Trump’s Meme Coin, Crypto Ventures ‘Irrelevant’ to Industry Regulation: David Sacks

White House crypto czar David Sacks deflected questions Friday about President Donald Trump’s potential crypto conflicts of interests, claiming that the president’s own digital asset ventures—like his controversial meme coin—are “irrelevant” to the administration’s policy in the same area.

“I don’t think it’s had any impact,” Sacks said when asked whether Trump’s own crypto projects have affected industry regulation. “I think it’s kind of irrelevant to what we’re doing here.”

When asked shortly thereafter about the president’s “personal investment” in cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Trump’s advisor offered a sharp rebuke.

“Those are facts not in evidence,” Sacks said.

Prior to his White House return, Trump has lent his brand to numerous crypto projects, including an Ethereum decentralized finance platform, World Liberty Financial, a Solana meme coin, TRUMP, and multiple collections of NFT trading cards.

Each of those projects appears to have reaped considerable profits—and benefited from the president’s endorsement. Trump-related companies reaped millions of dollars from the initial sale of those NFT collections, for example, while the gradually unlocking TRUMP tokens that will eventually be held by his companies are currently valued above $10 billion in total.

It is not publicly known, though, how much of that revenue has gone directly to the president’s pockets. In the case of World Liberty, an LLC associated with Trump will receive 75% of net revenue the protocol makes in excess of $30 million—a figure that, per on-chain data from Dune, could be greater than $200 million from the WLFI token sale alone.

Ever since the start of Trump’s second term, federal regulators have also adjusted their crypto policies in ways that benefited the president’s own projects. Just days after Trump’s meme coin launched, the head of the SEC’s new crypto task force, Hester Peirce, said the token would likely not fall under the regulator’s jurisdiction.

Weeks later, the SEC issued an official statement announcing that meme coins should generally not be considered to be securities.

Edited by Andrew Hayward