February 7, 2025
Although Donald Trump made a splash in 2021 when he called Bitcoin a “scam,” it seems the President has changed his tune. Just days before his inauguration, Trump himself released a controversial personal meme coin, $Trump, soon followed by $Melania. The new coins garnered both backlash and praise, with Congress, crypto players, and compliance experts split on whether their release was exploitative or genius.
Meme coins are a particular type of cryptocurrency, a speculative instrument with little practical utility—essentially, the coins are “for fun,” with proponents likening them to a kind of digital collectible. Fun or not, these coins have long been the subject of debate—and the ethics concerns raised by the volatility of meme coins have been compounded by the fact that the person behind these latest coins is the President of the United States.
Trump’s initial coin offering (ICO) released 200 million tokens to the public, while two Trump-owned entities (CIC Digital LLC and Fight Fight Fight LLC) retained the remaining 800 million tokens. The value of $Trump instantly skyrocketed, shooting to $75 per coin within one day. Hours after the launch, $Trump’s market valuation exceeded $5 billion. This rapid appreciation catapulted the new coin to the 19th most valuable coin globally, with a trading value close to $13 billion.
After the initial clamor, the coin experienced volatility, with its value decreasing by about 26% by the President’s inauguration. The coin held a nearly $5.5 billion valuation in the following week, though as of publication, suffered a steep drop (alongside many other meme coins) as the market reacted to some of the President’s recent economic policy announcements. Considering Trump and his team still hold 80 percent of the coins, they stand to rake in billions if they sell their shares—a common strategy for meme coins, commonly referred to as a “pump and dump.”
$Trump undoubtedly raises some questions about the future of crypto regulation, but it’s not the only signal the President has given that he’s interested in cozying up to digital currencies. Before he was elected, he courted crypto companies for campaign contributions, promising to make the United States the “crypto capital of the planet and bitcoin superpower of the world.” Companies like Ether and other key players in the industry expressed their excitement that Trump appeared poised to advance distributed ledger technology and integrate it into national policy. In total, crypto executives and investors spent more than $130 million on the 2024 election cycle—and a lot of that money went into Trump’s coffers.
The Trump Administration made headlines before the inauguration when it hosted a black-tie event called the “Crypto Ball” in Washington, DC. This event, organized by BTC Inc. and Stand with Crypto—two organizations advocating for “clear and sensible” crypto regulation—drew some high-profile sponsorships by crypto firms, such as Coinbase, MicroStrategy, and Galaxy Digital. Trump’s friendliness toward the industry may also be fueling digital currency valuation. Bitcoin is currently holding at over $90,000 for all of 2025 to date, and is, in the view of many industry stakeholders, hotter than ever.
As one of his first acts back in office, Trump signed an Executive Order to construct a working group to evaluate current crypto regulations and explore creating a digital asset stockpile. The working group is to be led by the White House’s “AI and Crypto Czar” (a brand-new position), David Sacks. Sacks is a venture capitalist best known for co-founding PayPal.
“We will have regulations, but from now on the rules will be written by people who love your industry, not hate your industry,” Trump told attendees at a bitcoin conference in Tennessee over the summer.
While it’s unclear if the former Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chair Gary Gensler “hated” crypto, it is true that the SEC has long dragged its feet on some basic questions related to coins—namely, whether they should be classified as securities or commodities. How crypto is classified, of course, affects which agency regulates its trading: as of February 2023, the SEC’s stance was that crypto is a commodity, and thus should be regulated not by the SEC, but by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).
Trump’s administration seems likely to depart from Gensler’s view, as the SEC announced it was instituting a new cryptocurrency task force in January. SEC Commissioners Mark Uyeda and Hester Peirce will head the new group, which will be developing regulatory frameworks for digital assets and the compliance challenges that come with them. Both Uyeda and Peirce are known proponents of crypto, with Peirce even earning the nickname “Crypto Mom” within the SEC.
While some industry insiders are thrilled by Trump’s apparent interest in crypto, compliance and ethics groups warn that Trump’s foray into digital currency presents an enormous conflict of interest. From his position of power, Trump creating a meme coin opens the door to potential foreign buyers seeking to curry influence within his administration. As a recent address authored by Senator Elizabeth Warren states, $Trump and $Melania represent a direct means—open to all people, foreign and domestic—of funneling money to the President. According to Warren, this is highly unprecedented and potentially in violation of the U.S. Constitution, which stipulates that the President may not accept any foreign gift without the consent of Congress.
Allegra Abramson, Esq. (LAW ’24) is the Postdoctoral Fellow at Temple Law’s Center for Compliance and Ethics.