Donald Trump Is a Crypto Bro

“I’m a proud crypto bro. You’re starting to become one of us, if not already,” Farokh Sarmad, a social-media influencer said to former President Donald Trump during a livestream on X last night. According to the platform’s listener counter, more than a million people tuned in for the launch of World Liberty Financial, a new crypto project promoted by Trump and his family. The former president has been posting about it on social media for several weeks.

Or at least the launch was supposed to be the purpose. Trump instead gave scant details about the project itself and kept talking about cryptocurrency more broadly. He admitted to not fully understanding the technology, saying that young people can more easily grasp it, similar to how his grandchildren learned “perfect Chinese” while toddlers.

Nevertheless, he said, “we have to be the biggest and the best” when it comes to crypto. He emphasized why those in the industry should care about the 2024 election. Both the SEC and the Biden-Harris administration have been “very hostile toward crypto. Extremely hostile like nobody can believe.” In a Harris presidency, he added, the crypto world “will be living in hell.”

Trump wasn’t always this pro-crypto. He once referred to bitcoin as a scam, but signaled interest in the crypto world in late 2022 when he partnered in the sale of Trump-themed NFT trading cards (digital-only collectibles maintained on the blockchain). This summer, he appeared at a bitcoin conference and declared that the United States “will be the crypto capital of the planet”; at least twice, he has hosted private parties at Mar-a-Lago for holders of his NFTs. It doesn’t hurt that crypto companies are bankrolling many Republican campaigns this election.

After Trump spoke, his longtime associate Steve Witkoff and his son Donald Trump Jr. came onto the livestream to talk more specifically about the new crypto project. Though the details are fuzzy, World Liberty Financial, on its X account, describes itself as driving “mass adoption of stablecoins”—a type of cryptocurrency that is supposedly less volatile than tokens such as bitcoin as it is tied to a somewhat stable asset, such as gold. It will reportedly also host some kind of crypto exchange and sell its own token, called WLFI, which will be a governance token—meaning it is used in order to vote on business decisions, and is not transferable. The company’s bio on X currently reads: “Beware of Scams! Fake tokens & airdrop offers are circulating. We aren’t live yet!”

World Liberty Financial is led by Chase Herro and Zachary Folkman. Herro was involved in a previous cryptocurrency project called Dough Finance that was hacked and lost millions of dollars, according to a Bloomberg feature published last week. Folkman is also known for running a service called Date Hotter Girls, while Herro has long aspired to be a crypto influencer. (In 2018, Bloomberg reported, he was filmed in a Rolls-Royce saying, “You can literally sell shit in a can, wrapped in piss, covered in human skin, for a billion dollars if the story’s right, because people will buy it.”) The Trumps became involved with World Liberty Financial when Witkoff arranged the meeting between Herro, Folkman, and Trump’s sons about nine months ago, he said on the livestream.

Trump’s interest in joining a crypto project seemingly came from his sons. “Barron knows so much about this,” he said on the livestream. “Barron’s a young guy, but he knows it. He talks about his wallet. He’s got four wallets or something,” he said about his 18-year-old son. “Eric and Don know it so well.” The exact responsibilities of the Trumps involved are unclear. The company reportedly lists nonspecific roles for several members of the Trump family. The former president is “chief crypto advocate,” while both Eric Trump and Don Jr. are listed as “web3 ambassadors” and Barron Trump is listed as the company’s “DeFi visionary” (DeFi being a reference to peer-to-peer financial services).

It is uncommon and maybe even unprecedented for a presidential candidate to launch a major new business venture so close to the election. Trump already holds a majority of the stock for Trump Media & Technology Group, which owns his social-media platform Truth Social—a possible conflict of interest. With his comments about the SEC last night, he appeared to suggest that he could interfere with a regulatory agency in favor of an industry that he is now financially involved in. The closest parallel for that might be former President Lyndon B. Johnson, who put pressure on the FCC to benefit his wife’s TV and radio empire. (Though this started when he was a congressman.)

Later in the livestream, Donald Trump Jr. spoke about his belief that the country’s Founding Fathers would be supportive of decentralized finance. He views it as less political than traditional banking, he said, and stated that his family has been “totally canceled” by banks. Echoing his father, he presented the 2024 election as a matter of life and death for crypto. The Republican Party, he said, is clearly the side that is pro-freedom. The left “is the side of censorship. They’re the side that wants to jail their political opponents,” he said. “They want to overregulate everything so much that you actually eliminate so many of the natural and great things that people love about crypto.”