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Consumer advocacy group Public Citizen published a report on August 27 estimating that five crypto products tied to President Donald Trump and his family have left investors at least $4.7 billion underwater combined, while Trump personally reported $1.4 billion in crypto-related income for 2025 in his most recent federal financial disclosure, filed in June.
The report, titled "'Thin Air,' Real Money," is a critical examination of Trump's crypto business by a nonprofit that has previously opposed his administration's policies, and its estimates rely on a mix of blockchain analytics, court filings and Trump's own disclosures.
The estimated losses, by product: the $TRUMP meme coin accounts for the largest share, with Public Citizen citing blockchain analytics firms Nansen and Bubblemaps to estimate that roughly 65% to 82% of retail wallets that bought the token on decentralized exchanges are underwater, for a combined $3.2 billion to $4.5 billion, most of it unrealized. The $WLFI governance token issued by World Liberty Financial, the venture Trump co-founded with his sons and White House envoy Steve Witkoff, accounts for at least $1 billion, including roughly $1 billion in unrealized losses at AI Financial Corp, the Nasdaq-listed company that built a $1.46 billion treasury of the token now worth a fraction of that.
Trump Media's digital-asset treasury, which bought over $1 billion in bitcoin last year, carries a $450 million paper loss on its bitcoin holdings as of June 30. The Trump Digital Trading Cards NFT series has lost buyers a combined $9.3 million, with three of its four editions now trading at a small fraction of their $99 issue price. USD1, the World Liberty Financial stablecoin, is the exception: Public Citizen found no losses there, since the token has held its dollar peg.
Public Citizen calculated that Trump personally made at least $7.2 million from NFT royalties, $557 million from $WLFI token sales, $635 million in $TRUMP licensing fees, and roughly $199 million from USD1-related revenue, without putting in any of his own capital into the ventures, according to the report's reading of his disclosures. The report also traces USD1 and $WLFI investment back to Gulf state-linked entities, including a firm backed by Abu Dhabi deputy ruler Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan that took a 49% stake in World Liberty Financial shortly before Trump's inauguration, and notes that Binance, which is barred from serving US customers under a 2023 settlement with the Treasury Department, holds a substantial share of USD1 in circulation.
The White House has said that neither the president nor his family has engaged or will engage in conflicts of interest related to his businesses. Public Citizen's report counters that Trump retains ownership and control of his crypto ventures through a revocable trust, of which he is the sole beneficiary and his son Donald Trump Jr. is the sole trustee, citing regulatory filings in the US and UK.
The report lands as the Senate weighs the CLARITY Act, the digital-asset market-structure bill that would set federal rules for how tokens like $WLFI and NFTs are regulated. Public Citizen argues the current draft does not go far enough, calling for provisions that would bar the president, his family and senior administration officials from issuing, owning or profiting from digital assets they help regulate, and for existing crypto holdings to be divested.
