There's an Inconvenient Fact You Never Hear About the Trumps' Crypto Empire

Sept 04, 2025 1:44 PM

A Donald Trump coin is pictured alongside Bitcoin and various other cryptocurrencies.

Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily.

The entire Trump family just cashed in on another big cryptocurrency payday. This Labor Day, the digital-assets firm World Liberty Financial—which the president's three sons co-founded just a year ago—launched a public sale of its flagship WLFI tokens, spurring $1 billion worth of trades on popular crypto exchanges like Coinbase, Kraken, and Binance (all of whose founders have ties with the current administration). Collectively, the Trump family already holds trillions of World Liberty coins, and the public trading—carried out mostly overseas and involving few retail traders—boosted the value of those tokens. Per the Wall Street Journal , the four male Trumps involved made as much as $5 billion on Monday, in what was “most likely the biggest financial success for the president's family since the inauguration.”

It all sounds flush as ever, another means for the Trumps to enrich themselves while they shower legislative gifts on their crypto donors and incorporate more of the industry's tech into government. (See also: the Commerce Department publishing GDP data on various blockchains, and housing regulators proposing that cryptocurrencies be legitimated as backing for mortgage applications .) But despite reports that this is a major windfall for the Trumps, I'm much less convinced that that is the reason they're going all in on digital funny money. Rather, it appears to be an in-kind effort to uphold an entire digital-assets industry that, for all its efforts, just isn't catching on with the American people.

The details of Trump's crypto orbit reveal some of the logic. Earlier this year, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. announced they were backing a new venture called American Bitcoin , whose stash of the namesake currency has benefited from a rise in Bitcoin valuation directly attributable to favorable governmental policy. (The company's executives have claimed that Eric is “not acting as an extension of his father's administration,” per the New York Times .) American Bitcoin's stock market debut on Wednesday earned some excited chatter, but by Thursday, its value had already dropped by over 20 percent .

The valuation of Trump Media & Technology Group, the publicly traded parent company of the president-favored social network Truth Social, is down 50 percent since the inauguration—so now its executives want to juice things by establishing multiple crypto-centric exchange-traded funds . Last week, former GOP lawmaker and Trump Media CEO Devin Nunes announced that he was forming a so-called digital asset treasury company, in partnership with Crypto.com, that would generate “reward” tokens for premium Truth Social users .

There are also the controversial meme coins Trump launched right after his inauguration, which inspired enough howls from otherwise-friendly true believers that Trump Jr. felt the need to clarify this week that WLFI “ isn't some meme coin .” (Incidentally, many of the same exchanges allow for trades of both Trump's meme coins and WLFI.) Speaking of Don Jr.: Polymarket, the crypto-based prediction market that will soon be approved for stateside operation thanks to the Trump administration, earned a multimillion-dollar investment from a capital firm backed by the elder son, who will also serve as a strategic adviser.

It's a helluva lotta crypto, and a helluva lotta openings for revenue via the family's private trusts. The companies behind the $TRUMP meme coin (one of which shares an address with the president's Florida golf club) held an auction that traded hoards of tokens for chances to dine with the Donald himself; according to the New Yorker , the Trumps and their partners net $320 million from transaction fees alone. Meanwhile, the value of their Trump-branded coins ballooned to $4.1 billion “even before the auction was complete.” Last month, a little-known crypto-software vendor named ALT5 Sigma announced that it would sell off $1.5 billion of its shares to raise cash to buy some soon-to-be-public WLFI tokens ; in turn, World Liberty Financial also acquired stakes in ALT5 and put Zach Witkoff and Eric Trump on the other firm's board. This arrangement was what made the WLFI launch seem like such a success .

But what, exactly, does this all entail financially? At the moment, these transactions and holdings may look good on paper, and the trading-fee revenues are no joke. Still, the overall substance is a far different matter.

To scour the charts from Trump's reinauguration until now is to peruse steep slopes with which no ski resort could compete. The official $TRUMP meme coin has fallen from a January peak of $45.47 to a current-day value of $8.23 , with trading volume down to a mere 0.5 percent of the early rush. (The May dinner auction led to a brief surge that quelled immediately after.) The complementary $MELANIA meme coin, which always had a smaller perch, has likewise crashed from an $8.48 peak in January to a price below 20 cents , with trading volume at 0.1 percent of its early-year launch. WLFI is already way down from Monday , with its price having plunged by 43 percent since launch and its volume having plummeted by nearly 65 percent since Tuesday.

On the more traditional markets, ALT5 Sigma has been cratering since its World Liberty deal was announced, its stock value reducing by 55 percent. Trump Media shares have never cracked the $100 price that Truth Social dies once hoped for. It's an outright victory for the short sellers , even though Trump Media execs have already asked that the administration investigates these party poopers.

What's more remarkable is that these investments have trended in the same direction even as the key stakeholders involved do everything they can to pump, pump, pump it up. President Donald Trump is not selling his shares in Trump Media, and he keeps posting major announcements on Truth Social; more, he's diving neither the $TRUMP and $MELANIA meme coins nor his WLFI tokens, which are “locked” for sale by him or the junior Trumps. WLFI's other major investors, like the controversial crypto titan Justin Sun, have also claimed not to be selling their tokens in the project, presenting this HODL nature as a vote of confidence. And Trump keeps pacifying the crypto industry at large, signing deregulatory legislation into law and dropping Biden-era investigations into various companies that have since worked with his crypto projects—like Binance, Crypto.com, and Coinbase.

Again, the transaction fees from the occasional bursts in trading hype cycles have been fruitful, and by flooding these respective markets with ridiculous numbers of coins, those low valuations can still very much add up . Still, the “paper” value of all this is thin. If Donald, Don Jr., Eric, or any other prominent stakeholder attempted to sell off their shares/coins, their fans would inevitably panic and join them in dumping this stuff before the value whittled down into nothingness. $TRUMP isn't the only “meme” here; Trump Media's market performance has directly resembled that of a meme stock , mirroring the bullishness of the president's biggest fans. If you've caught a single poll lately , you know that Trump himself has not been popular for a long time, not even with the younger men who are most likely to hold cryptocurrencies of any stripe. Indeed, even industry loyalists have wavered on the administration's actions, from their nervousness around the same coins to the ideological splits over whether the government should strategically reserve just Bitcoin or other digital assets as well (which Bitcoin maximalists refer to as “shit coins” ), to their sheer embarrassment at having a supposedly anti-government monetary experiment being so closely tied up with … the government .

The Trumps themselves are hardly crypto ideologues, having strenuously opposed the very concept before embracing it during the 2024 reelection campaign. But if it's not just a source of long-term cashing-in, then what is it?

Frankly, it's grateful. At a moment when Trump owes the crypto lobby for contributing heavily to the GOP's 2024 electoral victories, wants to keep those companies spending for the midterms , and is still facing down the fact that the sweeping majority of Americans don't use crypto , it's advantageous for the president and his sons to keep pumping up some crypto investment and volume however they can and generating excitable press for it, even if those rallies falter quickly afterward. The overall markets for major virtual currencies like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple, Solana, and still others are happier than ever , rebounding from the post–Sam Bankman-Fried downturn thanks to the sheer joy of deep-pocketed enthusiasts happy that the Trump government will not regulate their holdings. Not even a rise in wrench attacks can keep them down.

In a manner not dissimilar to how wealthy consumers are primarily keeping the unstable American economy afloat, it's only the most bullish of crypto investors hanging on to their pixelated money. And that's great news for the crypto companies that spent big in the election cycle, benefited from halted investigations and favorable regulations, and are gearing up to do it all over again. But to keep up their value, power, and clout, these corporations need to pretend that Americans are actually buying what they're selling. What better endorsement than the president and his family giving them more tokens for their digital exchanges and acting like they're in this for its inherent ideals?