Bankless: The President’s Crypto Empire

Author: Jack Inabinet Source: Bankless Translation: Shan Ouba, Golden Finance

It has only been six months since Trump returned to the White House, and the American leader who calls himself the "crypto president" has been making frequent moves.

According to recent reports, the Trump family has cashed out more than $600 million through token sales this year, and the book value of its related crypto asset portfolio has reached the level of billions of dollars.

Today we will sort out some of the Trump family's most eye-catching crypto operations and explore the potential impact of their aggressive crypto strategy.

Trump Digital Trading Cards

President Trump's first foray into the crypto field was the "Trump Digital Trading Cards" launched in December 2022, deployed on the Polygon PoS chain.

The first batch of 45,000 cards, priced at $99 each, sold out within hours of going online, with initial sales exceeding $4.4 million. Since then, the series has launched three expansion versions, with a total of hundreds of thousands of different digital cards.

Although the official promotion of these cards is only "digital collectibles for personal entertainment purposes", without investment functions and unrelated to the Trump campaign team, card holders can enjoy a series of real benefits: including invitations to dinner with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, receiving physical cutouts of the "winning jersey" he wore in the 2024 presidential debate, and receiving Trump co-branded sneakers for free.

During the card issuance period, users can purchase with bank cards or cryptocurrencies; after issuance, they can be freely traded on mainstream NFT markets such as OpenSea. All secondary market transactions will be charged a 10% royalty.

WLFI

World Liberty Financial is an investment DAO closely associated with Trump, currently holding nearly $200 million worth of crypto assets, ranging from stablecoins, mainstream coins (such as BTC, ETH) to altcoins (such as TRX, ONDO, MOVE) and other categories.

Although the project was initially promoted as a "decentralized lending platform similar to Aave", there is still only a sentence "coming soon" next to the "borrowing button" on its official website, and no on-chain lending function has been actually deployed.

Unlike TRUMP and MELANIA MEME coins, which are freely available to anyone, only investors who meet the SEC Reg D and Reg S exemptions (i.e., U.S. accredited investors or international investors who are not subject to sanctions) can invest in WLFI.

Although World Liberty Financial’s governance mechanism recently voted to remove transfer restrictions on WLFI tokens, KYC reviews and compliance monitoring will continue to ensure that tokens do not flow into the hands of unauthorized investors.

In March 2025, WLFI launched a U.S. dollar stablecoin called USD1, which is backed by short-term U.S. Treasury bonds and is custodianed by BitGo. As of now, USD1 has a market cap of $2.2 billion, making it the seventh largest stablecoin after MakerDAO/Sky’s DAI. The Trump family holds 22.5 billion WLFI tokens and a 40% stake in World Liberty Financial development company “WLF Holdco LLC”. The latter received 75% of the project’s token sale proceeds. TRUMP / MELANIA This is a pair of meme coins based on the image of US President Trump and First Lady Melania. TRUMP and MELANIA were issued in January 2025 (shortly after Trump’s inauguration). The overall price trend of these two tokens is mostly unilateral decline, but TRUMP occasionally surges in the short term due to news events.

For example:

• At the end of April 2025, when the media reported that Trump would invite 220 TRUMP holders to dinner, the price of TRUMP doubled in a short period of time.

• In June, the price of the coin rose by about 10% after Eric Trump announced that World Liberty Financial would buy a large amount of TRUMP as a treasury reserve asset.

Anyone can buy TRUMP and MELANIA on an on-chain DEX (such as Uniswap), and some CEXs (such as Binance, Coinbase, Kraken, Robinhood) also support trading of one or both assets.

Trump Media & Technology Group (DJT)

Trump Media & Technology Group was co-founded by Trump in 2021 and owns and operates the social platform Truth Social, an "alternative technology" social media product based on the open source social framework Mastodon.

The company successfully went public in March 2024 through a merger with the special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) Digital World Acquisition Corp, with the stock code DJT. This SPAC was established by Shanghai investment bank ARC Capital. In May 2025, Trump Media disclosed that it had raised $2.5 billion from about 50 institutional investors to build a Bitcoin vault. In early June, the company submitted a $12 billion securities issuance plan to the SEC to further purchase BTC. If the issuance is completed, DJT will become the world's second largest crypto vault company after MicroStrategy.

To further transform itself into a crypto asset holding company, Trump Media has also partnered with Crypto.com to launch a series of "Made in America" themed security and crypto ETFs on the upcoming financial platform Truth.Fi. As of now, DJT has applied to the SEC for three crypto ETF products.

In addition, on July 9, Truth Social announced that users who pay $9.99 per month to subscribe to the Trump Media "Patriot Package" will receive utility digital tokens that can be used to consume goods and services on the platform, and these tokens will be stored in the built-in Truth digital wallet.

American Bitcoin

American Bitcoin is a subsidiary of mining giant Hut 8 and American Data Centers (the latter is backed by Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr.) that focuses on "industrial-grade Bitcoin mining and strategic BTC reserve construction."

The joint venture was established in March 2025, and under the partnership agreement, Hut 8 will transfer most of its ASIC mining machines to American Data Centers in exchange for an 80% controlling stake in the joint venture.

Eric Trump serves as chief strategy officer. The company's website states that American Bitcoin will leverage Hut 8's mature mining capabilities and Eric Trump's "expertise in business strategy, capital markets and the development of a decentralized financial system." On June 10, American Bitcoin announced that it had purchased $23 million worth of Bitcoin, and later disclosed that it had raised $220 million in private placement financing, which it plans to use for additional purchases and expansion of mining equipment. Metaplanet (formerly Red Planet) is a Japanese hotel holding company that was on the verge of bankruptcy due to the continued business impact of the 2021 epidemic, but successfully avoided delisting from the Tokyo Stock Exchange after being acquired by Evolution Financial Group.

In June 2024, Metaplanet took its first step toward becoming “Asia’s leading Bitcoin vault company” by issuing bonds to Evolution Financial Group to raise 1 billion yen to purchase BTC. Since then, Metaplanet has gradually built a vault with a total of 8,888 BTC, with a cumulative purchase cost of 122.2 billion yen. Funds were raised primarily through primary offerings of stocks and bonds, with all financing provided by Evolution Financial Group’s “Evo Fund”.

In Japan, there is currently no local custody solution for physical BTC in brokerage accounts. Unlike other crypto vault companies, Metaplanet often sells cash-secured put options to acquire BTC, a strategy that gives the company the opportunity to buy BTC at a cost lower than the option signing price while earning premiums.

On March 20, 2025, Eric Trump, the second son of former US President Trump, was appointed as the first member of Metaplanet's "Strategic Advisory Board". In April, David Bailey, a well-known Bitcoin supporter and chairman of Nakamoto, also joined the advisory group.

TRON Inc.

On June 16, 2025, toy manufacturer SRM Entertainment announced that it would raise up to $210 million from a "private investor" to purchase TRX (Tron). By the end of the month, SRM had completed its first $100 million TRX purchase and deployed the assets to the JustLend platform to earn an annualized return of about 10%. The deal prompted TRON founder Justin Sun to become an advisor to SRM, and the company will be renamed "Tron Tron Inc." In addition, the company plans to launch a dividend policy after the TRX staking plan is "smoothly implemented." Although Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump both serve on the advisory board of Dominari Securities LLC, the sole lead underwriter of the financing, Eric Trump denied the Financial Times' previous report that he would take a public position at SRM. Although the specific details are not public, it is generally believed that Dominari received some stock compensation as an underwriter.

Conclusion

The Trump family's deep ties with the crypto industry have sparked heated public debate and regulatory doubts: Many critics believe that Trump may be using his presidency to seek huge private profits in the crypto field for himself and his family.

Several heavyweight Democratic lawmakers have condemned this. Among them, Senator Elizabeth Warren, who has long been anti-crypto, accused Trump of "making a fortune for himself and his family through the crypto business while his government weakened market regulation," believing that this constituted a "serious conflict of interest" and could cause systemic risks.

In response, White House officials said there was no misconduct, while members of the Trump family described their active participation in the crypto industry as "a mission to promote financial democratization and make the United States the global crypto capital."

Although Trump has indeed gained considerable benefits from his presidency, his supporters believe that compared with the suppression of the encryption industry during the Biden era, the positive effects of Trump's policy shift far outweigh his personal gains and losses.