Donald J. Trump's presidential campaign on Tuesday began accepting crypto donations, making good on the presumptive Republican nominee's pledge to become the first major party candidate to embrace bitcoin, ether and other digital currencies.

(Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is running for president as an independent, has been accepting crypto donations for months.)

Trump's move comes weeks after the former president declared himself crypto’s candidate at a Mar-a-Lago gala that thrust crypto into the 2024 campaign.

Trump's campaign said in a statement it "will build a crypto army" to combat the infamous "anti-crypto army" that Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren has campaigned on.

While Trump has yet to propose any concrete crypto policies, supporters of his positioning are accepting the positive noises as enough. That's largely because Joe Biden's administration has taken a sharply anti-crypto stance in the past.

Crypto's emergence as a bona-fide campaign issue may be changing Democrats' calculation, as evidenced in the House Democratic leadership's decision in the last 24 hours not to push its members against an upcoming bill on crypto policy.

UPDATE (May 23, 20:26 UTC): Adds background about Kennedy.

Donald Trump

Danny Nelson

Danny is CoinDesk's managing editor for Data & Tokens. He formerly ran investigations for the Tufts Daily. At CoinDesk, his beats include (but are not limited to): federal policy, regulation, securities law, exchanges, the Solana ecosystem, smart money doing dumb things, dumb money doing smart things and tungsten cubes. He owns BTC, ETH and SOL tokens, as well as the LinksDAO NFT.