The Trump family’s crypto business is increasingly becoming a bet on Bitcoin. On Monday afternoon, American Bitcoin, a cryptocurrency mining and holding company backed by Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., announced that it had raised $220 million. The firm plans to use the new capital to acquire more of the world’s largest cryptocurrency, and to buy more miners, which are computer servers that process Bitcoin transactions in exchange for crypto.
About $10 million of the private stock sale was immediately converted into Bitcoin. The announcement did not say how many or which investors bought shares of the Trump sons’ company.
American Bitcoin is a subsidiary of Hut 8, a publicly traded Bitcoin miner. A representative for Hut 8 did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In March, Hut 8 announced that it was giving “substantially all” of its Bitcoin mining equipment to American Bitcoin in exchange for 80% of the newly formed company’s stock. Eric and Donald Trump Jr. Are investors in American Bitcoin, but Hut 8 did not disclose whether the two sons of President Donald Trump exclusively owned the other 20%.
In May, American Bitcoin announced that it was going public through a reverse merger with the company Gryphon Digital Mining. The company plans to trade on the Nasdaq under the ticker $ABTC as early as the third quarter, according to a press release.
American Bitcoin is just one of a slew of Trump crypto businesses announced this past year. And it’s not the only one to raise hundreds of millions to accumulate Bitcoin.
In a nod to Michael Saylor, whose company Strategy has pumped up its share prices by accumulating over $60 billion in Bitcoin, Trump’s publicly traded media business announced in May that it planned to raise $2.5 billion to establish its own Bitcoin treasury. And Trump Media and Technology Group has filed to launch its own Bitcoin exchange-traded fund, or ETF, which lets investors gain exposure to the world’s largest cryptocurrency without owning it themselves.
Trump’s other crypto businesses are also raking it in. The 47th president has his own memecoin, which has a market capitalization of more than $1.7 billion. And then there’s World Liberty Financial, a sprawling crypto project that includes a yet-to-be-released app for decentralized finance—a term for banking services like lending and borrowing conducted on a blockchain.
Moreover, World Liberty Financial has its own stablecoin, or cryptocurrency pegged to stable assets like the U.S. Dollar. Its market capitalization is now $2.2 billion.
