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Former President Donald Trump was recently revealed to be the owner of an Ethereum wallet that held about half a million dollars in value. Now, it turns out that he may own much more—putting the high-profile crypto-skeptic in the ‘whale’ category.
In a fresh set of financial disclosure documents submitted to the Office of Government Ethics, Trump reports owning just over $2.8 million in cryptocurrency held in an Ethereum wallet. The updated figure was uncovered by the Washington-based ethics watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), and shared on Twitter on Tuesday.
The disclosures also showed that Trump earned close to $4.9 million in licensing fees from a collection of non-fungible tokens (NFT) that his campaign launched as part of his bid to return to the White House in 2024 after his previous defeat to current-President Joe Biden in 2020.
Sales of the tokens took off in the months following their release last December, including a brief surge after his first indictment by a state court in New York. However, their value sank soon after the candidate launched a second batch in April that crashed the first set’s value.
The size of Trump’s holdings put him in the category of crypto ‘whales,’ a term used to describe aholder of a massive amount of a given token. This is an ironic twist for a man who has described cryptocurrency as a “scam” and as a “very dangerous thing.”
“I never loved it because I like to have the dollar,” Trump told Fox Business in a December 2021 interview. “I was never a big fan, but it’s building up bigger and bigger and nobody’s doing anything about it. I want our currency called the dollar.”
Trump’s stances break with those of his fellow Republicans, who have pushed for new legislation in Congress that has been mostly welcomed by the cryptocurrency industry. It also clashes with the pro-crypto positions taken by his GOP rivals in the 2024 primary, including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.