Foreign money is pouring into president Donald Trump’s meme coin, $TRUMP, and the list of buyers includes powerful governments and secretive companies tied to them that have almost no public track record.
Billions are being pushed into this token by entities from China, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE, just as Trump sits in the White House and his family runs the coin’s business.
According to The New York Times, the biggest chunk of money—$2 billion—is tied to a United Arab Emirates-backed firm. That same week, a barely functioning Chinese firm announced it had secured $300 million to load up on $TRUMP, even though it hasn’t made a single dollar in revenue from the TikTok store it operates.
And none of this is happening in the open. Every move is being funneled through tax havens like the British Virgin Islands, leaving Washington scrambling to understand the scale of influence being purchased through crypto.
China-linked tech company wants $300 million in Trump coin
The company is called GD Culture Group, and it trades on the Nasdaq even though its filings show it has just eight employees and failed to generate any money last year. On Monday, the firm said it would use $300 million raised from a British Virgin Islands investor to buy Bitcoin and $TRUMP. The plan was later confirmed in a public SEC filing.
The GD Culture Group is tied to Shanghai Xianzhui, a Chinese subsidiary that admitted in March that its business could be “influenced” by the Chinese government. That detail alone has sent red flags through the ethics community because this would be the first known example of a Chinese-connected company buying into Trump’s personal coin.
Even stranger, the coin buy announcement came just as Trump is negotiating whether TikTok should be banned in the United States. TikTok, of course, is Chinese-owned, and the same app where GD Culture’s failing store operates. That means a struggling Chinese-tied firm is lining up to buy a president’s crypto, while he decides the future of the platform it relies on.
Former House Ethics Committee chair Charles Dent said the situation was “completely out of bounds,” adding that these governments were “obviously” trying to get close to the president. The company itself didn’t respond to any questions.
After the announcement, GD Culture’s stock jumped 12%, then dropped again. It’s still unclear if the company will follow through on the full purchase or how much money it actually received from the British Virgin Islands investor. The firm was already facing a Nasdaq delisting notice for failing to meet financial standards.
Trump’s coin opens the door to foreign cash and influence
Senator Christopher Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut, spent 20 minutes on the Senate floor on Tuesday explaining how all this money is quietly getting funneled to the Trump family. “I know Trump’s crypto scams can seem hard to understand,” he said. “A foreign government is investing $2 billion in Trump’s coin to get favorable treatment from the Administration. A wild corruption.”
Murphy pointed to more foreign transactions, including a real estate deal in Qatar and a Mexico-based shipping company called Fr8Tech, which publicly committed $20 million to the coin. The company said it was doing this to “advocate for fair, balanced and free trade between Mexico and the US.”
Crypto analytics firm Nansen found that many top buyers of $TRUMP were based in Mexico, Singapore, and Australia, and the president’s team is actively helping it, according to the Times.
Last month, Trump’s camp announced that the top 220 coin buyers would get invited to a dinner at his Virginia golf club. That news caused another wave of buying, sending the coin into another trading frenzy.
None of this money is going to a bank account. That would be illegal. Under federal law, foreign nationals can’t donate to political candidates or inaugural funds. But buying a coin? There’s no rule that blocks that. That’s what makes Trump’s crypto business so powerful, it bypasses campaign finance law entirely. That explains why Trump has been dragging his feet when it comes to crypto regulation.
While Trump rakes in crypto money from all over the world, most of the cash is being routed through anonymous entities in the British Virgin Islands. GD Culture’s deal is just one of many. In its official filing, the company confirmed the plan to buy the coin but gave no information about who the buyer was.
That secrecy is exactly what’s making this story so hard to trace. We don’t know who’s behind most of these purchases. We just know who benefits: the Trump family.
