The Inside Story of Eric Trump's American Bitcoin
They first met through mutual friends in late 2024: Genoot says he'd shown Eric photos of their 'beautiful, liquid cool data center' in Amarillo, Texas. Genoot says Eric was intrigued, and told Genoot stories of growing up with his dad on construction sites. The pizza night invite evolved, per Genoot, into almost daily meetings. The result? A company called American Bitcoin (ABTC), which launched on April 1. Hut 8, which reports having '1,020 megawatts of energy capacity under management across 15 sites in the US and Canada,' owns 80 percent of the company, while Trump, his brother Donald Jr., and legacy shareholders of their former data center business, American Data Centers, own the other 20 percent. Eric is a cofounder and chief strategy officer of American Bitcoin.
ABTC's CEO Matt Prusak (who is also the former CEO of Hut 8-affiliated bitcoin mining company Ionic Digital) says the Trump brothers brought 'two things to the table.' One was access to capital markets, through the Trumps' international business connections, while the second and arguably more compelling value add was, per Prusak, 'narrative'—the one that comes with the Trump family name.
Though Prusak says Eric is 'one phone call away from a wide variety of people with whom we can collaborate,' he and Genoot both insist Eric's position on the team doesn't give them a direct line to the president. Rather, they emphasize Eric's connections to large family offices and institutions. 'Institutions in Europe, Canada, now increasingly the Middle East, are all interested in the strategic alignment with American Bitcoin,' Prusak says.
In March, crypto exchange Binance announced a $2 billion investment from a fund backed by Abu Dhabi's government. Two months later, the Trump family's World Liberty Financial's stablecoin, USD1, was chosen for the transaction. On July 18, President Trump signed the GENIUS Act, which regulates stablecoins, into law. The House passed legislation laying out rules for the crypto market the day prior, which the president has requested land on his desk by August.
'We're able to tap into the American energy story,' Prusak says, noting Eric and Donald Jr.'s large and increasingly bitcoin-interested audiences. Sean Glennan, Hut 8's chief financial officer who previously worked at Citi, calls his current industry 'mimetic'— having a public facing executive from one of the world's most meme-able families doesn't hurt.
'American Bitcoin is uniquely positioned to scale faster and operate leaner than anyone in the space,' Eric said in a written statement to WIRED, citing Hut8's track record, infrastructure and energy expertise as 'unmatched'.
Will Foxley, cofounder of the bitcoin mining-focused Blockspace Media, puts it more bluntly. In the crowded mining industry, he says, 'there's only a few ways to stand out—one of those ways can be getting the president's son to help found the company.'
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.
'Going public is a game-changer: it unlocks capital and institutional access that will fuel our mission to build the largest, most investable platform for long-term Bitcoin accumulation,' Eric said.
Hut 8, however, is providing the infrastructure. ABTC pays Hut 8 for energy, operations, and shared services, which include 'accounting…HR support, payroll, benefits, IT support,' and legal services, per its SEC filing. While Hut 8 provides ABTC's mining facilities—currently in Niagara Falls, New York; Medicine Hat, Alberta; and Orla, Texas—it can use the company to raise and deploy 'massive capital,' says Prusak, that won't 'strain Hut 8's balance sheet.' With American Bitcoin taking care of mining, Hut 8 can focus on supporting growing technologies like AI and going after the business of 'hyperscalers,' says Foxley—companies like Meta and Google that need massive data centers for their energy-heavy operations.
Since Hut 8 is bankrolling the data centers, American Bitcoin just needs to buy its mining machines. It inherited an agreement from Hut 8 subsidiary Zephyr to buy around 17,280 Bitmain U3S21EXPH miners for a maximum of $320 million. As of May 31, American Bitcoin reported owning more than 60,000 bitcoin miners, made up mostly of Bitmain Antminer S21+ series miners (Glennan calls the miners 'Cadillac…not the Ferrari') and China-based MicroBt M5X and M6X series machines.
While the US boasts between 30 and 40 percent of the world's bitcoin mining, 90 percent of mining hardware comes from China. 'Bitcoin is becoming more and more central to the US financial ecosystem,' says Sanjay Gupta, chief strategy officer at Auradine, a US-based rival to Chinese bitcoin mining suppliers. As President Trump works to further cement bitcoin's role in that ecosystem, experts caution that security risks could arise from connecting Chinese hardware to critical US power infrastructure. Bitmain, for instance, is a privately listed company with links to the AI company Sophgo, which the US government blacklisted for security reasons.(Bitmain, which shares a co-founder with Sophgo, has not been added to the Entity List.)
Bitcoin mining businesses must navigate deteriorating economics: They rely on a volatile asset, and rewards for miners halve roughly every four years, as more than 19 million of the total 21 million bitcoin have been mined.
Glennan says maintaining minimal debt and hedging through bitcoin's derivative market will help American Bitcoin 'survive the ups and downs.' ABTC also aims to increase its computational power to mine more profitably. That could mean replacing older equipment with newer, more efficient models and acquiring other bitcoin mining companies.
This takes capital, which the company hopes the Trumps' name will attract. As much as Hut 8 and American Bitcoin representatives claim separation between their business and the Trumps' political connections, the company couldn't help but flaunt these ties during the May 2025 Bitcoin conference in Las Vegas. There, American Bitcoin threw an event that the Winklevoss twins, who each donated $1 million to Trump pre-election, and chairman of Cantor Fitzgerald Brandon Lutnick, son of Trump's secretary of commerce Howard Lutnick, attended.
On a stage that had hosted Vice President J.D. Vance hours earlier, during a panel with Prusak, Ho, and his brother, Donald Jr. told the conservative-leaning crowd, 'My father made a lot of promises to the…bitcoin community…[Eric and I] show our true level of commitment when you look at all the things we're doing in this space.' He named American Bitcoin first.
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