The Inside Story of Eric Trump’s American Bitcoin

Having mined 215 bitcoin between its April launch and May 31, American Bitcoin rounds out the Trump family’s crypto business portfolio. As of July 1, it raised $220 million from investors, which it plans to put toward buying bitcoin and mining equipment. Together with the Trumps’ past crypto plays—which include a meme coin, stablecoin, and $2.5 billion bitcoin treasury investment for Trump Media & Technology Group, which includes Truth Social—American Bitcoin’s helping further consolidate the family’s influence over this growing, and increasingly institution- and government-tied, financial ecosystem.

The Trumps’ crypto activities had reportedly contributed around $2.9 billion to the family’s wealth as of mid-March. American Bitcoin could add via its primary objective—accumulating bitcoin. First, it’s mining to generate bitcoin below market cost (since miners get rewarded for their work, they get bitcoin at a better value than those buying on exchanges). Then it will buy more bitcoin to create its own strategic reserve.

As of June 18, Prusak told Wired he “can’t disclose” when the company will start buying nor through what exchange, but Coinbase Prime currently serves as the company’s “primary market.” (Its CEO, Brian Armstrong, has reportedly met with President Trump to help shape US crypto policy.)

When Hut8 announced its joining with the Trump brothers to create American Bitcoin, others in the crypto mining industry were “caught off guard,” says Foxley. While meme coins like Trump Coin constitute flashy, headline-generating cash grabs, bitcoin mining is what Foxley deems the “backwater of crypto”—unsexy, and underreported on, save articles lambasting its extensive energy use.

But, with the Trump administration pushing an “energy first approach for the US,” Foxley adds, it makes sense. The president met with some of the US’s biggest miners while campaigning at Mar-a-Lago in June 2024, where they discussed how the US should be “number one” in bitcoin mining, an agenda Trump echoed the following month at the Bitcoin Conference in Nashville.

The crypto industry poured $135 million into 2024 elections, and it maintained political influence by lobbying Congress and gaining the president’s ear. President Trump has made sure to personally benefit from the 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 were bad news for the crypto mining industry in the US, they have so far not come into play. On May 12, American Bitcoin announced its plan to go public through a merger with the NASDAQ-traded Gryphon Digital Mining, which per its SEC filing “operates approximately 5,880 bitcoin mining computers” at a third-party’s mining center in Pennsylvania. The computers come from Chinese company Bitmain.

After American Bitcoin accumulates ample bitcoin through mining and buying, the company’s ultimate goal, per American Bitcoin’s SEC filing, is to “lead the ecosystem,” which could include supporting bitcoin developments and encouraging its adoption.

Like everything done under the Trump family name, American Bitcoin has “the goal to be the biggest,” Eric said in a May interview at blockchain conference Consensus. The company’s planned merger with Gryphon, per the latter’s SEC filing, will create a public entity “focused on building the world’s largest, most efficient pure-play Bitcoin miner.” After the merger, the company’s five directors will be Ho, Prusak (who’s also founder and partner at Defense Angels, a venture firm that per its website “invests in the future of national security”), and three non-employees—FabFitFun cofounder Michael Broukhim, Tinder cofounder Justin Mateen, and Genoot.