After a stablecoin, digital token, a couple of memecoins, and a bitcoin mining platform, the Trump family is now looking to expand their crypto empire with a debit card.
The family’s crypto venture World Liberty Financial is launching a debit card as early as this year. Trump’s sons, Donald Jr., Eric, and Barron, are all listed as active co-founders of the venture, while the President was “co-founder emeritus” until he took office.
“We are definitely rolling out a debit card that’ll bridge … crypto assets with everyday spending … we’ll be rolling out a pilot program here in the next quarter, and that debit card will either be live (in) Q4 or Q1 26,” CEO Zach Witkoff said at a crypto conference in Singapore on Wednesday, with co-founder Donald Trump Jr. by his side. Zach’s father is Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, Russia negotiator, and all-around fixer.
Crypto debit cards are not a new concept. The world’s two largest payment networks, Visa and Mastercard, both offer crypto-linked cards in partnership with various crypto trading platforms. They have interesting tax implications, though: every single transaction you make is subject to taxes (no matter how small), but you can also end up with tax write-offs. If the fair market value of your cryptocurrency is lower than it was at the time you purchased it, users can claim a capital loss to reduce taxes for the year. That’s not a far-off reality, considering how volatile cryptocurrency tends to be.
World Liberty Financial has been around for a whole year now to advance its stated goal of “decentralizing finance,” aka getting intermediaries like banks out of the way so financial transactions can be conducted with less oversight.
Crypto is usually under more regulatory scrutiny, but that was then, and this is now. Ever since Trump took office, he has made it a mission to legitimize cryptocurrency’s place in the American financial system.
Under Trump, the once-strict Securities and Exchange Commission is now unveiling crypto regulation and projects to make the United States “the crypto capital of the world.” Some enforcement actions against crypto companies like Coinbase, Crypto.com, and Kraken were dropped. And, in response, the industry is generally back to operating as if the good times will never end. Trump also spearheaded legislation that legitimized the role of stablecoins and signed it into law in July, just a couple of months after his family’s crypto venture debuted its own stablecoin USD1.
“My father was the first guy to run as sort of a pro-crypto president,” Donald Trump Jr. said at the conference on Wednesday.
Even though Trump was once a crypto-skeptic himself, his newfound belief —and the regulatory power to complement it— only made his family richer than ever.