Donald Trump’s sons want to turn their father’s growing bromance with the cryptocurrency industry into the new family business. So far, the project’s troubled rollout has succeeded in creating only one thing: a potential political liability for the former president.
Trump’s eldest sons — Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump — have been teasing their plans to unveil a crypto startup called World Liberty Financial for weeks. But the launch has been marred in recent days by a series of apparent scams that have redirected fans to fake pages and compromised the social media accounts of other Trump relatives.
The incidents have begun to rattle some of Trump’s allies within the crypto world. They’re warning that his family should shelve a project that they say creates unnecessary political risks and reflects poorly on the industry.
“This is a huge mistake,” said Nic Carter, a Trump supporter who is a founding partner at the crypto-focused venture capital firm Castle Island Ventures. “It looks like Trump’s inner circle is just cashing in on his recent embrace of crypto in a kind of naive way, and frankly it looks like they’re burning a lot of the good will that’s been built with the industry so far.”
The drama illustrates the risks associated with Trump’s growing embrace of the crypto community, which he’s promised to give a sweeping set of supportive policies if elected. Government watchdogs have also warned the intertwining of politics, policy and the Trump family business poses new conflict of interest concerns as Democrats try to paint him as a “con artist” in the home stretch of the presidential campaign. It comes as major crypto firms face ongoing criticism that the market is rife with scams and consumer abuse.
While the details of the Trump brothers’ crypto project haven’t yet been announced, Trump began promoting World Liberty Financial’s forthcoming launch on social media last month after it opened an official channel on the messaging platform Telegram.
Shortly after, it appeared that fraudsters began to pounce. The X accounts of Republican National Committee Co-Chair Lara Trump and Tiffany Trump were compromised late Tuesday, when allegedly unauthorized users posted links to a hoax website for the crypto project featuring fake details about it. World Liberty wrote on its official Telegram channel that the accounts were “hacked” and warned against visiting any links from the posts. Tens of thousands of Telegram users have been lured to a separate unofficial channel posing as World Liberty Financial.