Wired Magazine: Inside Trump's Son's American Bitcoin

Source: Wired Magazine; Compiled by Golden Finance. Early in Donald Trump's second term, Asher Genoot, CEO of the energy infrastructure company Hut 8, and Michael Ho, Hut 8's chief strategy officer, enjoyed thin-crust pizza with Trump's son, Eric, at the Trump Golf Club in Florida. Genoot says they chatted for hours and pitched a business idea that intrigued Eric Trump: a Bitcoin mining consortium. They met in late 2024 through mutual friends. Genoot says he showed Eric photos of their "beautiful, cool data center" in Amarillo, Texas. Genoot says Eric was intrigued and told him stories of growing up on construction sites with his father. According to Genoot, the pizza night invitations evolved into almost daily meetings. The result? A company called American Bitcoin was established on April 1st. Hut 8, which reports that it "manages 1,020 megawatts of energy capacity across 15 sites in the United States and Canada," owns 80% of the company, while Eric Trump, his brother Donald Jr., and shareholders of their former data center company, American Data Centers, own the remaining 20%. Eric is American Bitcoin's co-founder and chief strategy officer. Matt Prusak, CEO of American Bitcoin (and former CEO of Ionic Digital, a Hut 8-owned bitcoin mining company), said the Trump brothers bring "two things" to the table. One is access to capital markets through the Trump family's international business connections; the second, arguably more compelling value-add, is what Prusak calls "narrative"—the narrative that the Trump family brings. While Prusak says Eric is "just a phone call away from a wide range of partners," he and Genoot insist that Eric's position within the team doesn't grant him direct access to the president. Instead, they emphasize Eric's connections to large family offices and institutions. "Institutions in Europe, Canada, and now increasingly in the Middle East, are interested in strategic partnerships with U.S. 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 USD1 stablecoin from World Liberty Financial, a subsidiary of the Trump family, was selected for trading. On July 18, President Trump signed the GENIUS Act, which regulates stablecoins. The House of Representatives had passed legislation establishing rules for the cryptocurrency market the day before, and the president has requested that the bill reach his desk by August. "We can leverage the U.S. energy market," Prusak says, noting that Eric and Donald Jr. have a large and increasingly interested audience for Bitcoin. Hut 8's CFO, Glennan, a former Citibank employee, calls his current industry "full of copycats"—a positive development when you have a public executive from one of the world's most copycat families. In a written statement to Wired, Eric said, "American Bitcoin is uniquely positioned to scale faster and operate more leanly than anyone else in the space." He cited Hut 8's track record, infrastructure, and energy expertise as "unparalleled." Will Foxley, co-founder of Blockspace Media, a company focused on Bitcoin mining, put it more bluntly. In the competitive mining industry, he said, "there are only a few ways to stand out—and one of them is having the president's son be a part of your company." From its April launch to May 31st, American Bitcoin mined 215 Bitcoins, further expanding the Trump family's cryptocurrency portfolio. As of July 1st, the company had raised $220 million from investors, which it plans to use to purchase Bitcoin and mining equipment. Combined with the Trump family's past investments in cryptocurrency—including memecoins, stablecoins, and a $2.5 billion Bitcoin treasury for the Trump Media & Technology Group (which includes Truth Social)—American Bitcoin is further solidifying the Trump family's influence over a growing financial ecosystem increasingly tied to institutions and governments. As of mid-March, the Trump family's cryptocurrency activities reportedly contributed approximately $2.9 billion to their wealth. American Bitcoin can grow its wealth through its primary goal: accumulating Bitcoin. First, it generates Bitcoin at below-market cost through mining (because miners are paid more for their labor, the Bitcoin they receive is worth more than what they would purchase on an exchange). Then, it purchases more Bitcoin to build its strategic reserve. As of June 18, Prusak told Wired he "can't disclose" when the company began purchasing or which exchange it would use, but Coinbase Prime is currently the company's "primary market." (Its CEO, Brian Armstrong, has reportedly met with President Trump to help shape U.S. cryptocurrency policy.)

When Hut 8 announced its partnership with the Trump sons to create American Bitcoin, other players in the cryptocurrency mining industry were "caught off guard," Foxley says. While memecoins like Trump Coin are eye-catching, media-generating moneymakers, Foxley considers Bitcoin mining to be "the backwater of crypto"—unglamorous, underreported, and subject to articles criticizing its high energy consumption.

But Foxley adds that this makes sense given the Trump administration's "America Energy First" approach. In June 2024, while campaigning at Mar-a-Lago, Trump met with some of the largest U.S. miners to discuss how the United States could become the world's largest Bitcoin mining company. Trump reiterated this agenda at the Bitcoin Conference in Nashville, Tennessee, the following month.

The cryptocurrency industry has invested $135 million in the 2024 election and maintains political influence by lobbying Congress and garnering presidential support. President Trump has ensured he profits from these profits while working to tie the industry's success to the US government, encouraging crypto-friendly legislation and planning a federal strategic bitcoin reserve. While President Trump's proposed tariffs on Chinese mining equipment would be bad news for the US cryptocurrency mining industry, they have not yet taken effect. On May 12, American Bitcoin announced plans to go public through a merger with Nasdaq-listed Gryphon Digital Mining. According to its SEC filing, Gryphon Digital Mining "operates approximately 5,880 bitcoin mining computers" at a third-party mining center in Pennsylvania. These computers are sourced from the Chinese company Bitmain. According to American Bitcoin's SEC filing, once American Bitcoin accumulates enough bitcoin through mining and purchases, the company's ultimate goal is to "lead the ecosystem," which may include supporting bitcoin's development and encouraging its adoption. In an interview at the blockchain conference Consensus in May, Eric stated that, like everything under the Trump family's name, American Bitcoin aims to "be the biggest." According to Gryphon's SEC filing, the company plans to merge with Gryphon, creating a public entity "focused on building the world's largest and most efficient pure-play Bitcoin miner." Following the merger, the company's five directors will be Mr. Ho and three non-employees: FabFitFun co-founder Michael Broukhim, Tinder co-founder Justin Mateen, and Genoot. "Going public is a game changer," said Eric Trump. "It unlocks capital and institutional access, which will advance our mission of building the largest and most investable platform for long-term Bitcoin accumulation." Hut 8, however, provides the infrastructure. According to its SEC filing, 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), but Prusak says American Bitcoin can leverage Hut 8 to raise and deploy "significant capital" without "straining Hut 8's balance sheet." Foxley says that with American Bitcoin handling the mining, Hut 8 can focus on supporting emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and expanding into the "hyperscale" business—companies like Meta and Google that require large data centers to support their energy-intensive operations. Because Hut 8 finances the data centers, American Bitcoin simply purchases the mining hardware. It 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 reported owning over 60,000 Bitcoin mining machines, primarily Bitmain's Antminer S21+ series (which Glennan calls "Cadillacs... not Ferraris") and China's Microbit M5X and M6X series. While the United States accounts for 30% to 40% of global Bitcoin mining, 90% of mining hardware comes from China. "Bitcoin is becoming increasingly important within the U.S. financial ecosystem," said Sanjay Gupta, chief strategy officer at Auradine, a U.S. competitor to Chinese Bitcoin mining suppliers. As President Trump works to further entrench Bitcoin's position within that ecosystem, experts warn that connecting Chinese hardware to critical U.S. power infrastructure could pose security risks. For example, Bitmain, a private company, has ties to Sopho, an artificial intelligence company blacklisted by the U.S. government for security reasons.

Bitcoin mining companies must contend with worsening economic conditions: They rely on a volatile asset, and miners' rewards are cut in half roughly every four years as more than 19 million of a total of 21 million bitcoins are mined.

Glennan said keeping debt to a minimum and hedging through the bitcoin derivatives market will help American Bitcoin "weather the ups and downs of the market." The company also plans to increase its computing power to mine more profitably. This may mean replacing old equipment with newer, more efficient equipment and acquiring other bitcoin mining companies.

All of this requires capital, which the company hopes the Trump family name will attract. While representatives from both Hut 8 and American Bitcoin maintain that their operations are separate from the Trump family’s political ties, American Bitcoin couldn’t resist flaunting those connections at the May 2025 Bitcoin Conference in Las Vegas, where it hosted an event attended by the Winklevoss twins (both of whom donated $1 million to Trump before the election) and Cantor Fitzgerald chairman Brandon Lutnick (son of Trump’s Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick). Speaking on a panel with Prusak, Ho, and his brother Eric, Donald Jr., who had spoken just hours before on the same stage as Vice President JD Vance, told the conservative-leaning audience, “My father, Donald, has made a lot of commitments to the Bitcoin community… Everything that (Eric and I) have done demonstrates how committed we are to this space,” he initially mentioned American Bitcoin. UPDATE: Matt Prusak does not serve on American Bitcoin’s board of directors.