Trump Embraces Crypto: The President Who Delivered

In July 2019 President Donald Trump posted that he was "not a fan" of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, which were "not money" and whose value was "based on thin air". Two years later he told Fox Business that bitcoin seemed like a scam. Five years later, on 27 July 2024, he stood on stage at the Bitcoin 2024 conference in Nashville and promised to make the United States "the crypto capital of the planet".

What followed was the biggest change in US crypto policy since Bitcoin was invented, and a family fortune built on the same industry. By Trump's own 2025 financial disclosure, released in mid-2026, crypto was his largest source of income that year: more than $1.4 billion.

The campaign: from sceptic to candidate of the industry

The turn started with merchandise. In December 2022 Trump sold digital trading cards of himself at $99 each, recorded on a blockchain, the shared public ledger that crypto runs on. They sold out. In May 2024 his campaign began taking donations in crypto. At Nashville he promised to fire Gary Gensler, the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the stock-market regulator that had sued most big crypto firms, on his first day. He promised to free Ross Ulbricht, the founder of the Silk Road drug market, and never to sell the government's bitcoin.

The industry paid attention. Crypto companies and executives became some of the biggest political donors of the 2024 election cycle. In September 2024 Trump and his sons launched World Liberty Financial, a crypto venture that sold its own tokens, digital coupons that are traded like shares but give no ownership of the company.

The promises kept

Gensler announced he would step down and left on 20 January 2025, inauguration day. The next day Trump gave Ulbricht a full and unconditional pardon. On 23 January he signed an executive order banning work on a US central bank digital currency, a government-issued digital dollar, and creating a working group on crypto rules chaired by David Sacks, his adviser on crypto and artificial intelligence.

Enforcement changed fast. The SEC, now run by acting chair Mark Uyeda and then Paul Atkins, dropped its lawsuit against the exchange Coinbase in February 2025 and against Binance, the world's largest exchange, in May. In April the Justice Department disbanded its specialist crypto fraud team, saying it would no longer pursue "regulation by prosecution".

On 6 March 2025 Trump signed the order creating a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, telling agencies to keep, not auction, the bitcoin seized in criminal cases. On 18 July he signed the GENIUS Act, the first federal law written for crypto. It regulates stablecoins, digital tokens pegged to the dollar and backed by cash and short-term government debt, much like a money market fund that never pays interest. In August he signed an order opening 401(k) retirement plans to crypto and other alternative assets. In October 2025 he pardoned Changpeng Zhao, Binance's founder, who had served four months in prison in 2024 for failing to stop money laundering.

Bitcoin rose from about $69,000 on election day to a record of about $126,000 on 6 October 2025.

The family business

The policies arrived alongside the family's own crypto businesses. On 17 January 2025, three days before the inauguration, Trump launched a meme coin, $TRUMP, a token with no use beyond trading and the brand. Its largest holders were invited to a dinner with the president at his golf club in Virginia in May 2025. World Liberty Financial issued its own dollar stablecoin, USD1. In May 2025 World Liberty said that a $2 billion investment in Binance by the Abu Dhabi firm MGX would be paid in USD1. Five months later Trump pardoned Binance's founder. Trump Media, his social media company, bought about $2 billion of bitcoin in mid-2025, and his sons Eric and Donald Jr. listed a bitcoin mining company, American Bitcoin, on Nasdaq that September.

The numbers are now public. Trump's 2025 disclosure, reported by TIME in July 2026, lists more than $550 million from World Liberty token sales, more than $635 million from the company behind the meme coin and further crypto sums, for a total above $1.4 billion. A Reuters investigation in June 2026 estimated that the family's crypto ventures earned at least $2.3 billion in profit, and that outside investors had lost about the same amount. World Liberty's token, which began trading in September 2025, had fallen 87% from its peak.

The White House has rejected all of it. "Neither the President nor his family has ever engaged, or will ever engage, in conflicts of interest," spokesperson Anna Kelly told TIME. Democrats in Congress, including Senator Elizabeth Warren, have called the arrangement corruption.

The crash and the stalled law

Trump's policies did not stop the market falling, and one of his own posts set off its worst day. On 10 October 2025 he threatened 100% tariffs on Chinese goods, and about $19 billion of leveraged crypto bets, positions bought with borrowed money, were forcibly closed within a day, the largest such wipeout on record. Bitcoin kept sliding into 2026 and fell below $58,000 at the start of July, more than 50% under its peak. It traded at about $82,000 in mid-October 2026.

The broader rulebook he promised has not arrived. The CLARITY Act, which would decide which crypto tokens are policed by the SEC and which by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, passed the House in July 2025. On 15 September 2026 it failed a Senate procedural vote 49 to 50, short of the 60 needed. Democrats voted against as a bloc, joined by Republicans Susan Collins, Josh Hawley and Jerry Moran. Much of the fight was over an ethics clause on officials' crypto ventures, which critics said left existing ventures, licensing deals and meme coins untouched. Senator Cynthia Lummis, the bill's lead Republican in the Senate, declared it dead after the vote, FinTech Weekly reported.

The record has two columns. On policy, Trump did what he told the Nashville crowd he would do: Gensler is gone, Ulbricht is free, the reserve exists and stablecoins have a federal law. On money, crypto became the president's largest source of income while his own government wrote the industry's rules. Voters get their next say at the midterm elections on 3 November 2026.