Eric Lipton
speaker
759 appearances
6 recordings
4 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard 5 Aug
Eric Lipton’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Well, I mean, cryptocurrency has been around for quite a while now, and it's largely been a way for people to make financial bets that it's going to rise in value. It hasn't had a great deal of use case. It's like, what is it inherently about? And there's a lot of people in the industry who say, well, we want to have a use case. We want it to be used for buying and selling things and for banking.
You could use it to take out a loan. You could take loan on your crypto. You could invest your crypto and earn yield like you'd put deposits in the bank. And you could do international transactions. And it has been held up by the lack of a regulatory structure to oversee it.
And so, you know, this is a moment and Trump embraced the crypto industry, unlike any other presidential candidate in American history, because it hasn't been around that long. And he said, you know, we are going to become the crypto capital of the world. And the industry pushed in, you know, tens of millions of dollars to help him get elected.
And on Monday night at his golf club in New Jersey, President Trump had a dinner that cost a million and a half dollars to get into that was sponsored by the crypto industry. The crypto industry is quite excited about President Trump.
And the question is whether or not he is going to spoil this moment of opportunity for the industry because his family is pursuing profits so aggressively that it's creating questions about a conflict of interest.
Yeah, it's effectively, it's sort of something similar to a Fort Knox. I mean, the United States has a place where it stores gold. It's like a reservoir of gold. The gold used to back up the dollar. It's just a place that the United States government holds gold.
The idea of a strategic reserve is that the United States would collect a certain number of cryptocurrency tokens that are popular in the marketplace and And just hold them because it's a store of value. And just like you might collect foreign currencies and hold them because you want to invest in other foreign currencies.
So Trump announced earlier this year that he was going to create a strategic reserve of certain types of cryptocurrency. And the reason that it became a conflict of interest was that among the cryptocurrencies he mentioned when he did a social media posting was one called Ether.
And it turns out, of course, that his son's company, which he financially benefits from personally, World Liberty, had purchased tens of millions of dollars worth of Ether before Trump included that in his social media posting.
And as soon as he said, well, we're going to put Ether into the strategic reserve, Ether surged in value because, you know, oh, if they're going to put this type of crypto into the reserve, it must be worth more. So that was essentially he was basically writing himself a check because, of course, if you're going to mention one particular type of cryptocurrency, it's going to drive up its price.
And it did. Now, Ether has since dropped in value because there's a lot of other things happening in the global economy. But at least temporarily, Trump's announcement drove up an asset that his family had already invested in.
So World Liberty was effectively created in September, October of last year as the presidential election was coming towards a close. And it's a brand new company, therefore, I mean, relatively speaking. And its goal is pretty ambitious. I mean, it wants to be a modern day bank that offers a range of services. And it started off by selling tokens in which you could buy.
It's called a governance token, and you could buy the right to have some say in decisions that the company is making. So before the election, they had a really hard time selling those tokens because it was started off by Trump's sons and some of their friends who had some experience in the crypto sector. But there wasn't much motion behind it.
So they only sold tens of millions of dollars in tokens initially. But once Trump was elected, suddenly – you know, there's a thought, oh, it's going to be the future president of the United States. This is probably going to do well. He's going to have the power to influence policy. And next thing you know, they sell $550 million worth of tokens.
And a large chunk of the revenue from those tokens is supposed to be going to the Trump family and their business partners. So their services, their goals are to offer, you know, eventually offer the ability to deposit your crypto into World Liberty and to borrow money off of it or to earn yield on it or to use what they call the stable coins to buy and sell things.
I mean, it's essentially going to be a modern day bank. It's going to offer a range of services. That's their goal. So far, what they've done is to sell a governance token and a stable coin.
I mean, the White House has said to us the same statement each time we ask about this, that President Trump has no conflicts of interest because his sons are running this business and that he has divested of his interest to his sons of his corporations. And he did sign a statement in January of 2017 after his first term started in which he transferred control of his assets to his sons.
And that is true. But the issue is that Trump is still the financial beneficiary of these companies.
And so when he files his financial disclosure every year, as he's required to do under federal law, we can see that the same entities that are earning revenue from the crypto business or from the hotel business or the golf business or in the many businesses that he's in, that Trump himself is financially benefiting from them.
I mean, in fact, that is true. The President of the United States and the Vice President are the only two members of the executive branch that are exempt from a federal criminal law that makes it a crime to take an action that brings you or your family direct financial benefit. I mean, so that's a criminal offense.
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