Eric Trump flew across the world to headline a cryptocurrency conference in the United Arab Emirates this week and told thousands of enthusiastic attendees that he and his father, the U.S. president-elect, were effectively working in tandem to push crypto, a business sector the family is directly invested in.
The message was notable because it contrasted drastically with the promise the family made when Donald J. Trump entered the White House four years ago, to keep business and government operations separate.
Eric Trump said he had even phoned his father — “Pops,” he said he calls him — to celebrate when the price of Bitcoin hit $100,000 after the president-elect announced he intended to appoint a crypto-friendly lawyer as the new chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, which regulates the industry that the family now profits from.
“You’re going to have the most pro-crypto president in the history of America,” Eric Trump told the crowd. “Think about a president who isn’t going to allow Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies to be overregulated and stifled.”
Eric Trump made the remarks at the Bitcoin MENA 2024 conference, where he also promoted the family’s new business venture, World Liberty Financial, a cryptocurrency platform. His comments to attendees signaled that the Trump family is more willing to publicly announce when the president-elect’s governing role will steer into his personal investments and that it is not as concerned as it was in his first administration about avoiding potential conflicts or the appearance of them.
Other featured speakers at the event included Steve Witkoff, a real estate executive and golfing buddy of the president-elect whom Mr. Trump has named as his new Middle East envoy.
Mr. Witkoff has already started to work on trying to negotiate a new peace deal in the region, but he also is simultaneously promoting World Liberty Financial, which the Witkoff and Trump families helped create this year.
At the conference, Eric Trump and Mr. Witkoff both met privately with Justin Sun, a cryptocurrency executive targeted by the Securities and Exchange Commission on fraud charges who has invested in World Liberty.
Also at the conference was Paul Manafort, Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign chairman, whom Mr. Trump pardoned before he left office in 2021, clearing a conviction on bank fraud charges. Mr. Manafort also worked briefly with the Trump campaign this year to help plan the Republican convention.
“There’s a lot of exciting times ahead,” Mr. Manafort said in his speech on Tuesday. “For those of you who are celebrating the $100,000 Bitcoin, you’re going to be celebrating much higher very soon.”
In his keynote speech, Eric Trump explained that his family had come to embrace cryptocurrency, in part because many major financial institutions and other corporations stopped doing business with the family in the aftermath of the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol.
Cryptocurrency, he explained, is a way to slam the door back in the face of JPMorgan Chase and other major banks and financial institutions that distanced themselves from Mr. Trump and the family business.
“The attacks on the family, the attacks on our company, the nastiness of the system, the hell that they put us through,” Eric Trump said, recalling the periods when his father was first in the White House and after Jan. 6, which led to many companies dropping the Trump Organization as a client. “Had it not been for those attacks, I don’t think my eyes would have been as open to the crypto industry.”
Off the main stage at this event, a feeding frenzy was underway as crypto investors tried to gain access to people in Mr. Trump’s orbit.
In the sprawling convention center, conference attendees — some of whom paid as much as $10,000 for “whale passes” granting them special access to the speakers — posed with cardboard cutouts of Mr. Trump and Elon Musk, the world’s richest man. Mr. Trump has tapped Mr. Musk to helm a new initiative on government efficiency.
Many of the speakers were people who have faced legal problems in the United States, including the chief executive of Kraken, a company that has been sued by the S.E.C., and Changpeng Zhao, the founder of Binance, who recently completed a federal prison sentence for money-laundering violations.
In front of a packed room, Mr. Zhao credited Mr. Trump for recognizing that “crypto is a superior technology for money.”
He added: “For the people who are in doubt, now Mr. Trump probably fixed most of the doubt.”
Lawrence M. Noble, who served for over a decade as general counsel at the Federal Election Commission, said he could think of few precedents in American history to compare to this moment.
“This is taking it to a different level,” Mr. Noble, who now teaches law at American University, said. “This is a direct conflict of interest. We have not seen anything like this before. We have moved so far away from the ethical norms of past presidents, where they divested themselves of financial interests.”
President-elect Trump was initially a crypto skeptic — he called Bitcoin “a scam,” and said it was designed to undermine the U.S. dollar. But he started to embrace crypto on the campaign trail this year, as the industry spent more than $130 million backing congressional candidates.
In September, Mr. Trump and his sons started World Liberty Financial, a platform for investors to borrow and lend using cryptocurrencies. They unveiled a new digital currency, called WLFI, that was available for purchase.
The business got off to a rocky start. It aimed to sell $300 million of the WLFI tokens, which would have translated to a major windfall for the Trump family. After about two weeks, it had only managed to sell $2.7 million, according to a securities filing.
Then World Liberty Financial got a boost in the form of a $30 million token purchase by Mr. Sun.
Mr. Sun has legal problems in the United States: The S.E.C. sued him and his company, Tron last year, accusing them of manipulating the digital currency market, which he has denied. His investment in World Liberty could ultimately result in a payment as large as $22.5 million to Mr. Trump’s family under a compensation agreement that entitles a Trump business entity to 75 percent of token revenue.
Mr. Sun attended the event in Abu Dhabi flanked by bodyguards. He declined requests for an interview.
Eric Trump’s speech was the keynote event at the conference, and it was live-streamed on YouTube. But conference attendees with a whale pass got access to a networking lounge where Mr. Trump, Mr. Witkoff and Mr. Manafort gave smaller presentations that were closed to the media.
While in the Middle East, Eric Trump is also scheduled to travel to Saudi Arabia to announce the start of a new real-estate deal there with a branch of a Saudi-backed investment company, Dar Al Arkan. This, too, is another sign of a more relaxed approach during this new administration to business ethics, as new international deals were postponed during the first term.
Ravi Singh, a crypto enthusiast who attended the conference, said he had flown from Miami to Abu Dhabi to see Eric Trump speak. The president-elect and his allies have “become the new heroes,” Mr. Singh said. “These guys are the new champions.”
Eric Trump, in his remarks, compared the deplatforming of the family business by some banks after the Jan. 6 attack to aggressive regulatory actions by the Biden administration, which has filed a series of lawsuits and criminal cases against crypto industry executives, including several who were present in the convention center.
“I saw them come after you. I saw them strip your bank accounts. I saw them cancel you like crazy,” he said.
He made clear that that era is over.
Mr. Trump has said his nominee to lead the S.E.C. will be the securities lawyer Paul Atkins, who served on the advisory board of a crypto trade group. Eric Trump on Tuesday called Mr. Atkins “an unbelievable ally to this incredible industry.” Last week, Mr. Trump named the venture investor David Sacks, another crypto enthusiast, to be the “White House A.I. and Crypto Czar.”
“This is an exciting time,” said Mr. Singh, the crypto fan who had traveled from Florida. “Everyone here in this room is 300 percent richer.”
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