The secrets of Trump’s Bitcoin binge

In late May, vice-president JD Vance, along with two of Trump’s sons, Don Jr and Eric, were star guests at a major Bitcoin conference held in Las Vegas, the gambling Mecca of America.

“Honestly, I would love to see some of the big banks go extinct,” Eric Trump told the conference, railing against traditional finance being “weaponised” and sniping that banks “deserve” to die.

Vance also pumped the Bitcoin 2025 crowd with a message of 100% support. “I’m here today to say loud and clear with President Trump, crypto finally has a champion and an ally in the White House,” he said.

While Bitcoin’s price post-summit dipped, and has further declined on its pre-summit peak, Donald Trump’s message to the Bitcoin faithful might as well have been scratched in the desert sand in letters a mile high: We’ve got your back! 

All this is quite the shift. Only a few years ago, Trump tweeted a reasonable critique of “unregulated” crypto — attacking it as “not money” and warning that crypto’s “highly volatile” value is based on “thin air”. So what’s changed? 

The big difference is that Trump, via his wider family business empire and other aligned entities, is invested in crypto in multiple ways. 

The penny has well and truly dropped for this most transactional of US presidents that crypto — and the crypto community — offers a richly expanding tapestry of possibilities for #winning, Vegas jackpot-style. 

According to Forbes, over the past nine months, the president has netted almost a billion dollars via various crypto ventures — at a time when he’s in acute need of liquidity, given his looming legal fees.

For Trump, crypto is already MAGA merch on steroids — although self-enrichment may be just the tip of his long-term crypto ambitions. But before we get into the nitty-gritty of his expanding interests, it pays to break down some basics. What the hell is crypto anyway? 

Crypto refers to tradeable digital assets — including native coins and tokens — that use blockchain, or another form of decentralised ledger technology, to safeguard against double spending and ensure secure transactions. 

But that’s about all the safety you can expect from the average crypto venture. Values can be highly speculative, regulations lagging or lax, and transparency — let alone accountability — lacking. 

There are also many forms of crypto. Some, like Bitcoin (BTC), run directly on their own  “trustless” decentralised networks — meaning there’s no central governing authority, just a self-executing tech stack. 

Other flavours, like memecoins (branded around trends and influencers for added virality) and stablecoins (which can be pegged to fiat currencies or commodities for a promise of price stability), tend to be built on top of existing blockchains. 

Conversely, such coins may involve a central authority that governs the distribution and ownership of their crypto tokens — pushing some of these digital assets very far from a “trustless” peer-to-peer promise.

There are also NFTs (aka Non-Fungible Tokens) — intended to immutably represent ownership of a specific (unique) asset, like a digital artwork, on a blockchain. But, so far, most NFTs have turned out to be junk. 

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This is by no means an exhaustive list of what’s out there. But one way to think about all this digital stuff is that the funhouse world of crypto contains multitudes — with varying degrees of decentralisation, credibility and utility. 

This is absolutely a technological Wild West where actual money gets pumped in and sucked out through means that wouldn’t fly under proper oversight, such as you’d expect applies to the trading of more traditional financial instruments. 

Actual theft also happens so often in the crypto space it can feel like a baked-in feature, not a bug. (See the FTX debacle for one notoriously scandalous example.) Safe to say, there are a lot more stories of investors losing all their crypto than getting to retire young to some Cryptoland paradise.

All that said, crypto can’t be written off entirely — there are progressive arguments for P2P payment technologies. Improving access to financial services for the unbanked, for example, or enabling fast and cheap cross-border payments. But, nonetheless, crypto’s reputation as a paradise for grifters of all stripes has proven hard to shake. That looks even harder now Trump is involved.

What’s the pull? Wildly swinging values, which track most digital assets, dangle the possibility of getting rich quick by trading crypto — such as through conventional strategies like buying the dip. But of course, the ‘fun’ doesn’t stop there. 

The space is rife with pump-and-dump — price manipulation schemes that set out to turn a profit by exploiting investor naivety and/or FOMO (fear of missing out) via coordinated efforts to drive up the price of crypto tokens. 

On top of all that, fees can be levied at various aspects of the crypto chain — creating fertile ground for middlemen to plough their cut. And Trump definitely knows how to do that. 

So enter the US president, with zero shame and a rapidly growing web of crypto entanglements — from an early foray into NFTs to, more recently, hawking crypto tokens (via the Trump-linked World Liberty Financial), including branded memecoins ($TRUMP, $MELANIA), launching a stablecoin ($USD1), and even a plan to build up a strategic Bitcoin reserve within the US Treasury. (Other digital assets may also be stockpiled, per the White House fact sheet.) 

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Forbes has an excellent breakdown of how Trump has turned crypto hype into fat profit. But — in simple terms — the (real) money has poured into his coffers so far via a licensing deal on sales of NFTs; a (generous) profit-share structure on sales of World Liberty tokens; and trading fees and crypto payments linked to the buying, selling and swapping of memecoin tokens — most of which remain locked up for future release, meaning there’s plenty more crypto juice just waiting for Trump to give another squeeze. 

The stablecoin venture, meanwhile, offers the chance for Trump and his associates to profit by earning interest on (dollar) deposits — basically, the more buyers of $USD1, the more dollars are deposited and the more interest that (fiat) money accrues… Just add hype!

As for Trump’s moves to hoard Bitcoin, these look interesting as they suggest a longer term component to his crypto strategy — beyond quick and dirty cash-ins. This could be the start of a committed leaning in to the disruptive potential of digital money to reshape traditional financial structures. (Hence the family’s ‘Watch out Wall Street’ messaging.)

Down the line, Trump might envisage establishing a Bitcoin position that gives his administration meaningful leverage over the market (and other major investors). He wouldn’t even need to sell off the public reserve of Bitcoin; even just the threat of dumping BTC and causing a major price crash could put him in possession of a flush of those cards he likes to boast of holding — forcing leveraged investors to rush to the Oval Office to kiss his ass.

The bald risk for crypto investors is still that their bag of ‘virtual gold’ ends up worth less than what they paid for it. (Or, indeed, turns out to contain a sack of air.) 

Yet, for true believers, the lure of riding the crypto rollercoaster remains the prospect of Lamborghini-levels of riches for those who hold on long enough. 

It’s also worth noting that Trump has already managed to tap into the fortunes of wealthy crypto investors thanks to his conversion to crypto cheerleading. (The crypto lobby forked over nearly $200M in campaign donations this election cycle — with the (duly returned to the White House) president leading the donations.)

Even so, all this crypto #winning might just be Trump warming up on this stuff. Ever the wildcard, it’s possible he sees in crypto a longer-term weapon for bending the recalcitrant financial and democratic systems to his political will. 

Something that could, for example, be deployed to weaken the dollar through diversification — even if just a touch — meshing with his stated ambition to bring manufacturing back to the US. (A strong dollar remains a thorn in the side of that dream; I mean, who wants to buy a $3,000+ iPhone?)

That said, an early priority for Trump’s crypto tzar, David Sacks, has been pushing to regulate stablecoins — which could, conversely, strengthen the dollar’s dominance in the digital era, as well as unlocking more demand for US Treasuries (thereby helping to bankroll Trump’s government). 

Plus, (weakly) regulated US stablecoins will just supercharge Trumpian corruption, as Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren warned in May — arguing against the Republican-backed GENIUS Act. So, the early focus for Trump’s crypto bets may still mostly be preoccupied with securing the grift.

One thing is clear: Trump’s crypto portfolio is diversifying as it grows — suggesting an ambition to reach across and influence the entire ecosystem. Perhaps seasoned with the (conventional) financial wisdom of hedging one’s bets. 

As for where this all ends up, no one really knows what one Bitcoin or any of the other flavours of crypto is worth — or whether a final rug-pull might, one day, drop the curtain on an intricate set of high-tech Ponzi schemes.Still, we can be certain that, where Trump is concerned, all his schemes are powered by pure self-interest.

Natasha Lomas is a tech journalist who lives in Barcelona