Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson recently argued that TRUMP’s launch 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 agenda into a partisan battle.
In an interview, Hoskinson said that in December 2024, “we expected about 70 senators to vote for the CLARITY Act and a supermajority of the House,” and that TRUMP’s launch before the bill’s passage transformed crypto “from bipartisan to crypto equals Trump equals bad equals corruption.”
He also linked the coin’s launch to the Bitcoin-only rally that defined 2025, arguing that “government interference” and the Trump scandal have distorted altcoin flows and locked capital into BTC.
It’s a compelling story: One bad decision by Trump blew up 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 held by entities controlled by Trump.
Ethics experts and some pro-crypto Republicans immediately flagged it as a vehicle for a conflict of interest: a sitting president selling a coin while setting crypto policy. On May 6, the first concrete legislative consequences appeared.
Maxine Waters shut down a joint House Financial Services and Agriculture hearing on crypto market structure rules, explicitly citing Trump’s memecoin and World Liberty Financial as an abuse of power.
Hoskinson is correct that TRUMP has made the legislative process more difficult. But a few details complicate the picture. First, crypto had already drifted into Trumpworld before the coin.
Trump campaigned as the “president of crypto,” raised significant funding from the industry, and struck a lucrative deal with World Liberty Financial, where his family claims a significant share of token revenue and fees.
Ethical concerns about this deal and its USD1 stablecoin surfaced long before Waters was killed at that May hearing. Second, the legislative story did not end with the canceled hearing.
Despite the drama, House Republicans and some Democrats still proposed essential bills.
In mid-2025, the House approved the GENIUS Stablecoin Act and the CLARITY Digital Asset Market Structure Act with bipartisan, although far from unanimous, votes.
Media coverage noted that “many Democrats fiercely oppose” the package, seeing it as too pro-industry and too tied to Trump’s personal agendas, even as others cross the aisle to vote yes.
This coalition looks different from the pie of 70 senators described by Hoskinson. It’s the Republican Party that’s nearly unified, with a minority of Democrats, while a vocal progressive faction and ethics hawks push back.
Third, Waters’ objection focused on self-dealing and abuse of power, not partisan hostility toward crypto. She argued that she couldn’t participate in a hearing on “crypto market structure” while the sitting president ran a memecoin and stablecoin empire that could personally benefit from the scheme he allegedly wrote.
The distinction is important: It’s not that Democrats have suddenly decided that “crypto equals Trump.” This is because Trump’s plans have made questions of conflicts of interest inevitable.
Votes and timeline
There is no public tally showing 70 Senate votes blocked for CLARITY in December 2024. The record shows that congressional committees have advanced bills with bipartisan votes, but Democrats are increasingly divided between centrists and progressives.
Stories about global freedom and TRUMP hardened opposition among Democrats who might otherwise have been persuaded. At least one major hearing was canceled because of these Trump-related plans, Waters said in his statement.
There was a bipartisan path forward for crypto, but it was fragile and dependent on the White House not turning regulation into a vehicle for presidential enrichment.
TRUMP exposed a conflict of interest problem that already worries many Democrats, rather than creating partisan opposition out of thin air.
Even after TRUMP’s backlash, Congress still managed to pass GENIUS and remove CLARITY from the House, suggesting that memecoin did not kill the legislation outright.
Bitcoin-only rally was already planned
Hoskinson also linked the Bitcoin-only rally and delays to “government interference” and the memecoin saga. Market data highlights different factors.
Several independent 2025 reports address the same themes. A clash of institutional and retail flows into spot Bitcoin ETFs, with research showing that new ETF buyers have overwhelmingly focused on BTC, a trend that has “drained capital away from the broader altcoin market.”
A mature, more cautious market, with CoinGlass and other derivatives stores reporting “continued weakness in ETH and the broader altcoin market” linked to reduced risk appetite, tougher competition, and lack of killer new apps, not just political ones.
Bitcoin’s dominance increased through mid-2025, with market commentary repeatedly noting BTC’s share of total crypto market capitalization in the mid-60s at 70%, while altcoins lagged even during rallies.
A June analysis explicitly linked this to ETF-driven demand being “treated similarly to gold,” with dips bought and pumps sustained, while altcoin liquidity remained thin.
Zooming in on coins like
When the SEC greenlighted and then suspended a Bitwise altcoin index ETF conversion, XRP and other majors suffered setbacks due to regulatory uncertainty, not the TRUMP drama.
Trump’s Memecoin and World Liberty scandals added to media risk and made some institutions more cautious about crypto exposure, while ethics questions remained unresolved.
However, the main reasons why this cycle resembles “Bitcoin first, maybe variations later” are structural. ETFs and Treasuries have made BTC the cleanest institutional trade. Regulation is clearer for BTC and, to a lesser extent, ETH than for most altcoins. The appetite for risk and innovation is lower outside of a handful of L1 ecosystems.
None of this required TRUMP to exist.
Yet Hoskinson is optically right. Launching a presidential memecoin before a major regulatory bill was always going to complicate politics.
Waters May’s statement makes this concrete: she could not negotiate market structure while the president monetized his office through the same instruments they were trying to regulate.
However, the broader causal claims are found in the data. No 70-vote Senate coalition has been documented in December 2024. There was a fragile bipartisan opening that Trump’s crypto empire, first made up of World Liberty and then TRUMP, made politically more difficult for Democrats who feared approving self-serving deals.
