Donald Trump and Bitcoin: From ‘Not a Fan’ to Crypto Candidate

Next week, American voters will choose the next president. And of the two major party candidates, GOP nominee and former President Donald Trump has proven to be the most Bitcoin-friendly.

“We want all remaining Bitcoin to be made in the US,” he says said in June on his social media platform Truth Social.

Trump has now branded himself as a crypto-friendly candidate ahead of November’s divisive election, which will rake in millions of dollars. cash And digital asset donations of Silicon Valley’s technology leaders.

But it wasn’t always this way. Despite the Republican presidential candidate now calling for domestic Bitcoin production, he was once a staunch crypto critic. So, how did we get here?

Trump’s most defining early comment on cryptocurrency dates back to 2019, when as president… made it clear he didn’t like Bitcoin.

“I am not a fan of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, which are not money and whose value is highly volatile and based on thin air,” he said. said on Twitter at the time, before slamming shut Facebook’s plans for a digital currency.

“We only have one real currency in the US, and it is stronger than ever, both reliable and trustworthy,” he added. “It is by far the most dominant currency in the world, and always will be. It’s called the American dollar!”

Trump repeated his beliefs during a Bitcoin bull run in 2021. “Bitcoin just seems like a scam,” he said Fox Businessreiterating that he wanted the dollar to become the world’s leading currency.

Entering the NFT world

It took a long time for him to explicitly say he loved the best cryptocurrency, and the journey started with an unlikely crypto craze: NFT collectibles.

At the end of 2021, after Trump left the White House, his wife Melania left announced her plans for one Solana-based NFT collection. Solana Labs clarified that it had nothing to do with the launch of the collection on the blockchain, and Trump continued to do so save crypto despite his wife’s business being labeled “dangerous”.

The following year, however, the former commander-in-chief launched his own NFT collection. Minted on the Ethereum scaling network Polygoninitially was the digital trading card collection ridiculed– but it still sold out quickly and grossed millions of dollars.

Trump later said that he only launched the collection because he thought it was “kind of cute.” He has done so ever since launched more collections on Polygon, and even minted some of the third set on Bitcoin via the Ordinals protocol. A fourth collection launched in August 2024 with the largest number of NFTs to date.

Trump has even claimed that the success of his NFT collections, and the surprising number of buyers who used cryptocurrency instead of fiat money, helped change his view of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency.

A digital wallet linked to the ex-president by blockchain analytics firm Arkham Intelligence shows he did just that millions raised in royalties from the NFTs – and also includes some of the biggest unofficial Trump meme coins, likely sent to the wallet without Trump’s knowledge or consent.

Trump’s crypto embrace

But it wasn’t until this year that Trump really ramped up the pro-crypto talk. “I make money with it, I also have fun with it,” Trump said said in a March interview with CNBC’s Squawbox. “Crazy new currencies, that’s what I call them.”

When he hosted holders of his NFTs at his Mar-a-Lago resort in May, he told the crowd he was “good with” crypto – and lambasted Biden and the Democrats for being “against it.” Many saw the event as one turning point in conversations about crypto policy.

Now, along with his recent show of support for US Bitcoin mining, the digital asset space has become a prominent talking point of his campaign as he tries to win over the crypto community.

Rumors decreased in May that the world’s richest man and largest donor to the Trump campaign, Elon Musk, advised the presidential hopeful on a crypto strategy. (Musk denied the reports.) In July, the Republican Party released a draft party platform that explicitly mentioned crypto — a first for the industry.

After survived a murder In July, the business mogul and former reality TV star received public support from Musk, as well as support from many other prominent names in the digital asset space. And major crypto figures like Gemini’s Winklevoss twins and Kraken founder Jesse Powell have donated significant amounts of money to Trump.

Trump selected Senator JD Vance as his choice for running mate, along with the potential vice president seen as a pro-crypto candidate who previously disclosed Bitcoin holdings of between $100,000 and $250,000 in 2021.

But the most tangible sign of Trump’s embrace of crypto came when he spoke at the 2024 Bitcoin Conference in Nashville, Tennessee. There, he promised the crowd that he would build a “strategic Bitcoin stockpile” for the country and that his plan was to make the US the “crypto capital of the planet.”

The Trump family then teased a decentralized finance (DeFi) project called World Liberty Financial, with Trump himself posting several teasers on social media during the initial rollout.

The ex-president’s son, Donald Jr., has hinted that the crypto platform will be egalitarian. “For too long, the average American has been squeezed by the big banks and financial elites. It is time for us to take a stand together,” he says said on Twitter (aka X).

Then, a day after the second attempt about his life, Trump launched the project during a live interview with Rug Radio (Declutter‘s sister company). World freedom financial aims to provide borrowing and lending services for cryptocurrencies on the Ethereum network. An initial token sale for the project in October proved unpopular, but the team is pushing ahead, sources recently said Declutter that World Liberty Financial plans to issue its own stablecoin.

In addition to these efforts, Trump also surrounds himself with crypto believers. Bitcoin bull Robert F. Kennedy Jr. suspended his campaign to support Trump, and subsequently joined Trump’s transition team. And Howard Lutnick, CEO of orange-pill Cantor Fitzgerald, is also part of Trump’s political team and co-chairs his transition team.

Even Elon Musk, who Trump promoted during his last rally tour, is an avowed Dogecoin (DOGE) fan. Trump has said that Musk, if elected, could lead a potentially cost-saving Department of Government Efficiency — and the DOGE acronym, which mirrors Dogecoin’s ticker, is likely no coincidence. The latest hype has helped push the price of Dogecoin up.

Trump also last month became the first former US leader – that we know of – to use Bitcoin to buy something. At the popular Bitcoin-themed bar in New York City, PubKey, the ex-president bought burgers for supporters using the cryptocurrency. “It’s the beginning of a new era,” he said, referring to the digital assets industry.

However, if the Republican candidate gets a second chance to govern the US, how much of his new crypto-friendly rhetoric will be put into practice? BitMEX founder Arthur Hayes questions his sincerity, while Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin broadly warned voters against blindly supporting “pro-crypto” candidates whose values ​​don’t align with the space — though Buterin didn’t mention any names.

Still, some policy experts said Declutter that they believe Republicans will keep their promises — or at least that a potential Trump administration is likely to be less hostile to crypto than Biden’s current approach.

Edited by Andrew Hayward

Editor’s note: This story was originally published on July 19, 2024, and last updated with new information on November 1.