According to an article from Decrypt, former United States President and 2024 Republican presidential hopeful, Donald Trump, holds nearly $500K worth of the second largest cryptocurrency in the world, Ethereum.
This is according to a recently released financial disclosure form submitted to a federal ethics agency.
A filing submitted to the Office of Government Ethics incorporated a tally of assets and other sources of income belonging to the former president. In one line on the second to last entry of the 82-page form, it lists a “cryptocurrency wallet (Ethereum)” with a value between $250,000 and $500,000. LINK TO PDF
The wallet seems to be connected to a line of non-fungible tokens (NFT) that his campaign released as part of his offer to return to the White House in 2024 after his earlier loss to President Joe Biden in 2020.
The NFTs, a collection of virtual trading cards that feature graphics of Trump in a multitude of poses as a superhero, cowboy, or astronaut, released for $99 each in December 2022.
Sales of the tokens increased greatly in the following months, including after his first indictment by a state court in New York, before drastically declining after the candidate launched a second batch in April that crashed the first set’s value.
Trump’s ownership of a cryptocurrency wallet is unexpected against a backdrop of historically disparaging comments he has made about crypto, as he questioned their actual worth in ways more comparable to his Democratic Party contenders than his Republican peers.
When he was in office, Trump tweeted only once about crypto. In July 2019, he said that he was "not a big fan of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies." Anthony Scaramucci, Trump's former communications director at the White House, later told Decrypt that he believes Trump himself did not author the now-deleted tweet.
After an unsuccessful re-election run in 2020, Trump went on to tell Fox Business in June 2021 that Bitcoin, the first and most widely traded cryptocurrency—“just feels like a scam,” and he was very clear about preferring fiat currency. (https://decrypt.co/72939/bitcoin-seems-like-scam-former-us-president-donald-trump)
“I don’t like it, because it’s another currency competing against the dollar. I want the dollar to be the currency of the world. That’s what I’ve always said," Trump told Fox's Stuart Varney.
Trump’s dislike of crypto comes in sharp contrast to the warm welcoming extended to the technology by others in his party. Since taking control of Congress, Republicans in the House and Senate have worked to advance new bills providing regulations for crypto that have been supported by the industry—albeit with some misgivings.
Among his GOP contenders for the White House, there have been a few who have staked out pro-crypto stances.
Miami Mayor Francis Suarez and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy have publicly embraced cryptocurrency adoption. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has also promised to end what he says is the Biden administration’s “war on Bitcoin” if elected. All of these candidates remain far behind Trump in opinion polling.
On the Democratic side, long-shot Democratic Party candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been publicly vocal about his support for cryptocurrencies. He revealed that he and his family own about 14 Bitcoin after previously saying he was not an investor.
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