Donald Trump, from inside the White House, has pushed a new crypto investment. This time, it’s dressed up as a “crypto treasury” firm. But just like the last two times, his base is paying the price.
The setup is simple: Trump cashes out early. Everyone else eats the loss. According to The Wall Street Journal, the strategy looks eerily familiar to anyone who’s watched his past financial ventures blow up in supporters’ faces.
The playbook hasn’t changed.
Trump burns backers again with Truth Social collapse
When Trump dropped his Truth Social platform through Trump Media & Technology Group, fans jumped in. But those who didn’t get in before it changed its ticker to DJT got crushed.
That stock is now down 52% from right before the merger. From the high it reached a week later, it’s dropped 73%. Not learning the lesson, many went straight into $TRUMP, his personal memecoin launched in January.
Early buyers flipped profits fast. But anyone who joined after the first 24 hours got wiped out. By the day Trump was sworn in again, it had fallen 90%. That’s still better than $Melania, which did even worse.
The only thing that half-worked was the NFT drop. Trump sold $99 digital trading cards of himself posing as everything from a superhero to a space commander. Those NFTs hit a floor price of almost $800 at one point. Today, the cheapest one goes for around $200. But over the last week, individual sales have bounced between $82 and $846. Like always, late buyers lost the most.
Now comes a new pitch: a “crypto treasury” company modeled after what Michael Saylor pulled off with MicroStrategy, now renamed Strategy. Saylor’s model is simple: use company cash, debt, and equity to buy bitcoin nonstop. It now holds more than 3% of all bitcoin in circulation, worth $70 billion.
Trump’s family saw the hype and copied the structure, but swapped out bitcoin for a token called WLFI. The coin comes from World Liberty Financial, a company co-founded by Trump and his sons. As part of the fundraising, World Liberty took a stake in crypto firm Alt5 Sigma. The campaign is trying to raise $1.5 billion to buy WLFI tokens. Eric Trump, Trump’s son, now sits on Alt5’s board.
WLFI is scheduled to go live in September. But it doesn’t offer ownership, profits, or anything concrete. It gives holders just 5% of the vote in the governance of USD1, a dollar-backed stablecoin controlled by World Liberty. That’s it.
Bitcoin has a cap. WLFI doesn’t. It has no track record. The only value? Buying it is a public show of loyalty to Trump. Unless the holdings are massive enough to trigger disclosures, no one would even know you hold any.
Meanwhile, Trump holds a mountain of WLFI. And a company tied to him is entitled to take 75% of any WLFI sold by World Liberty. That’s where the money is. Not in the token. In the setup. The profits don’t go to the public. They go straight back to Trump.
Owen Lamont, a portfolio manager at Acadian Asset Management, said, “This phenomenon violates every principle of finance. Before, people had to do complicated things to bamboozle investors. Now they can just do the simple thing.”
And there’s history to back him up. Stocks that trade way above their actual asset value never hold up. The Taiwan Fund, launched in 1986, once had a premium of 300%. Today, it trades below the value of its holdings. Destiny Tech100, which has private equity stakes in SpaceX and OpenAI, soared to 20 times its asset value before falling back. It still trades at a premium, but far from the peak.
So when Trump promises infinite upside, remember the cycle: he cashes in first, and everyone else gets left behind. There is no such thing as a perpetual money machine. Not even in crypto.