Wyoming Promises Its Own 'Stable Token' to Make America the BTC Mining 'Capital of the World'

On March 31, block reward mining outfit Hut 8 (NASDAQ: HUT) announced the launch of American Bitcoin Corp (ABC), “a majority-owned subsidiary of Hut 8 focused exclusively on industrial-scale Bitcoin mining and strategic Bitcoin reserve development.”

President Donald Trump's family is leaving no stone unturned in their quest to get rich(er) off digital assets, but is there a limit to how much naked grifting America will stand from its first family?

On March 31, mining outfit Hut 8 (NASDAQ:HUT) announced the launch of American Bitcoin Corp (ABC), “a majority-owned subsidiary of Hut 8 focused exclusively on industrial-scale Bitcoin mining and strategic Bitcoin reserve development.”

Hut 8 will contribute “substantially all” of its ASIC miners to ABC in exchange for an 80% stake in America Data Centers—a shell company established just last month by President Trump's sons, Eric and Don Jr.—that will rebrand as ABC. Eric has been named ABC's chief strategy officer.

Hut 8, which started its pivot to AI high-performance computing operations last year, will serve as ABC's “exclusive infrastructure and operations partner through a series of long-term commercial agreements that will generate stable, contracted revenue streams in Hut 8's Power and Digital Infrastructure segments.”

As for what the Trumps are bringing to this table (besides their dad's name) for their 20% stake in ABC, we're led to believe that “Eric Trump's commercial acumen, capital markets expertise, and commitment to the advancement of decentralized financial systems” is worth the price of admission. (Since this news broke on March 31, we're assuming it's not an April Fool's prank.)

Hut 8 CEO Asher Genoot said carving out the mining business into a standalone entity “creates two focused yet complementary businesses, each purpose-built for its respective mandate.” Plus, now one of those businesses is effectively backed by the president of the United States, who has publicly pledged to do whatever it takes to make America the BTC mining 'capital of the world.' (Nobody tells Trump that one of Hut 8/ABC's “initial colocation sites” is based in Alberta, Canada.)

Not everyone is as impressed as Hut 8's management seems to be with the deal. Matthew Sigel, head of digital asset research at investment manager Van Eck, tweeted that Hut 8 was “selling 61,000 miners in exchange for an 80% stake in a subsidiary that they previously owned 100% of.” It's almost as if Hut 8 believes benefits might be derived from offering lucrative freebies to very powerful people. Huh.

As for ABC's plans for BTC 'reserve development,' Hut 8 already held some 10,237 BTC in its existing reserve at the end of February. Trump has announced plans to establish a national Strategic Bitcoin Reserve that will ensure no more BTC already in the government's possession is sold, while also exploring 'budget neutral' ways to add additional BTC to the reserve. ABC's execs insist their reserve plans are unrelated to those of the federal government.

Bloomberg quoted Hut 8's Genoot saying ABC's plan was to raise additional private capital before seeking an initial public offering. Despite the announcement claiming that ABC would be a “pure-play Bitcoin miner,” Genoot said the long term goal was to have “two sister publicly traded companies” under a single vertically integrated umbrella.

World Liberty Financial now a pure Trump play

Eric Trump told the Wall Street Journal that, while ABC will remain separate from the Trump Organization (which Eric leads), the Trump-controlled decentralized finance (DeFi) project World Liberty Financial (WLF) might collaborate with ABC in some unexplained fashion at some unspecified point.

Speaking of WLF, Reuters reported on a little-noticed revision to WLF's fine print, revealing that “DT Marks DEFI LLC, an entity affiliated with Donald J. Trump and certain of his family members, own approximately 60% of the equity interests in WLF Holdco LLC.” Said Holdco “holds all of the rights to net protocol revenues from the WLF protocol (other than net proceeds from the sale of $WLFI tokens).”

The change means that once WLF actually launches any of the many projects it claims are in the works, the Trumps will get a 60% cut of revenue generated from WLF's operations. That's in addition to the 75% of revenue derived from sales of WLF's governance token WLFI, total sales of which currently stand at $550 million.

DT Marks' majority control came after WLF co-founders Zak Folkman and Chase Herro appear to have relinquished their own control over the WLF protocol. Folkman and Herro were previously involved in Dough Finance, a borrowing/lending platform that suffered a $1.8 million exploit last July.

After WLF's other co-founders take their cut, WLF will be left with a mere 5% of revenue raised to date with which to fund its various