Former President Donald Trump announced the launch of a cryptocurrency platform in a post on Truth Social on Thursday. Trump’s post was sparse on details, but he and his sons suggested the platform would target unbanked and underserved communities.
“For too long, the average American has been held to the punch by big banks and financial elites,” the post reads. “It’s time we take a stand, together. #BeDefiant.” The platform’s name, The DeFiant Ones, is a play on “decentralized finance.”
Trump’s post on Truth Social links to a Telegram channel for the as-yet-unpublished platform, which has posts dating back to August 15 and calls it “the only official Telegram channel for the Trump DeFi project.” There are no details on what the project entails or whether it is a decentralized autonomous organization, a coin, an exchange, a cryptocurrency blog or publication, or something else.
In July, a company called AMG Software Solutions filed trademark applications for the terms “Be DeFiant,” “World Liberty,” and “World Liberty Financial,” the cryptocurrency publication The Block World Liberty Financial’s trademark is intended to “provide financial information in the field of decentralized finance (DeFi),” the filing reads.
In recent interviews, Trump’s sons Donald Jr. and Eric have suggested the project could target underserved communities. “In fact, over half of this country right now doesn’t have a bank account,” Eric Trump told the The New York Post“That means they’ll be denied most loans from most institutions. But with this technology, they could have the ability to be approved or denied almost instantly by a lender based on math, not policy. Money could be in their account in minutes, not months.”
One of Trump’s previous seemingly altruistic projects, Trump University, was accused of defrauding students and ordered to pay $25 million.
The idea that cryptocurrencies can help the unbanked gain better access to financial services is widespread in the industry – but reports suggest otherwise. The Center for American Progress (CAP), a liberal think tank, found “no systematic evidence that crypto transactions are less costly than traditional financial transactions,” noting that crypto assets are primarily used for speculation rather than payment.
“The fundamental goal of financial inclusion is to improve the overall economic well-being of low-income people, and encouraging people to use their hard-earned wages or savings to buy highly risky assets could do just the opposite,” Todd Phillips, CAP’s former director of financial regulation and corporate governance, wrote in 2022.
The DeFiant Ones aren’t Trump’s first foray into the world of crypto. He was the keynote speaker at this year’s Bitcoin conference in Nashville, Tennessee, where he vowed to fire Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Gary Gensler, a perennial foe of crypto investors.
According to his latest financial disclosures, Trump has between $1 million and $5 million in a “virtual Ethereum key.” He’s also earned $7.2 million from three NFT collections. People who bought Trump’s NFTs have been less fortunate. Some tokens have lost value almost immediately after they were purchased. By April, trading volume for Trump’s NFTs had dropped by 99%.
