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According to an investigation by Accountable.US, 73% of Trump's net worth may now come from crypto, which his administration is working to dramatically deregulate.
Over his nearly seven months as president, the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump has been taking a sledgehammer to regulations on cryptocurrency. A new report sheds further light on the reasons why.
The president may be profiting far more from his "rapidly-growing crypto empire" than was previously known and has used it to dramatically increase his net worth, according to an investigation released Thursday by the anti-corruption group Accountable.US.
While a report from Bloomberg on July 2 estimated the billionaire president's crypto holdings to total about $620 million of his nearly $7 billion net worth, Accountable examined other investments that had not previously been reported.
"President Trump's net worth," the group estimated, "could roughly be $15.9 billion, with about $11.6 billion in uncounted crypto assets." This would mean crypto accounts for 73% of his net worth.
Accountable reached this number by including investments that either had not yet occurred or were not public at the time of previous reporting.
These included roughly 22.5 billion tokens issued by Trump-owned WorldLiberty Financial Inc., which are estimated to be worth about $2 billion in value, but had not yet become tradable.
Other analyses, it said, also excluded the $7 billion in value of the new $TRUMP memecoins released in late July 2025.
"Two Trump-affiliated companies owned 80% of the $TRUMP venture as of May 2025 and were estimated to have collected over $324 million just in fees since January 2025," the report said.
Accountable also factored the holdings of Trump Media—the company that owns the president's social media app Truth Social. In July, the company bought $2 billion in Bitcoin and reserved another $300 million for Bitcoin options, and also announced the launch of its own set of NFTs.
As part of what they called "Crypto Week," Republicans passed multiple industry-friendly pieces of crypto legislation in July, the GENIUS Act and the CLARITY Act, which Accountable says allow Trump to directly profit.
The GENIUS Act purported to create a regulatory framework for so-called "stablecoins," which are pegged to existing financial assets like the U.S. dollar and are poised to become part of the portfolios of increasing numbers of companies. However, as Nikki McCann Ramirez wrote for Rolling Stone in June:
One of Trump's priorities has been the normalization of these so-called stablecoins — a type of asset that his family is now hawking.
Despite the moniker, stablecoins can be extremely unstable. A 2023 study published by the Bank for International Settlements found that of 60 stablecoins analyzed in their review, all of them had become de-pegged from their underlying asset at least once.
The 2022 crypto crash was triggered by the failure of Terraform Lab's Terra/Luna "algorithmic" stablecoin—the collapse of which saw $45 billion erased in the span of a week.
The bill places only very light regulations on stablecoins, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has warned that since he controls such a large percentage of the stablecoin market, their uptake into the broader economy could "create a superhighway for Donald Trump's corruption."
"As soon as the players understand that Trump's intervention is a real possibility, then the stablecoin market is no longer about a careful review of whether there are adequate dollars to back up a particular stablecoin, or whether the stablecoin issuer has an AAA rating," Warren said.
"Instead, the whole game becomes one of trying to engage the president to weigh the end and make one set of coins more valuable, and therefore another set of coins less valuable," she added. "It's corruption, but it's also a market manipulation that ultimately drains away any development...It undermines all the markets at that point."
But the CLARITY Act, which has been passed by the House and now awaits consideration in the Senate, is "the real prize" for the industry. It would dramatically narrow the Securities and Exchange Commission's (SEC) ability to regulate cryptocurrencies—most notably by recategorizing many assets as commodities instead of securities, which places them under the much smaller and less-resourced Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).
Trump would be one of the foremost beneficiaries of this bill, which would exclude digital assets like his $TRUMP and $MELANIA "meme coins" from SEC regulation.
It would also likely affect the classification of Bitcoin, which Trump Media has explicitly acknowledged would benefit the president. "If Bitcoin is determined to constitute a security," the company said in a June SEC filing, it could "adversely affect" the price of Bitcoin and the price of Trump Media's holdings.
Not only does this benefit Trump, said Accountable.US executive director Tony Carrk, but the legitimization and entrenchment of these unstable assets has the potential to make the whole economy less stable.
"Eerily reminiscent of the risky behavior that gave us the 2008 financial collapse, Donald Trump is ushering in a new era of casino-like speculation on Wall Street with highly volatile crypto trading in retirement accounts," Carrk said.
"While the Trump family stands to win either way with crypto investment product fees," Carrk added, "throwing such a wild card into the financial system with little to no guardrails could lead to history repeating itself—with everyday Americans footing the bill when things inevitably go south."
"Congress surrendered to the onslaught of crypto political spending and legitimized the world's biggest Ponzi scheme," said one GENIUS Act critic. "They also forfeited an opportunity to stop Trump's massive crypto grift."
More than 100 Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives helped Republicans send what would be the country's first major cryptocurrency law to the desk of President Donald Trump, despite warnings that the legislation would not only further his corruption, but also "expose our financial stability, national security, and consumer protections to greater risk."
All but a dozen voting Republicans and 102 Democrats—including House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (N.Y.)—supported the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins (GENIUS) Act, which last month passed the Senate 68-30, with support from 18 Democrats.
If signed by the president, as is expected, the bill would create a regulatory framework for stablecoins, which are pegged to the value of existing assets such as the U.S. dollar. The Trump family's World Liberty Financial has issued the stablecoin USD1.
@housedemocrats.bsky.social Shame on all of you. You have no foresight and no backbone.
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— Jodi Jacobson (@jljacobson.bsky.social) July 17, 2025 at 5:52 PM
Advocacy groups and Democrats critical of the GENIUS Act, and other bills making their way through Congress during "Crypto Week," have highlighted how the legislation would "bolster Trump's business empire while putting American interests at risk."
Leading House Democratic opposition to the GOP's package is Financial Services Committee Ranking Member Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), who warned last week that "these bills would make Congress complicit in Trump's unprecedented crypto scam."
As Politico detailed Thursday:
Waters and other Democrats called for presidential ethics provisions to be added to the bills, pointing to the Trump family's business entanglements in the crypto industry. Trump and his sons have stakes in several crypto ventures, including a company they launched last year that issues a stablecoin and could benefit from the GENIUS bill that is now awaiting the president's signature.
But a growing bloc of the party has joined Republicans in lining up behind the digital asset industry's Washington agenda, a sign of crypto firms' ascendance as a political force. Companies in the crypto sector have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into influence efforts, and a mountain of super [political action committee] money is threatening to target lawmakers who stand in the way of the industry's goals.
After Thursday's vote, Bartlett Naylor, a financial policy advocate for the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, declared that "today, House members piled venality onto perversion onto corruption. In approving this crypto-enabling bill, Congress surrendered to the onslaught of crypto political spending and legitimized the world's biggest Ponzi scheme."
"To add insult to injury," Naylor added, "they also forfeited an opportunity to stop Trump's massive crypto grift, some of the most heinous and flagrant corruption in American presidential history."
RM @repmaxinewaters.bsky.social slams Republicans’ UNSTABLE Act:“The UNSTABLE Act creates the appearance of a federal framework for #stablecoins, but it does not provide the Federal government with the full authority it needs.” | tinyurl.com/5t2skxvnWATCH: www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQWy...
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— U.S. House Committee on Financial Services - Democrats (@ushousefsc.bsky.social) July 17, 2025 at 1:23 PM
In addition to sending the GENIUS Act to Trump, the House advanced two other crypto bills on Thursday: the Digital Asset Market Clarity (CLARITY) Act, which would create a regulatory framework for digital asset markets, and the Anti-CBDC Surveillance State Act, which would prevent the Federal Reserve from issuing a central bank digital currency (CBDC).
All Republicans present and 78 Democrats backed the CLARITY Act, while just Democratic Reps. Jared Golden (Maine) and Shri Thanedar (Mich.) voted alongside the GOP to pass the CBDC ban. Both of those bills still need Senate approval.
Passing any bill that lets the president "enrich himself from deeper in the shadows is a recipe for American workers getting sold out to the highest bidder," warned the head of Accountable.US.
A new analysis details precisely how a slate of proposed cryptocurrency bills making their way through Congress this week, if passed, will enrich U.S. President Donald Trump and members of his family who are heavily invested in the crypto markets.
Republican leaders in the House of Representatives continued their fight to pass the GOP's cryptocurrency bills on Thursday, despite warnings from Democratic lawmakers and advocacy groups that the legislation would personally benefit Trump.
As right-wing hard-liners on Wednesday thwarted Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson's (R-La.) effort to advance the trio of bills, the watchdog Accountable.US released an analysis highlighting how the industry-backed package would "bolster Trump's business empire while putting American interests at risk."
The bills that the House is considering during "Crypto Week" are:
The Accountable analysis focuses on the first two bills. The group's executive director, Tony Carrk, said in a statement that "the so-called GENIUS and CLARITY acts ironically do nothing to lift the cloak of mystery and unaccountability that shrouds the Trump family crypto interests around the world, leaving American interests at high risk."
"The president has already demonstrated he'll seemingly take money from anyone, even possible criminal elements and foreign adversaries," he noted. "So to pass a bill that lets Trump... enrich himself from deeper in the shadows is a recipe for American workers getting sold out to the highest bidder. The real clarity we have about this president is he fights to give his billionaire buddies a tax break and profit from his office while betraying the working Americans he claims to represent."
The CLARITY Act would "significantly" limit the regulatory role of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), "which already has been severely weakened under Trump and has oversight over many Trump crypto products," the analysis details. It would also "put the less robust Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) 'at the center' of digital asset regulation."
According to Accountable:
A coalition of over 80 groups—including Accountable.US, Americans for Financial Reform, and Demand Progress—wrote to Johnson and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) on Tuesday that the CLARITY Act "creates loopholes or confusing legal questions that crypto and non-crypto firms will exploit in order to evade existing regulatory standards, causing more damage."
"The legislation gives the shady practices and endemic fraud in the crypto industry a government imprimatur without adequate guardrails to protect investors and the financial system and unleashes and rewards the administration's crypto corruption," the coalition warned, urging members of the chamber to vote against the bil.
Meanwhile, the GENIUS Act would let banks and private entities issue stablecoins—which are pegged to the value of existing assets such as the U.S. dollar—with "light oversight" and could "enable corruption, screw over taxpayers, and potentially destabilize the economy," warns Accountable's new report.
The publication points out that the Trump family's WLFI has launched its own "USD1" stablecoin, which was used in a $2 billion transaction between MGX, a fund backed by the United Arab Emirates, and the crypto exchange Binance, "just weeks before the Trump administration dropped a securities case" against Binance and its founder, Changpeng Zhao.
WLFI also announced on social media Wednesday that investors in its token voted to make the crypto tradable on public exchanges. Sludge reported that "the decision could boost the token's price and directly benefit President Trump and his family, who hold billions of the tokens and have already reaped hundreds of millions from its early sales."
Warren, the report notes, has warned that the GENIUS Act would "create a superhighway for Donald Trump's corruption."
They’re calling it the GENIUS Act—but @repmaxinewaters.bsky.social isn’t buying it.She lays it out: Trump’s billionaire donors get richer, 17 million Americans lose health care, and now Congress wants to bless digital money that benefits his inner circle.
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— Accountable.US (@accountable.us) July 17, 2025 at 12:35 PM
After a handful of hard-line Republicans tanked a procedural vote on the crypto package Tuesday, Trump hosted a meeting at the White House and later announced a deal had been reached to pass the legislation.
However, when Wednesday came, "committee chairs pushed back at hard-liners' demands to attach a central bank digital currency ban" to the CLARITY Act, Politico reported. "The impasse kept the House rule vote open for nine hours until GOP leaders finally cut a late-night deal to include a CBDC ban in the National Defense Authorization Act."
Now, Johnson has to juggle the defense and crypto legislation with a Trump rescission package that Senate Republicans passed overnight. As Politico put it: "If something's got to give, watch to see whether all three cryptocurrency bills end up getting a vote this week as planned. One possibility under discussion is passing only the Senate-approved stablecoin bill, which Trump wants to sign as soon as possible, and punting the other votes."
Congressional Democrats are divided on the GOP package, and leadership is not whipping for or against it. Politico obtained a Monday notice from the office of House Minority Whip Katherine Clark (D-Mass.) that, according to the outlet, "sharply criticized both a crypto market structure bill and a Senate stablecoin measure that the lower chamber is slated to vote on, but did not tell members how to vote."
Reps. Angie Craig (D-Minn.), Don Davis (D-N.C.), and Ritchie Torres (D-NY) are original co-sponsors of the CLARITY Act. Craig still wants Democrats to support the legislation, Semafor reported Tuesday, and both Davis and Torres joined Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.) in a Monday letter urging their Democratic colleagues to vote for it, arguing that "although this bill is not without its shortcomings and may still be improved, inaction is not a viable option."
More Perfect Union on Tuesday published a report detailing how Davis, Torres, and Gottheimer have collectively taken millions from cryptocurrency industry executives and political groups. Responding to the findings on social media, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said that "it's a terrible bill that basically endorses Trump's massive crypto corruption scheme. Democrats will regret voting for it."
It's not just Trump and his family who could benefit from the bills. A separate Washington Post analysis published Thursday found that "nearly 70 Trump administration officials and nominees held cryptocurrency or investments in blockchain or digital-asset companies at the time of their selection, with stakes ranging from small to more than $120 million."