Donald Trump’s return to the White House has brought global crypto markets to all-time highs. The US president has promised to swap the US Treasury’s gold for a “strategic bitcoin reserve”. He has established a task force to bring digital assets into the mainstream. He has even launched his own “meme coin”. For Trump’s supporters, he’s the first crypto president.  

Trump’s U-turn on cryptos (he called bitcoin a “scam” against the dollar in 2021) has come with hat tips to far-right bitcoiners. For example, the president has granted a full pardon to Ross Ulbricht, known as “Dread Pirate Roberts”, who netted around 1 billion dollars worth of bitcoin from selling illegal drugs and six murders-for-hire. Others walking free included leaders of far-right hate groups the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, charged with seditious conspiracy. Both relied on networks of crypto donors, taking in at least 112 Bitcoins since 2017. That’s 12 million dollars in today’s money. 

Today, bitcoin markets are buoyed by far-right enthusiasm. But could crypto, with its push for a decentralised financial system, be useful for furthering green and progressive ideals? 

Bubbles for bitcoin 

Big Crypto was by far the biggest corporate donor during the 2024 US presidential race, giving more than 120 million dollars. That’s more than Big Oil, Big Tobacco, and Venture Capital combined. Keen not to offend the young white men that make up the majority of crypto advocates, Democrat nominee Kamila Harris was also cosying up with Big Crypto. The industry is set to hand over another war chest worth 80 million dollars for crypto-friendly candidates of any political persuasion before the 2026 midterms.  

Proving his crypto credentials, Trump set up an election fundraiser selling digital artworks. The sale of “non-fungible tokens” (NFTs) depicting him as a cosplay superhero and National Rifle Association fan netted him 4.5 million dollars. But despite his honorary title, Trump isn’t the first crypto president. In 2021, El Salvador’s right-wing populist president Nayib Bukele bet his country’s economy on bitcoin, forcing every business to recognise crypto as a legitimate currency with parity to the US dollar. The gamble proved an unmitigated failure. Last month, under pressure from the International Monetary Fund, and a near-complete lack of interest from Salvadorans to buy anything with bitcoin, obligations to accept it were quietly dropped.   

But Trump is pushing ahead. He’s scrapped plans for a digital US dollar, focusing his support instead on private crypto projects, including “stablecoins” – digital tokens that peg their value to other cryptocurrencies, fiat money, or exchange-traded commodities.  

The crypto industry has always been awash with wash trading and fraud.

In Europe, the creation of another US-made payment tool might add urgency to the development of a digital euro – a global payments system that cuts out dominant US providers such as Visa and PayPal. The European system may itself resemble a cryptocurrency, albeit a highly centralised one. 

While the EU is taking a tougher stance on crypto market offerings, Czech central bank chief Aleš Michl is keen to plough billions of euros’ worth of bank reserves into crypto. “For the diversification of our assets, Bitcoin seems good,” Michl told the Financial Times. “Those [Trump] guys can now kind of create some bubble for bitcoin.” 

Trump has also been busy building his own crypto project, known as Trump Coin. Gary Gensler, outgoing chairman of the US’ agency against market manipulation (SEC), has highlighted that most crypto projects are simply illegal unregistered securities. Trump replaced Gensler with more crypto-friendly Paul Atkins.    

Trump Coin joins a long list of worthless celebrity-backed “shit coins”. The crypto industry has always been awash with wash trading and fraud. Thanks to Trump, it’s also a growing nightmare for the planet.  

Greenwashing crypto 

During the 2024 US presidential race, bitcoin prices doubled. The amount of crypto “mining” going on also doubled. Bitcoin currently uses as much energy as the whole of Poland, emitting nearly 100 million tonnes of CO2 per year. Not bad for a currency that almost no one uses to buy stuff.  

Bitcoin’s massive energy demand doesn’t stem from how many people use it, but rather from how the so-called digital gold is “mined”. The process involves specialist computers repeatedly making random guesses at a long string of digits. The machines generate a lot of heat and burn out quickly. Globally, redundant machines create around 30,000 tonnes of e-waste each year – about the same as the Netherlands. Much of this e-waste is dumped in the Global South. Bitcoin “miners” also suck up roughly 2,237 billion litres of fresh water each year for cooling. 

Unsurprisingly, due to the profits they make from it, the biggest commercial proponents of crypto are Big Oil firms. Some have been recognised by the World Bank for their “innovations”: capturing residual gas from oil extraction and burning it for bitcoin miners. Traditionally, oil companies flare off excess gas. The only difference between setting fire to methane and setting fire to methane for bitcoin is that the latter makes the oil industry much more profitable, slowing transitions to cleaner alternatives.  

Cryptocurrencies are terrible for the planet. And we shouldn’t cling on in the hope that the underlying blockchain technology could come in handy for environmentalists, feminists, or socialists any more than we should cling to micro-plastics and mustard gas. 

Bitcoin currently uses as much energy as the whole of Poland, emitting nearly 100 million tonnes of CO2 per year.

Yet there are numerous meme coin projects marketed around the supposedly green motives of their founders. In May 2022, billionaire businessman Adam Neumann launched a carbon credit cryptocurrency called Flowcarbon. Despite being ultimately meaningless for action on climate change, Neumann raised 70 million dollars in start-up capital from big tech firms, like Samsung and a16z. 

In 2014, left-wing Spanish activist Enric Duran made cryptocurrencies his centrepiece for disobedience in the hope of enabling post-capitalist futures to flourish. But his so-called “FairCoin” project was a degrowth currency in much the same way that Dogecoin has something to do with dogs. Degrowth was a logo that failed to translate to radical economic alternatives. Due to “significant trust issues”, the project was quietly folded in June last year. 

Jackson Palmer, the co-creator of Dogecoin, revealed his epiphany about the inherent unsustainability and conservatism of all crypto projects, from degrowth to dog money: “After years of studying it, I believe that cryptocurrency is an inherently right-wing, hyper-capitalistic technology built primarily to amplify the wealth of its proponents through a combination of tax avoidance, diminished regulatory oversight and artificially enforced scarcity.” 

Funding the far right 

Prominent so-called “bitcoin maximalists”, from US radio host Alex Jones to manosphere influencer Andrew Tate, are all on the extreme right of the political spectrum. Because the only real affordance crypto projects offer is in subverting political institutions, it makes sense that these projects are generally only useful for people who don’t believe in those institutions.  

Take the “Freedom Convoy”, for example – a series of protests and blockades which took off in January 2022 after a Covid-19 vaccine mandate was imposed on Canadian long-distance lorry drivers. President Justin Trudeau invoked an Emergency Measures Act to stop organisers from receiving donations from the public and tackle the major disruptions caused by the blockades. But bitcoiners moved in, raising nearly 1 million dollars worth of crypto to keep the Covid-19 conspiracy efforts going.   

The crypto-fundraising tactics were repeated in the Netherlands the following June, when right-wing bitcoiners turned their attention to Dutch farmers protesting government regulations to control greenhouse gas emissions.  

Right-wing activists created crypto, while white supremacists continue to take a shine to it, with bitcoin in particular reshaping the racist right in radical ways. According to a 2021 Hatewatch report, many prominent racist terrorists were also early crypto adopters. Patrik Hermansson, of the Hope Not Hate watchdog, told me:   

“In the UK, most far-right activists have been quick to start taking crypto donations, from Tommy Robinson to Patriotic Alternative. And this is for practical reasons. They’re de-platformed from other payment rails, like PayPal and Stripe. They may have their bank accounts frozen. Crypto effectively solves this problem. And extra anonymity is also useful. The risk of being publicly exposed as a financial supporter for a violent far-right cause usually deters other donors.” 

A progressive response 

In 2010, cyberlibertarian activist Julian Assange saved WikiLeaks with crypto. Following the organisation’s release of diplomatic cables and the “Collateral Murder” video, US politicians and payment providers, like Visa and PayPal, implemented a blockade choking off Assange’s financial support. But Bitcoin couldn’t save Assange from prison. Crypto is inherently incapable of engaging in political struggles.  

Cybercrime, war, sanctions evasion, climate change and all the other social and environmental issues Trumpism perpetuates would be easier to fix without crypto. But ridding the internet of crypto will be tricky due to an enduring myth that free-market capitalism can emancipate the poor from free-market capitalism. This myth is epitomised in books like Joshua Dávila’s Blockchain Radicals and Isaiah Jackson’s Black America. Both authors argue that cryptocurrencies are levelling the economic playing field, allowing “left behind” communities to enrich themselves and catch up with wealthy, mostly white, political elites.  

But this narrative, according to academic and activist Jared Ball, is “cryptoganda”. Ball argues that the mythology of “Black capitalism” implies that the rich acquired their wealth not through violence, but through the same modes of investment that Black communities are now being advised to use in order to get ahead. Even if some poor Black investors do strike it rich from crypto, their personal investment strategies in no way benefit their wider communities. “There is no investment pathway to collective revolutionary change or closing the material inequality gaps that exist between Black and white or any other group,” Ball told me. “No technology has ever changed social relationships. They exacerbate and intensify them and allow for a consolidation of power, and we’re already seeing that happen in the cryptocurrency space.” 

Bitcoin should be considered similar to the global trade in endangered rhino or tiger parts. When investors are allowed to speculate on bitcoin, they encourage an environmentally disastrous global industry that has failed to benefit anyone except criminals, Big Oil, and some early speculators. 

But saving ourselves from the fires of slapstick crypto capitalism doesn’t mean jumping back in the frying pan of traditional market finance. In the frying pan, “innovation”, “profit”, and “growth” are all used interchangeably. They are ends in themselves. Capitalist innovation, even of the “green” variety, produces crises that ultimately call for further capitalist innovation for profit. 

In challenging the crises-innovation spiral, it’s tempting to reject digital innovation altogether. But capitalism is the problem here, not technology. Cryptocurrencies, like every techno-fix, embody the political values shared by their design communities. Rather than understanding innovation as part of a wider growth imperative, we should recognise capitalism as an impediment to real digital innovation.  

Designing and building post-capitalist digital tools will require political struggles. No meme coin can erase this fact.