Donald Trump’s second term is turning out to be a testing ground for digital money, and his family into its biggest private beneficiaries.
It began as campaign talk about “making America the crypto capital of the world”, and is turning to a global financial project that fuses politics, foreign capital and volatile digital assets.
In less than a year, the Trump orbit has built a network stretching from Manhattan to Abu Dhabi, generating hundreds of millions in cash and breaking the boundaries between business and government.
The year Trump went all in on crypto
When Trump returned to the White House in January 2025, he inherited an industry still bruised by the regulatory crackdowns of the Biden years.
Within weeks, his administration scrapped enforcement teams, shelved pending lawsuits and invited crypto executives back into official meetings. The transition was immediate, and profitable.
According to Reuters, the Trump family made $802 million from crypto ventures in the first half of 2025 alone, accounting for more than 90% of the Trump Organization’s total income.
The family’s core vehicle, World Liberty Financial, sold governance tokens called WLFI, issued a stablecoin named USD1, and marketed a meme coin known as $TRUMP.
Those digital assets, built largely on Trump’s name and access to power, became the foundation of what analysts now call the “Trump crypto machine.”
WLFI tokens brought in $466 million from early buyers, many of them overseas investors. A meme coin linked to the president’s image added another $336 million.
The scale of the windfall dwarfed revenue from golf resorts and licensing deals combined.
The foreign money and the new stablecoin
The new cash came from unusual places. One of the biggest deals was a $2 billion investment in Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, carried out through USD1, the stablecoin launched by Trump’s company.
The buyer was MGX, a state-linked fund in Abu Dhabi chaired by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed, the UAE’s national security adviser. MGX said it simply used the coin for convenience.
But the effect was to hand Trump’s stablecoin venture a huge pool of deposits to earn interest on.
The New York Times later revealed that the MGX deal coincided with White House talks over a plan to sell hundreds of thousands of advanced US AI chips to the UAE, with some destined for Sheikh Tahnoon’s own tech conglomerate, G42.
Officials denied any link between the stablecoin transaction and the export framework, but the overlap raised questions about policy and private gain.
World Liberty’s structure added to the complexity. The firm’s co-founder Steve Witkoff, a longtime Trump ally and now a Middle East envoy, remained financially tied to the company even while handling diplomatic work.
Another adviser, David Sacks, who helped design the administration’s crypto and AI strategy, obtained an ethics waiver despite his venture fund’s ties to companies involved in the same deals.
But this web of relationships was part of the attraction for investors. Trump’s name is what allowed World Liberty to raise such amounts. But for ethics lawyers, this looked perilous and unethical.
Who’s really powering Trump’s empire
Two small financial firms have become central to the Trump family’s expansion.
The Financial Times traced much of the funding behind Trump-linked ventures to Yorkville Advisors, a little-known New Jersey lender, and Dominari Holdings, a boutique investment house now operating out of Trump Tower.
Yorkville arranged standby equity deals for Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG), allowing the company to issue up to $2.5 billion in new stock whenever it needed cash.
These arrangements, known as SEPA financing, are fast but risky because they can dilute share prices as more stock hits the market.
The firm has a checkered past, as it fought fraud charges from the SEC for years before winning dismissal in 2018, and is currently contesting a $100 million tax claim.
Dominari, meanwhile, became the family’s preferred platform for capital markets work. Its brokers helped list American Bitcoin, a renamed subsidiary where Eric Trump sits on the board.
The company grew from five employees to seventy in two years, and its shares soared 580% in the weeks before the Trump sons joined its advisory board.
Dominari now pitches small-cap listings, crypto M&A, and “America First” exchange-traded funds to investors seeking proximity to the Trump brand.
Both firms benefit from access that larger Wall Street banks do not enjoy. As Eric Trump told the FT, smaller partners are “more nimble” and “great friends.” That friendship has been lucrative.
Trump Media’s Bitcoin gamble
Earlier this year, Trump Media, parent of Truth Social, had spent $2 billion buying Bitcoin as part of a new “crypto treasury” strategy.
The announcement came after the company’s share price had fallen 68% from its peak and Trump’s personal fortune dropped by $3.3 billion.
The bet looked savvy at first, with Bitcoin having risen 57% over the previous year.
But the timing proved disastrous. A report by Forbes calculates that by November, the cryptocurrency was down roughly 12% from TMTG’s average purchase price, and the company’s Bitcoin trove was worth about $1.7 billion, a $300 million paper loss.
The stock fell another 24%, cutting $490 million from Trump’s net worth.
TMTG insisted the move was a success because it boosted assets from $274 million to more than $3 billion. Forbes countered that owning expensive assets does not mean earning profits.
Markets seemed to agree. The company’s market value now sits at roughly a third of its former peak.
The episode captured the volatility that defines the entire Trump crypto experiment. That is vast paper wealth in rising markets, but swift reversals when sentiment turns.
Pardons, power and the new crypto order
While the Trump family’s ventures drew foreign capital, the administration gave new life to some of the industry’s most controversial figures.
In October, Politico reported that Trump had pardoned Binance founder Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, who had pleaded guilty in 2023 to violating anti–money-laundering laws.
Days later, during a “60 Minutes” interview, Trump praised Zhao as a “highly respected” entrepreneur who had been “treated badly” by the previous administration.
The White House also welcomed Tether’s chief executive, Paolo Ardoino, twice this year.
The company, long questioned for opaque reserves and alleged use in illicit finance, is now planning a US subsidiary led by a former Trump adviser. Tether America has already contributed funds to the new White House ballroom.
Critics say the pardons and partnerships blur the line between governance and self-interest.
Senator Elizabeth Warren called it “bribery in plain sight,” citing the $2 billion Binance investment executed through the Trump family’s stablecoin.
Others in the industry worry that working with Trump-linked firms is becoming necessary to stay competitive.
The administration rejects those claims. Press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the family has “never engaged in conflicts of interest” and that the president is “fulfilling his promise to make the United States the crypto capital of the world.”
Some analysts see a more strategic logic. By drawing Binance and Tether closer, Trump may be forcing them to operate under US rules rather than outside them. That remains to be seen.
The next chapter for Trump’s crypto plans
The Trump crypto economy now stretches from high-level policy to small-town finance.
It connects sovereign wealth from Abu Dhabi, token sales from Hong Kong, and financing deals in suburban New Jersey. Together, they form a parallel financial ecosystem built around the president’s brand and regulatory power.
Yet its durability is uncertain. Congressional Democrats are drafting new rules that could tighten oversight of stablecoins and add explicit ethics provisions to prevent family entanglements.
WLFI tokens have lost most of their early value since listing. USD1’s circulation remains heavily tied to a single foreign transaction.
And the administration’s technology partnerships with the UAE could face renewed scrutiny if export controls tighten again.
Markets will ultimately decide whether Trump’s crypto plan becomes an enduring industry pillar or another speculative cycle tied to politics.
For now, it’s widely seen as an experiment in turning presidential power directly into digital wealth, a fusion of statecraft, branding and financial engineering unlike anything the modern US economy has seen.
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