Former President Donald Trump on Thursday touted his family’s forthcoming crypto project, a platform called “The DeFiant Ones.”
The name is a play on the crypto world’s shorthand term for decentralized finance.
“For too long, the average American has been squeezed by the big banks and financial elites,” Trump wrote. “It’s time we take a stand—together. #BeDefiant”
ADVERTISEMENT
The post provided no other information about what The DeFiant Ones would actually do for its users, nor what it actually is. Though it seems likely to be a crypto-cooperative, a blockchain organizational structure otherwise known as a decentralized autonomous organization, it could just as easily be a coin, a marketplace, or even a blog of some kind.
What the post did include was a link, which takes the user to a Telegram channel that boasted about 36,000 subscribers on Thursday night. The channel, which was created on Aug. 6, has a handful of posts teasing “the Trump DeFi project” and using the characteristically upbeat but empty parlance typically deployed by crypto aficionados.
“Let’s go!!!!!” the channel posted with no further details last Sunday, its most recent dispatch as of Thursday.
Trump’s endorsement follows weeks of hype-up by Eric and Don Jr. “Stay tuned for a big announcement…” Eric tweeted the same day the Telegram channel was created, gushing that he’d “truly fallen in love with Crypto / DeFi.” (Sorry, Lara.)
Eric gave an interview to the New York Post the next week where he expanded on his love for crypto, touting it as the mark of “a world where we don’t have to play by the big bank’s playbook.”
He suggested that the brothers’ project might target financially insecure Americans, ostensibly leveling the playing field by acting as a form of collateral.
“Essentially over half this country right now cannot be banked,” Eric said. “Meaning they will be rejected for most loans from most institutions. But with this technology they could have the ability to almost instantaneously be approved or denied from a lender based on math, not policy. Money could be in their account in minutes, not months.”
Tech blog The Verge pointed out after Trump’s announcement that crypto—a high-risk and volatile asset—can help unbanked and underserved communities more easily access financial services might not necessarily be true. In 2022, the Center for American Progress, a liberal economic policy institute, published an article noting that claims that crypto bolstered financial inclusion were “dubious” at best.
“There is no systematic evidence that crypto transactions are less expensive than traditional financial transactions, and crypto assets are still primarily used for speculation instead of payments,” the article reads. “The fundamental purpose of financial inclusion is to improve the overall economic well-being of low-income individuals, and encouraging people to use their hard-earned paychecks or savings to buy highly risky assets could do just the opposite.”
After spending years squinting suspiciously at crypto, Trump recently reversed course. As part of his presidential campaign, he appeared as the keynote speaker at this year’s Bitcoin Conference, and is openly being lobbied by cryptocurrency executives.
