What are the "factions" in Trump's encryption empire?

The Crypto of 2025 is the Trump family's Crypto.

Written by: BUBBLE, Rhythm

Early this morning, MagicEden announced a collaboration with $Trump to launch Trump Wallet. As soon as the news broke, the market cap of MagicEden's token $ME surged nearly 30% from $850 million to $1.1 billion within two hours. However, Trump's sons Eric Trump and Donald J. Trump Jr., along with Barron Trump, who had not previously tweeted on X, all issued statements denying any connection to the announcement.

Eric even posted twice warning the MagicEden project team, "MagicEden, I will be very cautious in using our name in projects that are unauthorized and unknown to anyone in our organization." Following the "anti-fake actions" by Trump's sons, the market value of $ME immediately dropped to 960 million dollars, and is now maintained at around 1 billion dollars.

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After announcing in the previous second, the rumor was refuted in the next second. What is going on with the 'Trump Wallet'?

The news was first announced today at 12:10 AM (UTC+8) by software engineer and crypto researcher Molly White on X that "Trump will launch a branded crypto wallet and trading app", where she found information about the domain name and website related to TrumpWallet.com, noting that the website was already live before the official announcement, providing waitlist registration for the wallet and promotion information for $TRUMP token rewards. The incident was later covered by Bitcoin Magazine.

An hour later, at 1:35, MagicEden officially announced a partnership with $TRUMP to build @TrumpWalletApp's wallet. After they made the announcement on their main account, many team members retweeted it, with MagicEden co-founder and CEO Jack tweeting an X adding, "Sign up to join our waitlist today! Once the app goes live, there will be $1 million in $TRUMP rewards. Users who refer at least 1 person to participate will have a chance to win a grand prize of $100,000", and with the launch of the "Invitation Campaign", the invitation code of TrumpWalletApp quickly spread among the community.

Another hour later, at 2:21 a.m., U.S. President Donald Trump's son, Eric Trump, tweeted that "I run Trump Inc., but I don't know anything about this project," and tagged WLFI and his own stake in AmericanBTC and the "hero" of the incident $Trump. Family members including DonaldJTrumpJr and Barron Trump, as well as a number of WLFI team members, subsequently reprinted and boycotted the act.

Although many "WLFI members" resisted, the official TrumpMeme account and the MagicEden team members confirmed this. At present, the original X account of Trump Wallet has been officially banned by Twitter, and before that, the account was an account belonging to MagicEden Gold Standard, and the information on the official website to view the privacy policy and terms and conditions or "promotions" are all responsible for the Slingshot Finance project that was acquired by MagicEden two months ago.

The Two Main "Factions" of the Trump Crypto Group

This is not the first time that the Trump team has shown instability, and during the last presidential term, the internal team members of the Trump administration were extremely engaged in games and changes, and personnel resignations were commonplace. And in this term, after the cryptocurrency field entered the center of gravity of Trump's administration, the teams with interests became more fragmented, and everyone wanted a "piece of the pie".

meme coin issuer, Trump's long-time business partner

Interestingly, as you can see from MagicEden CEO Jack's tweet, he just went to a dinner in $Trump with the founder of Slingshot, which mentioned the acquisition above, and this tweet was also retweeted by the official account of $Trump meme. And on June 3, TRUMP Meme officially said that it airdropped 3 different Solana NFTs to wallets for users who participated in the "Dinner with Trump" event, and now in retrospect, it seems to be some form of warm-up for the "Trump Wallet App".

From left to right, Slingshot founder Clinton Bembry Jr., MagicEden founder Jack, MagicEden Chief Business Officer Chris Akhavan

The person planning the May 2025 $Trump dinner in Washington is none other than President Trump's longtime friend Bill Zanker, the "authorized person" of Fight Fight LLC, the company behind the $Trump token, which together with CIC Digital LLC owns 80% of Trump's $TRUMP memecoin shares of tokens, worth billions of dollars.

Bill Zanker with Trump

CIC Digital LLC was founded in 2021 by one of Trump's lawyers, John Marion, and former advisor Nick Luna. CIC Digital LLC operates the website for the $TRUMP token in collaboration with Fight Fight Fight LLC, generating trading revenue from it.

CIC Digital LLC is responsible for licensing Trump's name and likeness for use in NFT projects such as Trump Digital Trading Cards. Bill Zanker is considered a key enabler of Trump's NFT project. Bill Zanker reportedly proposed an NFT collection to Trump in 2022 and met with him at Trump's club at Mar-a-Lago Manor to discuss the project's feasibility. CIC Digital LLC licensed Trump's brand to NFT INT LLC, a company registered in Delaware, and Zanker played an organizing and promoting role in the process, although he did not directly own NFT INT LLC himself.

In March 2024, the Trump Card NFT project announced that it would migrate to Magic Eden, saying that Magic Eden "has set up a dedicated team to assist users in managing Trump's digital card collection."

And this is not the first time the two have worked together, since they met around 2000 and have worked together many times, Bill Zanker founded The Learning Annex, which he wanted to make "the McDonald's of education". Founded in 1980 by Zankel for $5,000 in a studio apartment in New York, the company grew rapidly, earning more than $100 million in revenue at one point. Among the celebrities who gave advice in the course were motivational speaker Tony Robbins, former boxer George Foreman, and Trump, who gave a speech for the Learning Annex in 2002 titled "Ambition: There's Nothing You Can't Do!" Zanker claimed he paid Trump $1.5 million per appearance, but Trump later admitted that it was actually only $400,000.

In 2007, the two co-authored "Think Big and Kick ASS in Business and Life," and in 2013 they co-founded the ill-fated crowdfunding site FundAnything, which Zanker started with $1 million of his own, but a year later, Trump distanced himself from the project, posting only a few dozen tweets and saying " It took me too much time and energy to raise the money," and then the project "went to nothing". It wasn't until 2022 that Bill Zanker came up with the business concept of "trump NFT", and the two sides have been working together in the cryptocurrency space ever since.

Bill Zanker promotes co-authored book "Think Big and Kick ASS in Business and Life" with Trump

The statement "TRUMP" on the official website of $Trump is a registered trademark of DTTM Operations LLC. This product is not distributed or sold by Donald J. Trump, the Trump Organization, or any of their respective affiliates or officers. DTTM Operations LLC is a limited liability company registered in New York, established in 2015, active in multiple fields including real estate, hospitality, entertainment, apparel, and political services, holding a substantial number of trademarks associated with the Trump brand, with records showing at least 137 trademarks.

DTTM Operations LLC also holds the trademark for "THE TRUMP ORGANIZATION," and the registered copyright for $Trump is not provided with "IP support" by THE TRUMP ORGANIZATION, which is led by Eric Trump, but rather is obtained from the IP ownership of DTTM Operations LLC.

Although Trump claimed to hand over day-to-day operations to his children (such as Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump) while serving as president, DTTM Operations LLC is still widely regarded as the entity that protects and manages Trump-related assets.

In addition to Bill Zanker, the $Trump is believed to be led by the community as the chairman of the Crypto Committee, David Sacks, better known as one of the founders of the PayPal, who rose to fame by founding Yammer and selling it to Microsoft for $1.2 billion. In the cryptocurrency circle, David Sacks' most important identity is an investor in the crypto venture capital company Multicoin, and a Solana maximalist.

"One of the stupidest attacks against me this year is the claim that I sold SOL tokens to retail investors. If that were true, they should have made a fortune by now, congratulations to everyone holding SOL." Even during the FTX collapse, Sacks never sold SOL.

Because $Trump is deployed on the Solana chain, and David Sacks has remained silent about these "zero-sum meme coins" when Trump issued the $TRUMP coin, many believe that this chairman of the crypto committee and member of the PayPal Mafia is likely involved as well.

Further Reading: "The Right Turn in Silicon Valley: Peter Thiel, A16Z, and the Political Ambitions of Cryptocurrency"

And within a few days of $Trump, Trump's wife Melania's $MELANIA of the same name was also released. Messari founder Ryan Selkis tweeted a call on Trump, suggesting that he fire the people who recommended the $MELANIA project. "The lack of expertise of the project team, the potential for significant financial loss and goodwill damage, and the failure to adequately consider Trump's interests in project decisions." Selkis points out the problem with $MELANIA.

Compared to the $TRUMP coin$MELANIA issuance is more sloppy, the front-end code is incomplete, the images are not compressed, the website was only built the day before the project is released, and the legal text is not rigorous, many netizens speculate that the methods of $MELANIA and $TRUMP have many differences and may not be operated by the same team.

More than one community member has reported, "If my source is correct, $TRUMP is promoted by crypto czar David Sacks, while $MELANIA is done by the Worldliberty team. But it can be confirmed that these two coins are not created by the same team."

WLFI "Interest Group", Middle East Envoy's Father-Son Team

History is always remarkably similar, just like the last time when $Trump and $MELANIA had a "schedule clash". After the collaboration between MagicEden and $Trump, Trump's eldest son announced that WLFI will launch its own official wallet. However, applications like the "Trump Wallet" are not like Memecoins; there can only be one wallet app based on the Trump concept, which also led to today’s mix-up of the "real and fake Monkey King" incident.

Eric Trump escalated the dispute by sending a series of text messages to The New York Times, saying that the Trump family would file a legal challenge against the "$TRUMP Wallet," even though it was promoted on social media by an account associated with fellow Trump interests, Bill Zanker. "There is no agreement on this product," wrote Eric Trump, "and there is no agreement on this product. It has not yet been approved."

WLFI was formed on September 16, 2024, with then-President-elect Donald Trump announcing his march into X. The company was founded by real estate magnate Steve Witkoff and his son Zach Witkoff, while Trump's sons EricTrump and DonaldJTrumpJr are also part of the project.

Justin Sun (left), Zach Witkoff (center), and Trump's second son Eric Trump (right) attend the cryptocurrency conference Token2049 in Dubai

Zach Witkoff, son of Witkoff and co-founder of the cryptocurrency company World Liberty Financial, announced at a conference in Dubai that the company has reached an agreement with Tahnoon's enterprise, which will purchase 2 billion USD1 stablecoins issued by World Liberty. The Witkoff family and the Trump family are expected to share tens of millions of dollars in annual profits "The Trump family holds 60% of the shares in World Liberty Financial."

Since last fall, the Trump family has embarked on several different cryptocurrency projects, namely American Bitcoin, $TRUMP, $MELANIA, World Liberty Financial, and Trump Media & Technology Group. In addition to today's farce of real and fake "wallets", Trump's social platform Truth Social submitted a Bitcoin ETF application, and Mrs. Trump's official meme coin $MELANIA also reached a liquidity provision agreement with Wintermute, and WLFI also airdropped 47 USD1 to its token subscriber address, it seems that the stablecoin track is also on the right track.

At this point in time, the $Trump and the team behind Trump NFT, which have exhausted their benefits and can no longer draw liquidity from the market, seem to be gradually distancing themselves from the core circle of the "Trump Group."

Crypto in 2025 is Trump family's Crypto.