“There’s a famous saying that sometimes the enemy of your enemy is actually your best friend,” Eric Trump told the crowd at Consensus in Toronto, Canada. “That was the Trumps with the crypto community. And I think the banks made the biggest mistake of their lives.”
The son of U.S. President Donald Trump and co-founder of bitcoin BTC$103,913.70 mining company American Bitcoin is also an adviser to World Liberty Financial (WLF), which recently launched a U.S. dollar-backed stablecoin, USD1, that has already reached $2 billion in market capitalization.
Co-founders of WLF joined Trump on stage on Friday as they announced that USD1 was now operable across multiple blockchains through Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP).
Trump painted a vivid picture of personal grievance turned into ideological conviction, claiming he was “canceled” by major financial institutions for his political views which then got him interested in crypto as a shield against financial gatekeeping.
“So many of the banks have been weaponized and I was case in point,” said the son of the U.S. president. “I was probably the most canceled person for doing absolutely nothing wrong, only because we had a political view, and a political view that might not have been popular with some of the big financial institutions and guys, they came after me like I was a dog.”
USD1, he said, is a patriotic financial tool for people in unstable or corrupt regimes.
“It gives so much freedom of financial choice, especially to markets and countries where people have never had any kind of financial freedom, had never had any kind of financial independence, might be in a country where it’s war torn, where it’s subject to corruption, it’s subject to ridiculous inflation,” he said. “Every single day they go to work and their money is being burned under their mattress, and all of a sudden, we give the world the ability to be on the US dollar backed one to one by US Treasuries.”
Earlier today, lawyers representing WLF pushed back against scrutiny from U.S. Senator Richard Blumenthal, the leading Democrat on a panel responsible for investigating corruption and mismanagement, who had asked about the ownership and investment structure for Trump-affiliated entities, including WLFI, in a letter last week.
