Is Trump unveiling a crypto wallet? His associates say yes. His sons say no.
A flashy new website drew a surge of attention Tuesday afternoon, purporting to announce the latest cryptocurrency venture backed by President Donald Trump.
The developers of Trump's meme coin, the website said, were working with a company called Magic Eden to launch "the Official $TRUMP Wallet", a trading app for customers to buy and sell digital currencies.
But the announcement soon triggered a backlash from an unexpected source: Trump's sons.
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Donald Trump Jr.
wrote on the social platform X that the Trump family business had no connection to the new crypto product. His brother Eric Trump said he knew "nothing about" it. And in a rare social media post, Barron Trump, the youngest Trump son, said that "our family has zero involvement."
The sons' reaction to the announcement appeared to expose a rift in the president's ever-expanding network of crypto ventures, a complex web of businesses run by various family members and associates who now appear to be competing against one another.
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On one side is Bill Zanker, a longtime Trump business partner and the architect of the president's meme coin, a type of cryptocurrency usually based on an online joke, which Trump began promoting shortly before his inauguration in January. On the other are Trump's sons, who helped found World Liberty Financial, a separate crypto business that markets its own digital currency, which has generated $550 million in sales.
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In a series of text messages to The New York Times, Eric Trump escalated the dispute Tuesday, saying the Trump family would legally challenge the creation of the "Official $TRUMP Wallet" -- even though it was being promoted on social media by an account linked to Zanker.
"There is no deal for this product," Eric Trump wrote. "There is no agreement for this product. It has not been approved."
Zanker did not respond to a request for comment. But the meme coin's official X account confirmed the authenticity of the wallet announcement in a post late Tuesday. Similar language appeared on Magic Eden's official X account.
What appeared to have set off the Trump sons were their own plans to offer a similar product to what Zanker and Magic Eden unveiled. In his post, Donald Trump Jr. wrote that World Liberty Financial would be "launching our official wallet soon."
The back-and-forth illustrated the confusing array of Trump crypto products now on the market.
In the last four months, the Trump family and its partners have rushed to profit from the crypto industry's growth, with the president in the
White House
leading a rollback in crypto regulatory oversight. His embrace of the industry has fuelled predictions that crypto is poised to become a major part of the U.S. banking system and mainstream financial markets.
Since last fall, the Trump family and its associates have begun four different crypto ventures, under the brand names American Bitcoin, $TRUMP, World Liberty Financial and Trump Media & Technology Group.
A meme coin is a type of cryptocurrency with little value beyond speculation. Trump started marketing the $TRUMP meme coin as a collectible, the digital equivalent of a baseball card.
Almost immediately, it became an opportunity for speculators to try to make a quick profit by buying the coin as it first hit the market, worth less than $1, and then selling once it surged to nearly $75 per coin.
The Trump family and Zanker made money on every transaction, with small fees charged for each trade. They also control 80% of the total supply of $TRUMP coins, which could be worth billions of dollars, at least on paper. So far, none of those holdings have been sold. If even a small chunk hit the market, the price would crash.
Over the past few months, Zanker has explored various ways to drive up the price of $TRUMP.
In April, the meme coin's developers organized a monthlong contest for investors, announcing that the top 220 traders would be invited to dinner with Trump at the president's Virginia golf club. The event, on May 22, attracted crypto traders from around the world, some of whom attended with the explicit aim of influencing U.S. crypto policy. The dinner was followed by a White House tour for the top 25 buyers of the $TRUMP coin.
The chaos over the $TRUMP trading app started Tuesday, when Molly White, a prominent crypto researcher, unearthed a link to the website advertising the new product line.
The marketing materials featured a waitlist for customers to sign up for access to the app, promising the possibility of "$1 MILLION in $TRUMP REWARDS!" The site included an artist's rendering of the product, which resembled popular trading apps like Robinhood.
Soon Magic Eden, in a post from its official X account, confirmed the website's authenticity. Jack Lu, a founder of Magic Eden, said the app would allow customers to trade popular digital currencies like bitcoin and dogecoin.
The project showed his firm's "commitment to onboarding mainstream audience deeper into crypto," Lu wrote.
In late afternoon, the Trump meme coin's official X account also confirmed the announcement. "With Billions of Trump fans around the world, the $TRUMP mission has always been to make it super easy for Trump supporters to get into crypto and join the $TRUMP community," the post said.
By then, however, the Trump sons had each issued statements on social media distancing themselves from the plan. On Tuesday evening, Eric Trump went even further, effectively threatening the backers of the $TRUMP wallet effort.
"I would be extremely careful using our name in a project that has not been approved and is unknown to anyone in our organization," he wrote.
Around that time, an account on X called @TrumpWalletApp was suspended, leaving it unclear what might happen to the new venture.
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