The sale of face-to-face access to President Donald Trump using the Trump family’s own cryptocurrency has done more than benefit the president financially, although it has certainly done that.

Trump announced last month that leading buyers of a digital coin that his family is marketing would be rewarded with a private dinner with him at one of his golf courses and that the very top bidders would win a tour of the White House.

The auction, which ended Monday, has set off a spectacle that has drawn bipartisan criticism, triggered a suspicious trading pattern and left a sitting United States president wide open to attempts to corruptly influence him.

Since the announcement, crypto investors around the world have raced to expand their holdings of $TRUMP — a digital currency called a memecoin, which is typically treated more as a novelty investment than an actual currency.

Certain buyers, in interviews and statements, have said they bought the coins or entered the dinner contest with the intention of securing an action by Trump to affect United States policy.

Self-inflated value

The contest has pushed up the memecoin’s trading price, adding billions of dollars, at least on paper, to the value of a $TRUMP stash controlled by the Trump family and its business partners. And in a matter of weeks, the Trumps and their partners have reeled in more than $1.3 million in fees, taking a cut every time the coins changed hands, according to Chainalysis, a crypto data firm.

Certain other large traders, sensing an opportunity to cash in, have moved quickly to sell their $TRUMP holdings, exploiting the run-up in price caused by Trump’s promotional push as new money poured in from people enticed by his offer of “the most exclusive invitation in the world.”

Political price to pay

But the blitz of personal profit-seeking by Trump and his family is also provoking a backlash.

Last week, it helped derail a major piece of crypto legislation pending in Congress, as the sale prompted objections from crypto industry executives and lawmakers, including some Republicans.

Trading records examined by the New York Times show that a flurry of purchases of the $TRUMP token started the day before the coin’s backers disclosed the contest. Information had leaked about the upcoming promotion, allowing certain parties to make early bets that the market price was about to jump, the records suggest.

The aggressive effort by Trump and his partners to promote the dinner has also drawn scrutiny from former securities regulators, who assert that Trump may be violating federal securities laws. However, he would almost certainly not be targeted for investigation, now that his administration has curtailed crypto enforcement efforts at both the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Justice Department.

“This absolutely would have triggered an initial investigation,” said John Reed Stark, an enforcement attorney who spent 18 years at the SEC, including as chief of its unit that examined cybercrimes. “Or at least it certainly would have under norms from prior Republican and Democratic eras.”

White House officials have rejected the criticism. A senior official called the dinner “a private event” that would take place during the president’s personal time.

Numerous ventures

Trump started selling $TRUMP on Jan. 17, three days before Inauguration Day, prompting the coin’s price to soar briefly, before it crashed. The memecoins were one facet of a wide array of crypto ventures that he has pursued since he embraced the industry on the campaign trail last year.

Over months, he has made repeated efforts to prop up the memecoin’s value, culminating in the dinner announcement.

A website tied to the coin announced last month that the top 220 buyers would be invited to a “gala dinner” with him May 22. Even more enticing, the top 25 would win access to a “Private VIP Reception” with Trump, as well as a White House tour, the website said.

The auction has been playing out for nearly a month now, with an arcadelike leaderboard on the memecoin’s website that tracks the rankings.

Bidding largely foreign

But since the coin went on sale, it has been a losing bet for the vast majority of buyers, even as it has enriched the Trump family, according to a review by Chainalysis.

The bidders’ buying patterns, documented on a public ledger called the blockchain, suggest that a large share of the investors are based abroad. Many of the purchases took place on overseas crypto platforms such as Binance or Bybit that do not allow United States-based users.

Working with Nansen, a crypto data firm, the Times was also able to uncover the identities behind several of the top accounts.

“It would be great to be able to meet the president,” Kain Warwick, a crypto entrepreneur in Sydney, Australia, who is on the leaderboard, said in an interview. “That’s something that I wouldn’t have expected I would have the opportunity to be even in the position to do.”

An anonymous account on the social platform X posted on April 19 that Trump was planning a dinner for “large token holders,” citing a password-protected webpage that looked as if it might be related to the memecoin.

In Singapore, a crypto company called MemeCore surged to second on the leaderboard, with nearly 1.4 million coins, worth a total of $19.3 million.

Just above MemeCore in the rankings was a crypto user identified simply as “Sun.” According to two crypto forensics firms, the account belongs to an overseas exchange called HTX, where billionaire crypto mogul Justin Sun serves as global adviser. Sun was the target of a fraud suit from the SEC in 2023; the agency paused the case against Sun, who has invested heavily in Trump’s other crypto venture, World Liberty Financial.

Circumventing federal law

The contest has presented a straightforward opportunity for foreign-based investors to interact with Trump. Under federal law, noncitizens are barred from donating to political campaigns. But nothing stops them from buying a $TRUMP memecoin.

In Mexico, Javier Selgas, CEO of a transportation logistics company, announced last month that he intended to buy $20 million worth of $TRUMP tokens to try to persuade Trump to lower tariffs targeting Mexico, which would benefit his company.

On the other side of the world, Warwick has made his own plan to capitalize on an evening with Trump.

Warwick, founder of crypto firm Infinex, stocked up on $TRUMP coins in January, accumulating a large enough stash to secure a spot on the leaderboard.

At the dinner, he said, he hopes to get a few minutes with Trump or perhaps his son Eric to push them on crypto policy and champion “decentralized finance,” a branch of the crypto industry that allows people to borrow and lend money using digital currencies.