Last night, Donald Trump announced the launch of the $TRUMP meme coin, a form of cryptocurrency token known for volatility and fraud in an overall market that is already infamous for both. It was the latest in a series of actions taken by Trump throughout his campaign last year and post-election that have signaled his support for the cryptocurrency sector, as well as his willingness to put government backing behind it.
The launch of the president-elect’s meme coin is not his first foray into this sector, despite declaring himself a skeptic as recently as 2021. The former president launched an NFT collection (an image-based crypto-adjacent digital asset) in December 2022 at $99 each, which sold out in a matter of hours, reportedly to the tune of $4.5 million. While the overall NFT market has collapsed, Trump’s NFTs have had a surge in trading since the launch of $TRUMP. Trump also helped launch a crypto venture called World Liberty Financial last October, a decentralized finance project that allows users to trade in a variety of cryptocurrencies on its platform. Trump and his sons are not owners or officers in the company, although they are being paid to promote it. The latest data on the World Liberty Financial indicates that it is facing a loss of $4.8 million in its crypto holdings.
The web of connections around the president-elect’s crypto venture is getting all the more tangled. Trump helped get the company started with Steve Witkoff, a New York real estate billionaire that the president-elect recently named his Middle East envoy. Reports have indicated that Witkoff was also present for Trump’s meeting with embattled New York City Mayor Eric Adams in Florida last Friday. Adams, who is facing a federal corruption trial in April, has been vocal about his support for cryptocurrencies. “Remember y’all laughed at me when I first got my Bitcoin,” he said in a press conference on December 3rd of last year. “Who’s laughing now? Go look at my Bitcoin now. […] Now you wish you would have done it.” In his official statement on his meeting with Trump, Adams did not acknowledge Witkoff’s presence, nor did he indicate that cryptocurrencies were part of the discussion.
Beyond his personal dealings, Trump has also indicated his willingness to back the crypto sector with the might of the American government. Trump is appointing pro-crypto figures to key positions in government, like Paul Atkins, a vocal cryptocurrency advocate and veteran SEC official known for a “laissez-faire” approach to regulation. Silicon Valley financier David Sacks has been tapped to be Trump’s “A.I. and crypto czar,” according to multiple reports. Sacks successfully lobbied the federal government into bailing out the failed Silicon Valley Bank, where he had significant holdings, after previously taking a hardline libertarian stance against the practice in other instances.
Bloomberg reports that Trump is set to sign an executive order as soon as he’s in office declaring cryptocurrency a state policy priority and recommending a close working relationship between government officials and the industry. Those same sources indicate that Trump had already declared last summer during his campaign that if elected, he would hold on to the roughly $19 billion seized by the federal government seized from criminals – another move he could accomplish via executive order. Some crypto-promoting think tanks are encouraging the president-elect to go further and buy up more Bitcoin as part of a “strategic reserve” like the government’s stores of oil and gold, however such a move would likely require congressional approval.
President-elect Trump’s meme coin has already fluctuated wildly in value throughout its first day of trading, falling as low as $40.72 a token after reaching a high of around $75 this morning.
