A version of this story appeared in CNN Business’ Nightcap newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign up for free here.
New York
CNN
—
Last July, Donald Trump made a campaign stop that served as his crypto coming out party. Trump, a guy who has an aide follow him around with a portable printer so he can read the internet, got onstage at the Bitcoin Conference in Nashville and promised the moon to a crowd of extremely online crypto-Libertarians.
“Oh, you’re going to be very happy with me,” he said, before vowing to make America the “crypto capital of the planet.”
With the zeal of the converted, he rattled off crypto shibboleths, promising to “fire” Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler (the Biden-era bogeyman the industry loved to blame for its problems), to create a “strategic national bitcoin stockpile” and even pardon Ross Ulbricht — the creator of the Silk Road digital marketplace used primarily for selling drugs on the dark web, who was serving a life sentence.
Since retaking office, Trump has kept all of those promises (technically — Gensler stepped down before Trump could fire him). And he’s gone even further.
“Maybe the most important thing that we did for this community, we reject regulators and we fired Gary Gensler, and we’re gonna fire everybody like him,” said Vice President JD Vance at a crypto conference on Wednesday.
It’s hard to overstate how much the president has changed his tune on crypto, which he criticized in his first term as “highly volatile and based on thin air.” Now, Trump’s personal wealth is estimated to include $2.9 billion tied to his digital asset projects — representing some 37% of his total fortune, according to an April report from the left-leaning State Democracy Defenders Fund.
Bitcoin, a bellwether for crypto, has shot up 67% since Trump spoke in Nashville last year.
This week, Trump deepened his financial ties to the alternative financial industry that his administration is tasked with regulating. His two oldest sons and Vance took his spot headlining this year’s Bitcoin Conference in Las Vegas, where they reassured supporters that Team Trump is, in Don Jr.’s words, “seriously long crypto.”
On Tuesday, Trump’s media company said it would raise $2.5 billion to buy bitcoin — a move that mimics a corporate cash-management strategy popularized by MicroStrategy (now known as Strategy) and Tesla.
Two things to know about what’s going on here.
First: Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG), which owns the president’s social media platform, Truth Social, is not a company in a traditional sense of, like, a business that makes money. It is a perpetually unprofitable entity that generates almost no revenue, but public interest in Trump keeps the company’s stock market value elevated — much like a meme stock.
By becoming more of a bitcoin holding company, TMTG offers traditional investors exposure to bitcoin’s gains (and losses) without the hassle of actually buying bitcoin and managing it in a digital wallet themselves.
“Holding bitcoin on a balance sheet is part financial strategy, part cultural signaling,” said Temujin Louie, CEO of blockchain platform Wanchain. “TMTG’s move is more politically charged. Given its ties to President Trump, any decision must inevitably align with the current administration’s rhetoric and embrace of cryptocurrencies as a populist tool.”
Second: The bitcoin play adds another halo of legitimacy around an asset that investors are still afraid of.
The appearance of credibility has long eluded crypto because, well, it’s just so useful for doing crimes, and its advocates haven’t done a great job articulating mainstream use cases for digital money that you can’t actually buy much with.
But having an evangelist in the West Wing seems to be changing that. Bitcoin hit an all-time high of over $111,000 last week, fueled in part by the advancement of legislations that would create the first federal rules around stablecoins, a subcategory of crypto, a key step the industry has been lobbying for.
“I’m here today to say loud and clear with President Trump, crypto finally has a champion and an ally in the White House,” Vance said Wednesday at the Bitcoin Conference. He also implored crypto fans to carry last year’s voting momentum forward for the 2026 midterms, and boasted that he personally still holds “a fair amount of bitcoin today.”
Lawyers and ethics experts aren’t mincing words when they say Trump’s crypto ventures open the door to all kinds of potential corruption.
“The only reason this isn’t a crime is because the criminal conflict-of-interest statute does not apply to the president or the vice president,” Richard Painter, a former White House ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush, told CNN. “The president and his family are investing in crypto — riding a bubble that may someday burst. The systemic impact on the economy could trigger another financial crisis.”
The White House has repeatedly said the president has no conflicts of interest, and lashed out at the media for even asking. Press secretary Karoline Leavitt recently said it was “frankly ridiculous that anyone in this room would even suggest that President Trump is doing anything for his own benefit.”
