Eric Trump, President Donald Trump’s second son, thinks it’s a good time to buy ethereum, which he credits with driving the coin’s price briefly higher due to his support for it. But at the same time, it’s also a good time for politicians and regulators to take action to establish stricter regulatory measures against the cryptocurrency business that is being aggressively pushed by the Trump family and its associates, whose family business is expanding rapidly and has serious conflicts of interest with regulators.
It has now become clear that the Trump family doesn’t just want to put the U.S. on a path to support cryptocurrencies through friendlier regulatory measures, they want a piece of the action. A decentralized financial platform backed by the Trump family
World Liberty Financial has already built up a cryptocurrency reserve that includes about $340 million worth of
billion dollars worth of Ether. According to Reuters, Trump has issued billions of Memecoin out of thin air and generated nearly $100 million in transaction fee revenue for organizations associated with the president. In addition, Trump’s
Truth Social platform is also expanding its business with plans to enter the financial services sector.
This isn’t your average family’s kind of small-time investment; according to my calculations using the current spot price, the current holdings of Trump-linked organizations of
Memecoin has a book value of about 14.9
billion dollars. If those numbers are already staggering, the risks involved are just as staggering. As investors and industry insiders flock to ingratiate themselves with Team Trump by purchasing their tokens, it could ultimately lead to an increase in power transfers and corruption. At the same time, it also poses a moral hazard, as the world’s most powerful people and their relatives are promoting
Memecoin and being able to assume its risks will lead to more people investing in Memecoin as well without knowing their risk tolerance.When someone tells Trump that his holdings of
When someone told Trump how much his Memecoin holdings were worth, he responded almost nonchalantly, “Billions of dollars, that’s just chump change.
So when Eric Trump tweeted a friendly hint that ‘Ether is worth buying’, he was far from just saying it, just as he seemed to realize when he deleted the phrase ‘you can thank me later’ on X. Whether coincidentally or intentionally, World Liberty
has put his idea into practice, with the program’s address adding about $55 million worth of Ether after Trump’s tariff threats triggered a sell-off over the weekend. This comes after the platform shifted most of its reserves to
Coinbase
after it did so, although they denied having plans to sell. The conspiracy theory that Team Trump is harvesting the market through cryptocurrencies doesn’t hold water at this stage – after all, Trump’s tariff policy isn’t favorable to cryptocurrencies, and his son’s tweets have had a very limited impact on the market as a whole. However, given that this is the third week of the new administration, that ‘banana republic’ vibe is already very much in the air.
(When people say a country is like a ‘banana republic’, they are criticizing it for having serious problems with political chaos and corruption.)
Democracies have existed long enough to establish institutionalized safeguards against political conflicts of interest. But the question is whether the authorities are determined enough to actually enforce these measures. The United States, which had pushed for reforms in official ethics and transparency after the Watergate scandal, has also introduced
2012
Stock Act of 2012 to combat insider trading, as well as the Foreign Interest Clause, which has existed since the Constitution. Cryptocurrencies can’t be an excuse to avoid regulation, either: the EU’s latest digital asset rules have explicit provisions against insider trading and market abuse. Moreover, Trump’s nominee, former Democratic congresswoman
Tulsi Gabbard has also agreed to sell her stock and cryptocurrency holdings to comply with the regulations.
Without effective enforcement and reinforcement by the authorities, regulation of behavior will be null and void. Trump seems unconcerned about this. Trump’s nominee for Commerce Secretary
Howard Lutnick did not say whether he would recuse himself because his company, Cantor Fitzgerald, holds convertible bonds related to the stablecoin Tether
Tether, a stablecoin, and recused himself from participating in the cryptocurrency working group. There are issues of internal oversight within organizations that could cause financial losses in the future; for example, German fintech company Wirecard AG
collapsed when staff at its regulator, BaFin, were suspected of insider trading Wirecard’s stock rather than fulfilling their oversight responsibilities. We hope Trump-appointed cryptocurrency chief
David Sacks really delivers on his promises when he promises stronger consumer protections.
At the very least, a basic requirement for all politicians is that they have to put all their investments in ‘blindtrusts’ trusts on the day they take office, as well as limiting the investments of their relatives. The term “blind
trusts” refers to a form of asset management in which politicians hand over their assets to a third party to avoid any influence on investment operations and to prevent officials from using their power for personal gain. This is the view of Garen Markarian, an expert in corporate governance at the University of Lausanne.
point made by Garen Markarian. It is worrying that the prevailing elite attitude is surprisingly in favor of less oversight rather than more scrutiny of politicians and their related investments.
Trump is teaming up with the cryptocurrency community to pounce on the so-called ‘de-banking’ phenomenon; at the same time, Musk is being allowed to set his own rules, and he is using DOGE as a weapon against the government. This is completely typical of overconfidence, especially considering that this president has been convicted of fraud. It also sends an arrogant signal to the general public about the privileged class that has inside information, and the law treats those people with more leniency. The regulatory mess in the cryptocurrency space is well known, but there are few signs of action to clean it up.
