Donald Trump now reportedly holds over 90% of his net value in cryptocurrency. This revelation has sparked intense debate across social media, with distinguished tech entrepreneur and former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan weighing in on the potential global implications.
Writing on January 19 via X, Srinivasan called this development a “FIRST CRYPTO PRESIDENT.” In his words, “Overnight, the overwhelming majority of the online value ($59B) of the following President of america is now held in cryptocurrency. This can hold true even with a 90% drop.” He further identified that Trump’s stake in crypto soared from possibly 1% of his holdings to well over 90%, which Srinivasan likened to the early days of Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana adopters who saw similar meteoric changes to their personal wealth.
What The TRUMP Memecoin Means For Crypto
Srinivasan expressed a view that this phenomenon, where non-crypto assets are overshadowed by crypto almost overnight, might soon occur on a wider scale, saying, “This phenomenon — the overnight relative devaluation of all non-crypto holdings — can be experienced by billions globally inside our lifetime as fiat dies.” In accordance with him, Trump’s vast existing audience and his significant influence over political discourse could place him in a uniquely advantageous position. He observed that “every politician, influencer, and celebrity worldwide is watching mouth agog on the phenomenon. They’ll wait to see the way it shakes out politically and financially, and if the memecoin shows endurance — big if! — they might do their very own.”
Srinivasan argued that if hundreds of private memecoins emerge, investors would know they’re primarily betting on a private brand, saying, “every buyer knows what they’re buying: the potential future brand value of the meme.” In scrutinizing whether a Trump-branded token could withstand the volatility that causes many celebrity tokens to plummet, Srinivasan singled out the Trump’s massive following, “each day non-stop coverage,” and what he called “presidential immunity” as aspects that may buoy a token’s value. “Trump is Trump,” he wrote, underscoring the individuality of somebody with a couple of hundred million global followers and “unprecedented control over the federal government.”
Due to these benefits, Srinivasan suggested that any backlash from Washington might lead the incoming US president to “debate across social media in essentially the most aggressive way possible,” because the incentives for him to guard his own digital wealth would align with pro-crypto regulatory frameworks. He noted that critics would most probably assail this scenario as a direct conflict of interest.
Yet, he also alleged that it will be no different from how other high-level public figures have profited over time, remarking that “Biden took 10% for the large guy, and Pelosi traded her stocks, and Hillary monetized her speeches, and Podesta had his $300B climate slush fund, and Obama got his Netflix deal. All became millionaires via various deniable types of payola for Democrats.” In contrast, Srinivasan said, “Trump’s rebuttal could also be that he’s just doing all the things in public. His claim could also be that disclosure solves the conflict of interest problem.”
Nevertheless, public disclosure alone wouldn’t put to rest concerns about whether the interests of Trump’s office could possibly be decoupled from the performance of the digital assets he owns. Srinivasan drew a parallel between a company chief executive and a head of state, suggesting that alignment is the important thing issue: “The CEO of an organization is often one in every of the biggest shareholders, but he’s aligned with all his employees because they hold the identical shares. All holders rise and fall as one, ideally.”
By analogy, he speculated that in a purely aligned system, a president’s holdings and people of extraordinary residents might converge in something like a national cryptocurrency. “You’d ideally want the President to be aligned along with his residents, such that all of them held (say) USA coin, which gave some dividend from the profits of the USA. Sort of just like the Alaska Everlasting Fund.”
Srinivasan then raised the opportunity of Trump distributing tokens to the general public, proposing that “a method of solving the alignment problem can be for Trump to airdrop some TRUMP to each US citizen” or a minimum of to each supporter in his database. Such an unprecedented move would test legal boundaries, since “to my knowledge no politician has attempted a private airdrop before, to present away money — and definitely not at this scale.”
He suggested that if the present valuations hold, Trump could distribute the equivalent of 100 dollars’ value of TRUMP to all seventy-seven million of his voters at a value of roughly 7.7 billion dollars in an asset “that was value zero two days ago.” Srinivasan reasoned that the fee to Trump may be offset by an immense expansion of his political brand, especially if the one requirement for the airdrop was signing up for his personal email list. “It will ‘pay for itself’ by turning his base into much more rabid supporters.”
He speculated that this might undermine longstanding patronage structures inside American politics, especially “the Democrat patronage machine,” by incentivizing individuals to back pro-crypto policies in exchange for an efficient universal basic income. “If 77M Americans are also benefiting from TRUMP, charges of conflict of interest go away. It’d be a recent type of social contract, a private relationship between President & citizen.”
At press time, TRUMP traded at $58.00.
Featured image from YouTube, chart from TradingView.com