CRYPTO CORRUPTION IN FOCUS
A Reuters investigation found this week that President Donald Trump and his sons have withdrawn at least $2.3 billion from four crypto ventures since he returned to office. At the same time, more than a million investors have lost about the same amount.
The family lent its name, risked little or none of its own money, and took a fixed cut of every sale. All while also occupying the White House. World Liberty Financial, the family crypto company that offers financial services through software rather than a bank, gave a Trump entity 75% of its token sale proceeds, totaling about $987 million. The $TRUMP memecoin brought in about $616 million more.
For roughly every dollar the family banked, an ordinary buyer lost a dollar. Investors as a group are down about $2.25 billion.
The agencies built to police are being hollowed out. So the people actually following the money this week were a British teenager and a small group of civil servants. The Kremlin sanctioned one. The others were forced out of their own agency.
What to watch. Whether any regulator opens a real inquiry, and whether the CLARITY Act, a bill that would hand crypto oversight to a single hollowed-out agency, reaches the Senate floor.
THE ENABLER WATCH
This week, the focus is on the people who were supposed to be watching at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), the federal agency that polices futures trading and much of the crypto market.
A New York Times investigation documented how senior CFTC officials who flagged concerns about three betting and crypto firms tied to the Trump family, Polymarket, Crypto.com, and a Gemini affiliate, were placed on leave, investigated, and pushed out.
Watch where the deciders landed. Caroline Pham, the acting chair who stepped in to help those firms, left for MoonPay, a crypto company partnered with Polymarket. Her senior counsel, Brigitte Weyls, moved to become general counsel at Gemini Titan, the same firm whose application she had helped approve. The current chair, Michael Selig, the agency’s only sitting commissioner, once represented crypto firms as a corporate lawyer.
Under this leadership, the CFTC went from more than 80 crypto enforcement actions in the prior administration to two, and both of those targeted small operators rather than big firms.
Staff got the message. Do not make trouble for these companies. And the crypto bros appear to have returned the favor by hiring them.
THE MONEY TRAIL
Reuters showed how the Trump family built each deal to win no matter what the market did. A small Nasdaq company called ALT5 Sigma, now renamed AI Financial Corp, raised $750 million from shareholders and spent $717 million buying World Liberty tokens. More than $500 million of that went straight to the Trump family. The stock then fell from above $9 to about 75 cents, and shareholders lost roughly $675 million.
Alongside the money flowing to the Trump family, crypto money flowed into the election to elect Trump. Fairshake PAC, the crypto industry’s main political action committee, and its allied groups remain among the largest crypto “donors” in US elections. And a wave of newer crypto PACs is poised to dump money into the 2026 midterms. Guess which party they support?.
Meet regulatory capture, which is typically an issue with sequestered developing economies but that Trump has brought to America: Industry money helps elect friendly lawmakers, who then appoint industry insiders to the regulatory heights, who then write friendly rules. The rules protect the profits, and those profits go to electing friendly politicians.
America’s founders gave the country a defense mechanism — federalism. Because states regulate corporations in America, blue states, which dominate the American economy, could put a stop to much of this corruption. Why they and Democrats refuse to pull this lever utterly baffles us. If you have the answer, please sound off in the comments.
ENFORCEMENT TRACKER
The pattern this week was foreign investigators moving while America atomized its regulatory agencies.
Britain sanctioned the Huobi entity over Russian money flows, the European Union banned Russia-based crypto services, and Russia hit back by sanctioning a 17-year-old, the son of Putin’s mortal enemy, Bill Browder. In the US, the CFTC, like Bartley, simply preferred not to. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has spent the past year dropping its major crypto cases. Blockchain analysts at TRM Labs reported that North Korea was behind 76% of all crypto stolen by hackers this year, money that funds its weapons programs. America’s regulators have been told not to care.
ORDINARY AMERICANS HARMED
Reuters described a California software engineer who put $2,000 into the $TRUMP coin and was left with under $120, a Minnesota engineer who lost $60,000, and an Indiana machinist who lost about $32,700.
At scale, more than a million buyers are down a combined $2.25 billion against Trump family ventures. That is about the size of a mid-size American city’s entire yearly budget, transferred from ordinary people to the personal pockets of the sitting US president and Interior Designer-in-Chief.
When World Liberty froze a batch of wallets to comply with the new British sanctions, the offshore exchange HTX responded by forcibly converting regular customers’ holdings of USD1, the Trump stablecoin. The people whose money moved were ordinary account holders, not sanctioned criminals.
CORRUPTION RECEIPTS
We track ongoing crypto corruption stories across editions. A case stayed this week, a donation next, a policy change the next... Persistent monitoring reveals a pattern.
ONE THING TO WATCH
The CLARITY Act, forwarded to the Senate floor this week, would put most crypto oversight in the hands of the CFTC – the same agency now down to a single commissioner that just purged the staff who asked hard questions. Watch three things: whether senators keep a provision barring government officials from holding crypto stakes, a measure aimed squarely at the president, whether the bill wins floor time before the August break, and how many Democrats vote to pass this bill that will further enable the Trump family fortune.
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