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Jul 8, 2026·13 min read

The Crypto President Got Paid. The Market Got Sober.

Trump's 2025 crypto income hit $1.4 billion while $TRUMP holders lost $3.81 billion, and BTC perpetual funding now sits at its two-year median, 0.65 bps per 8h. Twenty months of the 'crypto president' trade, read through funding, open interest, and liquidations.

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Twenty months of the "crypto president" trade, read through funding, open interest, and liquidations — and why the flattest tape in two years is the real verdict on it.

In the space of a week, Washington produced two numbers that will follow each other around for years. There is a third, and it is the one this site exists to read.

Issuer side · 2025
+$1.4B
$636M $TRUMP + $799M World Liberty
Holder side · $TRUMP
−$3.81B
988,905 wallets underwater · 66%
Rented side · BTC funding
0.65 bps
55th %ile of 2yr · per 8h

Two numbers, and a third

The first number is $1.4 billion, the crypto income in Donald Trump's annual financial disclosure, released 30 June and covering calendar 2025. Roughly $636 million of it came from the $TRUMP memecoin. Another $799 million came from World Liberty Financial: about $250 million from selling his stake, more than $520 million from sales of the WLFI token.

The second is −$3.81 billion, the combined losses of the 988,905 wallets (66% of the 1.48 million that ever bought $TRUMP) that were underwater by the end of June, per Nansen. The token trades at $1.68 as I write this, 97% below its $75.35 peak. Its market cap has gone from $15 billion to about $400 million.

Most coverage stops there, because the moral arithmetic feels complete: issuer up $1.4B, holders down $3.8B. But there is a third number. As of 8 July, BTC perpetual funding across Binance, Bybit and Hyperliquid is 0.65 basis points per 8 hours, the 55th percentile of its two-year range. The perp trades four basis points under spot on Binance. Volume is running at 0.7x its weekly median.

No punishment in any of it. Just a market that has stopped paying.

The distance between the first two numbers and the third is the whole story of the "crypto president" trade, and it runs through the derivatives tape, not the news cycle.

What renting the narrative cost

A narrative, in market-structure terms, is something you can hold two ways. You can issue it — launch the token, collect the royalties, sell the stake. Or you can rent it — buy perpetual futures and pay funding for as long as you want the exposure. The Trump era is the cleanest natural experiment ever run on the difference, because the same man was the narrative's author and its biggest issuer.

The rent was expensive from the start.

Election night, 5 November 2024: BTC at roughly $69,000. Within a month it crossed $100,000 for the first time. Perps traders didn't just ride that move, they paid for it. Through the post-election melt-up, funding on BTC perpetuals repeatedly spiked past 100% annualized at the peaks and held above the bullish 0.01%-per-8-hours baseline for weeks on end. Longs were paying shorts double-digit annualized rent, with three-digit bursts, for the privilege of holding the trade everyone agreed was obvious. (That election was the one cycle in seven where the political result actually moved Bitcoin, which is exactly why the rent got so expensive.)

Then the author started issuing. $TRUMP launched on Solana on the night of 17 January 2025, three days before the inauguration. It hit $75.35 within 48 hours. Solana printed its own all-time high near $294 on the memecoin bid. The $MELANIA token launched on the 19th and knocked $TRUMP down double digits before the oath of office was even administered: the first hint that issuance, unlike rent, is a repeatable act.

On inauguration day BTC printed what was then its all-time high, just above $109,000. Funding euphoric, basis fat, open interest at records. Peak rent.

Sell the news, twice

The policy milestones that followed taught the market a lesson it kept refusing to learn: the narrative's content could be delivered in full and the trade could still lose.

The Strategic Bitcoin Reserve arrived by executive order on 6 March 2025, and BTC fell about 5% overnight, because the reserve was budget-neutral and built from coins the government already held. Buy the rumor for four months, sell the document in four hours.

The GENIUS Act, signed 18 July 2025, was the real structural win: the first federal stablecoin framework. It was also, not incidentally, the piece of the agenda most directly useful to the family business: World Liberty's USD1 stablecoin, which had already settled a $2 billion Abu Dhabi investment into Binance that spring. BTC made a then-high near $123K into the signing week. The issuer side and the rented side both got paid that month. It didn't last.

BTC topped out at $126,279 on 6 October 2025. Four days later the two sides of the trade met each other in the order book.

October 10: the author margin-calls his readers

On 10 October 2025, Trump posted that "massive" tariffs on China were coming. Within 24 hours, $19.37 billion in leveraged crypto positions were liquidated across 1.6 million traders, the largest liquidation event ever recorded by CoinGlass. BTC fell 14.5% to about $104,800. Per FTI Consulting's post-mortem, top-of-book depth on major venues shrank by more than 90% intraday, and spreads went from single basis points to double-digit percentages at the extremes. It still stands as the largest liquidation cascade in crypto history.

Read that event as market structure and it becomes the thesis. The narrative's author posted a sentence, and the sentence liquidated the people levered long his own narrative. He didn't need to target them; that is what the two positions are. A token issuer's revenue is direction-agnostic: royalties and stake sales pay out whether price goes up or down. A leveraged long is direction-everything, and it carries a liquidation price. One side of the trade had a stop-loss. The other side had a disclosure schedule.

Two ways to hold a narrative
Issue it
Launch the token, collect the fees.
+$1.4B
Paid whether the price went up or down.
Rent it
Bet on it with leverage.
−$19.37B
Wiped out in one day when the price fell. 10 Oct 2025.
The same man wrote the story and sold it. One side of the trade could be forced out of the market. The other just filed a disclosure.

Nansen's forensics on $TRUMP say the same thing at the retail scale: fewer than 500,000 wallets ever took profit on the token, about $4 billion total, concentrated among buyers in the first hours. Everyone later in the queue was exit liquidity. On perps, the queue mechanics are identical, just settled continuously through funding instead of all at once at launch.

The sober tape

The 2026 half of the story is quieter, which is the point. BTC started the year with a first-week pop to $93,000 and spent the next five months grinding down. Through the China summit in May (a $79,200 low on Xi's Taiwan warning), into the June unwind we documented in the quiet crash: a record 13-session, $4.33 billion ETF outflow streak, a 5 June print of $59,099 (then the lowest since October 2024), and a final quarter-end flush below $58,000 on 30 June. War didn't break that market and peace didn't fix it. A crypto president didn't save it either.

Here is what the tape looks like now, pulled from MarketTrace on the morning of 8 July 2026:

Funding · per 8h
0.65 bps
55th %ile · ~7% annualized · +sign 288h
Basis · Binance
−4.4 bps
perp trades under spot
Open interest
$14.0B
4 venues · 0.97× 1w avg · flat
Volume
0.7×
of weekly median
Liquidations · past hr
~$212K
vs ~$800M/hr on 10 Oct
OBI / taker buy
−0.003 / 0.508
every dial pinned to center

Read the cards down and none of them is doing anything:

  • Funding: 0.65 bps per 8h, the 55th percentile of 783 days of history. Annualized, that's about 7%, below even the 0.01%-per-8h "bullish baseline" longs held above for weeks in late 2024. It has kept a barely-positive sign for 288 straight hours: twelve days of funding that rounds to zero.
  • Basis: −4.4 bps on Binance. The perpetual trades under spot. Nobody pays a premium for levered exposure to the next headline.
  • Open interest: $14.0 billion across Binance, Bybit, OKX and Hyperliquid, flat. 0.97x its one-week average. No build, no flush.
  • Volume: 0.7x the weekly median. Liquidations in the past hour: about $212,000 notional. On 10 October the market was liquidating $800 million an hour.
  • Order book imbalance: −0.003. Taker buy ratio: 0.508. Every dial pinned to the center.

Here is that funding, live across the six perps we track:

Loading…
cell tint · |percentile − 50| · stronger = further from venue mediannegativepositivecollecting
How we calculate this →
Live funding rate per perp, refreshed every 60s. See the full dashboard or the methodology.

Compare the two disclosures this month made. Trump's disclosure says the issuer side of the trade earned $1.4 billion. The tape's disclosure says the rented side now costs almost nothing, because almost nobody wants it. Funding at its two-year median with price 50% off the high isn't fear. Fear looks like negative funding, like ETH at its 4th percentile in June. This is something else: the euphoria premium has simply been withdrawn. The market didn't turn against the crypto president. It stopped paying him rent.

What to watch

The disclosure will dominate a news cycle and move nothing. Issuance revenue is old flow, already extracted, mostly in 2025. If the narrative premium ever comes back, it will not announce itself in a filing. It will show up where it always shows up first:

  • Funding pushing and holding above its 90th percentile: the last sustained visit was the post-election melt-up.
  • Basis flipping decisively positive: someone paying up for forward exposure again.
  • Open interest building with price: new money renting the trade, not shorts covering.

All three are on the funding and positioning modules, updating every 30 seconds, free. The next time someone sells this market a story, you'll be able to watch, in basis points per 8 hours, exactly what the market is willing to pay for it.

Right now the answer is: about half a basis point. Sober is a number.

FAQ

How much did Trump make from crypto in 2025?

$1.4 billion, per the annual financial disclosure released 30 June 2026 and covering calendar 2025. About $636 million came from the $TRUMP memecoin and roughly $799 million from World Liberty Financial: about $250 million from selling his stake plus more than $520 million from sales of the WLFI token. It is issuance revenue, royalties and stake sales that pay out regardless of where the token trades afterward.

How much did $TRUMP memecoin holders lose?

About $3.81 billion. Per Nansen, 988,905 wallets (66% of the 1.48 million that ever bought $TRUMP) were underwater by the end of June 2026. The token trades near $1.68, roughly 97% below its $75.35 peak, and its market cap has fallen from about $15 billion to roughly $400 million. Fewer than 500,000 wallets ever took profit, and those gains concentrated among buyers in the first hours after launch.

What happened on October 10, 2025 in crypto?

After Trump posted that "massive" tariffs on China were coming, the market recorded the largest liquidation event ever tracked by CoinGlass: $19.37 billion in leveraged positions liquidated in 24 hours across 1.6 million traders. BTC fell about 14.5% to roughly $104,800. Per FTI Consulting, top-of-book depth on major venues shrank more than 90% intraday. It was a leverage cascade: the levered longs carried a liquidation price, and a single sentence found it.

Why is Bitcoin's funding rate so low in July 2026?

As of 8 July 2026, BTC perpetual funding across Binance, Bybit and Hyperliquid sits near 0.65 basis points per 8 hours, the 55th percentile of its two-year range, roughly 7% annualized, and the perp trades about 4 basis points under spot on Binance. That is not fear; fear looks like negative funding. It is the euphoria premium being withdrawn. With price around 50% off its October high, almost nobody is paying up for leveraged long exposure to the next headline.

Did the "crypto president" rally save Bitcoin?

No. BTC topped at $126,279 on 6 October 2025, then spent 2026 grinding down; a June ETF-outflow unwind took it below $58,000 by quarter-end. Neither the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve (6 March 2025) nor the GENIUS Act (18 July 2025) held a bid; the reserve fell about 5% overnight because it was budget-neutral. The issuance side earned $1.4 billion, but the derivatives tape shows the market has simply stopped paying a premium for the narrative.

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Sources

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