The cryptocurrency community welcomed Donald Trump’s re-election as promised to help bolster the position of digital assets in the U.S., ending the practice of ‘regulation by enforcement,’ and even establishing a national strategic reserve.
The initial months of the actual presidency stood in stark contrast and can generally be best described as a ‘mixed bag.’ Though President Trump ushered in a more crypto-friendly SEC and the Department of Justice (DoJ) is winding down its digital assets operations, the administration has hardly been lucrative for traders.
One of the metrics showing the deteriorating situation is that the number of Bitcoin (BTC) ATMs has been dropping in the U.S. through the first quarter (Q1) of 2025. At the beginning of the year, there were 30,119 such machines, while, at the end of Q1, there were 185 fewer: 29,934, as per data retrieved from Coin ATM Radar and highlighted in Finbold’s Q1 2025 Cryptocurrency Market Report.
Furthermore, April proved even more damaging. In only nine days, another 70 ATMs disappeared, bringing the total to 29,864.
While the drop, relative to the total number, may appear trivial, the severity of the trend is evident in the fact that worldwide, the number of such Bitcoin machines increased by 279, bringing the total at the end of Q1 to 38,001. The April decline also wasn’t as pointed on the global scale as only 4 crypto ATMs disappeared.
Is anti-fraud legislation killing Bitcoin ATMs?
In addition to the drop in the number of installed Bitcoin ATMs, approximately 1,200 such machines went offline in the U.S. in the first week of March, with little explanation.
The disappearance coincided with Illinois Senator Dick Durbin proposing legislation that would crack down on fraud involving cryptocurrency ATMs. At the time, Durbin cited a case in which one of his constituents was scammed into depositing $15,000 at one such machine to avoid getting arrested due to a fictitious arrest warrant.
Bitcoin price drop helps erase BTC ATMs
Beyond concerns of fraud and the possible impact of anti-scam legislation, it is difficult to miss that the drop in the number of Bitcoin ATMs coincided with a decline in the price of BTC and a wider loss of reputation suffered by cryptocurrencies.
To begin with, Bitcoin is down 18.75% in 2025 and lost 10.87% of its value in April alone, as it is trading at $75,972 at press time. The downturn can be directly linked to the broader economic turmoil triggered by President Trump’s aggressive tariff policy and the international backlash to the trade war.
Simultaneously, despite gaining more institutional acceptance, multiple events have severely undermined the credibility of digital assets.
One such event that is both recent and can be directly attributed to the supposedly pro-crypto Trump has been the opportunistic launch of a number of presidential-family-themed meme coins that were effectively pumped by the inauguration – likely by designed as most of them were launch in the immediate leadup to January 20 – only to quickly fade.
