Trump Administration Lets Loose the Dogs of Crypto: Dropped Enforcement Cases Give Green Light to Crypto Grifters
By Iván Cazarín
The Trump administration’s crypto corruption, rampant deregulation, and dropped crypto enforcement cases has greenlit the worst crypto grifters and threatened both investors and the stability of the financial system. The crypto industry claimed it was being unfairly targeted by enforcement efforts, but it is spending an unprecedented amount of money lobbying for a light-touch regulatory regime that would effectively allow deceptive practices, market manipulation, self-dealing, and more that harms crypto investors, workers saving for their retirement, and financial stability.
The administration has been letting a raft of crypto scofflaws off the hook. In April, Trump shuttered the Department of Justice’s crypto enforcement team, showing this administration had no intention of protecting investors from rampant manipulation, corruption, and scams in the crypto sector. The Trump administration has folded landmark enforcement cases against law breaking crypto moguls, their platforms, and even pardoned crypto billionaires. Dropping all these cases sends a clear message that the Trump administration intends to let the crypto billionaires get away with anything. Here are some of Trump’s crypto get out of jail free cards:
Enforcement case against Justin Sun dropped after he makes big investment in Trump crypto
Justin Sun has raked in $8.5 billion from his crypto holdings and ventures (including the Tron blockchain and its Tronix TRX token, as well as other crypto exchanges). He is a notoriously shady crypto billionaire. He recently paid $6 million for an art installation of a banana duct taped to a wall and then ate the banana.
In 2023, the SEC charged Sun and three of his companies with selling illegal securities and fraudulently manipulating the TRX price by artificially bumping sales through wash trades between insiders. Sun further promoted TRX by paying celebrities like Lindsay Lohan and Soulja Boy to pump the token on social media, which the SEC alleged they did unlawfully without disclosing endorsement payments. And his Tron platform hosted more than half of global illicit crypto finance — $26 billion in 2024 — according to a report by TRM Labs. Sun had long remained outside of the United States, fearing imminent arrest.
But Sun’s prospects changed when Trump went into the crypto business. Sun saw an opportunity to cozy up to Trump just by investing in the president’s crypto empire. He bought $75 million in crypto tokens from the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial, making him the platform’s largest investor during its launch. Sun purchased an $18 million mountain of $Trump memecoins which earned him the top spot and private access to Trump’s memecoin celebration dinner. These investments appear to have paid off. Soon after the inauguration, the Trump SEC stayed (or halted) its case against Sun. And he continues to plow money into Trump crypto. Earlier this month, he announced he would buy $20 million more Trump-affiliated crypto products.
Charges dropped against money launderer Binance as its founder deepens financial ties with Trump crypto empire
In 2023, the SEC filed thirteen charges against Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, and its founder and former CEO Changpeng Zhao (known as CZ), saying they had engaged in an “extensive web of deception, lack of disclosure, and calculated evasion of the law.” Several months later, CZ pled guilty and paid $4.3 billion to settle federal criminal charges for violations of the Bank Secrecy Act. The Justice Department found that Binance and CZ knowingly and willfully allowed sanctions evasion with accounts in Iran, North Korea, and Syria and laundered the proceeds of darknet transactions, ransomware, and scams. Attorney General Merrick Garland stated “using new technology to break the law does not make you a disruptor, it makes you a criminal.”
CZ brazenly applied for a pardon months after Trump took office. A month later, CZ enmeshed himself and substantially invested in the first family’s World Liberty Financial USD1 stablecoin. Binance wrote the basic code for USD1. And, in May 2025, a United Arab Emirates government-backed fund made a $2 billion investment in Binance using Trump’s stablecoin. A few days later, the SEC dismissed the remaining outstanding charges against Binance and its founder. To this day, 90 percent of USD1 coins circulate on Binance’s blockchain, trading activity that could generate tens of millions of dollars for the first family annually.
Rewarding Coinbase even though it deprived investors of their protections
In 2023, the SEC charged the exchange platform Coinbase for illegally operating a securities exchange, allowing investors to be exposed to fraud and manipulation, failing to make proper disclosures, and concealing conflicts of interest that increased costs for investors. Coinbase not only brokered client transactions but it also traded its own funds, which made it possible for the firm to maximize profits and fees from unwitting clients who might be pushed to buy Coinbase’s holdings. Coinbase added Trump’s co-campaign manager to its advisory council right after the inauguration. A few weeks later, the SEC dropped its case against Coinbase. The firm’s lawyer called the outcome a “complete win.” The company went on to be a corporate sponsor of Trump’s military parade this summer.
Trump gives a pass after Winklevoss twins’ Gemini loses $900 million in client funds
In 2023, the SEC charged Gemini, co-founded by the Winklevoss twins Cameron and Tyler, and the crypto bank Genesis with selling unregistered securities through the Gemini Earn program. The program launched in 2021 let Gemini customers loan their crypto to the Genesis bank, which promised to pay interest, known as staking. Gemini took a slice of the returns Genesis earned investing Gemini customers’ crypto. In November 2022, Genesis froze Gemini Earn accounts and prevented investors from withdrawing their crypto assets because it could not cover the withdrawal requests during the crypto winter. The SEC alleged Genesis froze $900 million from 340,000 Gemini Earn investors. Gemini terminated the Gemini Earn program but investors still cannot withdraw their crypto assets. In 2024, the New York Attorney General did secure a $2 billion settlement with Genesis and $50 million from Gemini for misleading investors about the risks of the Gemini Earn program. Last month, a few days after Gemini’s initial public offering, the SEC and Gemini agreed to settle the ongoing case.
Separately, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission — the preferred regulator of the crypto industry because of its weaker protections for ordinary investors and smaller enforcement capacity — ordered Gemini to pay a $5 million fine for misleading the regulator about the risk of market manipulation in its proposed Bitcoin futures contract. The Winklevoss twins demanded that Trump pull the CFTC nominee Brian Quintenz — a crypto millionaire and former policy director for crypto-booster Andreesen-Horowitz — allegedly because he would not shake up the CFTC enough. Quintenz stated that Tyler Winkevoss demanded that the CFTC changes must include “rectifying what happened to us.” Last week, Trump yanked the nomination, demonstrating the crypto industry demands — and Trump will deliver — unconditional supplication.
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These are some of the biggest cases but regulators have been dropping cases left and right. The SEC closed an investigation into the decentralized finance platform Uniswap and closed another into Robinhood’s crypto trading and possible securities law violations. Trump pardoned the convicted founders of BitMex, which the Justice Department found was operating a “money laundering platform.” The CFTC dropped a pending case against Kalshi for selling congressional election options contracts. Months later, federal prosecutors shuttered a similar investigation into Polymarket that alleged it continued to offer unregulated options contracts after it had agreed to cease this stablecoin-funded options betting and paid a $1.4 million fine. And, in August, the SEC settled its long-running, controversial case against Ripple, but only after a judge rejected a joint SEC-Ripple appeal to slash in half the prior $125 million court-imposed fine for violations of investor protection law. Months before, Ripple contributed $4.9 million to the Trump Inaugural Fund, which was the fund’s second-largest reported corporate donation.
Dropping these cases sends a clear message that crypto billionaires can break the law, defraud investors, pocket millions of dollars, and will not be punished — especially if President Trump or his crypto cronies can benefit financially. This gives the entire crypto industry a green light to continue to rip-off investors and imperil our financial system.