on published data show that various projects are approaching $1 billion in paper profits, even after considering the latest trade war-inducing market rotation.
Donald Trump is already the wealthiest person to become president of the United States, and his non-cryptic holdings include heavily invested in real estate. After the first election in 2016, Trump’s lawyers created trust to handle his business issues. It was managed by his two eldest sons and Allen Weisselberg, the longtime chief financial officer of Trump’s real estate company.
Eric Trump emphasizes that there is “no conflict” related to family crypto investments.
“I don’t work with the White House,” Eric Trump said in an April TV interview with Bloomberg. “We’ve been trusting cryptography for a long time.”
The president’s own official transformation to Crypto is still relatively new. Trump called Bitcoin a “scam” in 2021, saying he didn’t like the tokens because they “were a different currency that competes with the dollar” and that they should be regulated as “very, very high.”
Trump’s relationship with the digital asset industry has evolved significantly since then. As a candidate, he courted and benefited from the enormous contributions from Crypto executives and supporters to his reelection campaign.
During his second term, Trump signed executive orders in support of the US’s promise to be crypto capital for the planet, setting up David Sachs and Bo Hines to represent industry interests, and continued to promote his memecoin in posts on True Society.
“We’ve seen a lot of effort into making it,” said Eswar Prasad, a professor of trade policy at Cornell University.
Here’s how Trump’s crypto portfolio evolved:
Trump became a code convert after falling in love with his own digital collectible known as the creepy token.
Bill Zanker, Trump’s friend and founder of the adult education company The Learning Annex, initially pitched him the idea. Since then, Trump’s trading card NFT has shown him in a variety of poses and outfits (also dressed up as a superhero), spreading across four collections.
Last year, the president held a dinner for fans who bought the NFT.
The Trump tribe announced World Liberty Finance, a crypto project, ahead of the US election. Since its inception, the project has acquired millions of dollars worth of other cryptocurrencies, including Ether and Tron, but has yet to offer the promised Defi service that lends Crypto without a middleman.
According to the documentation provided, companies affiliated with Trump will receive 75% of their net revenue as a fee, including revenue from token sales. The Trump family owns 60% of the global Freedom share of stock through the company DT Marks Defi LLC.
The company raised $550 million in token sales after completing its second round last month.
Zach Witkoff, one of the co-founders of World Liberty, is the son of Steve Witkoff, who helped connect the president’s family to other World Liberty Financial participants. Since the platform’s token sales in October, observers have questioned the potential conflict of interest in the Trump family, given the administration’s upset over regulations.
Trump’s sons, Donald Jr., Eric and Baron, are all listed as “Web3 Advisors” for Liberty Financial around the world. The family actively promotes the project through social media and public appearances.
The day before Trump’s inauguration, he and his wife, Melania, launched their own Memecoin, a highly speculative corner of a code whose assets have less intrinsic value. Prices became tanks after the first surge, where the costs of the president-linked entity likely generated more than $11.4 million in January alone.
The foray was filled with complex reactions from the crypto industry, as many believed it would hurt the push to make it look more legal. Two Trump-related entities – CIC Digital and Fight Fight LLC own 80% of the supply.
Trump Media & Technology Group Corp. said in early February it was applied to trademark brands of investment products with themes that track Trump’s priorities, including the “Truth.fi Bitcoin Plus ETF.”
It says it will work with crypto.com to launch the ETF. In the month before Trump’s election victory, the SEC filed a notice that it intended to sue crypto.com to operate an unregistered stock exchange. The company said it closed its probe in March.
World Liberty Financial has announced plans to launch its own dollar tracking Stablecoin called USD1. According to World Freedom, tokens are supported one-to-one by short-term US Treasury, dollar deposits and other cash equivalents.
The move came just before the landmark Stubcoin Act, which has advanced through the House Financial Services Committee. Crypto companies have pitched Stablecoins as a way to make global financial transactions faster and faster.
The Trump tribe said they plan to launch a venture focused on Bitcoin mining at Hut 8 Corp. Bitcoin Miner is an early supporter of Trump’s reelection campaign. In June 2024, Trump at the time hosted several mining executives at Mar-A-Lago, informing him that he would become their advocate at the White House.
The US Bitcoin mining sector has been transformed into a multi-billion dollar industry.
“Investing in Crypto is not as easy as holding Bitcoin,” said Campbell Harvey, a professor of finance at Duke University. “There are various crypto segments. Trump has future stubcoins, other crypto assets, and now mining work.”
– Support from Annie Massa, Kyle Kim (News), Muyao Shen and Dave Lietka.
