Featured Image Credit: Win McNamee / Staff via Getty
In 2021, Donald Trump looked at Bitcoin and dismissed it as a 'scam.' Four years on, the president sits atop a sprawling family crypto operation, and the turnaround has drawn heavy scrutiny.
While the Trump name has minted a fortune in digital tokens, huge numbers of ordinary buyers who followed him into the market have been left badly out of pocket, with supporters losing billions after his meme coin collapsed.
Across 2025, Trump earned more than $1.4 billion through his family's cryptocurrency ventures, according to new financial disclosures. It was the most profitable year of a decades-long business career, and it came even as his signature meme coin shed 97 percent of its value from a January 2025 peak.
The family launched its main crypto firm, World Liberty Financial, in autumn 2024, during the closing stretch of Trump's third White House run. It followed months of courtship, with candidate Trump promising the industry favours such as a national Bitcoin reserve. The sector responded in kind, and crypto became the single largest donating industry of the 2024 election.
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Once he was in office, conditions improved further still. Bitcoin hit an all-time high in 2025, his administration wound back efforts to police the sector and pardoned convicted fraudsters.
Four days before the inauguration, a company tied to an Abu Dhabi royal quietly acquired almost half of World Liberty Financial, routing $187 million to Trump family entities, The Wall Street Journal reported. In the same week, Trump released a meme coin carrying the image of his defiant fist pump after the assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, which brought him roughly $636 million over the year.
However, the investors who bought in have fared far worse. Around two-thirds of those who bought Trump's meme coin have lost money, with losses reaching $3.81 billion by late June, crypto data firm Nansen reported.
Fatime Elrgdawy, a 29-year-old software project engineer from California, is one of them who reportedly put $2,000 into a $TRUMP coin bet last year, as per Reuters. Within five months, it was worth less than $120.
Meanwhile, MGX put $2 billion into a World Liberty coin and now counts among the owners of TikTok's US operations, an arrangement reached after the administration spent months pressing the app to hive off an American arm.
Asked about the overlap between policy and profit, the Trump administration told The Independent there are 'no conflicts of interest' around his business dealings. Trump himself has played down any close knowledge of the windfall. "I could know about it," he told CNBC last Thursday. "I didn't. There's nothing illegal. There's nothing wrong with it."
