When Albert Fall accepted roughly $400,000 in bribes as Warren G. Harding's interior secretary in the 1920s, the scandal was considered the worst corruption ever to touch a sitting American president. Adjusted for inflation, that sum amounts to around $6 million today. Donald Trump, by comparison, earned at least $2.

2 billion in a single year — a figure somewhere between 200 and 300 times larger than the bribe that defined "presidential corruption" in the American imagination for a full century. Of that $2.2 billion, at least $1.4 billion is reported to have originated from Trump's cryptocurrency ventures — a remarkable outcome for a president with no prior background in the industry.

A central figure in explaining that number is Justin Sun, a Chinese crypto billionaire born in Qinghai province in north-western China. Sun, who has described himself as "Crypto's billionaire barker," is best known internationally for purchasing an artwork called Comedian — a banana duct-taped to a wall — for more than $6 million, and then eating it. In Washington, however, he is recognised primarily as the man who invested nearly $200 million of his own fortune into Trump's digital asset enterprise, World Liberty Financial. The relationship has since collapsed into litigation.

Sun has accused World Liberty Financial of illegally freezing his assets; World Liberty has countersued him for defamation. The legal battle has drawn fresh scrutiny to the broader architecture of Trump's crypto wealth and to the question of how foreign capital flows into the financial orbit of a sitting United States president. Sun's own platform, the Tron blockchain, has attracted attention for reasons beyond its commercial success.