The sale of face-to-face access to President Trump using the Trump family’s own cryptocurrency has done more than benefit him financially, though it has certainly done that.
Mr. Trump announced last month that leading buyers of a digital coin his family is marketing would be rewarded with a private dinner with him at one of his golf courses and that the very top bidders would win a tour of the White House.
The auction, which ends Monday, has set off a spectacle that has drawn bipartisan criticism, triggered a suspicious trading pattern, and left a sitting United States president wide open to attempts to corruptly influence him.
Since the announcement, crypto investors around the world have raced to expand their holdings of $TRUMP — a digital currency called a memecoin, which is typically treated more as a novelty investment than an actual currency.
Certain buyers, in interviews and statements, have said they bought the coins or entered the dinner contest with the intention of securing an action by Mr. Trump to affect United States policy.
The contest has pushed up the memecoin’s trading price, adding billions of dollars, at least on paper, to the value of a $TRUMP stash controlled by the Trump family and its business partners. And in a matter of weeks, the Trumps and their partners have reeled in more than $1.3 million in fees, taking a cut every time the coins changed hands, according to Chainalysis, a crypto data firm.
Certain other large traders, sensing an opportunity to cash in, have moved quickly to sell their $TRUMP holdings, exploiting the run up in price caused by Mr. Trump’s promotional push as new money poured in from people enticed by his offer of “the most exclusive invitation in the world.”
But the blitz of profit-seeking by Mr. Trump and his family is also provoking a backlash.
Last week, it helped derail a major piece of crypto legislation pending in Congress, as the sale prompted objections from crypto industry executives and lawmakers, including some Republicans.
“It does give me pause because it complicates our work here,” Senator Cynthia Lummis, Republican of Wyoming, said in an interview last week after some Democrats began to balk on the crypto bill over Mr. Trump’s involvement in the industry. “The optics are challenging.”
Trading records examined by The New York Times show that a flurry of purchases of the $TRUMP token started the day before the coin’s backers disclosed the contest. Information had leaked about the upcoming promotion, allowing certain parties to make early bets that the market price was about to jump, the records suggest.
The aggressive effort by Mr. Trump and his partners to promote the dinner has also drawn scrutiny from former securities regulators, who assert that Mr. Trump may be violating federal securities laws. However, he would almost certainly not be targeted for investigation, now that his administration has curtailed crypto enforcement efforts at both the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Justice Department.
“This absolutely would have triggered an initial investigation,” said John Reed Stark, an enforcement attorney who spent 18 years at the S.E.C., including as chief of its unit that examined cybercrimes. “Or at least it certainly would have under norms from prior Republican and Democratic eras.”
White House officials have rejected the criticism. One senior official called the dinner “a private event” that would take place during the president’s personal time. At a news conference on Friday, the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said Mr. Trump is “abiding by all conflict-of-interest laws.”
“I can assure you the president acts with only the interests of the American public in mind, putting our country first and doing what’s best for our country. Full stop,” Ms. Leavitt said.
A spokesman for the Trump Organization declined to comment.
Mr. Trump started selling $TRUMP on Jan. 17, three days before Inauguration Day, prompting the coin’s price to soar briefly, before it crashed. The memecoins were one facet of a wide array of crypto ventures that he has pursued since he embraced the industry on the campaign trail last year.
Over months, he has made repeated efforts to prop up the memecoin’s value, culminating in the dinner announcement.
A website tied to the coin announced last month that the top 220 buyers would be invited to a “gala dinner” with him on May 22. Even more enticing, the top 25 would win access to a “Private V.I.P. Reception” with Mr. Trump, as well as a White House tour, the website said. And the top four would receive a Trump-branded timepiece — “the most beautiful watch ever made.”
The auction has been playing out for nearly a month now, with an arcade-like leaderboard on the memecoin’s website that tracks the rankings, allowing crypto investors to game out how much they would have to buy to win a ticket before the contest closes.
But since the coin went on sale, it has been a losing bet for the vast majority of buyers, even as it has enriched the Trump family, according to a review by Chainalysis.
Over the last four months, at least 764,000 buyers have lost money on $TRUMP, as its price dropped precipitously not long after it hit the market.
At the same time, investors who bought the coin quickly when it launched and then sold it to less sophisticated buyers saw huge windfalls. Fifty-eight investors who bought the coin each earned at least $10 million, data showed.
Most of the coin’s buyers are impossible to identify. The leaderboard lists only a long string of letters and numbers next to each crypto account, along with a nickname like “REKT” or “HYPE.”
But the bidders’ buying patterns, documented on a public ledger called the blockchain, suggest that a large share of the investors are based abroad. Many of the purchases took place on overseas crypto platforms like Binance or Bybit that do not allow United States-based users.
Working with Nansen, a crypto data firm, The Times was also able to uncover the identities behind several of the top accounts, including traders in Australia and Singapore.
“It would be great to be able to meet the president,” Kain Warwick, a crypto entrepreneur in Sydney who is on the leaderboard, said in an interview. “That’s something that I wouldn’t have expected I would have the opportunity to be even in the position to do.”
An Unusual Auction Opens
The architect of Mr. Trump’s memecoin venture is Bill Zanker, a longtime business partner who worked with him on the 2007 book “Think Big and Kick Ass.”
Mr. Zanker is listed as “authorized person” on incorporation papers filed in Delaware in January for Fight Fight Fight L.L.C., the sponsor of the memecoin. It pays an undisclosed cut of its proceeds to CIC Digital L.L.C., a company that was entirely owned by Mr. Trump according to his most recent financial disclosure, from last year, but controlled by his two oldest sons.
The week before Mr. Trump announced the crypto dinner, industry analysts worried that the price of $TRUMP was about to crash. That is because a large tranche of the digital coins, controlled by Mr. Zanker, the Trump family and others, was set to “unlock,” meaning that the insiders would be free to sell them.
Then rumors started to spread online.
An anonymous account on X posted on April 19 that Mr. Trump was planning a dinner for “large token holders,” citing a password-protected web page that looked as if it might be related to the memecoin.
Traders rushed to buy the coin, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars, according to Bubblemaps, a crypto data provider. One trader spent $160,000 on the coin the day before the dinner was announced. (The Times confirmed the trades by examining the blockchain.)
The price of $TRUMP jumped 12 percent even before the auction started.
The dinner website then went live on April 23, broadly publicizing news of the contest. “Have Dinner with President Trump and the $TRUMP Community!” it said. “Let the President know how many $TRUMP coins YOU own!”
Immediately, another much larger wave of buyers started to stock up on $TRUMP, competing for spots on the leaderboard and pushing up the price.
Most of these buyers were anonymous. But some either claimed public credit for their trades or were identified by Nansen and The Times.
In Singapore, a crypto company called MemeCore surged to second on the leaderboard, with nearly 1.4 million coins, worth a total of $19.3 million.
Cherry Hsu, the company’s chief business officer, said in an interview that MemeCore was hoping to share its “vision and mission” with Mr. Trump and other prominent figures at the dinner.
“They might be famous people from the crypto industry,” Ms. Hsu said. “It’s a very, very good opportunity.”
Just above MemeCore in the rankings was a crypto user identified simply as “Sun.” According to two crypto forensics firms, the account belongs to an overseas exchange called HTX, where the billionaire crypto mogul Justin Sun serves as global adviser. Mr. Sun was the target of a fraud suit from the S.E.C. in 2023; the agency paused the case against Mr. Sun, who has invested heavily in Mr. Trump’s other crypto venture, World Liberty Financial.
A spokeswoman for Mr. Sun declined to comment, and a representative for HTX did not respond to a request for comment. Mr. Sun has previously told The Times, in a text message, that his World Liberty investment was simply a vote of confidence in the Trump family’s “excellent project.”
The contest has presented a straightforward opportunity for foreign-based investors to interact with the president. Under federal law, noncitizens are barred from donating to political campaigns. But nothing stops them from buying a $TRUMP memecoin.
In Mexico, Javier Selgas, the chief executive of a transportation logistics company, announced last month that he intended to buy $20 million worth of $TRUMP tokens to try to convince Mr. Trump to lower tariffs targeting Mexico, which would benefit his company. (After the announcement drew international attention, a spokesman said the firm “currently does not have plans” to send a representative to Mr. Trump’s dinner.)
On the other side of the world, Mr. Warwick, the Australian entrepreneur, has made his own plan to capitalize on an evening with the president.
The founder of the crypto firm Infinex, Mr. Warwick stocked up on $TRUMP coins in January, accumulating a large enough stash to secure a spot on the leaderboard.
Now, as crypto’s regulatory prospects have improved, he is considering expanding his company’s presence in the United States.
At the dinner, he said, he hopes to get a few minutes with Mr. Trump or perhaps his son Eric to push them on crypto policy and champion “decentralized finance,” a branch of the crypto industry that allows people to borrow and lend money using digital currencies.
“If you assume Trump and 10 people within the Trump team are there, now you’ve got a one in 15 shot of having a conversation with one of them,” Mr. Warwick said.
Profits for Trump’s Family
Not everyone who bought the coin seemed interested in attending Mr. Trump’s dinner.
Some large traders, who had held on to coins hoping that they might rise in value, used the hype over the dinner as an opportunity to profit. One trader who goes by the nickname “ABC” purchased 126,000 $TRUMP coins as soon as the dinner was announced and then sold them all just eight days later, pocketing $407,000 in profits.
Even though the ABC wallet now contains zero $TRUMP coins, the trader might still receive an invitation to the dinner because the winners are picked based on their average holdings over the course of the contest.
All the frantic trading has enriched Mr. Trump and his family.
Each time someone sells a $TRUMP coin, the family and its partners receive a cut. Since January, the memecoin has generated $320 million in fees for them, according to Chainalysis.
That is just a tiny share of the family’s potential profits. A business entity tied to Mr. Trump also owns 800 million of the coins. The value of that stash has jumped by $4.1 billion since the rumors of the pending promotion started to circulate in April. For now, though, those gains are largely theoretical. If the family sold its holdings all at once, the price would immediately crash.
But the mere prospect of such a windfall has created an intense backlash in Washington and even from some crypto executives.
Mr. Trump, as president, is exempt from a federal conflict of interest law that makes it a crime to take an action on a specific matter that financially benefits himself or his family. The Supreme Court last year also ruled that presidents are immune from prosecution associated with official acts. But there are still limits, such as a provision in the Constitution that makes it an impeachable offense for a president to accept a bribe.
Senator John Kennedy, Republican of Louisiana, said in an interview last week that he would support a ban on “all public officials” using their position to profit from crypto.
Democrats were more explicit. “It looks very corrupt,” Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon said in an interview.
Late Friday night, as questions intensified over Mr. Trump’s moves, a crypto wallet linked to the $TRUMP executives moved about $50 million worth to an account where the coins would be easier to sell off, creating fears that the price was about to crash.
Executives took to social media to reassure investors that they were simply adding coins to the circulating supply to keep the market liquid, given the surge of trading. “Demand for $TRUMP has been tremendous,” the statement said.
Investors like Mr. Warwick were poised to buy even more.
By investing another half a million dollars or so, Mr. Warwick might break into the top 25, securing a seat at the more intimate meeting with Mr. Trump.
“It’s definitely on my mind,” Mr. Warwick said. “Obviously that would be a much better opportunity to have a conversation with Trump.”