Trump Became Crypto Believer After Falling in Love With NFTs of Himself

It was supposed to be a cryptocurrency conference, but it could've easily been mistaken for a Trump rally.

At an event where vendors hawked red hats reading "Make Bitcoin Great Again,” the crowd erupted in applause when Donald Trump vowed to fire Gary Gensler, the Securities and Exchange Commission chair, and replace him with regulators who love the digital-asset industry should he return to the White House.

"I pledge to the Bitcoin community that the day I take the oath of office, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris's anti-crypto crusade, it will end,” Trump told the Bitcoin 2024 conference in Nashville on Saturday, comparing crypto to the steel industry a century ago. “If Bitcoin is going to the moon,” he added, “I want America to be the nation that leads the way."

The speech capped a complete about-face of the former president’s stance toward an asset class he considered a crime-riddled scam while he was in office. It also marked what is more and more looking like the merger of a once-outsider political machine with an outsider financial movement that is also punching its way into the mainstream.

Conventional wisdom has it that this gambit is simply a classic Trumpian transactional relationship. He needs votes and money in a presidential horse race that now looks like it’ll be a photo finish, and he’s exploiting an opening created when President Joe Biden’s administration alienated the crypto crowd by pursuing a crackdown on the industry.

If so, it’s working. Crypto is an ecosystem whose public face is dominated by online warriors with a lot of money to throw around, fertile ground for Trump to reap tens of millions of dollars in campaign funds -- and a burgeoning army of vocal fans. His newfound role as cheerleader for the industry helped land him support from the likes of Dogecoin aficionado Elon Musk and billionaire twins Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss as well as venture-capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz.

“As the Bitcoin conference demonstrated, President Trump wants our nation to regain the global lead for technology, innovation, and manufacturing,” said Brian Hughes, a senior adviser to the campaign. “That includes crypto and other sectors.”

All the donations and noise emanating from the crypto sector has not gone unnoticed by the other side. Bitcoin fans on X circulated a letter purportedly signed by more than two dozen Democratic lawmakers and candidates. The letter, addressed to the party's national committee, urged a softer stance on digital assets.

Yet despite all the newfound support he is enjoying, there is something else that played an important role in Trump’s conversion to crypto believer: flattering images of himself. Simply put, he fell in love with Trump-themed nonfungible-tokens — and the supporters who bought them -- and that passion has turned into a broader appreciation for the industry, according to insiders who have watched Trump's crypto evolution.

Trump’s lingering questions about valuations of digital assets haven’t slowed his NFT sales pitch, which was clear in May as he riffed off-script to a Mar-a-Lago gathering of supporters who had purchased at least 47 of the digital trading cards -- pop-art renderings of the former president, including images of him dressed up like a cowboy, a superhero and other figures of fantasy.

They sold for $99 a pop, but Trump wondered aloud if he could've gotten more.

“A big difference between 99 and 499, 599, maybe a thousand dollars, I don’t know,” he told the crowd, according to a video of the remarks at the event held during a day off from his New York hush-money criminal trial. “But I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to leave it. Now, nobody would believe it, they’d say ‘oh what bullshit,’ this guy.”

It wasn’t too long ago that Trump himself was one of the critics calling B.S. on crypto promoters, blaming Bitcoin and other tokens for facilitating crime and criticizing valuations made out of “thin air” while he was president. Yet between that tweet and when he and his wife Melania began selling NFTs, Trump had a change of heart.

“The Trump NFTs were really what got him in front of crypto people for the first time,” said Kristin Smith, CEO of the Blockchain Association, a trade group that has been one of the liaisons between the Trump campaign and the crypto industry.

To a scandal-plagued industry facing near-existential threat amid a multitude of legal actions by the government, Trump’s flip-flop on crypto might as well have turned him into one of those superheros from his NFTs. And for Trump, the topic gave him another wedge issue to use to attack his Democratic opponents — a lopsided wedge considering the industry’s passion to get out the vote and an unprecedented amount of related fundraising. The pro-crypto Fairshake PAC and two allied super PACs have already raised $170 million this cycle, though they are focusing on congressional races and donating to both parties.

Trump’s symbiotic relationship with the industry was in plain sight in Nashville: While crypto fans cheered prospects for a more friendly regulatory environment, Trump tapped them for big donations. He charged $844,600 for a seat at a crypto “roundtable” he held, and $60,000 per person — $100,000 per couple -- for a photo-op reception. More will be raised on Monday, when Mike Belshe, chief executive officer of crypto firm BitGo, hosts a fundraiser in Palo Alto, California.

Despite all of the crypto-world celebrities mingling with Trump these days, there are some lesser-known figures who deserve the credit – or blame – for serving as Trump’s sherpas into the strange rabbit hole of digital assets.

The first is Bill Zanker, founder of the adult-education company The Learning Annex and co-author of the 2007 book Think Big and Kick Ass with Trump. Zanker said he is a longtime friend who used to book Trump as a speaker for the Learning Annex.

Zanker said in an interview that he approached Trump about two-and-a-half years ago to pitch him on an idea: NFTs featuring caricatures of the former president as artwork. Trump was intrigued, Zanker recalled, but didn’t want to call them NFTs.

“I want to call it digital trading cards on the computer,” Zanker said Trump told him. “If you call them NFTs, people just don't understand it.”

Then came the fall of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX exchange and a string of other industry bankruptcies in 2022 – a series of events that left millions of victims as bagholders and preceded the fierce crackdown on the industry under the Biden administration. In December 2022, the middle of what he calls “the crypto winter of winters,” Zanker went down to Mar-a-Lago and asked, “Mr. President, do you want to still do it?” He said, ‘you know what Bill, a lot of my friends say I shouldn't do it. But I like it, let's do it.’”

Trump’s role in the project has been anything but passive. “Every picture, he approves,” Zanker said. “He spends hours on it. He enjoys it. He calls it pop art,” adding that the project inspired Trump to spend time studying crypto, asking a lot of questions to help him understand topics like how the Ethereum blockchain works.

The NFTs were a hit, with each new collection selling out in a matter of hours, according to Zanker. Then came two events at Mar-a-Lago, one late last year and one in May, for Trump to meet and greet the buyers.

“He fell in love with this crowd: young, ambitious, not regulated,” Zanker said. “Somebody asked him, ‘what do you think of crypto?’ He said, ‘I like it, and I don't like it all going abroad.’ The crowd, of course, went wild.”

At one point, the topic of accepting campaign contributions in crypto form came up and Trump called his friend on stage.

“`Zanker, should we take crypto donations?’” Zanker recalled Trump asking. “I said yes. He became the crypto president.” So far, the campaign says it has raised more than $4 million in crypto donations, on top of the millions raised in traditional dollars from supporters in the industry. The Trump Trading Cards NFTs — almost 200,000 of them in total, spread over three collections — earned Trump and his partners more than $20 million, according to Zanker, who declined to say how the revenue was split.

After the NFT event, the industry’s courtship of Trump – and his reciprocal courtship of the potential donors who have been made rich by crypto -- continued to grow.

The next big event was in June in the tea room at Mar-a-Lago, where Trump and his guests snacked on cookies and he charmed a small group of executives from crypto miners, the companies whose massive, high-tech data centers do the work that facilitates transactions on the blockchain in exchange for compensation paid in Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies.

“We discussed how to get Bitcoiners to engage in the political process,” said Brian Morgenstern, the head of public policy at miner Riot Platforms Inc. who worked in the White House and the Treasury during the Trump administration. “You can't change policies if you are not engaged, if you are not talking to the candidates.”

Trump definitely was engaged. He emerged from the meet-and-greet with miners as a full-throated crypto cheerleader, posting on his Truth Social account that he wants all remaining Bitcoin to be “MADE IN THE USA!!!” and saying Bitcoin mining may be “our last line of defense against a CBDC.” That was a reference to a central bank digital currency, the monetary establishment’s answer to crypto that hasn’t gotten past the research phase in the US. Critics of CBDCs warn that they could be used as surveillance tools since they allow government authorities to more easily track the flow of funds. Of course, they also present stiff competition to crypto stablecoins that track the value of the dollar and other fiat currencies.

Trump’s circle of crypto advisers has widened, and he has relied on billionaire Tesla CEO Elon Musk for counsel on the industry. His former opponent in the Republican primaries, the entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, also said he has had discussions with Trump about potential crypto policy.

On Capitol Hill, he has found some crypto believers among his Republican allies. Tennessee Senator Bill Hagerty, who attended the Mar-a-Lago meeting with miners in June and the Bitcoin conference in Nashville, has become somewhat of a campaign surrogate for Trump when it comes to crypto.

The crypto industry was prominently featured at the Republican National Convention earlier this month in Milwaukee, where Wisconsin Representative Bryan Steil joined the Blockchain Sessions discussion on crypto and Hagerty spoke up for the industry in a panel discussion about manufacturing.

"We've got to get the bureaucracy in Washington, D.C., back in place and coloring back inside the lines again, what we've seen are agencies go way outside their remit and create uncertainty here -- and uncertainty has a very negative impact on capital investment," Hagerty said.

Just outside the security perimeter of the RNC, supporters passed out paper fans promoting the MAGA memecoin, a crypto project that has enlisted Trump ally Roger Stone as a partner.

The fans were the latest sign that Trump and the culture around him have turned into a major phenomenon with traders of memecoins, which are among tokens that offer the least amount of crypto innovation but the largest risks of being targets of pump-and-dump schemes.

MAGA is the biggest Trump-related memecoin, with a total market value of more than $300 million, according to tracker CoinGecko. The coins have no official connections to Trump, but that hasn't stopped them from gaining popularirty. The team at memecoin platform Pump.fun noticed that more than 2,000 tokens related to Trump were created on July 13 alone after the failed assassination attempt on the former president.

Of course, there is political risk for Trump to be so closely associated with such a notorious asset class, should another FTX-like situation arise — or even a simple downturn in prices that sours sentiment. Yet the risk may be greater for the crypto industry itself to be so ideologically aligned with the Republican Party, according to Hilary Allen, a professor at American University’s Washington College of Law whose research focuses on financial law.

“That may prove to alienate some users, given that crypto itself is a pretty ideological thing to invest in,” she said. “It may increase appeal among Republican users, but it may alienate Democrat users.”

Only time will tell whether Trump will win a second term and deliver the more favorable regulatory environment that the industry wants. Current betting on Polymarket, a crypto-based platform that allows people outside the US to wager on political outcomes, shows Trump is the favorite to win with an implied 57% probability.

Friendly regulators may not be his only gift to the industry if he wins.

In Nashville, Trump said that he will order the government to not sell the crypto it has seized in criminal cases and instead use it as the basis for what he called a strategic Bitcoin stockpile. Bitcoin, however, gave up its pre-speech gains after Trump stopped short of confirming plans to order the government to buy up to 1 million of the tokens, something his opponent Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Friday told the conference that Trump may announce.

Meanwhile, even amid a busy campaign schedule, Trump has been plotting the next steps for his own crypto enterprise.

The fourth Trump NFT collection is in the works, and Zanker said he hopes it will drop in August, promising it will be the “biggest, best one ever” with “a lot of surprises.” (Certain past purchases included real-world perks such as the Mar-a-Lago reception or a piece of the suit Trump wore when his mug shot was taken as part of his Georgia election-racketeering case.)

“We saw him right before the assassination attempt for him to approve art,” Zanker said. “He looks at every picture.”