Trump says he will announce a plan to make the United States the "crypto capital"

Author: Muyao Shen, Bloomberg; Compiler: Tao Zhu, Golden Finance

Donald Trump appears to be getting more deeply involved in the digital asset space, saying he will unveil plans to ensure that the United States becomes the "crypto capital of the earth."

The former US president and current Republican presidential candidate did not get more specific in a video message posted on the X social media platform on Thursday. The post included a link to World Liberty Financial, a decentralized finance project that his son has been promoting. While few details were revealed, the site's metadata describes the project as a "cutting-edge" DeFi platform that will connect users with "the best tools in decentralized finance for secure, high-yield crypto investments."

“This afternoon, I will lay out my plan to make sure that the United States becomes the crypto capital of the planet,” Trump said in the video.

It’s a sea change in Trump’s attitude toward the asset class, which he had dismissed as a criminal scam while in office. Last month, he was a featured speaker at a bitcoin conference, where donors were asked to pay $844,600 to attend a roundtable with Trump.

Decentralized finance, or DeFi, is a subgenre of cryptocurrency that seeks to eliminate intermediaries such as banks and brokers through the use of software-driven applications. Its supporters claim DeFi projects will democratize finance.

“They want to kill you. They want to put you out of business,” Trump said in the video on X, without specifying who “they” are. “We’re not going to let that happen.”

Proponents say the regulatory crackdown on cryptocurrencies has made the United States a less friendly country to build DeFi projects. Uniswap Labs, the creator of the largest DeFi trading platform on the Ethereum blockchain, said earlier this year that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission had warned it that it faced potential enforcement action for operating as an unregistered exchange and broker-dealer.

The setup of the project promoted by Eric and Donald Trump Jr. remains unclear. World Liberty Financial has launched a channel on the social media platform Telegram with more than 52,000 subscribers. Telegram's CEO Pavel Durov was charged in France this week with conspiracy to distribute child pornography and other crimes.

"President Donald J. Trump just mentioned World Liberty Financial on Twitter!" the latest message on the Telegram channel read. "Let's show our support together and keep moving forward! Be Defiant!"

The fourth series of non-fungible tokens launched on Tuesday, with images including those of the former president in a superhero costume and holding a symbolic Bitcoin. The NFTs are selling for $99 each.

Trump’s CIC Digital LLC, which has earned $7.2 million from licensing his image for NFTs, has at least $1 million in Ethereum in its crypto wallets. Trump’s support for cryptocurrency has prompted some of the industry’s top executives, including venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, to endorse him.