In brief
- Eric Trump, the U.S. president’s son, spoke at the Token2049 conference in Dubai on Thursday.
- He recounted how difficulties with banks led him to explore and ultimately embrace cryptocurrency.
- The Trump family is involved with a number of crypto endeavors, including World Liberty Financial.
Eric Trump, the son of President Donald Trump, said that it was “woke cancel culture” coming after his family that led him to embrace crypto—with the Trumps making many moves in the space in recent months.
The Trump Organization’s executive vice president claimed that the “some of the biggest banks in the world” canceled his accounts with them—as well as accounts for other family members—at the tail end of President Trump’s first term.
He believes this happened as a result of the “woke cancel culture that had spread across so much of the world,” echoing common Republican talking points.
“The second you start saying something that goes against the system, they’ll cancel you, they’ll ostracize you, and they’ll come after you,” Eric Trump said Thursday at the Token2049 conference in Dubai. “That’s actually what caused me to find cryptocurrency.”
Trump explained that he has spent his entire life working in real estate, just for his family’s business empire to be threatened with banks coming “after us like animals because of politics.”
In that moment, he noticed that banks were also going after crypto users in what’s been dubbed “Operation Choke Point 2.0”—with top crypto executives claiming that U.S. banks would deny them services as a means to strangle the industry’s capacity to function.
“Sometimes they say the enemy of your enemy is your friend, and that’s exactly what happened,” Eric Trump told the packed room of attendees. “What it also made me realize is how absolutely antiquated and broken the modern financial system is.”
During his first term, President Trump had labeled Bitcoin a “scam” and only considered the U.S. dollar as being worthy of his time. But as Trump started campaigning in 2024, he changed his tune and began to sing crypto’s praises, vowing to boost the U.S. crypto industry and Bitcoin miners in particular.
President Trump later released a Solana meme coin, of course, just days before his inauguration in January. He had previously launched multiple NFT collections on Ethereum scaling network Polygon.
This change in opinion largely aligns with the narrative that his son, Eric, has laid out. Eric claims that banks came after the family in 2021, prompting him to become increasingly convinced that crypto is the future. And Eric wants the banks to suffer for this.
“When the banks came after our family, I’ll never forget it,” Eric Trump said, sitting up slightly in his chair. “We became the most canceled people in the world, all because we’re associated with politics in the United States. And honestly, I really do believe that cryptocurrency, and certainly our venture into cryptocurrency, is going to make the big banks regret that.”
Last year, Eric Trump launched the World Liberty Financial DeFi project on Ethereum, with the USD1 stablecoin following in March. Onstage with Tron founder Justin Sun on Thursday, the pair announced that the dollar-pegged stablecoin would be coming to Sun’s network.
Also Thursday, World Liberty co-founder Zach Witkoff said that the Abu Dhabi state-funded tech investment firm MGX will use the USD1 stablecoin to complete its $2 billion investment into Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange by trading volume. The Binance investment was announced in March, without the World Liberty component disclosed at the time.
The move has generated significant backlash and accusations of conflicts of interest related to President Trump’s position in government, given his own backing of World Liberty Financial.
“Never before in American history have foreign governments, as well as people and corporations under investigation, so overtly and directly funneled vast sums to the president of the United States and his family,” said Robert Weissman, co-president of public advocacy group Public Citizen, in a statement. “This is far more than is captured by the term ‘conflict of interest.’ It is foreign policy for sale and justice for sale.”
Such criticism predated Thursday’s announcements, however, and hasn’t stopped the Trump family from making moves in crypto. Last month, Eric Trump also announced a new mining venture called American Bitcoin Corp with Hut8, with plans to go public. He said Thursday that he believes it’s early days for the industry.
“We are in the dial-up phase of the crypto revolution right now,” he added. “I’m telling you the countries that can move quickly, the countries that are nimble, and the countries that have some foresight are going to win this [revolution].”
Edited by Andrew Hayward
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