Former president Donald Trump is vying to be America’s leader again—and this time around, he’s Bitcoin-friendly.
“We want all remaining Bitcoin to be made in the USA,” he said last month on his social media platform Truth Social.
Trump has now branded himself as a crypto-friendly candidate ahead of November’s divisive election, bringing in millions of dollars in cash and digital asset donations from Silicon Valley tech leaders.
But it wasn’t always like this. Despite the Republican presidential nominee 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 he 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 on Twitter at the time, before slamming Facebook’s plans for a digital currency.
“We have only one real currency in the USA, and it is stronger than ever, both dependable and reliable,” he added. “It is by far the most dominant currency anywhere in the world, and it will always stay that way. It is called the United States dollar!”
Trump reiterated his beliefs during a Bitcoin bull run in 2021. “Bitcoin just seems like a scam,” he said on Fox Business, repeating that he wanted the dollar to be the world’s top currency.
Entering the NFT world
It took a long time for him to explicitly say he liked the top cryptocurrency, and the journey started with an unlikely crypto craze: NFT collectibles.
By the end of 2021, after Trump had left the White House, his wife Melania announced her plans for a Solana-based NFT collection. Solana Labs clarified that it had nothing to do with the collection launching on the blockchain, and Trump continued to slam crypto as “dangerous” despite his wife’s venture.
The next year, however, the former commander-in-chief launched his own NFT collection. Minted on Ethereum scaling network Polygon, the digital trading card collection was at first ridiculed—but it still sold out quickly and made millions of dollars.
Trump later said that he only launched the collection because he thought they were “sort of cute.” He has since launched more collections on Polygon, and even minted some of the latest set on Bitcoin via the Ordinals protocol.
A digital wallet tied to the ex-President by blockchain analytics firm Arkham Intelligence shows that he has raked in millions in royalties from the NFTs—and also holds some of the biggest unofficial Trump meme coins, which likely were sent to the wallet without Trump’s knowledge or consent.
Trump’s crypto embrace
But it was just this year when Trump really upped the pro-crypto talk. “I make money with it, I have fun with it too,” Trump said in a March interview with CNBC’s Squawk Box. “Crazy new currencies, that’s what I call them.”
Then, while hosting holders of his NFTs at his Mar-a-Lago resort in May, he told the crowd he was “good with” crypto—and slammed Biden and the Democrats for being “against it.” Many saw the event as a turning point in crypto policy conversations.
Now, along with his recent declaration of support for U.S. 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 dropped in May that the world’s richest man and biggest donor to the Trump campaign, Elon Musk, has been advising the presidential hopeful on a crypto strategy. (Musk denied the reports.) Last week, the Republican party issued a draft party platform that explicitly mentioned crypto—a first for the industry.
After surviving an assassination attempt last week, the business mogul and former reality TV star earned Musk’s public endorsement, as well as support from many other prominent names in the digital asset space. And major crypto figures like the Winklevoss twins of Gemini and Kraken founder Jesse Powell have donated sizable sums to Trump.
Meanwhile, a fourth NFT collection is apparently in the works, as Trump believes “the people want me to do another one.” His last set, the largest of the drops by far, still hasn’t sold out after seven months of release.
Earlier this week, Trump picked Senator J.D. Vance as his pick for running mate, with the potential Vice President seen as a pro-crypto candidate who previously disclosed Bitcoin holdings of between $100,000 and $250,000 back in 2021.
The most tangible sign of Trump’s embrace of crypto will apparently come next week, when he is scheduled to speak at the 2024 Bitcoin Conference in Nashville, Tennessee.
With a few months to go before the election in November, we’re likely to hear a lot more from Trump and his allies about crypto policy, particularly if it continues to be a potential wedge issue for voters.
If the GOP frontrunner does get a second shot at running the U.S., however, how much of his new crypto-friendly rhetoric will be put into practice? BitMEX founder Arthur Hayes doubts his sincerity, while Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin broadly warned voters about blindly supporting “pro-crypto” candidates whose values don’t align with the space—though Buterin didn’t name names.
Still, some policy experts told Decrypt that they believe that Republicans will follow through on 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 Ryan Ozawa and Andrew Hayward