Republican presidential candidate and former U.S. President Donald Trump gestures during the Bitcoin 2024 event in Nashville, Tennessee, U.S., July 27, 2024.
Kevin Wurm | Reuters
Former President Donald Trump on Thursday promoted a soon-to-launch Trump Organization crypto platform, “The DeFiant Ones,” to his 7.5 million followers on Social truth.
“For too long, the average American has been held hostage by big banks and financial elites,” Trump wrote. “It’s time we take a stand – together.”
It’s the first time the Republican presidential candidate has used his personal platform to promote the digital bank, which has yet to be activated. Within minutes, his son Donald Trump Jr. shared the message with his 12 million X-rated followers.
Trump’s message includes a link to a Telegram channel called “The DeFiant Ones,” which had about 29,000 subscribers as of Thursday morning and is growing.
An August 15 post describes the chat group as “the only official Telegram channel for the Trump DeFi project” which is building “the future of finance.”
Two of Trump’s sons, Eric Trump and Donald Jr., have spent weeks teasing the upcoming platform, which Eric recently described as “digital real estate.”
“It’s fair. It’s a guarantee that everyone can have instant access to,” Eric told the New York Post earlier this month. “I don’t know if people realize what a disruption this is for 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 asking people to “stay tuned for a big announcement.”
The mention of digital real estate could be a reference to selling digitized versions of assets in the metaverse, a concept that peaked in popularity in 2021 during the latest crypto bull market cycle.
Digitized real estate could also mean that the project would tokenize real-world assets.
The project’s launch coincides with the final stretch of Trump’s presidential campaign, as the former president struggles to regain momentum in the race against Vice President Kamala Harris.
Trump’s eldest son recently said the family is not launching a memecoin but is instead working on developing a crypto platform that would rival the traditional banking system.
“What we want to do is take on a large part of the banking world,” he said on August 8.
“I think there’s been a lot of inequality in the sense that only certain people can get finance … so this notion of decentralized finance is obviously very attractive to people like me who have been debanked,” Donald Trump Jr. said in the Locals interview.
In recent months, Trump senior has sought to portray himself as the pro-crypto candidate for president.
In April, Trump launched a fundraising campaign for non-fungible tokens on the Solana blockchain. In May, he became the first major presidential candidate to accept cryptocurrency donations, and in July, the Republican presidential nominee headlined the largest bitcoin event of the year in Nashville, Tennessee. And earlier this month, a personal financial disclosure form showed that the former president owns more than $1 million in cryptocurrency.
This is a significant shift from Trump’s previous stance on cryptocurrencies during his tenure in the White House, when he called bitcoin a scam.
Support and donations have poured in since his newfound support for the industry. The former president said he had raised $25 million from the cryptocurrency industry by the end of July.
