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New York
CNN
—
The Trump family is quickly learning what happens when you get into business with one of the internet’s most bizarre sideshows.
As a quick catch-up: On Tuesday, crypto researcher Molly White dropped a scoop that said the president was about to launch a Trump-branded cryptocurrency wallet to encourage people to trade his $TRUMP memecoin — yet another product expanding the Trump family’s reach in digital assets. (For the uninitiated, a crypto wallet is a kind of personal online vault for storing digital assets like cryptocurrencies.)
The project, White wrote, was being developed by the two Trump-family-run entities behind the memecoin in partnership with a crypto marketplace called Magic Eden.
A few hours later, Magic Eden confirmed White’s reporting and pushed out its own announcement of the “Official $TRUMP Wallet by President Trump.” The official Trump memecoin website also confirmed the launch in a post on X.
So far, just another day in crypto-land under Trump 2.0. The Trumps have raked in nearly $1 billion in paper gains (according to a Bloomberg estimate) through various ventures since the president’s re-election in November, and the wallet seemed like just the latest project in an ever-expanding crypto empire.
But then, the story took a turn.
Trump’s sons came out saying the family had “zero involvement with this wallet product.”
Donald Trump Jr. posted that he and his brother Eric knew “nothing about it,” but that separately one of their other crypto ventures, World Liberty Financial, would be launching an official wallet “soon.” Even Barron Trump, who rarely posts on social media, chimed in to say the family “has zero involvement with this wallet.”
It appears to be more than just a slight miscommunication.
As White noted in an update to her story, Magic Eden is a relatively big player in crypto, “so this is not a case of some nobody creating a fake project pretending to be an official Trump-affiliated app.”
But it’s far from clear how a run-of-the-mill wallet announcement turned into a public feud.
A Trump Organization spokeswoman wrote in an email to CNN that “Eric and Don had no prior knowledge on this project and there is no agreement with The Trump Organization.”
Representatives for the Trump memecoin and Magic Eden didn’t respond to CNN’s request for comment Wednesday.
Just to underscore the point: Eric Trump appeared to threaten Magic Eden with a lawsuit in a post Tuesday night, telling the company “I would be extremely careful using our name in a project that has not been approved and is unknown to anyone in our organization.” (Eric also told the New York Times that the Trump family would legally challenge the creation of the “Official $TRUMP Wallet.”
This rift is surprising because of how closely connected the two sides are.
On one side we’ve got the Trump boys, on the other the folks at Magic Eden and the official $TRUMP memecoin.
Those two sides are hardly isolated strangers.
The Trump boys run the Trump Organization, which has an affiliate called CIC Digital, which shares the majority of $TRUMP memecoins with another company called Fight Fight Fight.
*Deep breath*
Fight Fight Fight is led by a longtime Trump business associate named Bill Zanker, who co-wrote a book with the president in 2008 and has worked on several Trump-related crypto projects, and it runs the $TRUMP website.
So, Zanker is not officially part of the Trump Org, but he is deeply connected to the president and the family’s various crypto money-making operations. Zanker was the brains behind last month’s memecoin dinner at Trump’s DC-area golf club, Bloomberg’s Olga Kharif wrote recently.
“Zanker’s name is not on the website for the memecoin and he has avoided any comment on it,” Kharif writes. “But on a Delaware corporate filing, Zanker is listed as the ‘authorized person’ for Fight Fight Fight LLC.”
The $3 trillion crypto industry has been thrilled to get a cheerleader in the White House who’s promised to push friendly legislation and defang the regulators that have historically held crypto at arm’s length.
But at the same time, many crypto executives and investors are holding their nose and looking the other way whenever Trump embraces some of the silly (at times scammy) elements of crypto-land. Like the memecoin, a joke-based subcategory of crypto that has no utility and is closely associated with “rug-pull” scams. See also: the bitcoin strategic reserve and the pardoning of a notorious crypto criminal who was serving a life sentence for selling and distributing narcotics. Or the Trump $TRUMP dinner, widely criticized as selling access to the president.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt pushed back heavily on those criticisms during a press briefing hours before the May 22 dinner, telling reporters it was “absurd for anyone to insinuate that this president is profiting off of the presidency.”
This confusion over the crypto wallet rollout isn’t helping anyone trying to pitch crypto as a sophisticated market that’s ready for prime time.
