President Donald Trump has proposed a $5,000 “dividend” payment to every adult US citizen if Republicans hold Congress after the midterm elections.
Crypto traders picked up on it almost instantly, with at least one well-followed account framing the idea as the kind of liquidity shock that helped kick off the last major bull run.
Trump’s $5,000 Proposal Draws Crypto Attention
The president’s proposal would apply to roughly 245 million US citizens aged 18 and above, putting the estimated cost at about $1.2 trillion. The last time a stimulus of this magnitude was deployed was during the pandemic, when close to $4 trillion in fiscal support went out during lockdown.
Mark Chadwick, posting on X, focused on what the payment could mean for crypto:
“If this happens, and it’s a big IF – but if it does it would ignite the most insane Alt Season imaginable,” he wrote.
He compared the potential effect with the 2021 crypto market, calling it a “2021 Covid stim type catalyst” layered onto a bull market he already sees building. He closed with a nod to the president, saying, “Well played, Mr. Trump. Well played.”
But not everyone read it the same way, one of them being economist Peter Schiff, who dismissed the plan as an attempt to buy votes, writing that Trump was offering “a $5,000 bribe in exchange for their votes,” and warning that printing the money would push inflation well past anything seen under the Biden administration.
The Altcoin Setup Already Looks Shaky
Whether or not the payment materializes, it lands at an interesting moment for altcoins. Analyst Matthew Hyland has spent the past week pointing out that charts including ETH, Total 2, Total 3, and OTHERS have all broken multi-year downtrends, leading him to conclude that “the largest Altcoin Bull Run of all time is loading.”
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As CryptoPotato reported earlier, that thesis leans on a ratio comparing coins outside the crypto top ten against the S&P 500, which has spent years sliding from a 2017 peak and now sits near the bottom of that range with an oversold reading to match.
The leverage building underneath that story looks less convincing, though. Altcoin perpetual futures open interest overtook Bitcoin’s this week for the first time since December 2024, with Zcash alone carrying roughly $2.4 billion in open derivatives positions, with investor Michael Bucella comparing the setup to October 2025, right before a market-wide liquidation event.
