Republican presidential candidate and former U.S. President Donald Trump gestures at the Bitcoin 2024 event in Nashville, Tennessee, U.S., July 27, 2024.
Kevin Wurm | Reuters
Former President Donald Trump made a point of reaching out to his 7.5 million followers on Thursday Truth Social.
“For too long, the average American has been squeezed by the big banks and financial elite,” Trump wrote. “It's time we take a stand – together.”
With this post, the Republican presidential candidate is using his personal platform for the first time to promote the not-yet-activated digital bank. Within minutes, his son Donald Trump Jr. shared the post with his 12 million X followers.
Trump's post includes a link to a Telegram channel called “The DeFiant Ones,” which had about 29,000 followers as of Thursday morning and growing.
In an August 15 post, the group chat is described as “the only official Telegram channel for the Trump DeFi project,” which is building “the future of finance.”
Trump's sons Eric Trump and Donald Jr. have spent weeks promoting the upcoming platform, which Eric recently described as “digital real estate ownership.”
“It's fair. It's a security that everyone can access immediately,” Eric told the New York Post earlier this month. “I don't know if people realize what a disruption this is to the banking and financial world. I hope we can help change that.”
The Trump brothers also promoted the project with posts declaring that “decentralized finance is the future” and telling people to “stay tuned for a big announcement.”
The mention of digital real estate ownership could refer to the sale of digitized versions of assets in the metaverse, a concept whose popularity peaked in 2021 during the last bull market cycle in the crypto space.
Digitized real estate could also mean that the project tokenizes real-world assets.
The timing of the project coincides with the home stretch of Trump's presidential campaign, as the former president works to regain momentum in his race against Vice President Kamala Harris.
Trump's eldest son recently said that the family would not launch a memecoin, but was instead working on developing a crypto platform that could compete with the traditional banking system.
“We want to take on a large part of the banking world,” he said on August 8.
“I think there was a lot of inequality because only certain people could get funding. […] So the idea of decentralized finance is obviously very attractive to people like me who no longer have a bank account,” Donald Trump Jr. said in the interview with Locals.
In recent months, Trump Senior has tried to profile himself as a pro-crypto presidential candidate.
In April, Trump launched a non-fungible token collection on the Solana Blockchain. In May, he became the first major presidential candidate to accept cryptocurrency donations, and in July, the Republican presidential candidate headlined the biggest bitcoin event of the year in Nashville. And earlier this month, a disclosure of his personal finances showed that the former president owns over $1 million worth of cryptocurrency.
This represents a stark departure from Trump’s previous stance on cryptocurrencies during his tenure in the White House, when he called Bitcoin a fraud.
The support and donations have been pouring in since he started supporting the industry anew. The former president said he had raised $25 million from the crypto sector by the end of July.
Comments are closed.