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Welcome back. I'm Romain Bostik.
You are watching Bloomberg Markets, but right now I'm alongside the host of Bloomberg Crypto, Tim Stenovik, for a discussion, a very special discussion about American Bitcoin, which went public earlier this month and is one of the many crypto players that have entered the public markets this year. It is also part of a surge in digital asset treasuries, reaching a market cap of almost seven billion dollars. But uniquely, its chief strategy officer is a son of the President
of the United States. Please to say that Eric Trump joins us right now alongside American Bitcoin CEO Mico. Welcome to both of you.
Thank you guys very much. It's good for having us guys.
No shortage of crypto treasury firms out there, no shortage of bitcoin mining firms out there, Mike. What makes American Bitcoin different from everything else out there?
Well, we're the best of all worlds apart from Meeric Trump, apart from America.
That's the best part. But we're the best of all worlds.
We're not just a bitcoin mining company, We're not just a treasury We're a bitcoin accumulator, and what that means is we use bitcoin mining as just one layer of the strategy. Bitcoin mining is effectively, as of recent allows us to accumulate bitcoin at a fifty percent discount to Spot price. As a publicly listed, actively managed accumulator, we're very different than just buying an ETF. When you buy an ETF, when you buy spot bitcoin, your ownership ratio
to bitcoin will only ever be one blessed feast. When you buy an actively managed accumulation company.
We use all of our tools, our know how, our.
Ability to monetize volatility. As a public stock, we have a very volatile profile given that we track underlying bitcoin and our volatility is higher than bitcoin.
So being able to.
Issue low cost converts that convert at a premium to wear our share price today to buy moreco Bitcoin is an asset class that has been increasing double digits for the last decade is very highly a creative to our shareholders and increases the metric that is most important, and that is our Bitcoin ownership per share. As an actively managed company, it's using all these tools to increase bitcoin ownership.
Sure they're come on in here, because finally show that you own about a seven and a half percent stake of the company. What's your commitment to holding on to this equity?
Long?
And I've locked myself out for a very long period of time. How long, well over a year, and I think it's going to be beyond that. But we've locked ourselves out, and in fact, the whole board has, and you know, the company has. I'm damn committed to this company. And I'm committed to this company because they did everything they could to try and cancel us. They did everything they could I'm talking about traditional finance to put us
out of business. I was the guy that was getting hundreds of letters from the big banks, Capital One, JP Morgan, you know, I mean all of them, Bank America. I saw one hand was just on trying to take away accounts for for golf courses, for hotels, for residential buildings, for doing absolutely nothing wrong. And it drove me into crypto because I realized that there was nothing that couldn't be done in crypto better, faster, cheaper, more transparently. And
it's an amazing industry. You know you've covered well, I've heard you talk about this before. The idea that you were de banked and your family was de banked in recent years. I just want to make sure I understand this. Are you saying that the Trump organization was not able to
do business with any large financial institution. At one point, I got dozens of letters and I'm talking about the biggest banks anywhere in the world again, Bank of America, right, you know, Capital One, JP Morgan Where for no reason other than the fact that my father wore a red hat that said make America great again, you know, and maybe sat on a different end of a political aisle than kind of the woke ideology of the time. They were sending me letters for condominian buildings. Some of the's
assets we didn't even necessarily own. We managed, right, residential component in one of our buildings, right, they would send a letter to the board saying, congratulations, we will no longer bank you. It's like, that's not our banking the bank account of a residential building. I saw the weaponization of financial industry, and then I started realizing how broken, how slow it was. My wife and I owned my father, right, we had two point one percent residential mortgage rates.
I got via schmuck not to go.
Out and you know, get financing We bought a home with a bank that I had banked with for twenty
five years. It took me one hundred and twenty days to go through and know your customer right, and you're seeing there saying why why is it every week as a hospitality company, Right, I'm trying to get a wire out or I'm waiting to receive a wire through the Swift system, where if I don't get it out by five o'clock and by way, even if you get out five o'clock, zero chance it's making Therefore, before Monday, you know, when you can transfer five hundred million dollars with bitcoin
from an iPhone to an iPhone having a wallet address you know at you know, eleven o'clock on a Sunday night, you know, for no fees, for practically no fees, and that scares the big financial institutions and guys. I've always been a hard asset person. I've always been a builder of big buildings. That's what my families know. One for us and had it not been for the weaponization of the big banks, I would have never found the crypto industry. It's one of the greatest things and I am the
biggest proponent of Bitcoin. I think it's the greatest asset of our time. You have an asset that's, you know, appreciating seventy percent a year over year for the last ten year period of time. It's global, it's instantly liquid, it's the greatest hedge against real estate, and it's It's been a lot of fun, guests.
And I understand your personal experience at helping fuel this, But beyond your personal experience, what is the long term advantage And I'm talking for the broader audience out there, the broader community of folks out there for transacting more in that space, not just necessarily with bitcoin, but using the blockchain tocnos.
Such a great question.
And the reason that's great question is we have the greatest economy in the world.
Buy far barn On.
We all know this, right, I mean, imagine it's just tig Zimbabwe, right all right, where they had ten thousand percent inflation.
Year over year.
You go, you work your butt off, right, and all of a sudden, your money's burned. I mean you literally get in you actually have Crypto is going to be
the greatest tool to create financial free them throughout the world. Now, all of a sudden, stead of having that money just disappear because you've got a cookie government, or you've got bad financial policy, or because one hundred other Now, all of a sudden, you can take that based on one thing that everybody has, which is, you know, a smart device now in their pocket or just about anybody, and
that gives you financial freedom. Now, all of a sudden, you can go buy bitcoin, and you can go buy an asset that'sppreciating, as I said before, between fifty and seventy percent a year, and you actually have something at tangible at the end of it. Take the other side of crypto, right, you know, take take stable coin.
You can invest in the US dollar. You're in Zimbabwe.
Instead of having your currency devalue by that ten thousand percent a year, you can go invest in the US dollar. We're going to onshore trillions and trillions of dollars in the United States of America because of it, and that gives people financial freedom, and that's a wonderfulingful thing as well for the United States of America.
He might jump on in here because I want to ask a little bit about the relationship that American bitcoin has with bitmin the bitcoin mining equipment provider Representative none of Iowa Republican calling for a federal review of Bitmain, essentially saying that the US could that this could present a national security risk here in the U. Is it a national security risk for you to use this equipment?
I don't believe.
So it's very proven that these ACIS chips are programmed just for one purpose, and it's for computations on the shot two five to six algorithm, and ben Main has been a leading manufacturer for US. It's really about the merits of the technology, the hardway that we use. We use the most efficient, the most cost effective to be able to produce bitcoin at the lowest costs and most efficient with the most uptime.
But I am curious just on that point though too, Mike. I mean, is there any risk and I mean this also dovetails with having you know Eric by your side, but is there any risk with regards to teriff and trade policies and being able to get our hands meaning the US being able to get their hands on things from there or vice versa. I mean, just the start of this week, I mean we came in with China putting some blocks potentially on Nvidia and some of our homegrown chip makers.
We're really just focused on the silicone that is the A six that we use for bitcoin mining. We pay tariffs on the silicone that we imported from that made It is still the most competitive and most efficients and when we measure this latest generation of hardware, it is very technologically advanced in terms of the efficiencies. We've moved from twenty eight naanimeter chips down to sixteen, downs to ten, down to five. Now the latest generation of A six
that we use our three nanometer chips. The technology for the manufacturers to produce at this efficiency is very competitive and very difficult.
Eric, I'm curious how you view energy sources here because Mother Jones reporting recently that HUT eight buys wind power from a facility in Texas. Your father has made clear his views on wind power, and he's attacked projects and he stopped projects on federal lands. Do you disagree with his view on wind power?
No, I totally agree with it.
In fact, the reason we're able to buy wind power for such low amounts as they built a wind farm in the middle of absolutely nowhere and they didn't have anybody to distribute.
That energy to.
They were distributed to make before they were selling it to the hot eight they were bitting get to the grid.
They were distributed into two.
Texas, they didn't really have anywhere to send the power, and it was massively subsidized. Here's the reality with win power. Wind power is a massively subsidized thing. Right, the governments could go over to Europe, go over to the UK where my father is right now, the amount of subsidy you're talking about eighty percent subsidy on wind farms, where the government's paying them, subsidizing the actual creation.
Of them, and they're also ruining landscape.
Now, America, we have the greatest energy anywhere in the world, and it's untapped. We have energy reserves that every country in the world, including China, would absolutely die to have. It's just we've had that policy where we've never actually been able to exploit that. And so I'm not a wind power guy. I think there's much better forms of energy. I'm beyond excited about the potential of actually leading the revolution in terms of nuclear Again, it's something that America
was winning. America was winning the nuclear power revolution, and then all of a sudden, one day we just gave up on it. And then you see what's happening again in China. You see what's happening in the Middle East. I mean even France for the longest time was winning that technological revolution, and I think under my father's leadership,
that's coming back. But you cannot have a strong GDP as a country if you don't have cheap, efficient energy, and we better as a country be damn committed to that task at hand.
So it's interesting.
In the last couple of years, you've accumulated quite a bit of crypto. Your family's net worth has increased substantially, and now the value of its assets that are tied to crypto kind of rivals what it has when it comes to real estate. At the Trump organization, you're still co EVP of the Trump organization. Are you spending more time on crypto than you are at the Trump administration or Trump organization?
Now, I spent a lot of time on crypto. I spent a lot of time in real estate. As you can imagine, I've got one anymore. I've got one of the greatest portfolios of the projects of the world. I've got the best hotels in the world. We have the best golf course in the world, some of the greatest commercial buildings in the city. You probably know many of them and all around the world, and we do it incredibly well, and that's become that's obviously an incredible business.
And the underlying value of our hard assets is unlike any real estate portfolio in the world, especially based on the fact that we practically have no debt and I've spent years just paying off debt, and our cash flow is tremendous, and that's incredible. Then on the opposite side, we obviously have crypto holdings, and they're the greatest counterpart. Right on one side, you have really very little liquidity. Very few people could come out and buy Trump Cower.
The asset is too valuable. There's very few families in the world or companies in the world who could buy, you know, for it to buy a building like that, So that means, hey, guess what, it goes up in an inflationary period like we had under Biden. It's actually very good for real estate. You know, just guess what, every ibeam, every two by four becomes exponentially more expensive.
But if I tried to go sell one of those properties, you could take me six months, It could take me a year, It could take me eighteen months and.
You could have limited buyers. Right. You have the opposite side of the equation.
Where you have something like bitcoin, where if I wanted to sell a billion dollars at bitcoin, you know, I could walk out of the studio about three seconds after this interview, I could hit you know, two buttons on a phone and you could instantly liquidate it into any currency that you wanted. Right, and so they are unbelievable kind of counterparts to one another. Right once immediately liquid one is twenty four hours a day, seven days a week.
One you can you know, transact, it becomes utilitarian. You can do so anywhere in the world any demographic. You have another one that's a hard asset that's fixed to a certain geography, fixed to a certain city. Guess what if there's a flight to Florida from New York. You know, an asset in New York, you know, might suffer a little bit more, but maybe an asset in Florida picks up that weight.
Right.
It's why I always go out and I say, I actually think crypto is the greatest instrument for people in the real estate industry because it's the perfect edge, and it's why you see people like Grank Cardon. He's doing these walk up buildings, He's doing kind of rental projects all over Florida. He's actually anchoring those projects layering crypto in order to effectively buy down your effective yield on
your mortgages. And I think a lot of people in the real estate space are going to get into crypto for this reason. It's an unbelievable instrument and it's the perfect complement.
This gets to the use case though, that I think we used to talk about in years past when it came to the advent of a bitcoin and the other crypto tokens out there. I am curious, Mike, there are a lot of entrants in this space now. And Eric was talking a little bit earlier about traditional finance. Traditional
finance has finally taken notice of this as well. So how do you structure this business to not only grow yourself, but more importantly defend off what's probably going to be maybe your Brian one Hands or your Jamie Diamonds or other folks who finally decide they want a piece of this as well.
We see that as all extremely positive when you look at the proliferation and the rise of even ethereum or Solana. That just means that it broadens the on ramps of more dollars moving on chain. On chain benefits every crypto, and Bitcoin is not immune to that. Bitcoin will benefit from that as well. Bitcoin is the reserve asset class, whereas some of these other alternative coins are more on
ramps and or throughput settlement layers. But when you look at when you look at bitcoin adoption, when you look at crypto adoption, I'll start there first, crypto adoption, there's about sixty million active wallets out there with a non zero balance. I think it took Bank of America almost one hundred years to develop something similar million wall. It's sixty million bank accounts, and it took a lot of mergers and acquisitions and a lot of governance and permitting.
When you look at Blackrocks Gold ETF, it's about twenty they're coming up on their twenty year anniversary, and it's only about thirty billion dollars. Now, contrast that to Blackrocks IBIT. They're Bitcoin ETF. That's almost ninety billion dollars and it's been only a couple of years. And when you look at total ETFs institutional ownership of bitcoin, that represents more than six percent. Everyone wants bitcoin. Bitcoin's proliferation adoption is only the beginning.
All right, you have to leave it there. Really appreciate both of you coming.
HEK you guys very much.
Michae the CEO of American Bitcoin and of course he needs no introduction. Eric Trump as well, and our thanks to Tim Stenovich will be back in a moment. This is Bloomberg