The Project Crypto Scheme by Eleanor Davis-Diver

[justaprogressive]

In a bombshell financial disclosure report released last week, Donald Trump revealed he brought in $1.4 billion from cryptocurrency ventures in the first year of his second term. A Reuters analysis last month found that, since the 2024 election, the Trump family generated more profit from crypto than any other crypto firm listed in the United States. While raking in this cash from the family business, Trump oversaw the passage of the GENIUS Act, unleashing barely regulated stablecoin onto the American financial system. And Congress, with the administration’s support, is currently working to pass the CLARITY Act, which would strip investor protections and hand over crypto regulation to an overmatched, historically ineffective agency under Trump’s control.

But there’s a problem for the president: Democrats have insisted that the CLARITY Act must contain an ethics provision designed to prevent conflicts of interest for top government officials, which would limit the amount Trump himself could profit off of crypto and thus the deregulatory framework in the law.

Luckily for Mr. Trump, he can have his cake and eat it too. In fact, that’s exactly what he’s been doing for the last year thanks to a joint initiative from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). These are the two agencies with claims over crypto oversight; the CLARITY Act would move jurisdiction from the SEC to the CFTC, which has always been a light-touch regulator of the financial system. But it turns out the two are completely in cahoots, essentially abandoning their jurisdictional authority altogether. In that sense, the passage of the CLARITY Act wouldn’t lead to any meaningful changes in crypto oversight, at least for now.

SEC CHAIRMAN PAUL ATKINS ANNOUNCED “Project Crypto” last July in a speech to the America First Policy Institute, telling the crowd it would be “the SEC’s north star in aiding President Trump in his historic efforts to make America the ‘crypto capital of the world.’” Six months later, newly confirmed CFTC Chairman Mike Selig announced his agency would be joining the project. In the year since, Project Crypto has turned out to be less an initiative from two of the most important agencies regulating financial markets, and more a corrupt scheme to turn America into a free-for-all playground for crypto firms—and grow the Trump family’s billions in the process.

https://prospect.org/2026/07/06/project-crypto-scheme/