As Donald Trump and his family stretch into nearly every corner of the cryptocurrency sector, a dispute has broken out over which corporate entities are permitted to wield the Trump brand to promote the crypto products they launch.
On Tuesday, the X account for the US president’s Trump memecoin—which is administered by Fight Fight Fight LLC, formed by longtime Trump ally Bill Zanker—announced plans to launch a crypto wallet and trading platform in partnership with NFT marketplace Magic Eden. The corresponding website, first identified by independent crypto researcher Molly White, pitches the product as “the official $TRUMP wallet by President Trump.”
However, in X posts of their own, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. later repudiated the announcement, which they claimed had not been greenlit by the family. Eric Trump implied that the Trump Organization, the holding company for many of the family’s business ventures and intellectual property, could take action against Magic Eden.
“This project is not authorized” by the Trump Organization, wrote Eric on X. “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 added, tagging the Magic Eden handle.
In a separate post, Donald Trump Jr. revealed that a separate crypto wallet is under development at World Liberty Financial, a crypto company that he and Eric helped to launch in September. “Stay tuned—World Liberty Financial, which we have been working tirelessly on, will be launching our official wallet soon,” he wrote.
World Liberty Financial and Fight Fight Fight did not respond immediately to requests for comment. The White House and Magic Eden declined to comment. Eric Trump did not respond directly to questions from WIRED, saying only, “I know nothing about this project nor is there any contractual relationship.”
To some crypto watchers, the initial wallet announcement made by Fight Fight Fight had the ring of truth about it, not least because it was coming from the organization behind the Trump memecoin. In the past year, despite a chorus of complaints relating to alleged abuses of office and conflicts of interest, the Trump family has forged into almost every segment of the crypto market, from stablecoins to memecoins, crypto investment products, and bitcoin mining. To launch a crypto wallet appeared to some as a plausible next step: “It makes perfect sense for anyone who has their eye on where the puck is going,” says Brad Harrison, head of crypto platform Venus Labs.
The dispute over the wallets soon to be launched by World Liberty Financial and Fight Fight Fight, though, marks the second time in as many weeks that Trump-affiliated entities have thrown themselves into competition with one another as expansion on multiple fronts complicates the family’s crypto empire.
On May 27, Trump Media and Technology Group, a publicly traded company in which the Trump family owns a majority stake, announced it had raised $2.5 billion to accumulate a “bitcoin treasury.” The deal puts the conglomerate in competition with a growing stable of bitcoin-accumulation stocks, which act as a substitute of sorts for investing in bitcoin—among them American Bitcoin, the crypto mining firm launched recently by Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., which is pursuing a similar strategy.
The wallet conflict also underlines the inscrutability of the relationships and interplay between the Trump Organization, Trump Media and Technology Group, World Liberty Financial, American Bitcoin, Fight Fight Fight, and the Trump family.
The full ownership structure of Fight Fight Fight is obfuscated by layers of corporate filings unavailable to the public. The X posts by Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. on Tuesday appear to allege that, as the leaders of the Trump Organization, they reserve the right to limit the company’s use of their family name to the Trump memecoin.
Meanwhile, though World Liberty Financial has sought to underline its independence from Donald Trump’s political affairs—“We’re a private company having private-sector conversations,” wrote World Liberty Financial cofounder Zak Folkman in a recent statement—the wallet dispute has underscored its entanglement with the president’s family brand. In his X post on Tuesday, Donald Trump Jr. appeared to present the crypto wallet soon to be issued by World Liberty Financial as the real Trump family wallet, as set against what he alleges is the unauthorized Trump-branded wallet backed by Magic Eden.
In cryptoland, confusion reigns: “Not really sure what’s real and what’s not,” says Tom, the pseudonymous leader of peer-to-peer crypto exchange Raydium.
In the wider crypto industry, the ease with which anybody can put any name to an undifferentiated crypto product has long created problems, claims Cory Klippsten, CEO at bitcoin services company Swan Bitcoin.
“In crypto, it’s far too easy to spin up scams masquerading as innovation,” alleges Klippsten, “especially when you can hijack a brand and pump a token before anyone asks who’s behind it.”
