Donald Trump is being pushed as a presidential candidate by the crypto community, but digital asset enthusiasts aren’t all that impressed with his family’s official entry into the $2 trillion business, Fox Business has found.
The Republican presidential candidate, who has been hinting at an official cryptocurrency project for weeks, took to social media platform X’s LiveSpace forum on Monday night alongside his sons Don Jr. and Eric, and youngest son Barron Trump, to announce a decentralized lending platform called “World Liberty Financial.”
As advertised, World Liberty is a decentralized blockchain platform designed to democratize and depoliticize finance, making loans more accessible to ordinary people who don’t have access to the traditional banking system or who are “unbanked” – cases where banks close or refuse to open accounts for individuals or businesses due to perceived risks.
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“What we’re doing here is truly a game-changer,” Trump Jr. said on a conference call Monday night. “I think this is the beginning of a financial revolution.”
However, details about the venture were unclear, and many experienced cryptocurrency people interviewed by Fox Business were not overly impressed with what they heard and were skeptical about whether the project’s business model would work.
“We’re over two hours into Trump’s crypto conference call and there’s still been no talk of what the platform will do,” Wayne Vaughn, CEO of blockchain company Thielion, said in a post on X on Monday night, noting that the number of listeners dropped from 150,000 to 47,000 as the call progressed.
The drop came around 8:45 p.m. ET, when Trump handed the call over to his sons and several others involved in the business. Despite the drop in live viewership, as many as 1.3 million people tuned in at various times during the debate. The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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If the call did anything, it dispelled speculation that Barron Trump, an 18-year-old college freshman and purported crypto enthusiast, was launching a so-called meme coin with Martin Shkreli, aka “Pharma Bro,” who was recently released early after serving nearly five years of a seven-year sentence for securities fraud. Shkreli had recently claimed that his token was the Trump family’s “real” crypto token and that he was working on the project with Baron, but he was not present on Monday night’s call. A source close to the Trump family said Baron was advised not to work with Shkreli and instead encouraged to join the family’s crypto venture.
Baron did not speak during Monday’s conference call, even though his new official X account was featured on the speaker’s platform.
Alongside the Trumps were billionaire real estate developer Steve Witkoff, a longtime Trump donor and friend, and his son Zach, the project’s founder who works for his father’s firm, Witkoff Capital. Witkoff’s other son, Alex, was also on the call.
Witkoff explained that Zach introduced him to two “highly accomplished” crypto traders, Chase Herro and Zach Folkman, who also became part of the founding team. Herro and Folkman, who were also on the call, were previously involved in another DeFi project called Dow Finance, which folded in 2021 after losing $1.8 million in a cyberattack.
One of the most talked-about complaints about Trump’s project announcement was that it was too long and provided too few details about how it would actually work, who exactly its target customers would be, and how such a decentralized lending platform would make money.
Trump addressed the audience in a mostly question-and-answer format for the first 40 minutes of the interview, touching on the hostile environment the cryptocurrency industry faces from regulators under the Biden administration. Trump, a former cryptocurrency skeptic who said he made about $7 million from his eponymous collection of non-fungible tokens, according to financial disclosures, also credited his children with “opening his eyes” to the possibilities associated with cryptocurrencies and decentralized finance.
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Trump was particularly enthusiastic about Barron’s role in inspiring him to turn to cryptocurrencies, saying that Barron “knows this space inside and out.”
The speakers also proposed plans to introduce a non-transferable “governance” token that could be purchased by accredited investors through the platform’s official Telegram account, which would give investors rights in the project and allow them to vote on its future development in a decentralized way.
However, some listeners were disappointed that only accredited investors who meet certain asset thresholds can access the tokens.
“This is not for retail, and it goes against the message he wants to send,” said Wendy O., a crypto YouTuber who has nearly 400,000 followers on X. “Retail is not poor or stupid.”
World Liberty has a decidedly populist pitch that could fit well with Trump’s nationalistic economic agenda. The bank has been touted as an alternative for people whose bad credit or other problems have shunned the traditional banking industry. Donald Jr. said the Trump Organization was suddenly denied loans and access to banks after the Trump family got involved in politics.
Critics say this approach, which appeals to people who often default on loans, combined with the unregulated nature of DeFi could prove tricky to navigate.
World Liberty’s debut was met with considerable uncertainty, but Trump is unlikely to lose votes from the industry as he has vowed to roll back restrictions imposed by the administration of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee in November’s election.
Several listeners who spoke with FOX Business after the call said they were encouraged by the Republican presidential candidates’ embrace of cryptocurrency and its role in the future of finance.
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Harris’ campaign had been seeking to meet with crypto industry leaders to encourage the estimated 50 million people involved in crypto to vote in the fall election. However, the meetings fell apart due to strong skepticism from the industry about Harris’ performance as vice president. Meanwhile, Harris has not publicly commented on cryptocurrencies or given any concrete hints about how she would engage with the industry if elected president.