Republican presidential nominee and former U.S. President Donald Trump gestures at 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 Truth Social.
“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.”
The post marks the first time the Republican nominee for president has used his personal platform to promote the as yet unactivated digital bank. Within minutes, his son Donald Trump Jr., shared the post with his 12 million X followers.
Trump’s post includes a link to a Telegram channel called “The DeFiant Ones,” which had approximately 29,000 followers as of Thursday morning, and climbing.
An Aug. 15 post describes the group chat as “the only official Telegram channel for the Trump DeFi project” which is building “the future of finance.”
Trump’s sons Eric Trump and and Donald Jr. have spent weeks teasing the forthcoming platform, which Eric recently described as “digital real estate.”
“It’s equitable. It’s collateral anyone can get access to and do so instantly,” Eric told The New York Post earlier this month. “I don’t know if people realize what a shake up that is for the world of banking and finance. I hope we can help change that.”
The Trump brothers have 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 which peaked in popularity in 2021 during the last bull market cycle in crypto.
Digitized real estate could also mean that the project would tokenize real-world assets.
The timing of the project coincides with the homestretch of Trump’s presidential campaign. The former president is working to regain momentum in the race against Vice President Kamala Harris.
Trump’s eldest son recently said that the family wasn’t launching a memecoin and instead, was working to develop a crypto platform that would rival the traditional banking system.
“What we want to do is take on a lot of the banking world,” he said on Aug. 8.
“I think there has been a lot of inequality in that only certain people can get financing […] so this notion of decentralized finance is obviously very appealing to guys like me who have been debanked,” Donald Trump Jr. said in the interview on Locals.
In recent months, Trump senior has sought to brand himself as the pro-crypto candidate for president.
In April, Trump launched a non-fungible token collection on the Solana blockchain. In May, he became the first major presidential nominee to accept cryptocurrency donations, and in July, the Republican presidential nominee headlined the biggest bitcoin event of the year in Nashville.
It is a significant departure from Trump’s previous stance on cryptocurrencies during his stint in the White House when he called bitcoin a scam.
The endorsements and donations have rolled in since his newfound support of the industry. The former president said he had raised $25 million from the crypto sector as of the end of July.