President-elect Donald Trump is looking to get more heavily invested in the cryptocurrency market as he prepares to take office, where he has promised to take a number of actions that are expected to pump the price of Bitcoin and other digital assets, and help the sector overall.
Trump Media and Technology Group, the company that owns Truth Social, is in advanced talks to buy cryptocurrency trading platform Bakkt, according to the Financial Times. Trump is the majority shareholder of the publicly-traded Trump Media and Technology Group, and he has repeatedly said that he does not plan to sell his shares, including in a post on Truth Social after the election. Trump Media and Technology Group merged with a special purpose acquisition company connected to GOP donor Jeff Yass in March, catapulting Trump’s paper fortune by more than $4 billion.
Bakkt is owned by Intercontinental Exchange, the owner of the New York Stock Exchange. The company’s CEO is Jeffrey Sprecher, a billionaire Trump donor who gave $1 million this year to the Make America Great Again Inc. super PAC and $824,600 to Trump 47 Committee, a joint fundraising vehicle, according to Federal Election Commission records. Sprecher also hosted a fundraiser for Trump in April.
Trump’s inauguration committee co-chair Kelly Loeffler, the former U.S. senator from Georgia, was Bakkt’s CEO before she joined the Senate in 2019. Loeffler and Sprecher are married.
Earlier this year, Trump and his family members launched World Liberty Financial, a company that says it intends to use the Trump brand to attract more people to decentralized finance (DeFi) and “democratize access to financial opportunities.” The company began selling tokens last month for a penny and a half apiece, and a gauge on its website indicates it has sold about $20 million worth so far. The company’s “gold paper” says that a company affiliated with Trump called DT Marks DEFI LLC will get Trump “to promote the WLF and the WLF Protocol from time to time” and that it has “a right to receive 75% of the net protocol revenues.”
Trump would have significantly more exposure to the cryptocurrency market if the deal is completed to acquire Bakkt, which has a market cap of about $400 million after its shares rocketed up in price yesterday on the news.
