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Summary: Crypto's growing popularity hides risks that ordinary investors may struggle to see or control. Trump's crypto ventures and a security flaw in a popular hardware wallet show why trust, regulation and investor protection matter.
Crypto ads are back in full force. Four years ago, the government imposed a tax regime that looked like a ban, but punters have gradually come to accept the 1 per cent TDS as routine. My screens are now full of ads for the so-called crypto exchanges again, and I'm sure yours are too. More than 50 crypto platforms (Virtual Digital Asset Service Providers, or VDASPs) have registered, and the government's own estimates are that almost four crore people have invested in crypto.
I'd like to set this against two recent developments in the crypto world. The first concerns the President of the United States. When Trump's 2026 financial disclosures were published, they revealed that he had earned more than $1.4 billion from various crypto ventures connected to him. These include a memecoin (look it up!) in his name and a family firm with the clever name 'World Liberty Financial', whose tokens have made money very quickly. Worse, from an ethical perspective, the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund and Binance are involved, and somewhere along the line, the Binance founder was pardoned by Trump over money-laundering failures at Binance, after pleading guilty to failing to maintain the controls required by US law. Trump denies the two are connected, and readers are free to weigh the evidence for themselves. The price of the memecoin issued by the Trump company reached $74 and is now down to $2. The money didn't vanish; it moved from investors' pockets to the Trump family's.
How, you may ask, is this relevant to you and me in India? Step back and look at what's happening here. The US is the world's financial and regulatory superpower, and its President heads this machinery. How deeply crypto gets embedded in the world's financial system depends heavily on the US government's attitude to it. If the head of the government is brazenly involved in every kind of shady crypto activity, what hope is there that crypto will be well regulated globally?
Now let's look at the other end of the crypto story: a Canadian company called Coinkite and a device it makes called Coldcard. This device is widely used and likely has many users in India, too. Coldcard is a hardware wallet, a small, standalone device that generates and holds a person's Bitcoin secret keys offline, so owners can keep their coins in their own custody rather than trusting an exchange. Hardcore crypto faithful have long seen this as the safest way to store your Bitcoin because, as you must have read, exchanges keep getting hacked.
A few weeks ago, Coldcard's reputation collapsed. It turned out that for over five years, a bug in Coldcard's software generated secret keys that were easy to guess with only modest computing power. Starting on July 30, attackers emptied thousands of Coldcard wallets within minutes. The total is said to be well over $100 million.
Trump and Coldcard appear to be unrelated, but they actually affect the small saver with the same problem: you are required to trust a machine that you cannot see, control or understand. Unlike so many other forms of investment, you just have to blindly trust something with nothing backing that trust. In both cases, nothing looked wrong until everything was gone. The memecoin buyer watched a number climb to $74 and thought it was wealth. The Coldcard owner held a device that assured him his coins were safe. Neither could see what would ruin him until it had already done so. This is what happens when you are asked to trust a system you are not allowed to inspect. And if you are one of the four crore who have already put money in, or one of the many more these new ads are chasing, that saver is not some figure in a story from America or Canada. It is you.
A big reason that the normal regulated system works is that you don't need to understand the deep details yourself. Independent regulators like depositories, auditors and central banks with real teeth stand behind it. The crypto universe claims it isn't subject to any of this, but replaces it with nothing useful. With each cycle of hype and bust, crypto presents a shinier, more polished and yet more hollow facade. The latest version comes with Trump's blessings and invites you to bet on it. Make sure you decline the invitation.
This column was originally published in Mint on August 17, 2026
Also read: Your Bitcoin and socialism
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