Charles Hoskinson argues the TRUMP token cost crypto a 70-vote Senate win and sparked the Bitcoin-only crisis
The post Charles Hoskinson argues the TRUMP token cost crypto a 70-vote Senate win and sparked the Bitcoin-only crisis appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.
Charles Hoskinson recently argued that the launch of TRUMP three days before President Donald Trump’s inauguration derailed what would have been a 70-vote Senate majority for the CLARITY Act and turned a unified crypto-policy push into a partisan battle. In an interview, Hoskinson said that in December 2024, “we were expecting about 70 senators to vote for the CLARITY act and a super majority of the house,” and that launching TRUMP before the bill passed turned crypto “from bipartisan to crypto equals Trump equals bad equals corruption.” He also tied the coin’s launch to the Bitcoin-only rally that defined 2025, arguing that “government interference” and the Trump scandal distorted flows away from altcoins and locked capital in BTC. It’s a compelling narrative: one bad decision by Trump blew up the policy and market setup. The legislative record and market data tell a more complicated story. TRUMP launched in January 2025 with 200 million tokens sold and 800 million retained by Trump-controlled entities. Ethics experts and some pro-crypto Republicans immediately flagged it as a conflict-of-interest vehicle: a sitting president selling a meme coin while setting crypto policy. By May 6, the first concrete legislative fallout appeared. Maxine Waters pulled the plug on a joint House Financial Services and Agriculture hearing on crypto market-structure rules, explicitly citing Trump’s memecoin and World Liberty Financial as abuses of power. Hoskinson is right that TRUMP made the legislative path harder. But a few details complicate the picture. First, crypto had already drifted into Trumpworld before the coin. Trump campaigned as “the crypto president,” raised significant funds from the industry, and cut a lucrative deal with World Liberty Financial, where his family claims a large share of token and fee revenue. Ethics concerns about that deal and its stablecoin USD1 were surfacing well before Waters killed…
Filed under: News - @ December 22, 2025 9:21 am