In just over a month, the cryptocurrency market has pulverized the value of 1,200 billion dollars. The continuous declines since mid-October have wiped out a large part of the profits accumulated by small and large investors. Among the latter there is a well-known one: Donald Trump, who is also partly responsible for the euphoria that the sector experienced until October. But him Trump effect has completely vanished, with digital assets retreating to levels prior to his tenure. His direct support and entry into the cryptocurrency business served as fuel in the short term, but investors have already forgotten about it. Now the focus of the debate is the possible AI bubble and rate cuts. And Trump’s business empire has suffered a reality shock: Since September, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, he has lost at least $1 billion of his fortune (going from $7.7 billion in early September to $6.7 billion today), a decline largely due to his growing ties to crypto projects.
The Trump family’s commitment to digital assets has been total: they have launched tokens, created companies, invested in the sector, pardoned those convicted and legislated in favor of the sector, thus bringing the main cryptocurrencies to all-time highs. But from the extreme volatility and speculation, characteristic of this market, no one is safe, not even the president. Good proof of this was the launch, a few days before its inauguration, of the memecoin $TRUMP, a token without any support, as well as being linked to the figure of the tycoon. A few minutes after the launch, euphoria broke out and the token became worth more than 15 billion dollars (just over 14.3 billion euros). But like any speculative wave, the euphoria was short-lived and its price plummeted by up to 76% in a few hours.
In recent months $TRUMP has experienced ups and downs, but since mid-August it has intensified its declines and has lost around 40% of its value: since its launch it has fallen by 85%. To date, the extent of the Trump family’s involvement in this project is unclear; According to Bloomberg calculations, its environment owns approximately 40% of the total of these tokens. At current prices, that stake is valued at about $310 million, a loss of $117 million since the end of August.
But this is just the tip of the iceberg of the presidential family’s crypto empire. With its flagship project, the crypto platform Finance for world freedomissued the WLFI token, which has fallen 38% since the beginning of September: The president’s entourage owns a series of tokens that reached a book value of around $6 billion at its peak, but are now worth half that, around $3.15 billion, according to Bloomberg data. However, these assets are not included in the agency’s calculations, as they are not traded on organized markets.
Nor were all operations loss-making. In August, the company sold part of these assets to Alt5 Sigma Corp, a biotechnology company turned fintechwhose board of directors was joined by Eric Trump. From this sale, the Trump company earned $750 million in cash and an equity stake. Alt5Sigma, however, has had worse luck: since then its shares have fallen by 78%.
Finance for world freedom It has become a stepping stone for Trump’s children to enter the crypto ecosystem. In addition to this platform, they have extended their influence to other digital asset related companies. Eric Trump co-founded American Bitcoin, a cryptocurrency mining company, in March where he serves as Chief Strategy Officer and owns about 7.5% of the Nasdaq-listed company. Donald Trump Jr. also owns a smaller stake, although the percentage is unknown. The company’s shares hit a high on September 9, bringing Eric Trump’s stake to $630 million. But since then they have been in free fall: they have sunk by 53%, wiping out more than 300 million of Trump’s son’s assets.
Even with Trump Media, founded by the president, they gave their all. In recent months they have submitted applications to launch three ETFs: one linked to bitcoin, another to bitcoin and ether and another that tracks the price of these two assets and others such as solana, cronos and XRP. The company, which is unprofitable, has spent about $2 billion in the leading cryptocurrency, according to a statement in July, and maintains about 11,500 bitcoins in its reserves – acquired when they were around $115,000 – implying a loss of about 25%. He also began to accumulate units of chronograph (CRO), an unknown token issued by exchange Crypto.com. At the end of September it held approximately $147 million in this asset. Since then, the CRO has lost 45% of its value and Trump Media follows in its wake: it has collapsed by 70% in the year and its shares are now around historic lows.
Despite this, the Trumps’ confidence in the cryptocurrency market remains intact. Via his account on In a market where sharp turns are the norm, we will have to see whether this belief will end up being a long-term strategy or whether it will become one of the major sources of volatility for his own empire, capable of testing the patience and spirit of the president, who is also very unpredictable.
