In 2025, crypto holdings reportedly account for anywhere between 10% to nearly all of Donald Trump’s wealth, a truly wild turn of events given that (1) he spent most of his adult life associated with the real estate and entertainment industries, and (2) he once claimed digital assets were “based on thin air” and called Bitcoin a “scam.” immediately the president is all in, hosting meme coin dinners, launching NFT collections, signing executive orders to allow crypto in 401(k)s, and announcing plans to create a “strategic national bitcoin stockpile.” (Meanwhile, Trump’s non-financial-adviser adult sons are urging every “average American” to “purchase as much [bitcoin] as you can.”) In response, Senate Democrats have introduced the End Crypto Corruption Act, the purpose of which, per cosponsor Mark Kelly, is to “make it illegal for the President and other government officials to make a profit from crypto assets.”
But the president of the United States and his family aren’t the only ones making huge sums of money from the crypto world. According to Forbes, there are immediately more than a dozen crypto billionaires. Thanks to extremely lucrative initial public offerings, three new crypto billionaires have been minted this month alone.
One of those is Brendan Blumer, whose 30.1% stake in crypto exchange Bullish, which went public in mid-August, put Blumer’s holdings at around $2.8 billion. (Bullish’s former parent company was Block.one, which has been described as a “bit of a pariah in the crypto world” and in which billionaire venture capitalist and JD Vance–benefactor Peter Thiel was an investor.) Iowa-raised Blumer got his start “selling in-game digital assets for online games including World of Warcraft” at the age of 15, according to Bloomberg. Later, he moved to Hong Kong, and in 2020, gave up his US citizenship. According to Mansion Global, in March—before he became a billionaire, but when he was apparently already extremely rich—Blumer bought a 28-bedroom Sardinian estate for a record-breaking $172 million. Also adding three commas to his net worth via the Bullish IPO is Kokuei Yuan, who holds a 26.7% stake in the company. Far less is known about Yuan, who, according to Bloomberg, graduated from Tufts with degrees in economics and studio art, once worked as an investment banker at CLSA, and cofounded Okay.com, a property firm, with Blumer. His stake worth in Bullish is approximately $2.5 billion.
When stablecoin platform Circle Internet Group Inc—which sounds remarkably like the name of some circa 1990 internet company—went public in June, cofounder Jeremy Allaire saw his net worth banger more than $1.7 billion. Allaire, a graduate of Macalester College, who has been founding online companies for the last 30-something years—and helped Noam Chomsky set up a website to archive his correspondence—has called crypto a “purple issue,” politically. In January, Circle donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural committee; in July, he was at the White House when Trump signed the GENIUS Act, a crypto regulatory bill, into law.
And then there’s tech founder Dylan Field, who became a billionaire six times over in August with the IPO of his company, Figma. While not a crypto company—Figma is a cloud-based design tool—it’s crypto adjacent. According to MarketWatch, “along with Figma’s business model of subscriptions from 13 million monthly users as a tool for online commerce and branding, the company has also invested tens of millions of its balance sheet into cryptocurrencies.” Field, whose stake worth in the company banger over $6 billion when Figma went public, got his start in the tech world after dropping out of Brown and receiving $100,000 from the Thiel Fellowship, which encourages young people to “build new things instead of sitting in a classroom.” (At the time, his father told CNBC, “I’m quite nervous, yeah. Most start-ups do fail. I think he has a good shot, but certainly not a sure thing by any means.”) Field, who had a brief stint in child acting, has been described by an investor as “super nice and…a huge pain in the ass to negotiate with.” He’s also an NFT collector, and set a then record in 2021 when he sold “an avatar of a pipe-smoking, hat and sunglasses-wearing teal alien” for $7.5 million.
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