Consumer advocacy nonprofit Public Citizen released a report on August 28, 2026 documenting that five cryptocurrency products tied to Donald Trump and his family have collectively left investors at least $4.7 billion underwater. Over the same period, the Trump family collected at least $1.4 billion in 2025 alone through licensing fees, token sales, and equity stakes, according to Trump financial disclosures reviewed by Public Citizen.

The report covers products ranging from NFT trading cards launched in 2022 to a dollar-pegged stablecoin still growing in overseas markets today.

The Five Products, in Brief

The earliest product, a set of digital trading cards sold as NFTs in December 2022, generated roughly $12.3 million in initial sales at $99 per card. Those cards are now worth a combined $3 million in aggregate, representing a 76 percent decline. Investor losses total approximately $9.3 million, according to Public Citizen. Trump collected $7.2 million in licensing fees from the sale.

The largest source of retail losses is the $TRUMP meme coin, a speculative token launched on January 17, 2025. It peaked at $73.43 two days after launch and now trades at roughly $2.22, a collapse of approximately 97 percent from its high. Blockchain analytics firm Nansen tracked 1.48 million wallets that purchased the token; about 988,905 of them, or 67 percent, are currently underwater. Their combined losses total $3.81 billion. Meanwhile, early and insider buyers captured $4.04 billion in gains. Trump's licensing revenue from the token reached $635 million in 2025.

The $WLFI governance token, issued by World Liberty Financial (WLF), a company co-founded by Trump and his three sons, has fallen roughly 87 percent from its all-time high of around $0.46 and now trades near $0.057. Nansen data shows that 22,715 of 26,663 tracked wallets on secondary markets are at a loss, with combined secondary-market losses of $83 million. Investor losses across primary and secondary markets total at least $1 billion, while the family collected $557 million from token sales.

Public Citizen also examined USD1, a dollar-pegged stablecoin (meaning its value is designed to stay fixed at one US dollar) issued by WLF in March 2025. The report notes that USD1 holders have not suffered the kind of capital losses seen with the other products, given the stablecoin structure. However, the report flags a different category of risk: WLF retains unilateral authority to change the protocol's rules, and approximately 87 percent of USD1's $4.1 billion supply sits on Binance. In May 2026, Abu Dhabi's MGX fund invested $2 billion into Binance via USD1, further deepening the exchange's centrality to the stablecoin. Public Citizen also found that 64 percent of USD1 is held by foreign interests. Because Binance is barred from serving US customers under its 2023 Treasury settlement, the people holding most of this stablecoin are outside the United States. Trump's 2025 revenue from USD1 reached $199.2 million.

The fifth product, a Bitcoin treasury strategy adopted by Trump Media using proceeds from its DJT stock, holds roughly $557 million in Bitcoin against a cost basis of about $1.006 billion, leaving a paper loss of approximately $450 million.

Conflicts of Interest and Congressional Scrutiny

Public Citizen's report goes beyond price performance to document governance problems. WLF's token documentation gives holders no real voting control over the protocol. Justin Sun, the founder of the Tron blockchain and a WLF adviser, filed a lawsuit in April 2026 alleging that his tokens were frozen, his governance rights removed, and his holdings threatened with burning.

WLF's chief technology officer, Corey Caplan, was separately flagged for allegedly using project reserve tokens to make loans on a third-party platform he co-founded.

A US House investigation launched in February 2026 sought ownership and governance records from WLF after reports emerged that a 49 percent stake in the project had been sold to an entity linked to Abu Dhabi's Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan shortly before Trump's January 2025 inauguration. That deal was not publicly disclosed at the time.

Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut tied the controversy to US foreign policy directly, saying in a Senate floor speech that "the UAE investment steered millions of dollars to Trump and his envoy Steve Witkoff right before the Trump White House greenlit an unprecedented deal to sell advanced AI chips to the UAE."

The White House has pushed back. Spokesperson Anna Kelly stated: "Neither the President nor his family have ever engaged, or will ever engage, in conflicts of interest."

What This Means for Users Outside the US

The report's findings carry direct implications for retail users in South Asia and Africa, regions where Binance dominates crypto activity and where politically connected tokens have repeatedly caused outsized retail harm. The pattern echoes the collapse of the LIBRA meme coin, linked to Argentine President Javier Milei, in which more than 86 percent of traders sold at a loss, disproportionately affecting retail investors in emerging markets.

Indian retail users face related exposure. Chainalysis has previously ranked India among the top five countries globally for crypto adoption volume, and Indian investors are active on Binance, the dominant custodian of USD1. India's cautious regulatory environment makes the Public Citizen findings politically relevant there as well.

Pakistan offers the sharpest example. In January 2026, Pakistan's government signed a memorandum of understanding with SC Financial Technologies, a WLF affiliate, to explore integrating USD1 into the country's cross-border payment infrastructure, with a focus on remittances. The signing ceremony was attended by Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, Army Chief Field Marshal Asim Munir, Finance Minister Muhammad Aurangzeb, and Zach Witkoff, the son of Trump's special envoy Steve Witkoff and a co-CEO of WLF. The presence of Pakistan's army chief at a cryptocurrency agreement drew particular attention.

Adding to the governance concerns, Bilal Bin Saqib, the former chairman of Pakistan's Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority (PVARA), was named a WLF adviser in April 2025 before returning to government, raising questions about the regulatory-to-commercial pipeline at the center of the deal.

Pakistan ranks third globally in crypto adoption according to Chainalysis, and its overseas workers sent home $38.3 billion in FY2025. The country's central bank holds only $16.5 billion in foreign reserves, a figure Public Citizen cites as far below what would be needed to backstop large-scale USD1 integration. As of August 2026, no pilot has launched, no licenses have been issued, and no USD1 transactions have been documented under that agreement. A Karachi-based economist told Al Jazeera the MoU "had no real policy basis" and functioned primarily as a way to secure access to the Trump White House.

In Nigeria and Kenya, both in the top ten of Chainalysis's global adoption rankings, Binance converted its older BUSD stablecoin collateral to USD1 in December 2025. Users who held BUSD now hold USD1 by default, meaning passive exposure to a product whose issuer retains unilateral control over its rules and whose supply is concentrated in an exchange that received a $2 billion investment from Abu Dhabi's MGX fund via USD1 in May 2026. Nigeria's Securities and Exchange Commission and Kenya's Capital Markets Authority have both been increasingly vigilant about politically linked tokens, and observers expect this report to accelerate scrutiny in both markets.

What Comes Next

The Senate is scheduled to hold a cloture vote on the CLARITY Act, a broad crypto market-structure bill, on September 15, 2026. A cloture vote clears the procedural hurdle that allows a bill to advance to a final vote; it requires 60 or more senators to succeed.

Senate Democrats have conditioned their support for the CLARITY Act on stronger ethics provisions and foreign-influence safeguards. They have also sought to attach similar ethics requirements to the GENIUS Act stablecoin bill, which has already passed the Senate.

Public Citizen has called for mandatory divestment from crypto holdings by the president and family members as a condition of any bill's passage. Whether that condition survives negotiation will determine how much regulatory protection reaches the retail users, many of them outside the US, who are most exposed to the products this report examines.