Is Crypto Easily Corruptible or Is Trump Corrupting the Industry?

Trump and his family are enriching themselves and the titans of the tech industry.

Last week, the Trump family’s net worth increased on paper by $5 billion after one of their companies, the cryptocurrency venture World Liberty Financial, made a new digital currency available for public trading. A financial reform advocate from Public Citizen called the sale “the greatest corruption in presidential history.” Just a few days later, Trump’s sons launched the stock market debut of another cryptocurrency company, American Bitcoin. Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump’s stake in the bitcoin mining company is now worth over $1.5 billion.

You don’t have to understand the granular details of the crypto industry to understand the important parts: The president of the United States is actively promoting speculative investments in a volatile financial product that has cost regular Americans significant sums of money. He and his family own and are involved in multiple businesses that stand to profit, and are already profiting, in astronomical terms, from the industries that his administration is deregulating. Those same industries pose multiple threats to public wellbeing, including serious environmental threats and cost-of-living increases.

Perhaps most significant: By enriching himself, his family, and wealthy investors, the president is further concentrating extreme wealth in the hands of very few individuals and companies, a form of power they can use, and are using, to distort our politics and economy and therefore our lives.

Very little demonstrates Trump’s broken promises to drain the swamp as clearly as his full embrace of crypto companies. In January 2025, the Trump administration issued an executive order declaring its explicitly pro-crypto industry stance. His administration disbanded a Department of Justice watchdog tasked with investigating crypto-related fraud. Trump promoted crypto-backed leaders to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and since then, the SEC has dropped several investigations into crypto businesses. And then, once those changes were made, the Trumps launched their new crypto ventures for public trading. The Wall Street Journal reports that the WLFI crypto coin that went public this month “... is likely now the Trumps’ most valuable asset, exceeding their decades-old property portfolio.”

Even putting aside the Trump family’s new billions, World Financial Liberty is making the rich even richer — and denying the rest of Americans a piece of the pie. The WLFI token first went on sale roughly a year ago, in September 2024. But the only Americans who could buy the token during that initial sale were accredited investors, meaning investors who either make at least $200,000 annually or have a net worth of at least $1 million, according to Crypto Briefing. (This practice of limiting initial sales to an exclusive group of investors is known as whitelisting and is reportedly common in the crypto business.) That means that the people allowed to buy the WLFI token were already well-off. And those already rich investors are the ones, along with Trump and his sons, whose wallets fattened as the token’s value rocketed upward last week during its public launch.

Who lost money while the Trumps profited? Thousands of regular people who don’t have the income or net worth to count as accredited investors bought the token after its public launch, at the height of the market, when it was already about to drop. During the market swings, retail crypto investors lost hundreds of millions of dollars.

The president’s family getting richer after the Administration de-regulated the crypto industry harms the rest of us, too.

In addition to using enormous amounts of water and exposing people to increased air pollution, mining bitcoin (the process of using computers to solve complex puzzles that process and verify transactions and add new bitcoins to the blockchain) is extremely energy intensive. At a moment when the entire planet is facing an imperative to dramatically reduce emissions, the crypto and AI industries are increasing demands for electricity, which translates to increased emissions and rising electricity prices. Electricity costs are rising for a number of reasons, but in many regions, the increased demand from data centers straining the aging energy grid is a main factor. According to Energy Department data, the average retail residential price for electricity is 32% higher than it was five years ago. Meanwhile, data centers are expected to use even more energy in coming years.

In a functional democracy where our elected officials were primarily focused on solving our collective problems and were responsive to public will, our elected officials would be hammering out a way to ensure that the tech companies and wealthy individuals who are profiting billions of dollars from crypto sales are contributing to retrofitting the grid and building out clean energy. Our leaders would be creating guardrails to ensure that bitcoin mining and data center companies do as little harm as possible.

Instead, Trump and his family are enriching themselves and the titans of the tech industry who are actively lobbying for their businesses to be deregulated. We know what that means. With their ballooning fortunes, tech companies will be able to amass even more political power, through mounting campaign donations and lobbying dollars. Right now, ultrawealthy tech companies and owners can decide much more than tech policy. That’s why, even if our eyes glaze over when we hear about the blockchain, even if the millions and the billions start feeling unreal, it’s important that we stay informed about the movements of this industry. Standard Oil doesn’t exist anymore. Neither does the Dutch East India Company, which once spanned the globe. There are people organizing to make sure that this tech oligarchy won’t last forever, either.