The Crypto Presidents: How Trump and Milei Used the Presidency to Burn $2.25 Billion

A single operator — Hayden Davis, 28, CEO of Kelsier Ventures — ran $TRUMP, $MELANIA and $LIBRA. Same blockchain, same structure, same dump. Two presidents on two continents as testimonials for a scheme that burned the savings of 863,000 people.

Updated May 26, 2026 — Exclusive Investigation

A $148 Million Dinner

May 22, 2025, late afternoon. An exclusive private golf club in Virginia, a few miles from the White House. Two hundred and twenty people sit at tables, surrounded by liveried staff. At the center of the room: the 47th President of the United States of America.

This is no ordinary gala dinner. The entry ticket is not an invitation — it is a crypto transaction. To be present that evening, each of the guests had to purchase $TRUMP, the memecoin launched by Donald Trump three days before his inauguration. Whoever bought the most was seated closest to the president.

Justin Sun, founder of TRON and long in the SEC's crosshairs for fraud, spent twenty million dollars in $TRUMP that evening. He finished first on the leaderboard. The prize: a $100,000 Trump-branded watch and a handshake with the president of the United States. The next day, the top 25 finishers would receive a private tour of the White House.

That evening, according to The Guardian's analysis from June 2025, Trump and his partners collected $148 million — from a single dinner.

No conflict of interest? No clash with the role of head of state? No questions from the White House ethics office?

No. Because that office had, in the meantime, been gutted.

The Mechanism: How to Build a Presidential Trap

To understand what happened with $TRUMP — and then with $LIBRA in Argentina — you need to understand the structure of these schemes. This is not luck. This is not the market. It is architecture.

On January 17, 2025, three days before Donald Trump's inauguration as 47th president of the United States, a message appeared on Truth Social and X: "My NEW Official Trump Meme is HERE! It's time to celebrate everything we stand for: WINNING!"

Within hours, the $TRUMP token reached a market cap of $14.75 billion. The price touched $75 per token on January 19, 2025.

But the structure behind that token tells a different story from the excitement of those social media posts.

Eighty percent of the token was in insider hands. Public liquidity was 20% of the total. When the price rises thanks to a presidential endorsement, insiders can sell their enormous holdings. Retail buys. The price falls. Retail is left holding devalued tokens.

This is the structure of a pump-and-dump. With one difference from the classic version: the "pump" was done by the president of the United States from his official account.

The Numbers: 813,000 People, Two Billion Dollars

The data does not come from an anonymous blog. It comes from Chainalysis, the leading blockchain analytics firm, which provided its data to the New York Times for an investigation published in February 2025.

The result: 813,294 wallets collectively lost approximately two billion dollars on $TRUMP. Of these, 764,000 were at a loss at the time of the analysis.

On the other side, only 58 wallets gained more than ten million dollars each, for a total of $1.1 billion in profits concentrated in a few hands.

A single anonymous wallet had bought six million tokens at $0.18 per token. They sold after two days. Profit: $109 million.

The Trump Organization and its partners collected one hundred million dollars in trading fees alone — regardless of price performance. Every transaction, every buy and sell by anyone, generated commissions for insiders.

In its November 2025 report, the House Judiciary Committee estimated the Trump family's crypto holdings at $11.6 billion, with crypto income exceeding $800 million in the first half of 2025 alone.

In the Senate, the April 2026 Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations report updated the figures: $TRUMP and $MELANIA combined had wiped out $4.3 billion of retail wealth, with 45 early-deployment wallets having earned $1.2 billion collectively.

Hayden Davis: The Thread That Connects Everything

This article could have stopped here: a president launching a memecoin, 813,000 people losing money. That alone is a first-order scandal.

But there is one detail that transforms this story into something different. Something systematic.

The name is Hayden Mark Davis. He is 28 years old. He comes from Colorado. He studied for two semesters at Liberty University on a football scholarship. He did not graduate. His father, Tom Davis, has a criminal record for check forgery (one year in prison), then reinvented himself as a pastor. His mother grew up in the Church of First Born of the Lamb of God, a polygamous cult founded by Ervil LeBaron — a man responsible for dozens of ritual murders in the 1970s.

Hayden Davis founded Kelsier Ventures during COVID. He operates from Dubai. And he managed three of the most discussed presidential memecoins in recent history: $MELANIA, $TRUMP and $LIBRA.

On February 17, 2025, three days after the launch of $LIBRA, Davis agreed to speak with Coffeezilla — Stephen Findeisen, the crypto journalist with 4 million YouTube subscribers known for his investigations. In the interview, Davis admitted to personally earning $113 million from $LIBRA. He admitted that $TRUMP had been offered in presale to guests at the DC VIP Crypto Ball on January 19, 2025 — the day before the inauguration. He explained, with no apparent embarrassment, that the system works this way: insiders know, insiders profit, retail does not know and pays.

It is hard to find a more honest description of a scheme of this kind. Davis provided it himself.

The connection between Kelsier Ventures, $TRUMP and $MELANIA is documented by Bloomberg (February 2025): the Meteora launch platform had been used for both $MELANIA and $LIBRA. The same people from the $MELANIA ecosystem were involved in $LIBRA. Davis had privileged access to Trump since the campaign period. According to reconstructions cited by Bloomberg, he boasted of having a direct channel with the Trump family through payments made to the president's sister, Karina Milei — at which point we are approaching the Argentine story.

$LIBRA: Argentina's Cryptogate

February 14, 2025. Valentine's Day. In Argentina, President Javier Milei — the anarcho-capitalist economist who promised to take the chainsaw to the Argentine state — is about to do something unusual for a head of state.

At 6:58 PM Buenos Aires time, Hayden Davis's company Kelsier Ventures creates the $LIBRA token on the Solana blockchain, using the Meteora platform.

Three minutes later — at 7:01 PM — Javier Milei posts on X, Instagram and Facebook a message promoting the token. Three minutes. The time to open a browser and write a post.

What happens in the hours that follow is documented with mathematical precision by on-chain data. The $LIBRA token goes from $0.000001 to $5.20 in forty minutes. A rise of 520,000 percent. Market capitalisation touches $4.6 billion.

Then Milei deletes the post. And the price crashes 96 percent within hours.

In Argentina, the political scandal that local media immediately dubbed "Cryptogate" erupts. Within 48 hours, 112 criminal complaints are filed. Milei responds on social media with a phrase that has since entered the archives: "If you lose money in a speculation, what's the problem?" — comparing investors who lost their savings to gamblers who had placed a bet.

The Economist, on February 20, 2025, headlined: "The first major scandal of Milei's presidency."

The Phone Calls: The Evidence Nobody Wanted Found

One thing is a president promoting a crypto token out of naivety or ideological enthusiasm. Another is a president who calls the token promoter while about to publish the post, and then again while the market crashes.

This is the story told by the phone records seized by the Argentine prosecutor.

On March 6, 2025, prosecutor Alejandro Taiano ordered the seizure and forensic analysis of the phones of Javier Milei, Karina Milei (his sister and Secretary-General of the Presidency) and Sergio Morales (former CNV adviser, Argentina's equivalent of the SEC). The phones were confiscated. The contents were extracted and handed to investigators: WhatsApp messages, Telegram, Facebook, Instagram, X, LinkedIn, SMS. Everything.

The Buenos Aires Herald, in its March 2026 edition, cites 10,000 pages of judicial records. What emerges from the reconstruction is a sequence of eight communications between Milei and Mauricio Novelli — the broker through whom the connection to Kelsier Ventures passed — in the window of the $LIBRA launch.

On Novelli's phone, investigators find more. Messages describing recurring payments to Milei as a "monthly salary" — dating back to when Milei was still a congressman. Documentation of financial agreements linked to public endorsements.

Clarín, in December 2025, reveals that Davis had a confidential contract with the Argentine government: he had been appointed an unpaid consultant on blockchain and AI — two weeks before the $LIBRA launch.

Two weeks. Not an independent consultant pitching an idea. An operator who signs an agreement with the presidency, then launches a token, then the president promotes it three minutes after its creation.

Milei Is Not New: Three Schemes in Four Years

$LIBRA is not the first time Milei has found himself at the center of a crypto scheme. The difference is that this time he was president — and the damage was proportionally greater.

2021. Milei is still a congressman. He publicly promotes a project called CoinX. The CNV — Argentina's National Securities Commission, the equivalent of the SEC — bans CoinX as a Ponzi scheme. Thousands of Argentine investors lose money. Milei responds: "I just expressed an opinion as an economist."

2022. Milei promotes Vulcano Game NFT, calling the project "very interesting." The $VULC token crashes to zero. Investors lose everything. Milei does not comment.

2025. $LIBRA. Third scheme in four years. But this time Milei is president of the Argentine Republic, with the power to appoint sector regulators, to choose prosecutors, to control the country's economic policy. This time the damage is 74,000 victims and $251 million in losses.

The pattern is identical: endorse, crash, silence. The difference is the scale.

The Institutional Response — and Its Limits

What happened after? The judicial and political response in both countries tells a great deal about the fragility of oversight systems when the executive branch is directly involved.

In Argentina, the response was relatively robust, at least formally. On April 8, 2026, the Chamber of Deputies approved a formal parliamentary inquiry into $LIBRA. November 2025 had already seen the publication of a 200-page parliamentary report concluding: "Milei used his presidential role to spread an alleged fraudulent scheme." On March 13, 2025, prosecutor Taiano had requested an Interpol Red Notice for Davis — the measure that obliges member countries to detain and hold an individual. Argentine judge María Servini froze Davis's assets in November 2025 (estimated at $100–120 million).

But Milei himself was cleared by the national anti-corruption office. The reasoning: "He spoke as an economist, not as president."

Meanwhile, the Manhattan district attorney had opened a file. On November 26, 2025, hours before a hearing in New York, a wallet identified as "Milei" moved $9 million in cryptocurrencies.

In the United States, the institutional response was even more contradictory. On one side, the parliamentary opposition moved: the House Judiciary Committee published its report in November 2025. The Senate sent formal letters to Trump entities. The MEME Act — banning the president and vice president from issuing or promoting digital tokens — was proposed with bipartisan signatures. It was never brought to a vote.

On the other side, the executive systematically dismantled the oversight tools. In April 2025, the Department of Justice dissolved the National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team — the unit specialising in crypto fraud. In May 2025, the SEC closed its case against Binance, days after Binance had listed USD1, the Trump family's stablecoin. The SEC's civil cases against Justin Sun were still pending when Sun showed up at the Virginia dinner and received his $100,000 watch.

Who Paid the Bill

The final figures are these: 813,294 American wallets that collectively lost $2 billion on $TRUMP and $MELANIA. Seventy-four thousand Argentine investors who lost $251 million on $LIBRA. In total: 887,000 people. Two billion, two hundred and fifty-one million dollars burned.

Who were they? Not hedge funds. Not institutional investors with risk management departments. They were — and this is the term Coffeezilla used, not by accident — normies. Ordinary people who had seen the president of the United States or the president of Argentina promoting a token and had assumed that was a guarantee.

The voice of academics and politicians who have studied the case is unanimous in its diagnosis, even if divided on the solution.

Professor Richard Briffault of Columbia Law School: "Trump is commercializing access to himself as a way to profit his memecoin. People are paying to meet Trump and he is the head of the regulators. It's doubly corrupt."

Senator Jeff Merkley: "Trump's crypto schemes are the Everest of corruption."

Senator Elizabeth Warren: "Donald Trump has turned the presidency into a crypto money machine."

Former prosecutor Paul Rosenzweig: "Trump's profit from his presidential memecoin is a textbook example of what the Founding Fathers wanted to prevent."

And finally, Hayden Davis himself, with disarming honesty: the system works this way. Insiders know. Retail does not. If you're angry, it's because you weren't an insider.

The story of $TRUMP and $LIBRA is not the story of a market gone mad. It is the story of a mechanism designed with precision, executed in coordination, protected by those who should have stopped it. It is the story of how presidential credibility — built over years of democratic institution — can be monetised in forty-eight hours, and how the bill, in the end, is always paid by the same people.

The ones who weren't insiders.