The Trump family reshaped its business empire by embracing cryptocurrency. Now American Bitcoin is mining that digital gold.

Over the past few years, the U.S. has quietly become the leader in the creation of Bitcoin, and American Bitcoin—where Eric Trump is cofounder and chief strategy officer aims to ride this Bitcoin mining wave.

More recently, the crypto industry has also become intertwined with a Trump corporate brand best known for traditional real estate. In just over a year, the family has reportedly made at least $1 billion in pretax earnings from multiple crypto ventures that share a common playbook with American Bitcoin: attracting savvy partners and executing complicated transactions that position the family’s business organizations to scoop up profits.
But the company’s success is far from guaranteed.

Inside American Bitcoin: How Eric Trump added a $1.5 billion company to his family's crypto empire

Fortune_Crypto

When they first started construction, like what's going on out there outside the small rural town of Vega, Texas. Lies a 17,000 server Bitcoin mining operation. I have pictures. You want to see the pictures. This particular facility has ties to one of the country's most influential families. They'd probably love to be able to tell that story to people that don't live here, that Eric was coming. This is Trump country. Hey friends, Eric Trump. Welcome to American Bitcoin. This is something I believe in more than just about anything else in my life. Eric Trump has been a main player in his family's crypto ventures. I realized how fragile the financial institutions were in this country. I realized how punitive the financial institutions were in this country. And I fell in love with this new era of finance. As the Trump family's wealth surges during President Trump's second term. I wanted to understand why Eric Trump is mining Bitcoin and how vast the Trump crypta empire has become. The rules are only 21 million Bitcoin ever. That's it. Every 4 years, the amount of Bitcoin that gets released gets cut in half. Asher Annut is the chairman of American Bitcoin, Eric Trump's Bitcoin mining and holding company that went public in September 2025. So if you run the math, that's why in 2140, you'll get to 21 million Bitcoin, and then that's it, that's the amount of Bitcoin that's, that's out there. The cryptocurrency has exploded in value in the more than 15 years since its launch. In data centers like this, servers process payments between Bitcoin users. In exchange for lending their computing power, companies like American Bitcoin are rewarded with Bitcoin as currency. We mine about 8 to 10 Bitcoin a day. Monetarily we're talking about thousands of dollars or so forth and tens of thousands of dollars. And this facility, 5 football fields in length, is designed to cash in on Bitcoin's skyrocketing price. Have you been to this facility before? Yeah, actually my first time here. This is brand new for, for us. Yeah, and, uh, and we're building multiple different facilities. And we have mining all over the place and uh we're growing and growing and growing. Eric Trump and Gnut first met in Southern Florida through mutual friends, and I was telling a bit more of what we were doing and building at Hare, and we really jammed over actually building real physical infrastructure. And I showed them photos of this facility of other facilities that we have, and I was like, this is what our intentions are. They said, Listen, we're already doing the data center concept, and you love Bitcoin. We love Bitcoin. We believe in Bitcoin. Why don't we use Hut 8's infrastructure? Hut 8 is Gnut's other company, which operates data centers, power plants, and had a long-standing Bitcoin mining business. When Gnut and Trump decided to go into business together in March of 2025, Hut 8 cleaved off a portion of its Bitcoin mining arm to set up a new entity with Eric Trump. They called it American Bitcoin, though its holdings are still smaller than HUD 8's. American Bitcoin has amassed one of the biggest hordes of Bitcoin on a public company's balance sheet, mainly through selling its stock to buy crypto. And as of early January, the new company had about $500 million worth of Bitcoin on its balance sheet, enabling it to vault into the top 20 of the largest Bitcoin digital asset treasuries, a type of crypto-final play in which companies raise money by issuing debt and equity and then use that cash to buy crypto for their balance sheets. The business relies on the assumption that investors will buy the treasury company's stock to profit from the digital assets without owning them directly. The financial play became popular last year, but investor enthusiasm for these particular types of companies has waned. While some in crypto still believe there's a place for digital asset treasuries that hold Bitcoin, there's also a growing portion of the industry who believe that the model, which was once profitable, isn't sustainable over the long-term. HU 8 was around a market cap of $1.2 billion. Now the combined market cap of both companies is around 8 or $9 as of like market closed on Friday. Is that just the Trump effect? No, I mean, HU8 owns about a billion dollars of Bitcoin on the balance sheet, and we own a gigawatt of assets that we operate today. And then I think American Bitcoin. If we think about a company that was started April 1st of this year, in the first quarter we released, we did over $60 million of revenue at a 56% margin. I mean, that's better than some companies that have been around for 10+ years. Hut 8 still operates this data center, owns the land, and employs the technicians, but American Bitcoin owns the tens of thousands of servers that generate the crypto. We're the actual data center technicians. We do some more days. It should start blinking here any second now. Eric Trump first got interested in crypto around 2021, following the end of his father's first term in office. It was around then, when Donald Trump was facing mounting legal and financial hurdles, that Eric says major banks started closing his family's accounts. I happened to become the most debunked human being. In the history of de-bank human beings, de-banking is a term used to describe when banks deny customers access to financial services. I have unbelievable assets, have great cash flow, never had a default, never have a breach of any covenant, but because my father was wearing a hat that said Make America great again. They want to pull our accounts. Capital One pulled our accounts. JPMorgan pulled our accounts. Bank of America pulled our accounts. All three banks have denied that they closed customer accounts because of political stances and would not comment on Eric Trump's specific allegations. In general, banks say they weigh a variety of factors when closing accounts, including financial, regulatory, and legal risks. We don't debank people because of a political or religious affiliations. Losing their accounts at major banks prompted the Trumps to expand beyond real estate to. Currencies crypto is is worldwide. Crypto is 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Go to JPMorgan. Go try and get a loan from them. You're gonna have to go through this and you're gonna have to go through that, and crypto doesn't have any of that. The crypto gives you transparency. It gives you efficiency. In 2024, Eric announced the launch of his first crypto business, World Liberty Financial. We certainly went into crypto in a very, very big way. It was certainly in reaction to everything that those big banks had done to us. And despite the president's previous criticisms, Bitcoin. It just seems like a scam. Donald Trump signaled a full pivot to crypto during his 2024 bid for a second presidential term, and as crypto executives donated millions to his campaign. I'm laying out my plan to ensure that the United States will be the crypto capital of the planet and the Bitcoin superpower of the world. American Bitcoin is just one prong in the Trump family's growing crypto empire. The family has historically made its money from real estate, but according to Fortune's own Analysis. Over the past year and a half, the Trumps have amassed more than $3 billion on paper through a complex array of coins and companies. There's American Bitcoin, the company in Vega. Eric is a co-founder and chief strategy officer. Donald Trump Jr. Trump's eldest son, is an investor. World Liberty Financial, one of the Trump's most lucrative ventures on paper. The project has both its own cryptocurrency and stablecoin, which is like a digital dollar. President Trump and his three sons were listed as co-founders. Trump. Special envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff and his sons were also co-founders. Earlier this year, World Liberty Financial applied for a federal banking license. Meme coins. President Trump and the First Lady have both promoted their own meme coins. Think cryptocurrencies whose value is often tied to the popularity of a cultural joke or notable person. Trump Media and Technology, the holding company for Truth Social and other projects, which is run by Trump advisor Devin Nunes. It's buying Bitcoin, issuing crypto ETFs. And launching its own cryptocurrency, and the Fifth is the Trump Organization itself. We have a lot of crypto on our, our balance sheet. We believe in cryptocurrency do you have on your balance sheet? We're a private company, so I'm not gonna, I'm, I'm not gonna mention. Would you give me a range? It's substantial. More than 100 million. Absolutely, more than 500 million. Probably. That growth in crypto riches has coincided with Trump's second term in office, where he's pushed a series of pro-crypto measures. Trump has signed bipartisan legislation that regulates stablecoins. I issued crypto-friendly executive orders, and he's pardoned several people convicted of crypto-related crimes. Much of this has raised questions for ethics experts like Richard Berfault, who is a professor of constitutional law and government ethics at Columbia Law School. You never know whether they're making the decision on the merits, what they view is the right thing for the country. Or because it's good for them and their family, or whether they even see a difference between the two. If you're big in crypto, are you liberalizing the rules on crypto because you think it's a really good industry? And people should be involved in it, or because you're doing it because it's good for you, or some hybrid of the two. Eric Trump has said that the president is merely implementing good policy for the US when he focuses on crypto regulation. Brifault says the ethical concern isn't that presidents benefit from good policy. They should. It's when that policy appears to favor targeted interests. It's against the sort of disproportion that if the president or anybody else is, you know, distinctively. Benefited by these decisions. Those within the crypto industry also recognize the potential for conflicts of interest. The value of the Trump brand includes Trump, right? Like there is no way around that. It's inescapable, right? It's like trying to talk about math without talking about numbers. Austin Campbell is a longtime finance executive who now runs a crypto consulting agency. He's also testified in Congress about crypto legislation. Eric, I understand, wants to be His own person be involved in these businesses, but the reality is the magnitude of attention and capital and sort of like gravitas that they can have in this space is directly related to Donald Trump and his being President of the United States. Even though there are many Trump fans in crypto, Campbell says some stakeholders worry that the politicization of the industry because of Trump family involvement could lead to credibility issues for crypto at large. I don't have any personal animus towards the Trump family here. I hope that the projects essentially deliver the value they say that the Bitcoin miner mines Bitcoin successfully and returns capital to people and that World Liberty has a stablecoin that doesn't break or collapse and is used or someday can be redeemed effectively if they don't. Eric thinks his family's involvement will help the industry. I think we're a big part. Of bringing crypto to the forefront, um, and hopefully we'll forever be remembered is that we're these people who came out hard assets who started believing in digital assets. He also insists there's a wall between his businesses and one of the most powerful leaders in the world. My business has nothing to do with my father. My father's running the United States of America. I'm a guy who's been in the capital markets my entire life. Uh, but no, my father has no involvement in the Trump Organization. He has no involvement in our business. In a statement, White House Press secretary Caroline Levitt echoed Eric, saying in part, neither the president nor his family have ever engaged or will ever engage in conflicts of interest. The Trumps aren't just contending with critics, they're also facing a volatile crypto. Currency market. American Bitcoin shares have plummeted by more than 70% since it first went public. Like other digital asset treasury companies, its shares got hammered when the price of Bitcoin tumbled in October. The Trump's other crypto assets have seen a downturn as well. Obviously the market's crashing now. We're talking about American Bitcoin. Does it shake your confidence at all? 0. In fact, I've got more conviction on cryptocurrency right now than ever before. Volatility is our friend. In crypto assets, but Eric remains optimistic that crypto is both good for his pocketbook and for America. That's what we are focused on each and every day. And to have machines like this in American heartland in West Texas using American energy, mining, I think one of the great assets of our time right here in the United States of America, to not lose that competitive advantage to every country around the world, and they are all sprinting.