Donald Trump now reportedly has more than 90% of his net worth in cryptocurrencies. The revelation sparked intense debate across social media, with prominent tech entrepreneur and former CTO of Coinbase, Balaji Srinivasan, speaking out about the potential global implications.
Writing on January 19 via X, Srinivasan Named This development is the “first cryptocurrency president.” As he put it, “Overnight, the vast majority of the next President of the United States’ net worth ($59 billion) is now in the form of cryptocurrency. This will remain true even with a 90% decline.” He further noted that Trump’s stake in cryptocurrencies It rose from 1% of his holdings to more than 90%, which Srinivasan likened to the early days of Bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana adopters who saw similar meteoric changes in their personal fortunes.
What Trump Memecoin Means for Cryptocurrency
Srinivasan expressed the view that this phenomenon, where cryptocurrencies eclipse non-crypto assets almost overnight, may soon occur on a larger scale, saying: “This phenomenon – the relative overnight depreciation of all non-crypto holdings – will be witnessed.” Billions globally during our lifetime As the matter dies, according to him, Trump’s current vast audience and huge influence on political discourse could put him in a unique position of advantage and he noted that “every politician, influencer and celebrity around the world is observing this phenomenon Impatiently. They will wait to see how the situation changes politically and financially, and if the memecoin shows staying power – big if! – They might do it themselves.
Srinivasan argued that if thousands of personal memecoins emerge, investors will know they are betting primarily on a personal brand, saying: “Every buyer knows what they are buying: the potential future value of the meme brand.” In scrutinizing whether a Trump-branded token can withstand the volatility that causes many celebrity tokens to decline, Srinivasan singled out Trump’s massive following, “daily nonstop coverage,” and what he called “presidential immunity” as factors that may Supports the election campaign. Token value. “Trump is Trump,” he wrote, emphasizing the uniqueness of a person with more than a hundred million followers around the world and “unprecedented control of the government.”
Because of these advantages, Srinivasan suggested that any backlash from Washington could prompt the next US president to “debate on social media in the most aggressive way possible,” as incentives for him to protect his digital wealth would align with pro-crypto regulation. Frameworks. He noted that critics would likely attack this scenario as a direct conflict of interest.
However, he also claimed that it would be no different from how other high-profile public figures have benefited over time, noting that “Biden took 10% for the big guy, Pelosi traded her stocks, Hillary turned her speeches into money, and Podesta” had His $300 billion climate fund, and Obama got his Netflix deal. They have all become millionaires through various forms of deniable paychecks to Democrats. By contrast, “Trump’s response might be that he does everything in public,” Srinivasan said. His claim may be that disclosure solves the conflict of interest problem.
However, public disclosure alone will not allay concerns about whether the interests of Trump’s office can be separated from the performance of the digital assets he owns. Srinivasan drew a comparison between the CEO of a company and the head of a country, noting that alignment is the key issue: “Normally the CEO of a company is one of the largest shareholders, but he is aligned with all his employees because they carry the same thing.” shares. All shareholders rise and fall as one, ideally.
By analogy, he predicted that in a fully coherent system, the president’s holdings and the holdings of ordinary citizens might converge into something resembling a national cryptocurrency. “You’d better want the president to be allied with his citizens, so that they all have (for example) American coin, giving some dividend from the profits of the United States of America. Kind of like the Alaska Permanent Fund.
Srinivasan then raised the possibility of Trump distributing tokens to the public, suggesting that “one way to solve the alignment problem is for Trump to drop some Trump tokens onto every American citizen” or at least to every supporter in his database. Such an unprecedented move would test legal boundaries, because “to my knowledge no politician has ever attempted a personal airdrop before – and certainly not on this scale.”
He suggested that if current valuations hold, Trump could distribute the equivalent of a hundred Trump dollars to all of his seventy-seven million voters at a cost of about $7.7 billion in assets “that were worth zero two days ago.” “The cost to Trump might be offset by the massive expansion of his political brand, especially if the only requirement for the airdrop is a sign-up to his personal email list,” Srinivasan said. “He will pay for it himself by converting his base into more violent supporters.”
He speculated that this could undermine long-standing patronage structures within US politics, especially the “Democratic patronage machine,” by incentivizing individuals to support pro-crypto policies in exchange for an effective universal basic income. “If 77 million Americans also benefit from Trump, then the accusations of conflict of interest disappear. “It will be a new kind of social contract, a personal relationship between president and citizen.”
At press time, Trump is trading at $58.00.
Featured image from YouTube, chart from TradingView.com
