When Trump won re-election last year, the crypto bros were pumped and excited. Several months later that expectation has not only turned sour, it has gone totally toxic. Trump, through his usual stupidity and cupidity, is singlehandedly dragging crypto into the dirt by turning it into his personal casino.
Some of those crypto-bros are still clinging to their MAGA hats but rather than “liberating” cryptocurrency, as was once hoped, Trump has hijacked it, stuffed it full of grift, and left the rest of us to pick up the tab, like we have been doing with the recent turbulence in the market -- and all this is happening right when Crypto should be entering the sun-lit uplands of wider acceptance.
Remember, that back in 2021 the man called Bitcoin a "scam" that was "competing against the dollar." Fast-forward to the 2024 campaign and suddenly he was the Messiah of the blockchain, promising to ditch Gensler and make America the "crypto capital of the planet."
It sounded good. The useful idiots in the industry threw money at him like confetti. Hundreds of millions flowed into his campaign coffers from the very same crypto barons who once preached "code is law" and "not your keys, not your coins."
But what did they get for their trouble? World Liberty Financial – a DeFi "platform" that is less revolutionary technology and more Trump family enrichment scheme. The Donald is listed as “Chief Crypto Advocate” (whatever that means), his sons are “Web3 Ambassadors”, and a full 75 per cent of the revenue from their dodgy token sale goes straight into entities controlled by the Trump Organisation. That’s not deregulation, that’s the mother of all insider deals. Even Bernie Madoff would blush.
Then came the much-vaunted "Strategic Bitcoin Reserve." Sounds very grand, doesn’t it? Except the contracts to supply the million Bitcoins were handed out like party bags to donors, golf buddies and – surprise, surprise – companies linked to Eric Trump's property empire.
Welcome to Chicago-on-the-Potomac, crypto edition.
The result? Bitcoin briefly spiked to $109,000 on inauguration hype, then plunged below $60,000 when the market realised the reserve was just another Trump-branded pump-and-dump. Billions wiped off the market cap, retail investors rinsed, and the only people laughing are the ones with offices overlooking the Palm Beach surf.
Then it was rinse and repeat with tariff panic boosting "safe-haven" narratives and surging the price to $126,296, followed by the current slide to around $80,000 and who knows where.
Crypto bulls calmly reacting to market fluctuations
Meanwhile, genuine innovation is fleeing America. Singapore, Dubai and even Zug in Switzerland are hoovering up the talent because nobody wants to build the future in a country where the regulator’s loyalty is to one man’s wallet rather than the rule of law.
The tragedy is that Trump could have been crypto’s greatest champion. A proper bonfire of SEC red tape, clear rules of the road, and America really could have led the world. Instead we got a gold-plated grift that makes the Biden-Gensler years look like a model of probity.
So spare me the "but Kamala would have been worse" nonsense. This isn’t left-versus-right anymore. It's decent people versus a man who has turned the most revolutionary financial technology since double-entry book-keeping into just another line on the Trump Organisation profit-and-loss account. The crypto winter isn’t coming. Thanks to Donald Trump, it’s already here – and he’s charging you admission. For Crypto to live the Trump Presidency has to die.
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