Bitcoin-friendly Donald Trump won was inaugurated in January as the 47th President of the United States of America. But ahead of being formally sworn in, the commander in chief dropped a meme coin.
Yes, you read that right. Running on the Solana network, the TRUMP token at one point had a market cap of $14 billion. It’s since plunged to $1.5 billion, but the move signaled the new President’s growing enthusiasm for the digital asset space after campaigning to help Bitcoiners and the fast-moving sphere as a whole.
Trump branded himself as a crypto-friendly candidate ahead of November’s divisive election, bringing in millions of dollars in cash and digital asset donations from Silicon Valley tech leaders. And then he won.
But it wasn’t always like this: President Trump was once a staunch crypto critic. So how did we get here?
Trump’s most defining early comment on cryptocurrency dates back to 2019, when as president he made it clear he didn’t like Bitcoin.
“I am not a fan of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, which are not money, and whose value is highly volatile and based on thin air,” he said on Twitter at the time, before slamming Facebook’s plans for a digital currency.
“We have only one real currency in the USA, and it is stronger than ever, both dependable and reliable,” he added. “It is by far the most dominant currency anywhere in the world, and it will always stay that way. It is called the United States dollar!”
Trump reiterated his beliefs during a Bitcoin bull run in 2021. “Bitcoin just seems like a scam,” he said on Fox Business, repeating that he wanted the dollar to be the world’s top currency.
It took a long time for him to explicitly say he liked the top cryptocurrency, and the journey started with an unlikely crypto craze: NFT collectibles.
By the end of 2021, after Trump had left the White House, his wife Melania announced her plans for a Solana-based NFT collection. Solana Labs clarified that it had nothing to do with the collection launching on the blockchain, and Trump continued to slam crypto as “dangerous” despite his wife’s venture.
The next year, however, the commander-in-chief launched his own NFT collection. Minted on Ethereum scaling network Polygon, the digital trading card collection was at first ridiculed—but it still sold out quickly and made millions of dollars.
Trump later said that he only launched the collection because he thought they were “sort of cute.” He has since launched more collections on Polygon, and even minted some of the third set on Bitcoin via the Ordinals protocol. A fourth collection launched in August 2024 with the largest number of NFTs to date, though less than 10% of the available total was ultimately minted.