Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. have gone all in on the crypto industry by adding a bitcoin mining company to their growing stable of interests.
President Donald Trump’s oldest sons are merging their firm, American Data Centers, to create a new mining venture called American Bitcoin.
The siblings will take a 20% stake in the company, with the remaining 80% owned by Hut 8, which does the bitcoin mining.
Hut 8 is contributing around 61,000 mining machines from its sprawling data centers to the new company, per The Wall Street Journal, in exchange for its share in the company.
American Data Centers was formed in February by the two Trump brothers and Dominari, a small investment firm that leases space in the Trump Tower.
American Bitcoin is the third major crypto venture that the Trump family has launched in the past year, which has prompted conflict of interest concerns since the start of the second Trump administration.
The brothers launched World Liberty Financial, which offers two types of digital currency, during the election campaign.
On the eve of being sworn in as president, Trump launched the $TRUMP meme coin, which Republicans largely turned a blind eye to.
So what are the Trump brothers now getting into?
Put simply, cryptocurrency is digital money, which is designed to work through an online network without a central authority.
Bitcoin is the largest and oldest cryptocurrency, although other assets such as ethereum, tether and Elon Musk’s dogecoin have grown in popularity in recent years.
Bitcoin is created through an energy-intensive process called “mining,” which sees computer servers solve complex equations to unlock new tokens.
Eric Trump, who will serve as American Bitcoin’s chief strategy officer, told the Journal that getting fully into digital currency was a sound “hedge” against the real estate investments that have made the Trump family famous.
He spoke of plans to build a “bitcoin reserve” and potentially take the company public.
American Bitcoin will remain a separate venture from the Trump Organization ― the family real estate empire.
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In a press release, Donald Trump Jr. spoke of their long-standing “conviction in bitcoin,” and that “mining it on favorable economics opens an even bigger opportunity.”
After the GOP candidate signaled a lighter regulatory approach to the industry on the campaign trail, reversing his previous skepticism, cryptocurrencies surged to record highs after Trump won a second term in office.
But, in common with Wall Street more widely, crypto prices have dropped back amid fears, among other factors, over Trump’s tariffs war rekindling inflation.
