The Department of Justice on Wednesday asked a court to let the agency seize $225 million from a so-called “pig butchering” operation—a term that describes scams where con men build up the trust of a victim over time, and then trick them into handing over large amounts of money. The funds, which the crooks held in USDT stablecoins, were laundered through the crypto exchange OKX, according to Justice Department. This is the U.S.’s largest ever seizure of funds tied to crypto confidence schemes, said the agency.
While prosecutors didn’t name one perpetrator in the complaint, they did say the funds were linked to a “scam compound” in the Philippines. These locales usually house scores of workers who labor in shifts to lure victims into parting ways with their crypto, like Bitcoin, or cash. Many of these workers are employed by transnational criminal rings and forced to work against their will, according to the United Nations.
The DOJ was able to identify more than 430 victims tied to the 144 OKX accounts through which victims’ funds were laundered. One of these victims was Shan Hanes, the former CEO of Heartland Tri-State Bank in Kansas. In August 2024, Hanes was sentenced to 24 years in prison for stealing $47 million of his bank’s funds to invest in what he thought was a cryptocurrency investment opportunity that turned out to be a scam.
“These schemes harm American victims, costing them billions of dollars every year,” Matthew Galeotti, head of the DOJ’s criminal division, said in a statement.
Losses from cryptocurrency scams have accelerated in the U.S. over the past five years, according to the most recent annual report on internet crime from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. From 2023 to 2024, the money Americans lost skyrocketed 66% to $9.3 billion and the number of complaints the agency received more than doubled to nearly 150,000, said the government agency.
The most common crime linked to cryptocurrencies was extortion, or when bad actors manipulate photos or videos to create explicit content and lure victims into sending crypto. The second most common type was investment fraud, or when criminals promise victims outsized returns if they send them money.
This latter category includes Hanes, the former bank CEO. “He was the pig that was butchered,” wrote his lawyer at the time of his sentencing. “Mr. Hanes’s vulnerability to the Pig Butcher scheme caused him to make some very bad decisions, for which he is truly sorry for causing damage to the bank and loss to the Stockholders.”
Geopolitical tensions in the Middle East have spilled over into the crypto industry. On Tuesday, Nobitex, the largest crypto exchange in Iran, was hacked for more than $90 million, according to the crypto analytics firm Elliptic. A group that calls itself Gonjeshke Darande, or Predatory Sparrow, claimed responsibility for the hack. “These cyberattacks are the result of Nobitex being a key regime tool for financing terrorism and violating sanctions,” Predatory Sparrow wrote on X.
Instead of pocketing the $90 million of Bitcoin, Dogecoin, and more than 100 different cryptocurrencies that they raided, the hacking group decided to destroy (“burn” in crypto parlance) the funds instead so as to send a political message, according to Elliptic.
Blockchain addresses, or locations in a database that record how much money someone has, are randomly generated and typically consist of a garbled string of numbers and letters. For this operation, though, Predatory Sparrow sent the hacked funds to addresses that included the phrase “FuckiRGCTerrorists.” (IRGC refers to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a branch of the Iranian army.)
“To generate addresses with so many specific terms inside it would require so much computing power that you’re not going to do it within any reasonable lifetime,” Arda Akartuna, a lead crypto threat researcher at Elliptic, told Fortune. “So, it seems to have been more of a symbolic hack, as opposed to one where the intention is financial.”
Social media accounts for both Nobitex and Predatory Sparrow did not immediately return a request for comment. “The vast majority of assets are stored in cold wallets and were not impacted,” Nobitex wrote on X after the hack.
“I’ve never seen a hack that has occurred in the way that this one has,” said Akartuna.
Rising geopolitical tensions
The exploit of Nobitex follows days of violent conflict between Israel and Iran.
After a United Nations-backed nuclear watchdog said on Thursday that Iran was not complying with prohibitions against the development of a military nuclear program, Israel launched a series of missiles against the Islamic Republic. Iran retaliated with its own strikes, and the two countries have traded blows over the past six days.
On Tuesday, Predatory Sparrow, which Elliptic’s Akartuna says has repeatedly been linked to Israeli operatives, claimed responsibility for the hack of Iran’s Bank Sepah and destruction of the financial institution’s data. The hackers said the bank repeatedly circumvented international sanctions.
Predatory Sparrow made the same claims of sanctions evasions against Nobitex, which primarily caters towards Iranian users. In 2022, the U.S. sanctioned Iranian nationals who used the crypto exchange to launder proceeds from cyberattacks, according to Chainalysis, another crypto analytics firm.
Bitcoin options show traders are hedging against a price pullback to the $100,000 price level with geopolitical and economic uncertainty rising across global financial markets.
The put-to-call volume ratio on the crypto derivatives exchange Deribit surged to 2.17 over the past 24 hours, reflecting a strong tilt toward protective bets. Put options, which offer downside insurance by giving the holder of the contract the right to sell at a certain price, saw outsized demand, particularly in short-dated contracts. For options expiring June 20, open interest in puts struck at $100,000 now tops the board, with a put-to-call ratio of 1.16, underscoring concern about a near-term price fall.
Bitcoin reached an all-time high of $111,980 on May 22, and is up more than 50% since a now crypto-friendly Donald Trump was elected president of the U.S. for a second time in November. The largest cryptocurrency was little changed at about $104,377 on Wednesday.
The caution comes as Federal Reserve policymakers navigate a highly uncertain environment as geopolitical tension in the Middle East and volatile energy prices add to inflation and labor market risks tied to the Trump administration’s tariff policies. With U.S. officials widely expected to hold policy steady for a fourth straight meeting later Wednesday, markets will focus on the Fed’s latest projections for growth, unemployment and interest rates.
“A hawkish signal from the Federal Reserve could strengthen the US dollar and trigger a test of the psychological $100,000 mark,” Javier Rodriguez-Alarcón, chief investment officer of XBTO, wrote in a note. “Simultaneously, the geopolitical situation remains a wildcard; any credible de-escalation in the Middle East could serve as a significant risk-on catalyst, while a further deterioration would likely trigger another move down across risk assets.”
Three former engineers at crypto exchange Coinbase left the company earlier this year to start their own venture. On Wednesday, the team announced its new project: a crypto savings app called Nook, alongside $2.5 million in funding from venture capital firms Coinbase Ventures, Defy.vc, and UDHC. The company declined to disclose its valuation in the round.
Nook seeks to make it easier for non-crypto-native users to increase the amount of their crypto holdings through services like Aave, which let users lend their crypto to borrowers in exchange for interest.
Joey Isaacson, CEO and cofounder of Nook, told Fortune his team estimates that a user must go through 14 different steps to gain access to the average lending platform. This, he says, creates a barrier to entry for crypto investors who don’t understand the intricacies of blockchain technology and don’t have the time to learn it.
Nook hopes to strip away some of the complexities of other platforms by letting customers sign up with an email address rather than having to connect a crypto wallet, Isaacson said.
“What we’re trying to do is make the experience a lot easier, make the messaging a lot more clear…and stick to a clear setup where we are within the regulatory confines and we are following the rules,” he said.
While Isaacson says the company plans to introduce more lending programs in the future, Nook launched to the public on Wednesday with one partner, Moonwell, a lending platform founded in 2021 by another Coinbase alumnus.
Prior to launching publicly, Nook had been slowly onboarding customers from its waiting list of over 50,000 people. These users have received an 8% annual return by lending their Bitcoin or some other crypto to borrowers on Moonwell via Nook. “We can’t guarantee it, but that has been the result that users have been seeing,” Isaacson said.
Because cryptocurrencies are so volatile, it is risky to engage in lending and borrowing of crypto. However, Moonwell and other companies like it try to limit the risks involved by requiring borrowers to “overcollateralize” their loans, meaning they put in more crypto than they take out of the program to invest. In the instance that the value of the collateralized crypto falls to a predetermined threshold, the borrower is automatically liquidated, meaning they’re forced to return their loan and the program sells their collateralized crypto.
Another Coinbase alumnus and former CEO of lending protocol Compound, Jayson Hobby, is pursuing a similar venture called Legend. Hobby’s platform gives users broad access to multiple decentralized finance applications—platforms that facilitate a financial function without a third party like a bank—rather than forcing users to sign into a number of different accounts.
At the moment, Nook is free for customers to use. However, Isaacson said he will consider various revenue options after the company attracts a sizable user base. “Once we can make that connection and continue to build up our community, we see a few revenue options down the road,” Isaacson said.
The company will use the money raised in this round to fine-tune its technology and to market and distribute its product.
The Senate passed legislation Tuesday that would regulate a form of cryptocurrency known as stablecoins, the first of what the industry hopes will be a wave of bills to bolster its legitimacy and reassure consumers.
The fast-moving legislation, which passed by a 68-30 vote and will be sent to the House for potential revisions, comes on the heels of a 2024 campaign cycle in which the crypto industry ranked among the top political spenders in the country, underscoring its growing influence in Washington and beyond.
Eighteen Democratic senators crossed the aisle to vote for the legislation on Tuesday, siding with the Republican majority in the 53-47 Senate. Republican Sens. Josh Hawley and Rand Paul were the only members of their party to oppose the measure.
It was the second major bipartisan bill to advance through the Senate this year, following the Laken Riley Act on immigration enforcement in January.
Still, most Democrats opposed the bill. They raised concerns that the measure does little to address President Donald Trump’s personal financial interests in the crypto space.
“We weren’t able to include certainly everything we would have wanted, but it was a good bipartisan effort,” said Sen. Angela Alsobrooks, D-Md., on Monday. Alsobrooks, a co-sponsor of the bill, added, “This is an unregulated area that will now be regulated.”
Sen. Bill Hagerty, R-Tenn., the bill’s sponsor, said on the Senate floor ahead of the vote that the legislation will have “far reaching implications” for the financial system — a “paradigm shifting development” that he believes will bring it into the 21st century.
“With this bill, the United States is a step closer to being a global leader in crypto,” Hagerty said.
Known as the GENIUS Act, the bill would establish guardrails and consumer protections for stablecoins, a type of cryptocurrency typically pegged to the U.S. dollar. The acronym stands for “Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins.”
The bill only needed a simple majority vote to pass Tuesday, after it had already cleared its biggest procedural hurdle last week in a 68-30 vote, with 18 Democrats siding with Republicans. But the bill has faced more resistance than initially expected.
Trump’s stake in crypto
There is a provision in the bill that bans members of Congress and their families from profiting off stablecoins. But that prohibition does not extend to the president and his family, even as Trump builds a crypto empire from the White House.
Last month, the Republican president hosted a private dinner at his golf club in Virginia with top investors in a Trump-branded meme coin. His family holds a significant stake in World Liberty Financial, a crypto project that launched its own stablecoin, USD1.
Trump reported earning $57.35 million from token sales at World Liberty Financial in 2024, according to a public financial disclosure released Friday. A meme coin linked to him has generated an estimated $320 million in fees, though the earnings are split among multiple investors.
The administration is broadly supportive of crypto’s growth and its integration into the economy. Ahead of Tuesday’s vote, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent urged the Senate to pass the bill, saying it could help stablecoins “grow into a $3.7 trillion market by the end of the decade.”
Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase — the nation’s largest crypto exchange and a major advocate for the bill — has met with Trump and praised his early moves on crypto. This past weekend, Coinbase was among the more prominent brands that sponsored a parade in Washington commemorating the Army’s 250th anniversary — an event that coincided with Trump’s 79th birthday.
But the crypto industry emphasizes that they view the legislative effort as bipartisan, pointing to champions on each side of the aisle.
“The GENIUS Act will be the most significant digital assets legislation ever to pass the U.S. Senate,” Senate Banking Committee Chair Tim Scott, R-S.C., said ahead of a key vote last week. “It’s the product of months of bipartisan work.”
Some Democrats object
The bill did hit one rough patch in early May, when a bloc of Senate Democrats who had previously supported the bill reversed course and voted to block it from advancing. That prompted new negotiations involving Senate Republicans, Democrats and the White House, which ultimately produced the compromise version that won passage Tuesday.
Alsobrooks said “many, many changes” were made during negotiations and “it’s a much better deal because we were all at the table.”
Ahead of the vote Tuesday, GOP Wyoming Sen. Cynthia Lummis said that she is “OK” with where the stablecoin legislation has landed after negotiations.
“I’m not thrilled with it, but it’s OK,” said Lummis, one of the bill’s co-sponsors.
Still, the bill leaves unresolved concerns over presidential conflicts of interest — an issue that remains a source of tension within the Democratic caucus.
“Passing the GENIUS Act without strong anti-corruption measures stamps a Congressional seal of approval on President Trump selling access to the government for personal profit,” Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley said in a statement after the bill’s passage.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., has been among the most outspoken as the ranking member on the Senate Banking Committee, warning that the bill creates a “super highway” for Trump corruption. She has also warned that the bill would allow major technology companies, such as Amazon and Meta, to launch their own stablecoins.
Among the Democrats who backed the bill was first-term Sen. Elissa Slotkin, who received $10 million in support from a crypto political action committee during her Michigan race last year. Slotkin acknowledged the bill “wasn’t perfect” but called it a “good-faith, bipartisan start” to regulating stablecoins.
The stablecoin legislation still faces several hurdles before reaching the president’s desk. It must clear the narrowly held Republican majority in the House, where lawmakers may try to attach a broader market structure bill — sweeping legislation that could make passage through the Senate more difficult.
Trump has said he wants stablecoin legislation on his desk before Congress breaks for its August recess, now just under 50 days away.
Senate Committee on Appropriations subcommittee Chairman Sen Bill Hagerty R-Tenn., questions Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chairman Paul Atkins, during a hearing to examine proposed budget estimate for fiscal year 2026 for the SEC, on Capitol Hill, on June 3, 2025, in Washington.
Ethereum is dead. Ethereum will be fine. The social media takes are flying on the state of the world’s second most valuable blockchain. Conceived in 2013, Ethereum has experienced a series of dramatic ups and downs, including an existential hack in 2016 and a remarkable technological upgrade in 2022. But this year has brought unprecedented scrutiny of the current and future direction of the project.
A big part of this is due to the price of Ethereum, which is badly lagging Bitcoin. The world’s most valuable cryptocurrency has notched a series of all-time highs and a flurry of interest from Wall Street investors. Meanwhile, as of Tuesday, Ethereum was trading around $2,500, about 50% lower than its all-time high, according to data from crypto exchange Binance.
Ether’s lackluster price movement has prompted some to proclaim Ethereum’s end. “Ethereum died,” wrote Max Keiser, a prominent Bitcoin booster, on X. “It just hasn’t been buried yet.”
This is an overstatement. But questions remain on whether Ethereum’s price slump reflects a temporary stumble, or whether the blockchain—long hailed by boosters as the computer of the future—will never grow into its promise.
Congestion fees and scaling
“Bitcoin has died many times… Ethereum has died several times,” Joseph Lubin, CEO of the blockchain technology firm Consensys and cofounder of Ethereum, told Fortune. “When there are challenges, we learn from them.”
Those challenges have been present since 2013, when a wiry 19-year-old from Canada named Vitalik Buterin had an idea for a new type of computer. Fearing that Big Tech firms had an unhealthy monopoly over cloud computing that could stifle developers, Buterin looked to blockchains instead. He and others came up with Ethereum—a decentralized blockchain-based computing platform where programmers’ code was immune to the whims of corporate behemoths.
Developers soon flocked to Ethereum, but the increase in activity brought a rise in “gas fees.” Every time users send each other assets on Ethereum, they need to pay with cryptocurrency—in the same way Amazon requires users to pay dollars to use its cloud computing network. The only difference is that Ethereum’s gas fees are distributed to the decentralized cohort of computers supporting the blockchain, instead of one corporate entity. In 2021, sending a few dollars of cryptocurrency to other users on Ethereum resulted in charges of sometimes hundreds of dollars, and developers looked for a solution.
That solution is what Ethereum’s critics say has sapped the network of some of its financial value. Instead of immediately working to speed up Ethereum’s core network, developers fostered a system of layer 2 blockchains, or L2s, built on top of Ethereum. These L2s—including Arbitrum, Optmism, and Polygon—package user data into one bundle and post that onto Ethereum, rather than ask the blockchain to process each transaction individually.
If gas fees are any indication, that strategy has worked. Since a peak in mid-2020, transaction costs have plummeted more than 99% on Ethereum, according to data from Glassnode.
But Kyle Samani, managing partner at crypto investment firm Multicoin Capital, believes this approach has made the core network of Ethereum less valuable. “It’s my fundamental view that a network is not sustainable or valuable without direct user activity,” he told Fortune.
Users have moved to L2s and drained Ethereum of some of the activity that propped up its cryptocurrency’s price, Samani, a noted supporter of the competing Solana blockchain, argued.
However, Paul Brody, chairman of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, an advocacy group for the blockchain, said fixation on the price of Ether in the short term is missing the point. “Ethereum is the amazing world computer,” he told Fortune. “I don’t think it can or should try to be all things, all people, and, especially, I don’t think Ethereum should also try to be the best, most deflationary cryptocurrency.”
Back to layer one
Ethereum’s upgrades, not any explicit work to buoy Ether’s price, should prompt a rise in demand for the cryptocurrency, said Brody. And that’s what developers are working on, said Danny Ryan and Vivek Raman, cofounders of the Ethereum advocacy group Ethrealize—one of many wings of a robust technical and cultural community based around the blockchain that convenes at large annual get-togethers like ETHDenver in Colorado.
Programmers are now optimizing the speed of the layer-1 network, not just its ecosystem of layer-2 chains, say Ryan and Raman. Plus, the duo believe that the flood of Wall Street and Big Tech firms exploring blockchain technology will spur a rush to buy the cryptocurrency. “I don’t think that we should pretend like the asset doesn’t need to be valuable,” added Danny Ryan. His cofounder Raman even equated Ethereum to “digital oil.”
“When you ask institutions, when we go have our meetings and say, ‘Which is a civilizational infrastructure, which is the global, neutral infrastructure that you can actually deploy real assets with real trust?’” Raman added. “Ethereum is the obvious choice.”
But whether Wall Street titans decide to go with Ethereum, rather than competitors like Solana, remains to be seen. Still, proponents are hopeful. “If we do our job, and we become the first place for everybody to do business,” said Brody, “then the asset price is just something that takes care of itself.”
The Senate is expected to approve legislation Tuesday that would regulate a form of cryptocurrency known as stablecoins, the first of what is expected to be a wave of crypto legislation from Congress that the industry hopes will bolster its legitimacy and reassure consumers.
The fast-moving legislation, which will be sent to the House for potential revisions, comes on the heels of a 2024 campaign cycle where the crypto industry ranked among the top political spenders in the country, underscoring its growing influence in Washington and beyond.
Eighteen Democratic senators have shown support for the legislation as it has advanced, siding with the Republican majority in the 53-47 Senate. If passed, it would become the second major bipartisan bill to advance through the Senate this year, following the Laken Riley Act on immigration enforcement in January.
Still, most Democrats oppose the bill. They have raised concerns that the measure does little to address President Donald Trump’s personal financial interests in the crypto space.
“We weren’t able to include certainly everything we would have wanted, but it was a good bipartisan effort,” said Sen. Angela Alsobrooks, D-Md., on Monday. She added, “This is an unregulated area that will now be regulated.”
Known as the GENIUS Act, the bill would establish guardrails and consumer protections for stablecoins, a type of cryptocurrency typically pegged to the U.S. dollar. The acronym stands for “Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins.”
It’s expected to pass Tuesday, since it only requires a simple majority vote — and it already cleared its biggest procedural hurdle last week in a 68-30 vote. But the bill has faced more resistance than initially expected.
There is a provision in the bill that bans members of Congress and their families from profiting off stablecoins. But that prohibition does not extend to the president and his family, even as Trump builds a crypto empire from the White House.
Trump hosted a private dinner last month at his golf club with top investors in a Trump-branded meme coin. His family holds a large stake in World Liberty Financial, a crypto project that provides yet another avenue where investors are buying in and enriching the president’s relatives. World Liberty has launched its own stablecoin, USD1.
The administration is broadly supportive of crypto’s growth and its integration into the economy. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent last week said the legislation could help push the U.S. stablecoin market beyond $2 trillion by the end of 2028.
Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase — the nation’s largest crypto exchange and a major advocate for the bill — has met with Trump and praised his early moves on crypto. This past weekend, Coinbase was among the more prominent brands that sponsored a parade in Washington commemorating the Army’s 250th anniversary — an event that coincided with Trump’s 79th birthday.
But the crypto industry emphasizes that they view the legislative effort as bipartisan, pointing to champions on each side of the aisle.
“The GENIUS Act will be the most significant digital assets legislation ever to pass the U.S. Senate,” Senate Banking Committee Chair Tim Scott, R-S.C., said ahead of a key vote last week. “It’s the product of months of bipartisan work.”
The bill did hit one rough patch in early May, when a bloc of Senate Democrats who had previously supported the bill reversed course and voted to block it from advancing. That prompted new negotiations involving Senate Republicans, Democrats and the White House, which ultimately produced the compromise version expected to win passage Tuesday.
“There were many, many changes that were made. And ultimately, it’s a much better deal because we were all at the table,” Alsobrooks said.
Still, the bill leaves unresolved concerns over presidential conflicts of interest — an issue that remains a source of tension within the Democratic caucus.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., has been among the most outspoken as the ranking member on the Senate Banking Committee, warning that the bill creates a “super highway” for Trump corruption. She has also warned that the bill would allow major technology companies, such as Amazon and Meta, to launch their own stablecoins.
If the stablecoin legislation passes the Senate on Tuesday, it still faces several hurdles before reaching the president’s desk. It must clear the narrowly held Republican majority in the House, where lawmakers may try to attach a broader market structure bill — sweeping legislation that could make passage through the Senate more difficult.
Trump has said he wants stablecoin legislation on his desk before Congress breaks for its August recess, now just under 50 days away.
Brian Armstrong, left, Co-founder and CEO of Coinbase, and Jeremy Allaire, Co-Founder, Chairman and CEO of Circle, participate in the State of Crypto Summit, in New York, on June 12, 2025.
On the campaign trail last year, then-candidate Donald Trump promised the crypto industry that he would become the first president to embrace blockchain technology. At the time, he didn’t reveal that he also planned to make crypto a cornerstone of his growing business empire.
On Friday, the White House released Trump’s first financial disclosure report as president, revealing new details on his web of business ventures, including his golf courses, sponsorship deals, and publicly traded media group. Notably, the report also provided a window into Trump’s crypto platform, World Liberty Financial, which his sons announced last summer.
According to the disclosures, Trump has earned over $57 million from token sales on the platform and holds nearly 16 billion of the governance tokens—the crypto version of voting shares—launched by World Liberty. Based on earlier sales of those tokens to accredited investors, which valued them between 1.5 and five cents, Trump’s holdings could be worth nearly $1 billion, though the token is not currently trading. Bloomberg recently estimated his total net worth at around $5.4 billion.
As government watchdogs argue that Trump’s ventures in the crypto industry represent a conflict of interest with Congress debating blockchain regulation, the new report provides the first substantial look at the president’s increasing entanglement with digital assets.
The first crypto president
Before his third run for president, Trump had expressed skepticism of crypto, describing Bitcoin as a “scam” just a few years ago. But he increasingly embraced the blockchain industry on the campaign trail last year as companies such as Coinbase and Ripple poured tens of millions of dollars into donations—a reaction to the Biden administration’s crackdown on the sector.
Trump not only touted the technology at industry events, including a Bitcoin conference last summer, but also began to explore his own ventures in the space. Trump had previously launched a series of NFTs, but the newer projects represented a full-blown move into the crypto business, primarily through the vehicle of World Liberty Financial.
The platform, first announced by his son Eric last August, promised a “new era of finance,” though its exact function is still unknown. In the ensuing months, World Liberty has launched a series of products. That has included the governance token, as well as a dollar-pegged stablecoin called USD1, which an Emirati investment firm used to invest $2 billion into the leading crypto exchange Binance in May.
While the exact ownership structure of World Liberty, as well as Trump’s potential profit from token sales, remained largely opaque, the financial disclosure report offers the first details on the president’s profit, including the $57 million earned off token sales. World Liberty offered WLFI to accredited investors, including the Chinese crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun, who had previously faced charges from the Securities and Exchange Commission that were dropped after Trump took office.
The report does not include details on Trump’s other major crypto project—his memecoin, also called Trump, which he launched the weekend before his inauguration. While Trump’s memecoin has plummeted in value since its release, dropping from a market capitalization of $9 billion in January to around $2 billion today, it has remained a source of potential profit—and controversy—for Trump, whose organization likely owns around 80% of the total supply. Trump hosted a dinner for the top holders of the memecoin in May, drawing criticism from lawmakers across the aisle and even industry lobbyists.
Trump continues to advance crypto industry priorities, including legislation in Congress that would establish regulation for stablecoins and token issuance. But even as real estate dominates his holdings, Friday’s financial disclosure report demonstrates the increasing importance of crypto to his business empire.
President Donald Trump (C) speaks alongside Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent (L) and White House Crypto Czar David Sacks at the The White House Digital Assets Summit at the White House on March 07, 2025
President Donald Trump earned $57.7 million from token sales by the crypto firm he and his sons helped launch last year, according to his required federal financial disclosure forms.
The financial disclosure, released Friday by the Office of Government Ethics, provided details on his sprawling empire, including hundreds of millions of dollars in income from his hotels, golf resorts and cryptocurrency ventures.
The $57.7 million came from sales by World Liberty Financial, the crypto firm launched last year before the election. Trump and his three sons, Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump and Barron Trump, are among the company’s founders, according to its website.
That haul wasn’t the largest source of the president’s income from private holdings. Trump Endeavor 12 LLC, a Miami-based company that owns golf courses and a resort, produced $110 million. His Mar-a-Lago Club generated more than $50 million in resort-related revenue.
Trump, who’s worth an estimated $4.8 billion according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, valued 22 assets at more than $50 million, including Mar-a-Lago, his Turnberry, Scotland, golf resort and his stakes in World Liberty Financial and Trump Media & Technology Group Corp., which owns his Truth Social platform. Officials disclose the values of their holdings in broad ranges with “over $50 million” the highest, which means that they can’t be used to calculate an individual’s net worth. Trump Media, for example, is currently worth $2.2 billion.
Fight Fight Fight LLC, which sells Trump’s meme coin, was launched in January and wasn’t included in the disclosure, which covers 2024. The company hosted a dinner that Trump attended for the 220 largest holders of the $TRUMP coin in May. The event, when announced in April, caused the coin’s price to shoot up 56%.
CIC Digital LLC, the entity that earns money through licensing Trump’s image on nonfungible tokens, produced income of $1.1 million in 2024. It also holds a wallet holding Etherium worth at least $1 million.
The 234-page disclosure also lists hundreds of trademarks Trump owns across the world, including in China, Taiwan, South Korea, Venezuela and other countries, and details his personal investments that aren’t part of his business empire, as well as first lady Melania Trump’s holdings.
Trump listed 11 outstanding debts on the form, including two judgments against him won by author E. Jean Carroll involving allegations of sexual assault and defamation and one owed from the criminal fraud case for which he was convicted of 34 felonies. Those debts were stayed pending the outcome of appeals Trump has filed.
He did not list any outstanding debt to lawyers or law firms stemming from the criminal and civil cases. Save America, his leadership political action committee, has paid most of those fees.
Trump had seven outstanding real estate loans, including mortgages in amounts of more than $50 million on Trump Tower, Trump National Doral and 40 Wall Street. He also listed debt on his American Express credit card of at least $15,000.
Vice President JD Vance also disclosed assets for him and his wife, Usha Vance, worth at least $6.5 million.
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