HONG KONG — The Trump family “loves” the Bitcoin community, Eric Trump said in Hong Kong on Friday, predicting that its value could hit $1 million as concerns mount over conflicts of interest in his latest venture set to go public.
Trump said his family became interested in cryptocurrency when it was cut off from banking services “because my father was in politics.”
“The Bitcoin community embraced my father, unlike anything I had ever seen before,” Trump said at the Bitcoin Asia conference here.
“And I hope that’s paid off in spades, because we love this community,” he said, sitting in front of a screen with a live ticker showing the cryptocurrency’s price at nearly $110,000, up from about $70,000 on the day his father, Donald Trump, was voted back into office in November.
Eric Trump has attracted an almost cult-like following in the crypto industry, which was apparent in Hong Kong as hundreds of attendees — some dressed up in outfits ranging from sparkly robes to white suits covered in Bitcoin symbols — cheered as Trump took the stage, bashed his father’s predecessor, Joe Biden, and said, “This is the time to buy.”
The cryptocurrency industry has become big business for the Trump family, whose patriarch has become one of its biggest champions since it helped return him to office.
Feeling unfairly targeted by the Biden administration, the industry was a political force in the 2024 election season, directing an estimated $135 million in donations toward Trump and other crypto-friendly candidates.
Since then, the Trump family has only become further enmeshed in the industry — no one more so than Eric Trump, who said Friday that “90% of my time in life is in this community.”
His latest venture is called American Bitcoin. Launched in March with his older brother, Donald Trump Jr., and the Nasdaq-listed Hut 8, a crypto energy infrastructure company, American Bitcoin aims to be the “world’s largest, most efficient pure-play Bitcoin miner while building a robust strategic Bitcoin reserve,” according to a news release.
Eric Trump said Friday that the company will be going public “very soon” as it merges with a pre-existing Nasdaq-listed company called Gryphon Digital Mining.
“We are one of the biggest Bitcoin mining companies on Earth,” he said. “We mine about 3% of the world’s Bitcoin every single day.”
He insists that the family’s business is separate from national politics and has dismissed concerns about conflicts of interest.
“My father’s totally shielded off from our company. There’s total separation of church and state,” he told CNBC in December. “We have great ethics advisers. We take it incredibly seriously.”
But Donald Trump was a major topic of discussion at his son’s Q&A in Hong Kong, which began with a round of applause for the president, who has vowed to make the United States the “crypto capital of the world.”
Since returning to office in January, Trump has pushed to ease regulation of the industry, shut down the Justice Department’s national cryptocurrency enforcement team, appointed a “crypto czar” and held a White House summit for industry leaders. He also said the U.S. would create a national strategic crypto reserve.
This month he signed an executive order allowing cryptocurrency and real estate investments to be included in 401(k) retirement accounts, which critics say could put Americans’ retirement savings at risk.
Trump has also sought legislative backing for a form of cryptocurrency known as stablecoins, some of which is already in place. One of the three bills that received support on Capitol Hill last month was the GENIUS Act, which allows stablecoins to be issued by private companies.
The passage of the bills was slammed by Americans for Financial Reform, a left-leaning watchdog group, which said in a statement last month that Trump and his allies would “personally benefit from limitless legalized corruption while the rest of us stand in harm’s way of the next crypto implosion.”
Trump, who said in 2021 that Bitcoin “seems like a scam,” has since embraced it as a moneymaking opportunity, sometimes at great cost to investors. According to the watchdog group State Democracy Defenders Fund, as of mid-March his crypto assets were valued at $2.9 billion, or about 37% of his total wealth.
Much of that money, which Trump earned in about six months, came from ventures such as the $TRUMP coin that he launched ahead of his inauguration, which was trading at nearly $8 on Friday, down from its peak of $73 in January. A meme coin was also launched for first lady Melania Trump.
Industry professionals call these meme coins, meaning they have little practical use and are mostly symbolic, making their value subject to extreme volatility. About 764,000 wallets of mostly small holders lost money on $TRUMP while 58 wallets made more than $10 million each, CNBC reported in May, citing data from the blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis.
In May, Trump briefly appeared at a dinner outside Washington for the 220 largest buyers of $TRUMP, who spent an average of $1 million on the token.
Trump also has a large stake in World Liberty Financial, a decentralized crypto exchange that was launched last fall and is majority-controlled by the Trump family.
World Liberty’s flagship project is its $WLFI stablecoin, which holders voted last month to make more widely tradable. The family also stands to gain from an agreement by a technology company backed by the government of the United Arab Emirates to invest $2 billion in one of World Liberty’s stablecoin products.
That currency will then be used to invest in Binance, one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges, whose CEO stepped down in 2023 after the company pleaded guilty to money laundering and other charges.
The deal was announced at a crypto conference Eric Trump attended in Abu Dhabi shortly before his father visited the United Arab Emirates city in May.
Even amid the enthusiasm at the Hong Kong conference on Friday, participants said there was some discomfort around the Trump family’s involvement in the cryptocurrency industry.
“There is serious conflict of interest, and people recognize it,” said Bharat Prabhakar, 25, a New York-based conference attendee. “But not a lot of people say it out loud because there’s real consequences for it.”
