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Donald Trump is the crypto community’s preferred candidate for president, but that doesn’t mean digital asset enthusiasts were impressed with his family’s official foray into the $2 trillion business, Fox Business has learned.
After weeks of teasing an official cryptocurrency project, the GOP presidential nominee took to the social media platform X Monday night in a live Spaces forum alongside sons Don Jr., Eric, and his youngest son Barron Trump, to announce key details of what was described as a decentralized lending platform named “World Liberty Financial.”
As pitched, World Liberty is designed to democratize and depoliticize finance and provide easier access to loans for ordinary people who don’t have access to the traditional banking system.
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“What I think we’re doing here is really a game-changer,” Trump Jr. said on the call Monday night. “This is the start, I think, of a financial revolution.”
However, details about the venture turned out to be thin; many seasoned crypto participants interviewed by Fox Business came away unimpressed by what they heard and skeptical about whether the project’s business model could work.
“We’re over two hours into this Trump crypto call, and they haven’t yet spoken about what the platform does,” said Wayne Vaughan, CEO of blockchain firm Tierion, in an X post, noting that the listener count fell from 150,000 to 47,000 throughout the space.
The drop-off occurred at about 8:45 PM EST when Trump turned the call over to his sons and a handful of others involved in the venture. Despite the drop-off in live listeners, an impressive 1.3 million people tuned in to hear the spaces at various times throughout the discussion. The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
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If the call did anything, it dispelled speculation that Baron Trump, an 18-year-old college freshman who is said to be a crypto enthusiast, was launching a so-called meme coin with “Pharma Bro,” aka Martin Shkreli, who was recently released from prison early after serving nearly five of a seven-year jail term for securities fraud. Despite Shkreli’s recent insistence that his token was the “real” crypto token of the Trump family — and he was working with Baron on the project — he was absent from the Monday evening call. Sources close to the Trump family revealed that Barron was advised against working with Shkreli and instead encouraged to join the family crypto venture.