Disgraced ‘Pharma Bro” Martin Shkreli claims he and Barron Trump — the 18-year-old son of Donald Trump — are behind a mysterious Trump-branded cryptocurrency whose value has been surging this week.
Shkreli, who was convicted of securities fraud in 2017 after he hiked the price of a life-saving drug, said he was initially approached by an acquaintance of Barron Trump about making the coin, which has been branded DJT TrumpCoin.
Rumors of possible links with the 45th president sent DJT TrumpCoin’s value skyrocketing by 385% within 24 hours on Tuesday, and amassing a trading volume of $363 million.
“About three months ago I started working with two other guys, one of whom was a Trump family member to create Trump Coin,” he claimed in a live stream on X, formerly known as Twitter.
“I was surprised. It was the president’s son, [which] seems like a good idea,” he said during the X Spaces event. “He wants to make money.”
The existence of the token “Trump Coin” was first reported by Fox Business on Monday after it was registered on the Solana blockchain platform.
Shkreli said repeatedly throughout the X exchange that he had evidence of Barron Trump’s involvement in the project that had eventually as many as 50 people working on it.
Shkreli had first told online crypto investigator ZachXBT of how he worked with Donald Trump’s youngest son to launch the coin.
“I have over 1000 pieces of evidence I created it with Barron,” Shkreli wrote in that exchange.
Nevertheless, Shkreli has not yet made public any of the proof linking Barron Trump to the coin that he purportedly has in his possession.
Online sleuths had tried to unmask the creator of the DJT token after blockchain company Arkham Intelligence offered $150,000 to anyone who could successfully identify them.
Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for this year’s race for the White House, has not confirmed whether he or Truth Social is connected to the coin, which carries the same DJT symbol as his social media platform.
The DJT coin’s rally comes as investors continued to dump stock in parent company Trump Media, which fell by 15% after trading opened on the Nasdaq on Thursday to roughly $27 per share.
The MAGA coin, a Trump token that is not affiliated to the 45th President, has plummeted by more than 20% since Tuesday, with a price of $6.82 per coin and a market value of just over $328 million.
The Post has approached a Trump spokesperson and Truth Social for comment about Shkreli’s claims.
The 41-year-old Shkreli first became notorious in 2015 as chief executive of Turing Pharmaceuticals when he ordered the price of the anti-parasitic drug Daraprim to be raised overnight by more than 4,000% to $750 per table
He later served more than four years in prison following his 2017 conviction for defrauding investors in two hedge funds and scheming to defraud investors in another pharma firm. A court then banned him for life from the industry.
Cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin created in 2009, are digital currencies that are not controlled by major financial institutions such as central banks.
Their supporters argue this brings financial freedom, but their value can also be extremely volatile making a potentially risky asset for investors.
Transactions are recorded and verified on a open source digital platform known as the blockchain. The system is similar to a virtual spreadsheet where every cryptocurrency trade is logged.
By design, there is a cap of 21 million bitcoins that can be bought, and some 90% have already been mined.
Last week, Trump wrote on Truth Social that the remainder of all available Bitcoins should be minted in the United States.
It marks yet another U-turn for the presidential hopeful who told Fox Business in 2021 that the digital coin was “a scam against the dollar.”
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