Original article by Jessica Klein, Wired Magazine

Compiled by Luffy, Foresight News

Eric Trump (second son of US President Trump and Executive Vice President of the Trump Organization) attended the "Bitcoin 2025" conference held in Las Vegas, Nevada, USA on May 28, 2025.

Early in Trump's second term, Asher Genoot, CEO of the infrastructure company Hut 8, and Michael Ho, its chief strategy officer, enjoyed thin-crust pizza with Eric Trump at the Trump Golf Club in Jupiter, Florida. Genoot recalls that they talked for hours and pitched a business idea that intrigued Eric Trump: forming a Bitcoin mining consortium.

The two first met in late 2024 through a mutual friend: Genoot says he showed Eric pictures of a "beautiful liquid-cooled data center" in Amarillo, Texas. Eric was intrigued and told Genoot about growing up with his father working on construction sites. According to Genoot, after that pizza night, they saw each other almost every day. The result: American Bitcoin (ABTC), founded on April 1st. Hut 8 holds an 80% stake (the company claims to manage "1,020 megawatts of energy capacity across 15 locations in the United States and Canada"), while the Trump brothers (Eric and Donald Jr.) and existing shareholders of their data center company, American Data Centers, hold the remaining 20%. Eric serves as co-founder and chief strategy officer of American Bitcoin.

Matt Prusak, CEO of American Bitcoin (and former CEO of Ionic Digital, a bitcoin mining company affiliated with Hut 8), said the Trump brothers brought "two things" to the table. First, access to capital markets through the Trump family's international business connections; second, Prusak described it as more compelling "narrative value" stemming from the Trump family name.

While Prusak says Eric "can connect with numerous potential partners with a single phone call," he and Genoot insist that Eric's position doesn't grant him direct access to the president. Instead, they emphasize Eric's relationships with large family offices and institutions. "Institutions from Europe, Canada, and even the Middle East are interested in strategic partnerships with American Bitcoin," Prusak says.

In March, the cryptocurrency exchange Binance announced a $2 billion investment from a fund backed by the Abu Dhabi government. Two months later, the USD 1 stablecoin from World Liberty Financial, a crypto project affiliated with the Trump family, was selected as the settlement currency for transactions. On July 18, President Trump signed the GENIUS Act, establishing a regulatory framework for stablecoins. The House of Representatives had passed a bill regulating cryptocurrency markets the day before, and the president mandated that the bill reach the White House by August.

“We can leverage the U.S. energy market,” Prusak said, noting Eric and Donald Jr.’s large and increasingly crypto-interested audience. Hut 8 CFO Sean Glennan, formerly of Citigroup, said his industry is “very imitative,” and having an executive from one of the world’s most talked-about families in the spotlight can’t be a bad thing.

“American Bitcoin is uniquely positioned to scale faster and run leaner operations than any other player in the industry,” Eric said in a written statement to Wired, calling Hut 8’s track record, infrastructure, and energy expertise “unparalleled.”

Will Foxley, co-founder of Blockspace Media, a company focused on bitcoin mining, put it more bluntly: In the fiercely competitive bitcoin mining industry, "there are very few ways to stand out. Having the president's son co-found a company is one of them."

From its founding in April to May 31st, American Bitcoin mined 215 bitcoins , further strengthening the Trump family's cryptocurrency portfolio. As of July 1st, American Bitcoin had raised $220 million from investors, which it plans to use to purchase bitcoin and mining equipment. Combined with the Trump family's previous crypto investments (including meme coins, stablecoins, and a $2.5 billion Bitcoin treasury investment by Trump Media & Technology Group (which owns Truth Social)), American Bitcoin is further solidifying the family's influence in the cryptocurrency ecosystem, which continues to grow and is increasingly connected to institutions and governments.

As of mid-March, the Trump family's crypto holdings reportedly contributed approximately $2.9 billion to their wealth. American Bitcoin's core goal is to accumulate Bitcoin, which could further increase the family's wealth. First, by acquiring Bitcoin at a price below market price through mining (miners are rewarded for their computing power, which is lower than purchasing from exchanges); second, by expanding their strategic Bitcoin reserves through acquisitions.

On June 18th, Prusak told Wired magazine that he couldn’t disclose when the company began purchasing Bitcoin or through which exchange, but that Coinbase Prime is currently its “primary market.” (Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong reportedly met with President Trump to help shape U.S. crypto policy.)

Foxley said that when Hut 8 announced its partnership with the Trump brothers to launch American Bitcoin, many in the crypto mining community were "caught off guard." While meme coins like Trump coin can generate buzz and grab headlines, Foxley believes Bitcoin mining is a "negative sector" in the crypto world—unglamorous and rarely reported on, save for articles criticizing its high energy consumption.

But Foxley added that this strategy makes sense given the Trump administration's "America Energy First" policy. In June 2024, the president met with several of the nation's largest mining farms at a Mar-a-Lago campaign event to discuss how the United States could become "the leading country for Bitcoin mining." The following month, he reiterated this goal at the Nashville Bitcoin Conference.

During the 2024 election, the crypto industry invested $135 million to maintain political influence through lobbying Congress and reaching out to the president. While President Trump promoted crypto-friendly legislation and planned a federal strategic Bitcoin reserve, he also ensured that he could directly benefit from the industry's profits.

Although President Trump has proposed imposing tariffs on Chinese mining machines, a negative development for the US crypto mining industry, the policy has yet to be implemented. On May 12th, American Bitcoin announced plans to go public through a merger with Nasdaq-listed Gryphon Digital Mining. According to Gryphon's SEC filing, it "operates approximately 5,880 Bitcoin mining machines at third-party mining facilities in Pennsylvania," sourced from the Chinese company Bitmain.

According to American Bitcoin's SEC filing, after accumulating enough bitcoins through mining and acquisitions, the company's ultimate goal is to "lead the Bitcoin ecosystem," which may include supporting the development of Bitcoin technology and promoting its popularization.

"Like all Trump family ventures, American Bitcoin aims to become a major player in the industry," Eric said in a May interview at the blockchain conference Consensus. According to Gryphon's SEC filing, the merger with American Bitcoin will create a publicly traded company "focused on building the world's largest and most efficient pure-play Bitcoin mining company." The merged company's board of directors will consist of five members: Ho, Prusak (also the founder and partner of the venture capital firm Defense Angels, whose website describes itself as "investing in the future of national security"), and three outside directors: FabFitFun co-founder Michael Broukhim, Tinder co-founder Justin Mateen, and Genoot.

“Going public is a game changer. It unlocks capital and institutional access, which will advance our mission of building the largest and most investable long-term Bitcoin accumulation platform,” said Eric.

However, Hut 8 provides infrastructure. According to SEC filings, American Bitcoin pays Hut 8 for energy, operations, and shared services, including "accounting, HR support, payroll, benefits, IT support," and legal services. Hut 8 provides American Bitcoin with mining facilities (currently located in Niagara Falls, New York; Medicine Hat, Alberta; and Ola, Texas). Prusak claims that American Bitcoin will help Hut 8 "raise and deploy significant capital" without "drag[ing] down Hut 8's balance sheet." Foxley believes that with American Bitcoin focused on mining, Hut 8 can focus on supporting emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and compete for "hyperscale data center users"—companies like Meta and Google that require high-energy data centers.

Since Hut 8 financed the data center, American Bitcoin only needed to purchase the mining machines. The company inherited an agreement from Hut 8 subsidiary Zephyr to purchase approximately 17,280 Bitmain U3S21EXPH mining machines for up to $320 million. As of May 31st, American Bitcoin owned over 60,000 mining machines, primarily consisting of the Bitmain Antminer S21+ series (which Glennan called "Cadillacs... not Ferraris") and China's MicroBt M5X and M6X series.

The United States holds 30%-40% of the world's Bitcoin computing power, but 90% of its mining machines come from China. "Bitcoin is increasingly becoming central to the US financial ecosystem," said Sanjay Gupta, chief strategy officer at Auradine, a US-based crypto mining machine supplier and Bitmain's US competitor. As President Trump promotes Bitcoin's integration into the US financial system, experts warn that integrating Chinese hardware into critical US power infrastructure could pose security risks. For example, Bitmain, a private company, has ties to Sophgo, an AI company blacklisted by the US government for security reasons (Bitmain and Sophgo share a co-founder but have not yet been added to the Entity List).

The bitcoin mining industry has to contend with increasingly harsh economic realities: dependence on a volatile asset, with mining rewards halving every four years or so, and more than 19 million of the 21 million bitcoins already mined.

Glennan said keeping debt low and hedging risk through the Bitcoin derivatives market will help American Bitcoin "weather market volatility." The company also plans to increase its computing power to improve profitability, which may mean replacing older machines with more efficient new equipment or acquiring other mining companies.

All of this requires capital, and the company hopes the Trump family name will attract it. While representatives from both Hut 8 and American Bitcoin claim their businesses have no connection to Trump's political connections, the companies couldn't resist flaunting their ties at the May 2025 Bitcoin Conference in Las Vegas. The American Bitcoin event featured the Winklevoss twins (each of whom donated $1 million to Trump's 2024 campaign) and Cantor Fitzgerald Chairman Brandon Lutnick (son of US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick).

On the stage where Vice President J.D. Vance had spoken just hours earlier, Donald Jr. participated in a discussion with Prusak and Ho. He told the conservative audience: "My father made many promises to the crypto community... Everything that (Eric and I) do in this area demonstrates our sincerity." The first thing he mentioned was American Bitcoin.

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