The $TRUMP token hit $74.27 on January 19, 2025, the day before Donald Trump returned to the Oval Office. Within weeks, it had lost the majority of that value. By July 1, 2026, it was trading around $1.66.
A Newsweek analysis of CoinMarketCap data found that a $10,000 investment in the Official Trump ($TRUMP) token on Inauguration Day, January 20, 2025, would be worth about $364 as of July 1, 2026, representing a loss of 96.4 percent. For anyone who bought at the all-time high of $74.27 hit the day before the inauguration, a $1,000 investment would have bought 13.46 tokens. At a price of approximately $1.68 as of July 1, 2026, that $1,000 is now worth around $22.61, a loss of 97.7 percent in less than 18 months.
Those figures translate to a family’s emergency fund, a down payment someone spent years building, or retirement money staked on a sitting president’s personal token. While those investors were losing almost everything they put in, the man whose face was on the coin was collecting fees, royalties, and equity proceeds on the other side of those trades.
What Trump’s Financial Disclosure Actually Shows
President Donald Trump earned more than $1.4 billion from his cryptocurrency ventures in 2025, according to his personal financial disclosure released by the Office of Government Ethics. The 927-page document showed the president earned billions in revenue from properties around the world and from cryptocurrency. The disclosure listed $636 million from CIC Digital LLC, a cryptocurrency firm affiliated with the Trump Organization, plus $526 million from the sale of cryptocurrency tokens through Trump-connected firm World Liberty Financial, $65 million from equity sales in WLF’s holding company, and $196,875,000 from investments in Stablecoin Holdco, LLC, the parent holding company of World Liberty Financial.
The $635 million meme coin income was attributed to a group called “Celebration Coins.” No public record of that entity could be found, and a representative for the Trump Organization did not respond to requests for comment.
For context, President Barack Obama’s final disclosure form was eight pages; President Joe Biden’s was 11; Vice President JD Vance’s form for the same period is 17. Trump’s crypto earnings in 2025 exceeded the income from the real estate investments he spent decades assembling. The core of the disclosure is straightforward: retail investors were losing 96 cents of every dollar they put into $TRUMP while the president collected revenue on the other side of those transactions.
The $2.3 Billion Structure
A Reuters investigation found the Trump family generated at least $2.3 billion from four crypto ventures since returning to the White House, while more than a million investors lost the same amount across those same ventures. The four ventures examined were World Liberty Financial, the TRUMP meme coin, American Bitcoin, and AI Financial Corp, formerly ALT5 Sigma.
In each case, the Trumps licensed the family name rather than investing their own capital, promoted the ventures through social media and public appearances, and collected revenue as investors piled in. When prices collapsed, the family remained in profit while buyers absorbed the losses. Reuters reported each venture could have been established for less than $1 million in development and legal costs, meaning the $2.3 billion gain came almost entirely from licensing fees and revenue sharing rather than capital at risk.
The Trumps profited most from sales of $WLFI, the World Liberty Financial governance token, taking a 75% cut of token sales while holding a 60% stake in the company. American Bitcoin shares collapsed from $11 to $1.15, generating more than $200 million in losses for retail buyers.
Eight government ethics experts told Reuters the arrangement represents a conflict of interest unlike anything seen in modern American history, with Trump’s administration directly regulating the crypto industry while his family profits from it. All eight noted the conduct is legal, provided no regulatory favors are exchanged for financial gain. The White House has pushed back on that characterisation, with a spokeswoman stating Trump has “proudly made the United States the crypto capital of the world” through supportive policies.
Who Was Actually Buying
Data from Nansen, which tracked 1.48 million wallets that bought Trump’s memecoin since its January 2025 launch, found roughly two-thirds of those holders are currently underwater. A separate Nansen analysis of secondary market buyers found 85% of World Liberty’s WLFI token holders are also in the red.
Investors have been barred from selling most of the coins they accumulated, meaning even early buyers cannot recover their money or cut their losses. Reuters interviewed one investor whose $2,000 investment in $TRUMP is now worth less than $120.
When the $TRUMP meme coin launched on January 17, 2025, almost two days before the presidential inauguration, its market capitalisation surged to approximately $27 billion within 24 hours, making it one of the fastest-moving asset launches in crypto history. That frenzy drew in buyers who saw a president-endorsed asset skyrocketing and moved quickly. The token has since fallen more than 97% from its January 2025 peak, with its market capitalisation dropping to around $400 million.
Losses in the $TRUMP token were substantially larger than those experienced by people who bought Bitcoin on Inauguration Day. Bitcoin traded at approximately $101,083 on January 20, 2025, and fell to about $58,562 by July 1, 2026. A $10,000 investment in Bitcoin on that day would be worth about $5,793, a decline of roughly 42 percent. A hypothetical $10,000 investment tracking the S&P 500 on the first trading day after Inauguration Day would have grown to roughly $12,298 by July 1, 2026.
The Conflict of Interest Question
No law directly prohibits a sitting president from profiting from an asset class his administration is simultaneously deregulating. Since returning to the White House in January 2025, Trump has launched a slate of crypto-friendly policies, including announcing that his government would create a national strategic cryptocurrency reserve. Reuters reporting also found Trump’s crypto profiteering may be holding up passage of the CLARITY Act, legislation intended to provide regulatory clarity to the crypto industry in the United States.
Five Democratic senators, including Elizabeth Warren and Richard Blumenthal, called on their Republican colleagues to join them in forcing Trump administration officials to testify under oath about their cryptocurrency dealings. The financial consequences, however, fall on whoever actually bought the tokens, regardless of political affiliation.
The coin’s disclaimer says it was never intended as a financial instrument. That is legally useful. It is also difficult to reconcile with a president who held a dinner at Mar-a-Lago for the token’s top holders, and whose sons traveled the country promoting the ventures. Family members including Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. stoked interest, investors put in money, and prices then fell, leaving buyers with sizable losses. The structure is a licensing arrangement that was always going to pay out on one side of the ledger.
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The Ledger Doesn’t Lie
Trump’s net worth has nearly tripled since he returned to office, rising from around $2.4 billion to approximately $6 billion, with crypto profits accounting for a significant share of that gain. The investors who bought $TRUMP tokens on the day he returned to the White House have, on average, 3.6 cents left for every dollar they put in.
Crypto is volatile, meme coins especially so, and anyone putting money into something called $TRUMP on Inauguration Day was taking a speculative risk. The symmetry in the Reuters figures, however, is not something ordinary market volatility produces. The Trump family earned $2.3 billion in pretax crypto income from November 2024 to April 2026, while investors lost $2.25 billion across the same ventures over the same period.
Those figures are almost perfectly mirrored because the money did not vanish. It transferred from the wallets of retail buyers into the revenue streams of Trump-affiliated entities, through licensing arrangements that were already in place before the first token was ever sold to the public. The people who lost the most were the ones who believed the pitch most completely. They bought what looked like an opportunity backed by the most powerful office in the world, and they got a token now trading near its all-time low.
AI Disclaimer: This article was created with the assistance of AI tools and reviewed by a human editor.