A reference companion to our reporting on cryptocurrency regulation.
This section exists because the crypto-regulation story has a vocabulary problem. Following it requires holding a stack of terms — stablecoin, national trust bank charter, fiduciary activity, the GENIUS Act — that even careful readers, and careful editors, do not always fully own. Our reporting cites these pages so the articles can move faster and hit harder, and so any reader who wants to get up to speed has somewhere to do it.
These are not neutral-textbook entries, and they are not advocacy. Cryptocurrency is a legitimate financial technology with real uses. The position taken here is narrower and, we think, harder to dismiss: reasonable regulation of all currency and currency-exchange systems is a precondition for democratic accountability — and the question worth asking about any crypto instrument is not whether it should exist, but whether the supervisory perimeter that applies to functionally similar dollar products applies to it too.
Where the public record shows a specific instrument being used as a wealth-transfer vehicle for named federal officeholders — and for the Trump family in particular, the record is substantial — these pages say so directly, with citations, in the same operational register as the rest of our work. We describe legal outcomes, not motives. We name the constitutional provisions that were meant to prevent these arrangements, and we note where no enforcement has been mounted. We do not adjudicate; that is a court’s job.
How to use these pages
Every page follows the same structure: a one-paragraph operational definition, the mechanic, what the instrument or arrangement effectively removes from the oversight regime, why it is in the regulatory fight right now, common confusions, and where the term shows up in our reporting. Every factual claim links to a source. Every page carries a “last reviewed” date and a “next review trigger” — these are living documents, kept current as the regulatory record moves.
If you are new to cryptocurrency, start with the first page below — it covers everything the rest of the section assumes. If you already follow crypto and want the regulatory specifics, skip straight to the mechanics or the instruments.
The pages
Start here:
- What is a cryptocurrency? — a plain, operational introduction: what crypto is, how a transaction works, why holders are pseudonymous, why this is a capture story and not a tech story. Everything else in the section builds on this page.
The mechanics:
- Stablecoin — a cryptocurrency engineered to hold a constant dollar value, and the supervisory-perimeter question at the center of the 2025–2026 fight.
- National trust bank charter — the federal banking license that authorizes custody without deposit-taking, and the obligations it sits outside.
- The OCC — the Treasury bureau that charters national banks; the federal venue where crypto firms apply for banking licenses.
The specific instruments:
- USD1 — the dollar-pegged stablecoin issued by the Trump-family-controlled World Liberty Financial; the instrument at the center of the OCC charter application and the Foreign Emoluments Clause question.
- Memecoin — a cryptocurrency backed by nothing, driven by attention; the $TRUMP and $MELANIA coins as presidential-access and wealth-extraction vehicles outside campaign-finance law.
The law:
- The GENIUS Act — the first federal statute to regulate stablecoin issuance, championed by a president whose family issues its own stablecoin.
The synthesis:
- The Crypto Cluster — why this is not only a Trump-family story: roughly 216 administration appointees holding $175M–$340M in crypto, with the regulators among them writing the rules that move the asset class.
Transparency Cascade Press reports on institutional capture, corruption, and threats to democratic accountability. This reference section is maintained alongside that reporting and adheres to the same editorial policies. Corrections and source questions: contact@transparencycascade.org.