Trump crypto venture unveiling stirs skepticism; few details revealed

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.

Barron did not speak on the Monday call. 

Alongside the Trumps were billionaire real estate developer Steve Witkoff, a long-time donor and friend to Trump, and his son, Alex, who works for his father’s firm, Witkoff Capital. Alex is also a founder of World Liberty Financial.

The elder Witkoff described how Alex introduced him to two crypto “exceptionally bright” traders, Chase Herro and Zak Folkman, who also became part of the founding team. Herro and Folkman, who were present on the call, were previously connected with another DeFi project called Dough Finance, which disbanded in 2021 after a cyber-attack drained the company of $1.8 million.

One of the more talked-about gripes about the Trump project was that the spaces ran too long and provided little detail on the specifics of how it would actually work, who exactly would be the target customer, and how such a decentralized lending platform would make money.

Trump primarily addressed the audience in a Q&A style interview for the first forty minutes, where he touched on the hostile environment the crypto industry has faced from regulators under the Biden Administration before turning the stage over to his sons and the other project creators. Once a crypto skeptic, Trump credited the success of his namesake non-fungible token collection (for which he’s made around $7M in profits, according to financial disclosures). He also pointed to his children for “opening his eyes” to the possibilities associated with crypto and decentralized finance.

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He was particularly effusive about Barron’s role in making him a crypto convert. Baron, Trump said, “knows this stuff inside out.”

World Liberty also plans to introduce a so-called non-transferable “governance” token that accredited investors can buy through the platform’s official Telegram account. This token would give investors a stake in the project and allow them to vote on future developments in a decentralized way.

However, some listeners were disappointed that only accredited investors, meaning those who meet a certain wealth threshold, will be able to access the token.

“It’s not for retail, so it defeats the message he wants to push,” said Wendy O., a crypto YouTuber with nearly 400,000 X followers. “Retail is not poor and stupid.”

World Liberty has a decidedly populous pitch, which may work well with Trump’s nationalist brand of economics. The bank has been touted as an alternative for people shunned by the traditional banking business because of issues like bad credit.

Critics say this approach — appealing to people who often do not pay back their loans, coupled with DeFi’s unregulated nature — could prove tricky to navigate.

Despite the uneven rollout of World Liberty, Trump is unlikely to lose votes from the industry as he vows to roll back regulations imposed by President Joe Biden’s administration and Vice President Kamala Harris, now the Democratic nominee for the November election.

After the call, several listeners who spoke with FOX Business said they were encouraged, saying the GOP presidential nominee was acknowledging crypto and its role in the future of finance. 

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The Harris campaign had been seeking meetings with crypto industry leaders to woo the estimated 50 million people who engage with crypto to vote for her in the fall. Still, those meetings have now ended mainly amid intense industry skepticism over her record as VP. Harris, meanwhile, has made no public comments about crypto and has given no concrete indication about how she would engage with the industry if elected president.