CRYPTO CORRUPTION TRACKER

Week of May 19, 2026

CRYPTO CORRUPTION IN FOCUS

This newsletter focuses on corruption in the cryptocurrency industry. More Americans need to understand that behind the indecipherable wall of numerical gibberish stands an “industry” with no legitimate use. It is not some cutting-edge technology or remotely close to a technological advancement, or whatever nonsense the cryptobros are pushing. However, cryptocurrency is well-suited to money laundering and insider trading. This newsletter is intended to demonstrate that and is not intended to focus on President Donald Trump. But as the cryptocurrency industry chose Trump as its spirit animal, and Trump has remade his brand around it, avoiding a discussion of Trump has become impossible. In fact, the Trump family has begun doing our work for us, as we shall talk about today.

As you likely have heard, on May 14, the U.S. Office of Government Ethics released two 113-page disclosure forms showing that accounts in President Donald Trump’s name executed 3,642 individual stock trades between January and March 2026, worth between $220 million and $750 million. What you probably haven’t heard is that Crypto-tied positions sit at the heart of the file. Trump bought shares of Coinbase Global (COIN), Robinhood Markets (HOOD), SoFi Technologies (SOFI), Bitcoin miner MARA Holdings, Bitcoin treasury firm Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy), and Block, all of which benefit directly from rule changes his administration has imposed.

Why it matters: A periodic transaction report (OGE Form 278-T) is the only public window onto a sitting president’s brokerage activity. That sounds like insider DC bureaucratic trivia, but Trump is the first president since the 2012 STOCK Act took effect to trade individual stocks while in office. The law’s drafters assumed a basic level of patriotism from our public servants and from those in Congress, who are ultimately responsible for enforcing it. Sigh…

Back to Trump… he did not place his assets in a blind trust. The crypto-linked names that keep appearing next to Trump’s come from firms whose enforcement cases he made disappear and whose business models depend on rules he writes.

What it means for Americans: Reader Tina D forwarded Canadian writer Dean Blundell’s excellent post laying out how egregious Trump’s voluminous insider trading has become. You should read it. This is precisely the behavior Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent once conceded on Bloomberg TV would bring the SEC knocking on your door. Of course, he was criticizing Rep Nancy Pelosi. The SEC under Trump appointee Paul Atkins has only knocked on the doors of the little people, not Trump, crypto insiders.

What to watch: Six Senate Democrats asked the SEC to open an insider trading probe of Trump’s tariff trades in 2025. They received no public answer. This disclosure is a fresh test. Republican voters despise insider trading. Trump’s central 2016 message was about abuse of power (“drain the swamp”). Yet, his corruption has gifted the Democrats one of the greatest gifts in modern American political history. Trump’s brand is about abusing power for the benefit of the cryptocurrency industry. Can the Democrats capitalize on that?

Our recommendation: This must be the opposition’s electoral agenda. Every chance you get, announce that you are storing this stuff for January. Voters will vote for you for that alone. Every time the Republicans refuse to hold Trump accountable, expand the research and announce you’re doing so. We’ll help. But don’t focus solely on Trump. Build dossiers on all the enablers who make Trump possible. Name names. Create an accountability clock with their names on it. Then, come January, advise them to rent housing near Capitol Hill since they’ll be stars.

This can’t be one hearing — bigger than the Watergate Hearings. If the Democratic Party wants to be entrusted with governing, this must be its agenda. This is how Péter Magyar, the Hungarian candidate, beat Viktor Orbán. Whether the Democrats can do this is an open question. The Magyar lesson was that anti-corruption has magical political resonance against authoritarianism when wielded as a wire brush on the system. The Democrats’ goal should be to make Sen Slotkin’s cryptobro allies extremely nervous.

THE ENABLER WATCH

This week, Donald Trump Jr. and the prediction-market crypto pipeline.

A prediction market is an online exchange where users buy yes-or-no contracts that pay out when a real-world event occurs, from elections to military strikes. The two largest platforms are Polymarket, which settles bets in cryptocurrency and operates an offshore exchange, and Kalshi, which settles bets in U.S. dollars. Donald Trump Jr. now sits on the advisory boards of both. In August 2025, his venture capital firm, 1789 Capital, made an eight-figure investment in Polymarket, and the president’s son joined its advisory board. The Trump family’s social media site, Truth Social, also has its own prediction market product in development.

Polymarket has become a chosen tool of insider trading. On April 23, federal prosecutors unsealed an indictment of Army Master Sergeant Gannon Ken Van Dyke for using classified information about the U.S. capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro to wager about $33,000 and pocket $409,881 on Polymarket. Trump gets away with it because he’s president. Law for thee, not for me, and all that… Last weekend, 60 Minutes reported on nine linked anonymous Polymarket accounts that netted $2.4 million on Iran war bets with a 98 percent win rate. Profits, the blockchain analytics firm Bubblemaps found, were funneled through the Bybit, Binance, and HTX crypto exchanges.

In February, Israel indicted an army reservist and a civilian on serious security charges for using classified IDF information to bet on military operations on Polymarket. The same platform. Always cryptocurrency. And of course, the Trump family is on the board and involved in the policy decisions, swinging the markets.

THE MONEY TRAIL

The Coinbase trade in the OGE filing is the clearest quid pro quo on the page. Coinbase poured over $45 million into Fairshake, the crypto super PAC, during the 2024 election cycle, and then donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural committee.

Just over a month after Trump took office, acting SEC Chair Mark Uyeda dismissed the SEC’s lawsuit accusing Coinbase of operating as an unregistered securities exchange. No fine. No admission. With prejudice, so the SEC cannot refile, even though the court had previously rejected Coinbase’s previous motion to dismiss.

Months later, Coinbase admitted donating to Trump’s $300 million White House ballroom project to maintain good relations. In October, the company committed another $25 million to Fairshake for 2026. House Financial Services Committee Democrats called it a pay-to-play scheme. Trump’s brokerage account bought the stock anyway and is now sitting on an estimated +35% gain.

ENFORCEMENT TRACKER

A Kroll analysis found a 33% dismissal rate for crypto matters at the SEC versus 4% for everything else under Chair Paul Atkins, a former co-chair of the crypto industry’s Token Alliance. The Van Dyke arrest is the only insider trading charge brought by the Trump Department of Justice involving crypto rails, and the target is a soldier, not a presidential cabinet member.

ORDINARY AMERICANS HARMED

In a regulated market with surveillance, insiders entrusted with governing who chose to exploit that trust by helping personal associates benefit from it face consequences. The plan for the Trump and Fairshake crypto economy is to run the US economy without surveillance. And they’re making progress on that goal. A research paper reviewed by CoinGeek examined 588 million trades on Polymarket between 2022 and 2026 and found that the top 1% of users captured 76.5% of all trading gains. A second study found that 3% of accounts drive price discovery, while the rest provide volume and losses.

Memecoins are just a trashier variant. Take Trump’s $TRUMP. He hawked it to retail investors in January 2025, but it has now crashed 94% from its peak. Those investors lost an estimated $4.3 billion. Insiders kept around 80% of the supply. A few months later, Argentine President Javier Milei endorsed a memecoin called LIBRA. Insiders cashed out roughly $107 million before retail buyers realized what hit them. The token lost 94% of its value in a matter of hours.

In 2022, a Coinbase product manager, Ishan Wahi, faced prosecution for insider trading. His relatives made $1.5 million. He went to prison. Last year, no Trump official faced a single such charge.

CORRUPTION RECEIPTS

Here we track ongoing stories. A case stayed this week, a donation next week, a policy change the week after, the pattern only emerges through persistent monitoring.

ONE THING TO WATCH

On April 30, the U.S. Senate voted unanimously to ban senators and their staff from trading on prediction markets, effective immediately. The resolution was introduced by Bernie Moreno of Ohio, who was elected in 2024 with major support from the crypto sector. The same body has not banned itself from trading individual stocks. Speaker Mike Johnson, who controls whether the Restore Trust in Congress Act gets a floor vote, has said he supports a ban on balance. The discharge petition needed to force the vote sits 136 signatures short.

Dekleptocracy Journal is supported by Dekleptocracy Alliance, a Texas 501(c)4, an investigative transparency activist that incubates independent transparency organizations in order to put corruption at the top of the US political agenda. Like the rest of our projects, someday this will be an independent organization.

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