Trump is launching a cryptocurrency platform, and we have no idea what it does

Former President Donald Trump is launching a cryptocurrency platform, he announced Thursday in a post on Truth Social. Trump’s post included few other details, but he and his sons have suggested it will targeted at unbanked and underserved communities.

“For too long, the average American has been squeezed by the big banks and financial elites,” the post reads. “It’s time we take a stand — together. #BeDefiant.” The name of the platform, the DeFiant Ones, is a play on “decentralized finance.”

Trump’s Truth Social post links to a Telegram channel for the as-of-yet unreleased platform, which has posts dating back to August 15th calling it the “only official Telegram channel for the Trump DeFi project.” There are no details about what the project entails or whether it’s a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), a coin, a trading market, a cryptocurrency blog or publication, or something else altogether.

In July, a company called AMG Software Solutions filed trademark applications for the terms “Be DeFiant,” “World Liberty,” and “World Liberty Financial,” the cryptocurrency publication The Block reported earlier this month. The trademark for World Liberty Financial is for “providing financial information in the field of decentralized finance (DeFi),” the filing reads.

In recent interviews, Trump’s sons, Donald Jr. and Eric, have suggested the project could be targeted at underserved communities. “Essentially over half this country right now cannot be banked,” Eric Trump told the New York Post. “Meaning they will be rejected for most loans from most institutions. But with this technology they could have the ability to almost instantaneously be approved or denied from a lender based on math, not policy. Money could be in their account in minutes, not months.”

One of Trump’s previous ostensibly altruistic projects, Trump University, was accused of defrauding students and settled for $25 million.

The notion that crypto can help unbanked people better access financial services is a rampant one in the industry — but reports suggest otherwise. The Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, found “no systematic evidence that crypto transactions are less expensive than traditional financial transactions,” noting that crypto assets are primarily used for speculation instead of payments.

“The fundamental purpose of financial inclusion is to improve the overall economic well-being of low-income individuals, and encouraging people to use their hard-earned paychecks or savings to buy highly risky assets could do just the opposite,” Todd Phillips, CAP’s former director of financial regulation and corporate governance, wrote in 2022.

The DeFiant Ones is not Trump’s first foray into cryptocurrency. He was the keynote speaker at this year’s Bitcoin Conference in Nashville, during which he promised to fire Gary Gensler, the chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, a perpetual enemy of the crypto crowd.

Trump has between $1 million and $5 million in a “virtual ethereum key,” according to his most recent financial disclosures. He also made $7.2 million from three NFT collections. The people who bought Trump’s NFTs have been less lucky. Some tokens lost value almost immediately after being purchased. As of this April, trading volume of Trump’s NFTs was down by 99 percent.