American Bitcoin Corp. plans to eventually go public, the CEO of majority owner Hut 8 said.
The new business was formed out of a majority acquisition of American Data Centers, a business set up by the elder sons of President Donald Trump, Eric and Donald Jr.
Hut 8 this week took an 80 percent interest in the new business, and transferred “substantially all” of its ASIC miners to the company. Hut 8 will serve as American Bitcoin’s exclusive infrastructure and operations partner through a series of long-term commercial agreements.
While shifting its ASICs to American Bitcoin, Hut 8 will continue to push into hosting as well as GPU-as-a-Service contracts. Hut 8 went public in 2018, and has seen its share price rise by 5 percent on the Trump news – although shares are still down 39 percent year-to-date.
“So you can see this in the long term as two sister publicly traded companies,” Asher Genoot, CEO of the Miami-based business, told Bloomberg TV.
“One that is energy, infrastructure, data centers and the other one that’s Bitcoin, AISCs, and reserves and together they form a vertically integrated company that has some of the best economics out there.”
In the same interview, Eric Trump claimed that there were no conflicts of interest issues given his father’s embrace of cryptocurrency.
“There are no conflicts because I don’t work with the White House,” he said. “I’ve been in private industry my entire life and we started World Liberty long before my father ever got elected to the White House.”
World Liberty Financial is a separate company that aims to allow people to access financial services using cryptocurrencies. It was founded last September.
President Trump is listed as the company’s chief crypto advocate, Barron Trump is its DeFi (decentralized finance) visionary, and Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. are both Web3 ambassadors.
“We must have had a hell of an intuition if we popped up a company year before he was ever even elected president, thinking that that could somehow enrich us,” Eric Trump said, despite having campaigned for his father the week the business was announced. The Trump son is also believed to have advised on White House appointments.
“I mean, you know, by that same standard, lower energy prices enriches us because we use gasoline in our lawnmowers at our golf courses,” he added.
American Bitcoin plans to keep the Bitcoin it has mined as a ‘strategic reserve.’ It is unclear how this relates to the national strategic reserve President Trump announced, which briefly inflated crypto prices.
Last month, Eric Trump also joined the Strategic Board of Advisors at Metaplanet, Japan’s largest corporate holder of Bitcoin and the world’s 10th largest corporate holder.
“I believe in Bitcoin. I absolutely love Bitcoin, and I’m very proud that my father stood on stage in Nashville and said that he’s going to be the Bitcoin president,” Eric Trump said in December. He was referencing President Trump’s statements in July last year – ahead of the creation of World Liberty.
As president, Trump has created a strategic crypto reserve, pardoned crypto-related individuals, and relaxed enforcement of the sector. As an individual, he launched his own memcoin that rocketed in value before crashing. Trump received fees on the coin transactions.
