From Twitter calling orders to the 14.9 billion Meme empire, how did the Trump family turn the crypto market into a political ATM?

Original title: Crypto's First Family Is Deepening the Swamp

Written by: Lionel Laurent, Bloomberg Opinion Columnist

Compiled: J1N, Techub News

Eric Trump, the second son of US President Trump, believes that now is a good time to buy Ethereum, and he believes that his support for Ethereum has driven a brief 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 regulatory measures against the cryptocurrency business that the Trump family and its associated personnel are actively promoting, whose family businesses are expanding rapidly, and There is a serious conflict 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 more friendly regulatory measures, they also want to get a share of it. World Liberty Financial, a decentralized financial platform backed by the Trump family, has established cryptocurrency reserves, including Ethereum worth about $340 million. According to Reuters, Trump issued billions of Memecoins out of thin air and generated nearly $100 million in transaction fee revenue for president-related institutions. In addition, Trump's Truth Social platform is also expanding its business and plans to enter the financial services field.

This is not a small investment like an ordinary family. According to my current spot price, the book value of Memecoin held by institutions currently linked to Trump is about $14.9 billion. If these numbers are already staggering, the risks are equally astonishing. As investors and industry insiders try to please the Trump team by buying their tokens, it will eventually lead to the intensification of power transfer and corruption. At the same time, this also brings moral risks, because when the most powerful people in the world and their relatives promote Memecoin and are able to take risks, it will lead to more people investing in Memecoin without knowing their own risk tolerance. . When Trump was told how valuable he held the Memecoin, he responded almost carelessly, "billions of dollars are just small money."

Therefore, when Eric Trump friendlyly hinted on Twitter that "Ethereum is worth buying", he was by no means just saying it, just as he deleted the sentence "You can thank me in the future" on X. a little. Whether coincidence or intentional, World Liberty put his idea into practice, adding to the project address about $55 million worth of Ethereum after Trump’s tariff threat triggered a sell-off over the weekend. This happened after the platform moved most of its reserves to Coinbase, although they denied there were plans for sale. At this stage, the conspiracy theory of Trump's team's cryptocurrency harvesting market through cryptocurrency is not valid. 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, given that this is the third week of the new government's office, the atmosphere of "banana republic" has become very strong.

Democratic countries have existed for a long time to establish institutional 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 has promoted reforms to officials' morality and transparency after the Watergate incident, and has also introduced the Stock Act of 2012 to combat insider trading, as well as the Foreign Interest Clause that has existed since the Constitution. Cryptocurrencies cannot be an excuse to evade regulation: EU's latest digital asset rules clearly stipulate terms for insider trading and market abuse. Moreover, former Democratic Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, who was nominated by Trump, has agreed to sell her shares and cryptocurrency to comply with relevant regulations.

If the authorities do not implement and strengthen measures effectively, then supervision of behavior will be ineffective. Trump seems to care nothing about it. Trump-nominated Commerce Secretary candidate Howard Lutnick did not say whether he would shirk participation in the cryptocurrency task force because his company Cantor Fitzgerald holds convertible bonds related to the stablecoin Tether. There is a problem of custody and theft within the institution, which may cause economic losses in the future; for example, when the German fintech company Wirecard AG went bankrupt, staff of its regulator BaFin were suspected of insider trading Wirecard stocks instead of fulfilling supervisory responsibilities. We hope that Trump-appointed cryptocurrency director David Sacks can deliver on his promises when he promises to strengthen consumer protection.

At least, for all politicians, a basic requirement is that they must deposit all their investments into the "blind trusts" trust on the day they take office, and also limit the investments of their relatives. Here, the "blind trusts" trust refers to an asset management method in which politicians hand over property to a third party to manage, thereby avoiding any impact on investment operations and preventing officials from seeking personal gain through power. This is the point put forward by Garen Markarian, an expert in corporate governance at the University of Lausanne. It is worrying that the current general attitude of the elite class is to advocate reducing supervision rather than strengthening scrutiny of politicians and their related investments.

Trump is joining forces with the cryptocurrency circle to slam the so-called "debanking" phenomenon; at the same time, Musk is allowed to set rules on his own, and he is using DOGE as a weapon to fight the government. This is totally typical overconfidence, especially considering that the president was convicted of fraud. This also sends a signal of arrogance to ordinary people, allowing people to see that the law will appear more tolerant to these people with internal information. Regulatory chaos in the cryptocurrency field has become obvious, but there are few signs of action to clear it up.