Donald Trump is launching a cryptocurrency platform, he announced on Thursday in a post on Truth Social. Trump’s post included a few more details, but he and his children have suggested that it will target unbanked and underserved communities.
“For too long, the average American has been squeezed by big banks and financial elites,” says the post. “It’s time for us to take a stand: together. #BeDefiant”. The name of the platform, The DeFiant Ones, is a play on words with “decentralized finance.”
Trump’s post on Truth Social links to a Telegram channel for the yet-to-be-launched platform, which has posts dating back to August 15th, calling it the “official Telegram channel for the Trump DeFi project.”
What is this Donald Trump crypto project about?
There are no details about what the project entails or whether it is an autonomous decentralized organization, a currency, an exchange market, a cryptocurrency blog or publication, or something completely different.
In July, a company called AMG Software Solutions filed trademark applications for the terms “Be DeFiant,” “World Liberty,” and “World Liberty Financial,” as reported earlier this month by the cryptocurrency publication The Block.
In recent interviews, Trump’s sons, Donald Jr. and Eric, have suggested that the project could be aimed at disadvantaged communities. “Essentially, more than half of this country right now cannot be banked,” said Eric Trump to the New York Post.
“That means they will be rejected for most loans from most institutions. But with this technology, they could have the ability to be approved or denied almost instantly by a lender based on mathematics, not politics. The money could be in their account in minutes, not months,” he explained.
One of Trump’s previous ostentatiously altruistic projects, Trump University, was accused of defrauding students and reached a settlement for 25 million dollars.
The idea that cryptocurrencies can help the unbanked to have better access to financial services is widely spread in the industry, but some reports suggest otherwise.
The DeFiant Ones is not Trump’s first foray into cryptocurrency. He was the keynote speaker at this year’s Bitcoin Conference in Nashville, Tennessee, during which he promised to fire Gary Gensler, the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, a perpetual enemy of the crypto crowd.
