Eric Trump said the huge investment in artificial intelligence, which has been one of the factors depressing cryptocurrency prices, will ultimately be the fastest driver of digital-asset growth.
“The thing that’s going to spawn the growth of digital assets by far the quickest is actually the AI trade,” Eric, a co-founder in the Trump family crypto venture, said at the Token2049 conference in Singapore on Wednesday. “The faster our kind of friends on the other side of the aisle in AI can sprint toward their goal, the better this industry is going to do.”
He gave the example of asking an AI agent to book a holiday, saying it would use a crypto wallet to make the transaction rather than fiat currency. “The faster people embrace AI and technology, and the faster that gets integrated into people’s life, the faster this industry is going to grow,” he said.
Bitcoin’s drop from a record high of $126,000 in October last year has in part been attributed to investors selling crypto to buy AI stocks. The original cryptocurrency’s recent rally back above $80,000 shows that “now it’s cycling back out, and it’s going back into crypto,” Trump said.
“We’re seeing that, we’re seeing prices go up” but “you’re going to see money continuously cycle between the two,” he said.
The US President’s second-oldest son is a co-founder of World Liberty Financial, his family’s cryptocurrency venture whose flagship stablecoin is USD1.
Eric Trump said the growth of dollar-backed stablecoins could help to bolster demand for US government debt.
Tokenization
Trump also used the panel at what is one of the world’s largest crypto conferences to tout the “philanthropic” benefits of tokenization.
Putting luxury real estate, art and music revenues on blockchains could open assets traditionally reserved for wealthy investors to a broader public, he said, echoing a sentiment that the industry has long promoted as a benefit of putting real-world assets on blockchains.
“It’s philanthropic in terms of giving people an opportunity to invest in things that they believe in that they could have never otherwise had the opportunity to invest in,” he said.
Throughout the talk, he took the opportunity to restate his distaste for banks — a theme he has frequently returned to at crypto events — saying they had done everything they could to prevent the growth of digital assets but were now racing to adopt them.
“All of us in here beat the big banks because every single day you see another one” embracing cryptocurrency, Trump said. “It’s because people dared to push back against major headwinds. And honestly, I think today we could all declare victory.”