An up-to-date tally of Trump followers turned crypto investors is in. And for them, the overall results are remarkably bad.

Nearly 1 million people who bought President Donald Trump’s meme coin have lost money through the end of June, according to a report by cryptocurrency analytics firm Nansen. Their losses total $3.81 billion.

The analytics firm’s assessment was calculated this past week after Trump signed an annual financial disclosure showing that he walked away with a $636 million payout on the same crypto bet, part of a haul of at least $2.2 billion from all of his business ventures in 2025.

The odds were always in his favor. Trump profited whether the price of his meme coin went up or down. He collected returns whenever anyone traded the tokens, as he repeatedly pushed his followers to do, using his Truth Social account to promote the coin.

Once a crypto skeptic, Trump embraced the profit-making opportunity of digital currencies in 2024, while he was running for president. He and his sons founded a crypto startup called World Liberty Financial, which soon began selling a coin called $WLFI that has also declined sharply.

Three days before his inauguration, Trump unveiled a second Trump-branded investment — the $TRUMP meme coin, a type of novelty currency with little practical value.

“It’s time to celebrate everything we stand for: WINNING!” Trump wrote on social media. “Join my very special Trump community. GET YOUR $TRUMP NOW!” But that turned out to be bad advice.

Most crypto transactions are publicly visible, recorded on a digital ledger called the blockchain. That allows analysts to trace purchases of digital coins from individual crypto accounts, known as wallets. Nansen’s data shows that, as of the end of June, 988,905 buyers of the $TRUMP meme coin have lost money, representing roughly two out of every three buyers.

Cumulatively, these 988,905 wallets have lost a total of $3.81 billion, including buyers who have held on to their stash and recorded paper losses, according to Nansen. The coin was trading at $1.76 as of Friday, down 97% from its peak price of $75.35.

Nicholas Pinto is among the losers. A frequent crypto trader who voted for Trump in 2024, Pinto said he invested a total of roughly $500,000 in the $TRUMP coin, and has now lost about half that investment.

“He is leveraging the power of being president to launch currencies, when he seems trustworthy in the public’s eye,” Pinto said in an interview. “It is kind of incredible. It is almost a legal scam.”

The White House this past week rejected any suggestion that Trump has cashed in at the expense of his followers. Since arriving at the White House, Trump and appointees have curtailed regulatory oversight of the industry, including policies related to meme coins.

“President Trump proudly made the United States the crypto capital of the world,” Anna Kelly, a White House spokesperson, said in a statement to The New York Times after Trump’s annual report was made public Tuesday. “All actions by President Trump and his administration are taken in the best interest of the American people.”

A representative for the $TRUMP meme coin venture did not respond to a request for comment. David Wachsman, a spokesperson for World Liberty, blamed the plummeting value of $WLFI on broader market conditions that have forced down the prices of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

“No one can control the markets,” he said. “World Liberty stands behind the governance token WLFI, which has had increasing utility in a growing ecosystem since day one.”

Trump was not the only winner on the $TRUMP coin. After it launched, its price surged from less than $1 to more than $70, creating a window of opportunity for sophisticated crypto traders to extract a big profit.

These advanced traders, often using automated programs to purchase digital currencies, know that meme coins often skyrocket quickly in value and then crash, as the early buyers sell their holdings to less sophisticated, slower-moving investors hoping to get in on the action.

A little under 500,000 crypto wallets have recorded profits from $TRUMP, totaling $4 billion, according to Nansen. But that figure “reflects a small number of early buyers capturing enormous gains while the broad retail majority absorbed the losses,” the report said.

The meme coin was only one of several crypto ventures that reeled in profits for Trump and his allies.

Trump’s total profits from World Liberty reached $799 million last year, according to his financial disclosure, including hundreds of millions from the United Arab Emirates, which secretly moved in early 2025 to buy nearly half the company. A Trump business entity also collected a 75% cut of sales of $WLFI, after the deduction of certain expenses, guaranteeing that Trump would profit, even if the coin’s price ultimately crashed.

The losses on World Liberty’s coin are more complicated to track. Initially, the company sold the coin directly to investors, at prices of either $0.015 or $0.05, according to Nansen.

Anyone who bought the coin at $0.05 has made a slight profit, Nansen found. But $WLFI did not become widely available until September, when it started trading on secondary markets, known as exchanges.

Those transactions are not all publicly traceable. Of the 26,663 wallets that Nansen tracked, 85% have recorded a loss. The total losses amount to $83 million, compared with $23 million in profits.

But that is likely just a tiny cut of the overall losses — as the other buyers purchased the coins on exchanges whose data is not publicly visible. Today, World Liberty’s coin trades at $0.057, down 82% since September.

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Eric Lipton/David Yaffe-Bellany/Elizabeth Frantz

c.2026 The New York Times Company