President Trump pitched himself to voters on the campaign trail as the next “crypto president”. His administration has ushered in favourable regulation, a crypto-friendly Securities and Exchange Commission, and a pardon for Changpeng Zhao, the founder of the Binance exchange.
However, so far, that hasn’t translated into stellar returns for holders of bitcoin, the world’s largest digital currency.
The price of bitcoin fell 3.7 per cent to $96,022 in morning trading in New York on Friday, below the $102,195 level seen on the day of Trump’s inauguration on January 20.
Bitcoin has underperformed the S&P 500 since the start of the year, rising 2.7 per cent compared with a gain of 15 per cent for the index of America’s largest listed companies.
The notoriously volatile digital asset snapped a seven-year streak of monthly gains in October, falling nearly 5 per cent after Trump spooked investors and triggered the largest crypto liquidation yet by announcing a 100 per cent tariff on Chinese imports and threatening export controls on critical software.
Bitcoin fell as low as $104,783 between October 10 and 11, having set a record high a few days earlier above $126,000. Analysts at 10x Research, a digital assets research firm, think that the crypto industry has entered a bear market.
President Trump and his wife, Melania, promoted their new meme coins in January
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In a note this week the firm said: “It is admittedly hard to turn aggressively bearish when equity indices sit near all-time highs and AI momentum remains intact.
“However, crypto positioning tells a different story: [exchange-traded fund, or ETF] buyers appear exhausted, trading desks are still recovering from the October 10 liquidation event, and retail investors have taken substantial hits this year.”
For its critics, bitcoin has little point beyond the gamble that its price will rise. Its supporters have suggested it can have everyday utility as a digital store of wealth and a payment method but the development of its practical usefulness has been agonisingly slow.
Tom Essaye, president of Sevens Report, said: “I think what’s happened is that people got a little bit ahead of themselves on declaring bitcoin anything other than essentially a risk asset, which it still is at this point.
“In many ways, Trump is the bitcoin president. There are advances going into the legitimacy of bitcoin, of using it in everyday commerce, but those are our slow-moving but important advances. They will show up in overall demand metrics years from now. I think people thought bitcoin’s moment had arrived. It has not yet.”
Global markets have been volatile. A rally in US equities at the start of the week as investors found comfort in the ending of the US government shutdown has faded.
On Thursday the Nasdaq fell 2.3 per cent, with steep losses in AI-related stocks including Nvidia and Palantir Technologies as investors faced renewed uncertainty over interest rate cuts owing to inflation worries and disunity among central bankers about the US economy’s health.
Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia, which was among the technology companies affected by the AI-related stock sell off last week
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Bitcoin ETFs recorded net outflows of about $870 million on Thursday, the second-largest daily withdrawal since their debut, Bloomberg reported.
The next US Federal Reserve rate-setting event on December 10 is expected to be an important date for the sector.
Matthew Tuttle, a bitcoin investor and chief executive of Tuttle Capital Management, said: “I think people are starting to get worried that the Fed is going to be on hold at that meeting, which I think is at least part of today’s [Thursday’s] sell-off.”
He said that while the price of bitcoin has been falling, he has been “buying the dip”. “You know, I think intermediate term, longer term, I’m bullish,” he said.
However, he said: “When bitcoin got into the $120s, that was great, but that was too far, too fast, and just like anything else, you can be the biggest bitcoin bull ever, but you’re sitting on massive profits. And the old adage: take your profits before somebody else takes them from you — that applies to everything, including bitcoin. People like to talk about bitcoin as some magical asset, but it really isn’t.”
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The $100,000 level is regarded as an important psychological threshold for investors. Investor nerves are reflected in the wider crypto market.
Many retail participants “are deeply underwater, which reduces their risk appetite and limits fresh capital inflows into crypto”, analysts at 10x Research said.
Reuters has claimed that Trump’s family made more than $800 million from sales of crypto assets in the first half of 2025. However, the Trump meme coin, launched in January using the $TRUMP ticker, has collapsed in value from a range of between $60 and $65 to $8.
The Bullish and Gemini cryptocurrency exchange IPOs have each fallen by about 68 per cent since their listing peaks on August 13 and September 12. Meanwhile, Circle has tumbled 67 per cent from its peak on June 23.
It can’t have been the kind of performance the president had in mind when he spoke about making the US the “crypto capital of the world” in July.