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stablecoins
Most of Trump's Net Worth Comes From 'Crypto Empire': Report
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.
Aug 11, 2025
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."
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With the Crypto Industry War Chest Looming, Senate Democrats Help GOP Pass GENIUS Act
Democrats "need to win the next election, which means we can not afford to alienate a very vocal and wealthy group of donors," wrote one lawyer who works with crypto clients.
Jun 18, 2025
Over the objections of critics who say a landmark cryptocurrency bill lacks adequate consumer and financial system protections, among other concerns, several Senate Democrats voted with Republicans on Tuesday to pass the legislation that would establish a regulatory framework for a type of crypto called stablecoin.
The Senate voted 68-30 to pass the bill, which is backed by the crypto industry, with two Republicans senators voting no. The bill's journey to Senate passage—which at one point seemed in doubt—comes after crypto groups spent tens of millions in support of candidates for federal office in the 2024 election cycle. The bill now heads to the House of Representatives.
Among the Democrats who voted for the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins, or GENIUS, Act are Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) and the bill's co-sponsor Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), both of whom received support from pro-crypto entities last year.
The full list of Democrats who voted in favor of the bill is: Angela Alsobrooks (D-Md.); Cory Booker (D-N.J.); Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.); John Fetterman (D-Penn.); Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.); Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.); Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.); Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.); John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.); Andy Kim (D-N.J.); Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.); Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.); Alex Padilla (D-Calif.); Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.); Adam Schiff (D-Calif.); Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.); Mark Warner (D-Va.); and Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.).
Acting CEO and president of the Crypto Council for Innovation, Ji Kim, called the Senate's passage of the bill a "historic step forward for the digital asset industry," in a prepared statement shared in advance of the vote, according to the outlet CoinDesk.
The Senate's passage of the bill came one day after the outlet The Lever reported that "a private group chat of Democratic Party operatives and crypto industry advocates has been secretly coordinating to push Democratic senators" to support the bill.
The Lever reviewed the contents of a Signal chat which contained messages from venture capitalists, lobbyists, lawyers for crypto firms, former staffers on Capitol Hill, and others. Participants in the chat expressed the need for the Democrats to pass the bill in order to avoid alienating the crypto industry.
Avichal Garg, a managing partner at a venture capital firm that focuses on digital asset technology like cryptocurrency, said in the chat that "if Dems bail on this [bill], they will get 0 dollars going forward," according to The Lever.
"It would be political suicide for them not to support it," he added.
Jason Gottlieb, a lawyer who works for the law firm Morrison Cohen and defends cryptocurrency companies, wrote in the chat that regardless of concerns about the shortcomings of the bill, Democrats "need to win the next election, which means we can not afford to alienate a very vocal and wealthy group of donors," The Lever reported.
Last year, the industry pumped more than $40 million into a successful effort to topple former Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio in favor of his Republican challenger luxury car dealer Bernie Moreno.
No one has been a bigger critic of the GENIUS Act than Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), the ranking member on the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, who has warned that in addition to weak protections for consumers and financial stability, the bill allows tech companies to issue their own private currencies and "take control over the money supply."
She also said that the GENIUS Act mirrors the passage of the 2000 passage of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act (CFMA), which deregulated derivatives and helped the product proliferate in the lead-up to the financial crisis of 2008.
"It all sounds very similar. But there is one big difference between the GENIUS Act and the CFMA," said Warren on the Senate floor earlier in June, according to a copy of her remarks. "President [Bill] Clinton did not own a derivatives company. President [Donald] Trump does own a stablecoin company."
Warren told Rolling Stone ahead of key votes that the GENIUS ACT would "create a superhighway for Donald Trump's corruption."
Earlier this year, the Trump family's crypto company, World Liberty Financial, launched its own stablecoin called USD1.
In May, it was announced that USD1 would be used for a $2 billion deal between an investment firm established by the government of Abu Dhabi, MGX, and the world's largest crypto exchange, Binance.
The GENIUS Act bars executive branch officials and lawmakers from issuing stablecoins, but according to the Wall Street Journal, "it isn't clear how that would affect the Trump family's World Liberty Financial crypto firm because regulators would have to interpret the company's ownership structure."
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16 Senate Dems Join GOP to Advance Crypto Bill—A Gift to Trump's 'Reeking Corruption'
"No Democrats should be supporting Trump's self-enrichment," said one grassroots progressive group.
May 20, 2025
Despite concerns that it does not address U.S. President Donald Trump's ties to the crypto industry, 16 Democrats in the Senate voted with most Republicans on Monday to advance a bill that creates a regulatory framework for stablecoins, digital assets whose value is tied to traditional currency, such as the U.S. dollar, or a commodity like gold.
The industry-backed Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins (GENIUS) Act passed a cloture vote, with support from Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), the original co-sponsor of the bill, Angela Alsobrooks (D-Md.), Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.), Mark Warner (D-Va.), Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-Del.), Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.), Ben Ray Luján (N.M.), Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), Cory Booker (D-N.J.), Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.), John Fetterman (D-Pa.), Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.), Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.), Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), and Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.). The bill is now teed up for Senate debate.
Back in February, a coalition of consumer groups and watchdogs warned that the bill would accelerate the "convergence of Big Tech and Big Finance" and is "a necessary prerequisite for future giveaways to the crypto industry."
In early May, the legislation faltered after several crypto-friendly Democrats raised concerns that it did not contain strong enough provisions around anti-money laundering, national security, and other issues.
Pro-crypto Democrats have said that the version of the bill that was considered on Monday contains a number of revisions that address those concerns, including more consumer protections and some limitations on Big Tech's ability to issue stablecoins.
However, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.)—the top Democrat on the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs—said on the Senate floor Monday that the bill's "basic flaws remain unaddressed," according to prepared remarks.
Warren is concerned, in particular, that the bill does not "rein in the president's crypto corruption."
"Trump and his family have already pocketed hundreds of millions of dollars from his crypto ventures and they stand to make hundreds of millions more from his stablecoin, USD1, if this bill passes," Warren said. "Passing this bill means that we can expect more anonymous buyers, big companies, and foreign governments to use the president's stablecoin as both a shadowy bank account shielded from government oversight and as a way to pay off the president personally."
USD1 is a stablecoin developed by the Trump family crypto firm, World Liberty Financial. A few weeks ago, it was announced that USD1 would be used for a $2 billion deal between an investment firm established by the government of Abu Dhabi, MGX, and the world's largest crypto exchange, Binance.
Warren on Monday also expressed concern that the bill, even with revisions, creates a relatively weak regulatory framework, and still allows Big Tech to create private currencies, among other objections.
"Democrats correctly deride Republicans for abetting Trump's endless, daily, sulfurous corruption. But given the chance to stand up to his crypto grift—perhaps the most reeking corruption in presidential history—too many Democrats instead yielded to another depravity, namely unprecedented political spending by a handful of crypto corporations and billionaires," said Public Citizen co-president Lisa Gilbert on Monday, referencing election spending by the crypto industry.
In the last election cycle, crypto industry-supported super political action committees gave money to multiple senators who voted for cloture on Monday, including Slotkin and Gallego.
"No Democrats should be supporting Trump's self-enrichment," the grassroots progressive group Indivisible wrote on Tuesday on Bluesky.
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