HONG KONG — Eric Trump expressed the Trump family’s affection for the Bitcoin community during a Friday talk in Hong Kong, foreseeing Bitcoin’s value reaching $1 million amid growing concerns about potential conflicts of interest in his upcoming public venture.

Trump said his family became interested in cryptocurrency when it was cut off from banking services “because my father was in politics.”

“The Bitcoin community embraced my father, unlike anything I had ever seen before,” Trump said at the Bitcoin Asia conference here.

“We have a deep appreciation for this community,” he commented, while seated in front of a display that showed the cryptocurrency’s price nearing $110,000, rising from approximately $70,000 since the re-election of his father, Donald Trump, in November.

Eric Trump has garnered a nearly devoted following within the crypto sector. This was evident in Hong Kong as hundreds gathered — some garbed in outfits ranging from glittering robes to white suits adorned with Bitcoin logos — applauded Trump’s appearance on stage. He criticized his father’s predecessor, Joe Biden, and declared, “Now is the time to invest.”

For the Trump family, the cryptocurrency sector has grown into significant business, with its head becoming one of its leading advocates after it supported his return to office.

Perceiving themselves as unjustly targeted by the Biden administration, the industry wielded political influence during the 2024 elections, contributing an estimated $135 million to Trump and other candidates supportive of cryptocurrency.

Subsequently, the Trump family has become more deeply involved in the industry, especially Eric Trump, who stated on Friday that “90% of my life is dedicated to this community.”

His latest venture is called American Bitcoin. Launched in March with his older brother, Donald Trump Jr., and the Nasdaq-listed Hut 8, a crypto energy infrastructure company, American Bitcoin aims to be the “world’s largest, most efficient pure-play Bitcoin miner while building a robust strategic Bitcoin reserve,” according to a news release.

Eric Trump said Friday that the company will be going public “very soon” as it merges with a pre-existing Nasdaq-listed company called Gryphon Digital Mining.

“We are one of the biggest Bitcoin mining companies on Earth,” he said. “We mine about 3% of the world’s Bitcoin every single day.”

He insists that the family’s business is separate from national politics and has dismissed concerns about conflicts of interest.

“My father’s totally shielded off from our company. There’s total separation of church and state,” he told CNBC in December. “We have great ethics advisers. We take it incredibly seriously.”

But Donald Trump was a major topic of discussion at his son’s Q&A in Hong Kong, which began with a round of applause for the president, who has vowed to make the United States the “crypto capital of the world.”

Since returning to office in January, Trump has pushed to ease regulation of the industry, shut down the Justice Department’s national cryptocurrency enforcement team, appointed a “crypto czar” and held a White House summit for industry leaders. He also said the U.S. would create a national strategic crypto reserve.

This month he signed an executive order allowing cryptocurrency and real estate investments to be included in 401(k) retirement accounts, which critics say could put Americans’ retirement savings at risk.

Trump has also sought legislative backing for a form of cryptocurrency known as stablecoins, some of which is already in place. One of the three bills that received support on Capitol Hill last month was the GENIUS Act, which allows stablecoins to be issued by private companies.

The passage of the bills was slammed by Americans for Financial Reform, a left-leaning watchdog group, which said in a statement last month that Trump and his allies would “personally benefit from limitless legalized corruption while the rest of us stand in harm’s way of the next crypto implosion.”

Trump, who said in 2021 that Bitcoin “seems like a scam,” has since embraced it as a moneymaking opportunity, sometimes at great cost to investors. According to the watchdog group State Democracy Defenders Fund, as of mid-March his crypto assets were valued at $2.9 billion, or about 37% of his total wealth.

Much of that money, which Trump earned in about six months, came from ventures such as the $TRUMP coin that he launched ahead of his inauguration, which was trading at nearly $8 on Friday, down from its peak of $73 in January. A meme coin was also launched for first lady Melania Trump.

Industry professionals call these meme coins, meaning they have little practical use and are mostly symbolic, making their value subject to extreme volatility. About 764,000 wallets of mostly small holders lost money on $TRUMP while 58 wallets made more than $10 million each, CNBC reported in May, citing data from the blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis.

In May, Trump briefly appeared at a dinner outside Washington for the 220 largest buyers of $TRUMP, who spent an average of $1 million on the token.

Trump also has a large stake in World Liberty Financial, a decentralized crypto exchange that was launched last fall and is majority-controlled by the Trump family.

World Liberty’s flagship project is its $WLFI stablecoin, which holders voted last month to make more widely tradable. The family also stands to gain from an agreement by a technology company backed by the government of the United Arab Emirates to invest $2 billion in one of World Liberty’s stablecoin products.

That currency will then be used to invest in Binance, one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges, whose CEO stepped down in 2023 after the company pleaded guilty to money laundering and other charges.

The deal was announced at a crypto conference Eric Trump attended in Abu Dhabi shortly before his father visited the United Arab Emirates city in May.

Even amid the enthusiasm at the Hong Kong conference on Friday, participants said there was some discomfort around the Trump family’s involvement in the cryptocurrency industry.

“There is serious conflict of interest, and people recognize it,” said Bharat Prabhakar, 25, a New York-based conference attendee. “But not a lot of people say it out loud because there’s real consequences for it.”