AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
There's a dinner Thursday for investors who held President Trump's memecoin during a period of time this and last month. Memecoins are a type of crypto asset. Trump created the one in question just before Inauguration Day and announced the contest to have a private dinner with him three and a half weeks ago.
Declan Harty has been following the ups and downs of the $TRUMP coin and the many ethical questions around it. He covers the markets and cryptocurrency for Politico, and he joins us now. Welcome to the program.
DECLAN HARTY: Thanks so much for having me.
RASCOE: What have you discovered in your reporting about this Trump memecoin as this dinner approaches?
HARTY: So this will, as you mentioned, be for the top 220 holders of this memecoin that the president and his family and organization launched in January. And really, what we're seeing here is kind of the new wave of conflict concerns around this administration. Obviously, in Trump one, we saw a lot of questions around the Trump Hotel in D.C., and it seems like this is a leading front in those new questions this time around, as well.
RASCOE: Do we know anything about the people who are set to attend? And what kind of access are they hoping to get with the president?
HARTY: What we know about these folks is they've spent millions of dollars on this dinner. The reality, however, though, is that we only know details about a few of these people. The 220 folks who are invited - they're only being identified online by their, quote-unquote, "crypto wallet address," but there's no significant identifier other than a couple of letters identifying them. And so there's been a lot of speculation about who might hold them and who might not. But from those folks who are talking about their plans to attend the dinner, they are mostly cryptocurrency believers and hoping to really get an audience with the president.
RASCOE: Can you give us a little more detail on exactly, like, what is a memecoin?
HARTY: Yeah. Memecoins are a type of cryptocurrency that inherently has no value or no purpose, and they're really kind of equated generally to, like, Beanie Babies or baseball cards. Maybe the best known memecoin is called Dogecoin. It has no inherent value. It was created as a joke. And yet, it's had some staying power. It's still around today. And so the Trump coin was inspired by that.
RASCOE: Well, if other people are buying and selling Trump's coin, like, from and to each other, how would the president personally profit from it?
HARTY: So the way the memecoin is structured is that 80% of it is still held by an affiliate of the Trump organization as well as another entity. So any time this token rises in value, that stake becomes more valuable on paper. The other piece of this is that the family and its partners who launched this are also collecting trading fees any time this is bought and sold. So that has created a whole lot of questions around some of the ethics here and some estimates among blockchain analytics companies saying that there have been more than $320 million in trading fees generated since this thing launched in January.
RASCOE: So how does this memecoin differ from the other interests that the Trump family has in crypto?
HARTY: So the memecoin is one very large constituency of the growing Trump crypto empire. The other big piece of it is this venture called World Liberty Financial. It is a crypto firm that purports to offer financial services to folks. And critically, it has another type of cryptocurrency called a stable coin, which is a type of token whose value is tied to the U.S. dollar.
The Trump family's interest in crypto, I think is - it's complicated, in some respects. For some, I mean, it's clearly a sign that this industry has staying power in the U.S. For a long time, there's been questions around whether this is all vaporware, if this is all going to go away. I think that the Trump family's buy-in here is kind of a further extension to say that this industry does have some power here and especially in D.C.
On the flip side of this, it is raising a lot of questions because President Trump and this administration are ultimately being charged with crafting the regulations around crypto. And so it's creating this dynamic where you have arguably an administration being led by a major crypto investor, helping orchestrate some of the regulations of this very market. And that is going to be a continuing thing that we see over the next couple of years as this regulatory debate around how to police this market and oversee it takes shape.
RASCOE: That's Declan Harty of Politico. Thank you so much for speaking with us.
HARTY: Thank you.
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