Eric Trump, the son of the 47th president, is a self-described “Bitcoin maxi,” or someone who believes that the world’s largest cryptocurrency is the best and most valuable digital asset. In an interview with Fortune, he recounted how Michael Saylor, the billionaire who transformed his software company Strategy into one of the world’s largest stockpilers of the cryptocurrency, last year advised him to mortgage Mar-a-Lago, his father’s Florida country club, to buy more Bitcoin.
Eric Trump says he concluded such a move was too aggressive even for him, and instead told Saylor “Listen, I know you’ll be right, but there’s a second best play”—his family’s Bitcoin mining venture, American Bitcoin, which plans to follow Strategy into the public markets later this year.
On Thursday, Eric Trump was again talking up this “second best play”—this time to a packed audience in Toronto who had gathered for the annual Consensus crypto conference.
Eric Trump and his brother Don Jr. launched the venture in March in partnership with a mining firm called Hut 8 that is providing the mining equipment and infrastructure to American Bitcoin in exchange for 80% of the company’s stock. The Trump family recently announced that they would execute a reverse stock merger to list the company on the Nasdaq as early as the third quarter.
Bitcoin miners use high-powered computers to compete with others to solve a math problem. The first miner to discover the correct solution earns a reward in the form of the cryptocurrency and, in doing so, processes transactions and updates the blockchain.
While American Bitcoin will accumulate Bitcoin through mining, Eric has said that he views his company as a proxy investments for those looking for exposure to the world’s largest cryptocurrency.
It’s a playbook that Strategy’s Saylor, whom Eric has called a “dear friend,” has deployed to great success as his company’s market cap has swelled to almost almost $109 billion—a value that not only matches the value of its Bitcoin holdings, but far exceeds it.
This has led to a growing number of other firms trying the same tactic. That includes other Bitcoin miners that have also started accumulating the cryptocurrency, along with small public companies that have said they would put Bitcoin on their balance sheet. Even large financial firms like Cantor Fitzgerald are getting into the game.
Eric isn’t concerned about the competition. “The more people that sprint toward this race, and the faster they can accumulate, the more the price that Bitcoin actually goes up,” he told Fortune.
American Bitcoin is just one of the Trump family’s crypto endeavors. They’re also launching a decentralized finance app called World Liberty Financial. The family’s publicly traded media company is planning to launch crypto ETFs. And the President himself has his own memecoin as well as NFT collection.
While Democratic lawmakers have alleged that the Trump family’s crypto ventures have created conflicts of interest for the President, Eric has repeatedly said that that criticism is “far-fetched.” He told Fortune that he doesn’t speak with his father about his crypto business and that his father is focused on “far bigger priorities.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
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