As strategic Bitcoin reserves are being established in the United States and the cryptocurrency industry gears up to fund candidates for another American Presidential election, it is useful to recall that this once alternative digital financial community was originally quite anti-state. The Bitcoin white paper circulated at the height of the 2008 global financial crisis proposed alternative electric cash that was not centralized around central banks (Nakamoto 2008). What eventually became the realm of so-called ‘decentralized finance’ (DeFi) still pits itself firmly against traditional centralized finance (CeFi), where state and quasi-state, as well as large too-big-to-fail financial (TBTF) institutions, are the core actors rather than individual people and smaller distributed organizations.
How times have changed. In its less than two-decade existence, ‘crypto’ has become increasingly centralized and replicated key features of traditional finance. Moreover, DeFi has crept into the core of CeFi. This evolution has occurred most clearly in the United States of America (USA). After the Joe Biden Democratic presidency’s antagonistic approach to crypto was decried for its all-around ‘bad policy’, the DeFi industry primarily backed Trump and the Republicans in the 2024 presidential election. This was despite the Republican presidential candidate Donald J. Trump having called Bitcoin a scam in 2021. Trump promised to become the Bitcoin president in a rousing speech at the Miami Bitcoin conference in 2024.
The post-2024 election ‘Trump bump’ did briefly make Bitcoin great again, at least in terms of its dollar exchange price, which rose to the all-time high of $126,080 in October 2025. However, a subsequent halving in the dollar price of Bitcoin, to $63,000 at the time of writing, has been far less well received in the crypto community. The enthusiasm for Trump in this industry- or self-described ‘space’-cooled in 2026 as the ‘artificial intelligence’ bubble ramped up, the administration’s previously appointed ‘crypto czar’ departed, and key pro-crypto legislation stalled in Congress.
These products have transparently exposed for the world to clearly see the uncomfortable role of crypto in the corruption of centralized state power, which DeFi supposedly arose against.
After going nearly all in for Trump since 2024 (while, of course, still hedging bets and also donating to Democratic candidates), the DeFi industry — not unlike other backers of Trump since 2024 — is having doubts. Despite Trump supposedly ‘ending the war on crypto’ and turning the USA into ‘the Bitcoin superpower’, there are doubts about the costs of having become the ‘crypto capital of the world’ by cozying up to state power and becoming part of the broader, increasingly reviled, Big Tech-Big State.
A strangely under-considered conundrum in crypto’s growing ambivalence about Trump and MAGA has been the suite of crypto and DeFi products launched just as the president returned to the highest office of the world’s superpower. These products have transparently exposed for the world to clearly see the uncomfortable role of crypto in the corruption of centralized state power, which DeFi supposedly arose against.
Transparent crypto-corruption in the USA and beyond
If corruption is defined simply as the abuse of entrusted power for private gain, then the over $1 billion Trump officially made off of crypto in 2025 alone fits the bill. About half of Trump’s crypto earnings came from royalties of “Celebration Coins”: meme-tokens that use Trump and his family branding, like $Trump, launched near the 2025 re-inauguration and criticized by the opposition Democratic party as “textbook example of a pump and dump scheme, allowing his [Trump] insiders the ability to buy in early and cash out at the expense of regular investors”. The other half of Trump’s crypto earnings in 2025 came from sales of digital tokens via World Liberty Financial. This Miami-based DeFi firm was co-founded in 2024 by a group consisting of Trump’s sons, Donald Jr. and Eric (the company’s Vice-President), as well as the sons of Trump’s long-time business partner Steve Witkoff, Alex Witkoff, and Zach Witkoff, who is the company’s CEO. While a majority of the company is owned by the Trump family, 49% ownership in World Liberty Financial is held by an investor group led by the United Arab Emirates national security adviser Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed al-Nahyan, purchased for a half-billion-dollar price shortly before Trump’s 2025 inauguration.
Bribery, payola, and other forms of corruption are of course not unfamiliar to American and democratic politics in general, nor to crypto/DeFi itself, as the collapse of the exchange FTX and many other examples have showcased. However, crypto-corruption of the US Presidency is novel and has important implications for both the crypto-industry and the world for at least two reasons.
Similarly, Trump is not shy about linking sales of his memecoins to opportunities to influence US policy, for instance, holding dinner parties at Mar-a-Lago for leading purchasers of $TRUMP and $MELANIA, the first lady’s meme coin.
First, the blatantness of Trump’s corruption via crypto and the lack of an attempt to disguise crypto corruption means that it is quite transparent. World Liberty Financial issues both the governance token WLF$ and the so-called stablecoin USD1 using distributed ledger technology (DLTs), where transactions are visible on digital ledgers. Despite doubts about its now-former auditor, World Liberty Financial publishes proof of reserves to emphasize how USD1 is backed by Treasury bills and other US-dollar assets. Buying USD1 is more than token support for the Trump administration: the Trump family benefits when equivalent US dollars are deposited with World Liberty Financial. The World Liberty “Gold Paper” and Trump’s sons in interviews try to link their gains to the wider benefits of maintaining US dollar hegemony by emphasizing how USD1 increases global demand for greenbacks at a time when their international usage is progressively shrinking. Similarly, Trump is not shy about linking sales of his memecoins to opportunities to influence US policy, for instance, holding dinner parties at Mar-a-Lago for leading purchasers of $TRUMP and $MELANIA, the first lady’s meme coin.
Second, the internationalization of Trump’s DeFi, as well as wrappings of World Liberty Financial in financial freedom and inclusion discourse, has implications for crypto as an international industry oriented around overcoming exclusion. That anyone around the world can fairly smoothly purchase $TRUMP, WLF$ and USD1 underlines one of the core propositions of DeFi as enabling access to individuals and organizations ‘financially under-served’ by traditional CeFi. While financial inclusion may broadly be laudable, the risk for crypto is that this form of ‘inclusion’ also enables financial and political access to the highest political office of the USA to convicted criminals.
Enabling transparent state corruption poses risks to the legitimacy of crypto and decentralized finance more generally. An oft-cited case in international media is that of the Chinese-born founder of TRON, a crypto platform, Justin Sun, who invested $75 million in World Liberty Financial in 2024. Sun subsequently faced SEC charges of fraud and market manipulation, ongoing since 2023, against him dropped in 2025. As the top investor in the $TRUMP memecoin, Sun was also able to attend a private dinner with the president in 2025. Another prominently reported case is that of Chinese-born Canadian citizen Changpeng Zhao, known in the DeFi world as CZ, who received a Presidential pardon in 2025 for anti-money laundering violations he pleaded guilty to in 2023 as head of the world’s largest crypto-token exchange, Binance. This pardon attracted large media coverage when, in a now infamous 60-Minutes report, Trump responded to an inquiry about Zhao by stating that he had “no idea who he is”. Further international media coverage of crypto-corruption stemmed from the authorization to export scarce advanced American AI chips to the United Arab Emirates after USD1 was used by Abu Dhabi investment firm MGX to invest $2 billion in Binance. The world’s largest crypto-exchange is estimated to hold nearly 87% of all USD1 in circulation, or roughly $4.7 billion out of the $5.4 billion total supply of the Trump-linked stablecoin. The close connection between these international events raises the risks of crypto becoming increasingly involved in geopolitics as a primarily American corruption vehicle.
Four questions for the future of transparent crypto-corruption
Given the uncomfortable implications for both American democracy and the legitimacy of the DeFi industry, there has been surprisingly little overt pushback so far against Trump’s crypto-corruption. To the contrary, World Liberty Financial in August 2026 received a conditional approval for a national bank charter, which may enable further scaling up of the scope of Trump family profiteering from the highest office.
Yet, it remains unclear if the association with Trump crypto-corruption will damage the prospects for the crypto industry under any future Democratic or less pro-crypto Republican administration.
Four interrelated questions should guide future analysis of crypto-corruption. First, do American voters who are faced with a litany of Trump scandals, as well as MAGA supporters who are confronted with backpedaling from the President’s campaign promises, add crypto-corruption to the reasons to turn on him? If so, where do the crucial independent voters and MAGA supporters put their support? The Democratic candidate for president in 2024, Kamala Harris, pivoted late in the campaign to a more pro-crypto stance. The crypto industry has been careful to also fund Democratic candidates. Yet, it remains unclear if the association with Trump crypto-corruption will damage the prospects for the crypto industry under any future Democratic or less pro-crypto Republican administration.
Thus, a second question regards what future US Presidents will do: stem or embrace crypto corruption? It may become normalized as yet another unfortunate but commonplace feature of politics in the world’s superpower democracy. This possibility raises a third question: will individuals and countries learn from the CZ, Justin Sun, and UAE examples to utilize crypto-corruption as an avenue of influence? Countries and even the crypto industry itself could ostensibly try to influence US presidents to make policies that take the planet on alternative, less war-ish and pro-AI paths. Such a scenario raises a final provocative question: could conditions of any normalized transparent corruption, purchasing $TRUMP, USD1 and WLF$ justify unconventional manners of trying to stop war, to tackle climate change and at least advocate for policies that are not only good for the Trump family but for the world? If it is here to stay, could crypto-corruption of the highest office be repurposed from a means of pardoning criminals to attempting to achieve different ends?
