US will be ‘crypto capital of the planet’ – Trump

US Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has promised to unveil a plan that will make America the world cryptocurrency capital.

In a post on X on Thursday, the former US president shared a video of himself with the voiceover: “This afternoon, I’m laying out my plan to ensure that the United States will be the crypto capital of the planet.”

“They want to choke you. They want to choke you out of business,” Trump says in the video, without specifying who “they” are. “We’re not going to let that happen,” he concluded.

The post included a link to World Liberty Financial, a decentralized finance project that his sons, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, have been promoting recently. Trump Jr. has said previously that the platform would rival the traditional banking system. The project’s Telegram channel has been quickly gaining subscribers, with more than 53,000 followers as of Thursday.

Trump is the first major presidential candidate to accept donations in cryptocurrency. He was the featured speaker at a Bitcoin conference last month, where donors were asked to pay $844,600 for a seat at a round table with him.

Trump has said that crypto is essential to his vision of America in the future. Last month, he pledged to ensure that the US government never sells off its Bitcoin holdings and creates a Bitcoin “strategic reserve,” if he returns to the White House.

On Tuesday, Trump launched a fourth collection of nonfungible tokens (NFTs), which feature images ranging from the former president in a superhero costume to figurative Bitcoins. The NFTs sell for $99 each.

According to CNBC, the crypto platform and the NFTs are a private Trump family enterprise in the digital currency space, and are not officially connected to Trump’s presidential campaign.

Trump, who in 2019 wrote on social media that Bitcoin’s value is “based on thin air” and in 2021 warned that cryptocurrencies were a “disaster waiting to happen,” made a U-turn in his rhetoric early in the current election campaign.

The Republican candidate’s embrace of crypto has led to endorsements from some well-known venture capitalists and executives in the sector, such as Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz.