GuShiio.com It is now clear that the Trump family not only wants to put the United States on the path of supporting cryptocurrencies through friendlier regulatory measures, they also want a piece of it.
Original title: Crypto’s First Family Is Deepening the Swamp
Written by Lionel Laurent, Bloomberg Opinion Column
Compiled by: J1N, Techhub News
Eric Trump, the second son of U.S. President Trump, believes that now is a good time to buy Ethereum. He believes that his support for Ethereum has driven the temporary rise in the currency price. But at the same time, it is also a good time for politicians and regulators to take action to establish stricter regulations on the cryptocurrency business that the Trump family and their associates are actively promoting, whose family business is expanding rapidly and has serious conflicts of interest with regulators.
It is now clear that the Trump family not only wants to put the United States on the path of supporting cryptocurrencies through friendlier regulatory measures, they also want a piece of it. World Liberty Financial, a decentralized financial platform backed by the Trump family, has built cryptocurrency reserves, including Ethereum worth approximately $340 million. According to Reuters, Trump issued billions of Memecoin out of thin air and generated nearly $100 million in transaction fee revenue for the president-related agencies. In addition, Trump’s Truth Social platform is also expanding its business and plans to enter the financial services sector.
This is not a small investment like ordinary families. Based on my calculations using current spot prices, the book value of Memecoin currently held by Trump-linked institutions is approximately $14.9 billion. If these numbers are staggering, the risks are equally staggering. As investors and industry insiders curry favor with the Trump team by buying its tokens, power transfer and corruption will eventually intensify. At the same time, it also brings moral hazard, because when the world’s most powerful people and their relatives promote Memecoin and are able to take its risks, it will lead to more people investing in Memecoin without knowing their own risk tolerance. When Trump was told how valuable his Memecoin holdings were, he responded almost indifferently,”Several billion dollars, that’s just a small amount of money.”
So when Eric Trump amicably suggested on Twitter that “Ethereum is worth buying,” he was not just saying it, just as he seemed to realize this when he deleted the phrase “You can thank me later” from X. Whether by coincidence or design, World Liberty put his ideas into practice, adding to its holdings of Ethereum worth about $55 million at the project site after Trump’s tariff threat triggered a sell-off over the weekend. This came after the platform transferred most of its reserves to Coinbase, although they denied there were plans to sell. At this stage, the conspiracy theory that Trump’s team harvests the market through cryptocurrency is untenable. After all, Trump’s tariff policy is not conducive to cryptocurrency, and his son’s tweets have a very limited overall impact on the market. However, since this is the third week of the new government’s inauguration, the atmosphere of a “banana republic” is already very strong.
Democracies have existed long enough to establish institutionalized safeguards to prevent political conflicts of interest. But the question is whether the authorities are determined enough to actually implement these measures. The United States promoted reform of official ethics and transparency after the Watergate Incident, and also introduced the 2012 Stock Act to crack down on insider trading, as well as the Foreign Interests Clause, which has existed since the Constitution. Nor can cryptocurrencies be an excuse to evade regulation: the EU’s latest digital asset rules clearly stipulate provisions against insider trading and market abuse. Moreover, Trump’s nominated former Democratic congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard has agreed to sell her stock and cryptocurrency holdings to comply with relevant regulations.
If the authorities do not have effective enforcement and strengthening measures, then the regulation of behavior will become illusory. Trump seems to care nothing about this. Trump’s nominee for Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick did not say whether he would avoid participating in the cryptocurrency working group because his company, Cantor Fitzgerald, holds convertible bonds related to the stablecoin Tether. There is a problem of theft within the institution that could cause financial losses in the future; for example, when the German financial technology company Wirecard AG collapsed, staff of its regulator BaFin were suspected of insider trading Wirecard’s shares rather than fulfilling supervisory responsibilities. We hope that David Sacks, appointed by Trump as head of cryptocurrency, will truly deliver on his promise when he promises to strengthen consumer protection.
At the very least, a basic requirement for all politicians is that they must deposit all their investments in “blind trusts” on the day they take office, while also imposing restrictions on the investments of their relatives. Here,”blind trusts” refer to an asset management method in which politicians hand over their assets to a third party for management, thereby avoiding any influence on investment operations and preventing officials from seeking personal gain through power. This is the view put forward by Garen Markarian, a corporate governance expert at the University of Lausanne. What is worrying is that the current general attitude among the elite is to advocate reducing supervision rather than strengthening censorship of politicians and their related investments.
Trump is joining forces with the cryptocurrency community to lash out at the so-called “debanking” phenomenon, while Musk is allowed to set his own rules and is using DOGE as a weapon against the government. This is completely typical of overconfidence, especially considering the president’s previous conviction for fraud. This also sends an arrogant signal to ordinary people, letting people see that the law will treat these people more lenient if they have internal information. The regulatory chaos in the cryptocurrency field has become clear, but there are few signs of actions to clean up this chaos.
