Trump promotes family crypto project ‘The Defiant Ones’

Former President Donald Trump is publicly showing his support for his family’s crypto project, Defiant Ones.

Trump supported the decentralized finance project in an Aug. 22 post on Truth Social, saying, “For too long, the average American has been squeezed by big banks and the financial elite. It’s time for us to take a stand—together.”

It is worth noting that Trump met with the leaders of the largest financial companies in the US, promising tax cuts and deregulation in exchange for their support ahead of the 2024 presidential election. Among the names he met with this summer were JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, Citigroup CEO Jane Fraser and Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan.

This is the first time Trump has publicly supported the dormant cryptocurrency project from his personal account.

So far, his sons Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. have been promoting this mysterious project for the past few weeks.

In a previous interview with The New York Post, Eric described the project as “digital real estate” and emphasized its potential to shake up the financial industry by providing equal and instant access to collateral.

It’s fair. It’s collateral that’s available to everyone and available to them instantly. I don’t know if people realize how big a shakeup this is for the banking and financial world.

Eric Trump talks about the Defiant Ones

Many of the Trump brothers’ posts imply that the project’s goal is to “build the future of finance,” but they provide no details about its functionality.

This has fans wondering whether this could be a decentralized autonomous organization, a new cryptocurrency, a trading market, or something else entirely.

To reduce speculation, Trump Jr. recently directed people to a Telegram channel called Defiant Ones, stating that this would be the official source of information about the mysterious project.

There are many rumors about our crypto project. Join our official Telegram channel to learn the real story and stay up to date with official announcements. Don’t trust speculation—get the news right here! https://t.co/wVPMEJTpKy

—Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) August 15, 2024

The channel currently has around 40,000 members, 10 of whom were recently gifted premium Telegram subscriptions.

The project appears to be the culmination of Trump’s newfound support for crypto. While he has referred to the industry as a “fraud” in the past, he has since reinvented himself as a pro-crypto stalwart, gaining support from the industry in the process.

In July, the former president chaired the Bitcoin 2024 conference in Nashville, Tennessee, and outlined a number of crypto-friendly proposals, including the establishment of a national Bitcoin (BTC) reserve if elected.

After The Defiant Ones was released, numerous reviewers at X.com immediately labeled it as yet another “scam”.

At least six of Trump’s companies have gone bankrupt. Trump University, founded in 2005 and now defunct, was shut down due to fraud. Trump has since resorted to selling sneakers, Bibles and non-fungible tokens, or NFTs.