The Trumps have never been known for their subtlety: They like to do things fast, big, and loud. This is especially so in the context of cryptocurrency, a noisy and chaotic industry by nature. Remember our president’s collection of NFTs? Among the depictions on these digital trading cards is a portrait of Donald Trump in an Iron Man–inspired suit, accompanied by the caption “SUPERTRUMP.” Or how about the $TRUMP meme coin and accompanying gamified gala dinner for its biggest investors?
It has been easy, in part because of the bluster of the Trumps’ approach to promotion, to discount the family’s dalliances in crypto as a cash grab: The meme coin—which has no function except to facilitate gambling—almost immediately made Trump a crypto billionaire. But recently, the family has taken a decidedly different tack—less Trumpian bombast, and more sober promotion of their crypto businesses. On Wednesday, Eric Trump joined CNBC after American Bitcoin, the crypto-mining company he co-founded, went public and began trading on the Nasdaq stock exchange. For the most part, he sounded like any other C-suite exec talking up their company after an IPO: “Watching what the stock is doing right now is just—it’s beautiful and incredibly rewarding.”
The public debut of American Bitcoin is just one way that the Trump family’s crypto play has been dressed up over the past two weeks. The crypto firm Trump and his sons co-founded, World Liberty Financial, has aggressively expanded; the media company behind Truth Social has hoovered up millions in even more crypto; and that same company created a new crypto treasury to hold the stockpile. This blitz has proven to be enormously consequential (and enormously lucrative) for the maturing Trump crypto empire. Each of these moves has a veneer of legitimacy that the family’s earlier crypto dealings lacked: They are much easier to defend than an Iron Man–inspired NFT, while doing just as much to enrich Trump and his sons.
The core of this maneuver is World Liberty Financial, which, despite counting Trump’s three sons (including 19-year-old Barron) as founders, is by far the most legitimate-seeming operation in Trump’s crypto universe. It is goofy—a “gold paper” issued by the company is plastered with a cartoon of Trump’s face—but the company has attached itself to one of the most bulletproof parts of the crypto industry: stablecoins. These are cryptocurrencies pegged to the price of another asset, like the U.S. dollar, and are typically backed by reserves. Think of them like digital cash. Thanks to a couple years of widespread adoption, stablecoins are now broadly accepted as the crypto industry’s most robust innovation—one of the only true use cases in an industry that has long sought to prove it’s more than just an avenue for speculation.
The company’s stablecoin, USD1, launched back in March—but this week, the company moved to unlock a large tranche of what are known as “governance tokens.” All governance tokens, in theory, can bring a level of accountability and democracy to a crypto project, conferring voting rights that can influence corporate governance decisions—a little like how shareholders use voting stock to sway public companies. Except that in this case, the governance power conferred by the tokens seems mostly symbolic: World Liberty Financial’s management team likely own so much of the coin that they can veto the decisions. The Trumps alone hold nearly a quarter of the governance tokens that exist. The family netted as much as $5 billion in “paper wealth” once the tokens hit the market this week, according to The Wall Street Journal. The tokens, as of today, are likely the Trump family’s most valuable asset, eclipsing all their golf courses and hotels.
It’s a great example of the family’s new crypto philosophy in action. World Liberty Finance certainly presents as a legitimate cryptocurrency business, but it is also, like the Trump meme coin, a way to put the Trump brand to work and potentially capitalize on the office of the presidency. In an emailed statement, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt defended Trump’s crypto dealings: “The media’s continued attempts to fabricate conflicts of interest are irresponsible and reinforce the public’s distrust in what they read. Neither the President nor his family have ever engaged, or will ever engage, in conflicts of interest.”
Just in case the stablecoin operation wasn’t enough to pass the legitimacy test, come Monday, Trump Media Group CRO Strategy, a new crypto company that exists mostly to buy lots of a single coin, will join American Bitcoin as a public company and be listed on Nasdaq. Tellingly, neither of these firms chose to go public through a traditional IPO, which involves all sorts of regulatory hurdles and public disclosures. By fast-tracking these stocks’ public debuts, the Trumps are attempting to prove that these are real companies—legitimate assets backed by the fundamentals, rather than vaporware. Nasdaq, unlike some of the exchanges that listed the Trump meme coin, can be halted and controlled.
Few serious crypto investors could support Trump’s meme coin with a straight face (Anthony Scaramucci famously called it “Idi Amin level corruption”), but today those same investors can point to American Bitcoin, or to World Liberty Financial’s stablecoins, or to Trump Media Group CRO Strategy, and say, See? You can still buy the meme coin, or the Trump NFTs, or any of those other, more questionable, assets—but in the realer parts of their crypto empire, the Trumps have a perfect cover.
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