The president of the United States wants to be in the money management business. Not when he ends his term, but right now.
This is the unprecedented upshot of the development on Tuesday when Trump Media & Technology, the company that owns the Truth Social platform and has been delving into crypto ventures, applied to bring out a Bitcoin exchange-traded fund that will be listed on the New York Stock Exchange.
The fund, which will be called the Truth Social Bitcoin fund, must be approved by the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
If it gets the green light, the fund will be a bit late to the boom in crypto ETFs that began in January 2024.
Led by BlackRock’s Bitcoin offering, the funds have reshaped the crypto market by drawing in legions of investors and amassing $130 billion worth of the top digital asset.
Just this week, one analyst said BlackRock was destined to overtake Satoshi Nakamoto as the No. 1 holder of Bitcoin as its $70 billion stockpile keeps growing.
Taking a bite
TMT is determined to take its own bite of this ever expanding pie via a purported fintech division called Truth.fi.
In January, the company approved investing $250 million in crypto as part of a push into what it called “the patriot economy.”
TMT’s shareholders seemed lukewarm on the Bitcoin ETF gambit — on Wednesday its shares were down almost 1% when most other stocks were up.
Of course, no commander-in-chief has ever been involved with a company that introduces and manages investment funds even as his administration helps to draw up new rules and regulations for the same industry.
Trump owned roughly 57% of TMT’s shares, which trade under the ticker DJT, before transferring his holdings into the Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust after winning the election in November 2024.
Donald Trump Jr, the eldest of the president’s five children, controls the trust, according to SEC filings.
Memecoin dinner
Even though Democrats have decried the president’s crypto involvement as “open corruption,” TMT is just one arm of the Trump family’s crypto businesses.
World Liberty Financial, the purported DeFi project backed by the family, introduced a stablecoin called USD1 in March.
And the president himself released a memecoin in January and then hosted a dinner for the 220 top holders at his private golf club in May.
At the same time, the Trump administration has ended the crackdown on the industry pursued by former SEC Chair Gary Gensler.
The agency, now under new Chair Paul Atkins, a Washington lawyer, has dropped or delayed virtually all the enforcement actions it brought against Coinbase, Binance, Ripple and other crypto projects.
Last week, TMT said it plans to amass a $2.5 billion Bitcoin treasury. In late April, Trump’s media conglomerate said it was exploring a “utility token” for subscriptions to its streaming platform Truth+.
Moreover, Trump’s sons, Eric and Donald Jr., announced in late March they were forming a new Bitcoin mining company, dubbed the American Bitcoin Corp.
Pedro Solimano is a markets correspondent based in Buenos Aires. Got a tip? Email him at [email protected].
