Since launching in March and listing on the Nasdaq earlier this month, Eric and Donald Trump Jr.’s company, American Bitcoin, has been one of — if not the — fastest growing companies in the country.
And, Eric told me, the Trump family — no stranger to superlatives—is hoping to break a few more records.
“We’ve created one of the great Bitcoin companies anywhere in the world,” Eric said. “And we’re doing it on American soil using American energy.”
American Bitcoin (ABTC), which gives investors access to both Bitcoin itself and the mining process, went public by merging with Gryphon Digital Mining — an existing company that traded on the Nasdaq and rebranded to American Bitcoin.
ABTC also has a long-term partnership with Hut 8, one of North America’s largest Bitcoin miners that handles much of the logistical processes in an energy-efficient way that allows them to mine at a lower cost.
“We can focus on driving Bitcoin production without all the cost of running a vertically integrated operation,” Asher Genoot, CEO of Hut 8 Corp., told me. “We have over a gigawatt of power plants we own, we have some hundred megawatts of data center capacity, and we have some data centers connected to the grid, other ones that are actually connected to power generators.”
That allows ABTC to mine Bitcoin at a 50% discount, giving them a huge cost advantage and enabling them to spend less on mining — and more on amassing Bitcoin with the additional cash.
While there are already publicly traded Bitcoin mining companies as well as digital asset treasury strategies (a company that uses a significant amount of cash on its balance sheet to buy Bitcoin), ABTC combines the two.
“If you think about American Bitcoin, it’s not just a mining company, it’s not just a Treasury… It’s the best of all those worlds,” Eric said. “Our primary goal is to increase Bitcoin per share and to build Bitcoin’s infrastructure backbone right here in the United States.”
Since the deal was announced, the stock jumped from less than $1 per share to nearly $7 per share though it has fallen from its all-time high of more than $9 immediately following the listing.
Of course, Eric and his brother’s embrace of cryptocurrency has come with a tremendous amount of scrutiny and concerns that their ties to the White House will allow them to profit unfairly from their father’s presidency.
But Eric insisted his father has “no involvement” in the business and that he has no involvement in his father’s policies. While he embraces the work his father has done to deregulate cryptocurrency, he also added that he has no special insight into what policies will come next.
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American Bitcoin is one of many projects Trump is working on. He has a book — “Under Siege: My Family’s Fight to Save Our Nation” — out next month; serves as Executive Vice President of Development and Acquisitions for The Trump Organization, where they just relaunched Trump Vodka; and is an ambassador for World Liberty Financial. He is also a husband and a father to two children and four rescue dogs.
He jokes that, fortunately, he got the Trump family gene that lets him function on just a few hours of sleep.
But crypto is increasingly taking up much of his time. He spent nearly two weeks in Asia earlier this month discussing crypto and meeting with investors.
“I’ve never been more proud to be a part of something in my life,” he told me.
Trump’s entrance into crypto is a marked departure from his background as a “hard hat” kind of guy, as he puts it. For the vast majority of his career, he’s focused on a very tangible asset: real estate.
But when the Trump Organization was debanked by several major financial institutions, including JPMorgan Chase and Capital One, in 2021, it was a wake-up call. He had to find — and then ultimately create — alternatives to the giants that refused to work with them.
As the 41-year-old began reading the Bitcoin white papers and getting deeper into crypto, he started to see broader applications for how it could undermine traditional financial intermediaries and empower people to rely on them less.
“People are sick and tired of traditional finance because it’s never served them well … they take your money, overcharge you with every fee … crypto solves all of these problems,” he explained. “We’re digitizing the whole of the system and removing intermediaries … If you want to transact, you don’t need a bank.”
He added that the crypto industry is “growing faster than the internet grew and we’re on the one-yard line.”
As for what the 10-yard line looks like, Eric believes that crypto can democratize everything — and eventually it may result in real estate and crypto overlapping.
“Why is it if I want to finance this building I probably have to go to seven different banks,” he said. “Why can’t I go out to tens of millions of people around the world and say we’re going to put a $500 million financing on Trump Tower and give all these people a small share.”
In other words, crypto tokens could enable a $500 million Trump Tower financing to be crowdfunded by issuing digital tokens to millions of investors worldwide. Each investor would own a small, tradable share directly, bypassing multiple banks and their associated fees.
“In a tokenized world, you’re giving people the ability to choose the asset that they want to invest into, save a ton of fees and get that exposure directed,” he told me.
Whether that happens sooner or later remains to be seen but Trump is confident, “Crypto is here to stay.”
Ultimately, he believes, “This is a new way to finance the nation.”
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This story originally appeared on NYPost
