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Two of President Trump’s sons announced on Monday that they were investing in a new Bitcoin mining venture, an expansion of the family’s business interests in the crypto industry.
Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. said they would join forces with the Bitcoin mining company Hut 8 to create a firm called American Bitcoin. Bitcoin mining is a lucrative branch of the crypto industry, in which large companies run energy-guzzling machines that help process Bitcoin transactions.
“From the start, we’ve backed our conviction in Bitcoin, personally and through our businesses,” Donald Trump Jr. said in a statement. “But simply buying Bitcoin is only half the story. Mining it on favorable economics opens an even bigger opportunity.”
Under the terms of the deal, Hut 8 will control 80 percent of the new company, with the other 20 percent going to a business entity called American Data Centers Inc. whose investors include the two Trump sons. The announcement on Monday by Hut 8 listed Eric Trump as a co-founder of the new mining venture and said he would serve as its chief strategy officer.
The mining project is the third major crypto venture that the Trump family has started over the past year.
These business ventures have created some of the most overt conflicts of interest in the history of the American presidency, according to government ethics experts.
Four years ago, Mr. Trump was a crypto skeptic who dismissed Bitcoin as a “scam.” Now, he regularly promises to turn the United States into the “crypto capital of the planet.”
Bitcoin mining has been among the most widely criticized features of the crypto industry. When Bitcoin was a niche, novelty investment, anyone could run a computer program to help process Bitcoin transactions, earning new Bitcoins as a reward.
But as the industry grew, the amount of computing power required for mining skyrocketed. Publicly traded firms like Hut 8 run sprawling data centers packed with servers that power Bitcoin transactions. These mining operations have drawn complaints from environmental organizations and people who live near the noisy machines.
The origins of the Trump family’s mining venture trace back to February, when the investment firm Dominari Holdings announced the creation of American Data Centers Inc. At the time, Eric Trump, a member of Dominari’s advisory board, said that the venture was designed to develop computing infrastructure for the artificial intelligence industry.
For now, though, the objective is Bitcoin mining. The Trump family’s venture will focus on running Bitcoin mining machines and establishing a large stockpile of the cryptocurrency, according to the announcement.
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