In January, just days before taking office for his second term, Trump launched his own meme coin, $Trump. By early February, the coin had earned “close to $100 million in trading fees.” In April, the site for the coin announced that some of the coin’s holders could win an “unforgettable Gala DINNER with the President” in May, seemingly causing the coin’s value to go up “by more than 50%, according to CoinMarketCap.” According to an analysis from The Washington Post, “The holders of 27 crypto wallets … each acquired more than 100,000 $TRUMP coins, stakes worth about a million dollars each” after the announcement. [BBC, 1/18/25; Reuters, 2/3/25; CNN, 4/24/25; The Washington Post, 4/24/25]

During Trump’s second term, he has instituted policies friendly to cryptocurrency. In one executive order, Trump reportedly established “a strategic bitcoin reserve for the United States, putting the cryptocurrency on par with petroleum and gold as strategic assets that Washington stockpiles.” [Foreign Policy, 3/7/25]

Stew Peters

In April, far-right host Stew Peters announced his crypto coin $JPROOF, claiming that Trump “rugged his supporters” with his coin. On his show, Peters said that the coin was named JPROOF because it was “Jew proof,” and that he launched it to “completely destroy all of these subversive Jewish robbery coins that these crooked Jews and their bought and paid for celebrities and politicians use to steal money and stab you right in the back.” He urged followers to “buy $110 worth of” the coin (the number 110 is an antisemitic dogwhistle). Later in the month, he claimed that the coin’s market cap had reached $200 million. [Telegram, 4/12/25; The Stew Peters Show, 4/14/25, 4/23/25; Twitter/X, 4/20/25; Anti-Defamation League, accessed 4/29/25]

Peters is a white nationalist and Holocaust denier with a history of extreme rhetoric. He has called Adolf Hitler “a hero” for burning books and said of the Nazis in 1930s Germany, “Turns out more people decided to support it than not, and that’s great.” [Media Matters, 3/13/23; Angry White Men, 1/24/24, 3/8/24; Bluesky, 4/16/25]

Enrique Tarrio

In February, Enrique Tarrio (and fellow Proud Boy Ethan Nordean) launched a coin, $PROUD. According to the Miami New Times, he launched the coin “to fund the Proud Boys organization’s media projects, help support formerly incarcerated January 6ers, and ‘reintroduce themselves’ to society.” The publication also reported that “the coin hit a market capitalization (the value of all Proud Coins in circulation) of $27 million at its peak, only to fall 98 percent to its current market value of $625,000 by the next day.” The Proud Boys organization itself claimed that it had not “officially endorsed” the coin, but in March, Tarrio announced that “the disbursements of the $Proud Coin to J6ers has begun.” [Twitter/X, 2/16/25; Miami New Times, 2/13/25; Telegram, 2/16/25, 3/12/25]

Tarrio was pardoned by Trump while he was serving a 22-year sentence for seditious conspiracy in connection with the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. After being released in January, Tarrio told reporters that he suggests “the media should, should stop calling me ex-Proud Boy leader” because the far-right group “made a decision four years ago to not tell the media what our structure is.” As reported by The New York Times, “While Mr. Tarrio was not in Washington that day, prosecutors say he helped prepare his compatriots for street fights and remained in touch with them while the mob — with the Proud Boys in the lead — overran the Capitol.” [The Associated Press, 9/6/23; CBS News, 1/22/25; The New York Times, 1/22/25; The Guardian, 1/24/25]

Following the pardon, Tarrio and others who similarly received pardons or commuted sentences from Trump toured right-wing media. Tarrio appeared on the far-right network Infowars and demanded that the people who prosecuted him be “put behind bars.” [Media Matters, 1/24/25; Infowars, The Alex Jones Show, 1/21/25]

Dom Lucre

On February 8, Dom Lucre (real name Dominick McGee) launched his coin, $LUCRE. Later that day, he claimed that it had “passed President Trump’s crypto,” and the following day, he appeared to show a screenshot of the coin having a market cap of nearly $750,000 on one selling platform. [The New York Times, 1/14/21; Twitter/X, 2/8/25, 2/8/25, 2/9/25]

Lucre is known for spouting a variety of conspiracy theories, including QAnon-related conspiracy theories, outlandish claims about high-level Democrats, and election denial. He also previously posted child sexual abuse imagery on social media. [Media Matters, 11/12/24; The Washington Post, 7/28/23]

Ron Watkins

On February 11, 8chan administrator Ron Watkins launched a coin, $8CHAN, along with a site for the coin. The site promised that at a $500 million market cap, “we will reveal the tell-all of a mysterious figure whose influence has been felt by many but never fully understood.” That same day, Watkins claimed that the coin had reached a $10 million market cap and suggested that it was the launch of Trump’s coin that led him to realize that he could create a coin for free. [Twitter/X, 2/11/25, 2/11/25, 2/11/25, 2/11/25]

Watkins is the administrator of the message board site where QAnon has been based. The far-right message board site 8chan (which had been called 8kun for a period of time) has been the home of “Q,” the QAnon conspiracy theory’s central figure. Watkins is administrator of the site, and a 2021 HBO documentary series — and subsequent analysis from computer scientists — showed that Watkins may have had control of the Q account on the message board for at least some time. He also launched an effort in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election to push false claims of election fraud, later saying that his promotion of those false claims ​​“was basically three years of intelligence training, teaching normies how to do intelligence work. It was basically what I was doing anonymously before, but never as Q.” [The Washington Post, 4/5/21; The New York Times, 2/19/22; Media Matters, 6/2/21]

Jacob Chansley

In January, Jacob Chansley launched his coin $SHAMAN, later claiming that the coin would “send a message to the Deep State & Globalists.” On Tim Pool’s show later that month, Chansley also said that the coin was part of “helping children that are victims of sexual abuse and trauma to heal through art, as well as establishing the founding principles of our nation in the cryptocurrency space.” [Twitter/X, 1/23/25, 1/26/25; YouTube, The Culture War with Tim Pool, 1/31/25]

Chansley suggested that the amount of money Trump made from his coin influenced him to create his own, and wrote that Trump was “making America the crypto capital of the world so let’s do our part!” Chansley also said in a January livestream about his coin that Trump “said himself, guys … he’s going to make America like the crypto capital of the world. Seems pretty, you know, obvious to me what to do.” [Twitter/X, 1/23/25, 1/23/25, 1/31/25, 2/3/25, 2/3/25]

Chansley, known more widely as the “QAnon Shaman,” received a pardon from Trump after previously “pleading guilty to charges of obstructing an official proceeding” in connection with the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. In addition to supporting the QAnon conspiracy theory, he had pushed what has been “characterized as a form of ‘conspirituality,’ or what Hugh B. Urban, professor of comparative studies at Ohio State University, calls a ‘complex mix of New Age spirituality and conspiracy culture,’” according to The Washington Post. [NPR, 3/31/23; The Daily Beast, 1/21/25; The Washington Post, 6/6/23]