Speaking to a packed auditorium at Consensus 2025, Eric Trump said the quiet part out loud: “Everybody in the world is trying to hoard Bitcoin right now. Everybody. I hear it from sovereign wealth funds. I hear it from the wealthiest families. I hear it from the biggest companies. I mean the adoption of it is incredible. ”
The son of US President Donald Trump used the stage to explain why his newly formed mining venture, American Bitcoin, is being rushed onto public markets via a reverse-merger with Gryphon Digital Mining. Trump, who serves as the company’s chief strategy officer, called Bitcoin “digital gold” and a superior store of value compared with the illiquid trophy properties that built the family fortune.
Bitcoin Is A ‘Race To The Top’
I really believe in digital gold, which is Bitcoin,” he told the audience. Trump contrasted the portability of Bitcoin with the illiquidity of trophy real estate that built the family fortune. “I sold a hotel a couple of years ago. It took me a year and a half to literally transact that hotel because title reports, escrows, lenders and managers all had to line up,” he told the crowd. “Then all of a sudden you’ve got this digital asset you don’t need to watch, you don’t need to manage. It’s global, it’s instantaneous. I can have a glass of wine with my wife on Saturday night and be transferring value at the same time. That’s modern-day finance.”
Trump also explained the FOMO he’s currently experiencing: “And so every single day, guys, I’m telling you, people who were kind of staunchly against it, people who didn’t understand it, people who were closed-minded, people who are kind of rhinos to traditional finance are coming around in a massive way. And I think the kind of spike in Bitcoin is going to be significant and therefore it really is kind of a race to the top right now. There’s a lot of people who are running very very hard at this mission.”
The speed motif also dominated Trump’s merger. “The speed at which the reverse merger happened—and the speed at which we’re going to get to market—is going to be pretty unparalleled for any public company,” he said, describing a round-the-clock internal chat with Hut 8 CEO Asher Genoot and Gryphon executives that “literally goes back and forth all day, every day, Saturday, Sunday.” Minutes later he distilled the branding rationale: “American Bitcoin, to me, is everything… it has to have the word American and it has to have the word Bitcoin.”
Market data suggest investors are rewarding that urgency. When Hut 8 and Gryphon unveiled their stock-for-stock deal on May 12, Gryphon shares rocketed more than 200% in pre-market trade and Hut 8 gained 12%. The combined company will keep the American Bitcoin name, list on Nasdaq under the ticker ABTC and is scheduled to close in the third quarter, with Hut 8 retaining majority control.
Trump’s assertion that sovereign wealth funds are now active Bitcoin accumulators lands as large public companies escalate their own treasury strategies. Every day new Bitcoin treasury companies are announced. Also, sovereign wealth funds are loading up on Bitcoin. Just yesterday, Mubadala, the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund, disclosed owning 8,726,972 shares of BlackRock’s spot BTC ETF (IBIT) in a 13F filing, valued at $408.5 million.
For Trump, the macro landscape divides into two contests: an accumulation race, in which players such as Strategy bulk-buy coins, and a mining race, which American Bitcoin intends to win by sourcing some of the world’s cheapest electricity through Hut 8’s US infrastructure. “If I can mine an asset for literally a third the cost that it’s trading right now, and we can do that in America using the lowest-cost energy anywhere in the world, we’re on to something really good,” he said.
The political subtext was never far away. Trump credited “political weaponization” against the family for pushing him toward crypto allies and argued that a liquid, censorship-resistant asset is an antidote to the hurdles faced by hard assets. Yet he kept the tone promotional, not partisan. “I don’t think I’ve ever been more excited about a project.”
At press time, BTC traded at $103,889.
Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com
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