Live look at the Trump bros right now:

You’ve gotta hand it to Don Jr. and Eric Trump. While most presidential kids are busy doing charity work or trying to stay out of the tabloids for their addiction to crack and hookers, these two looked at their dad’s second stint in the Oval Office and thought, “Cool, how do we turn this into 0’s in the bank account?”

And today, the answer arrived in the form of American Bitcoin, ticker ABTC, making its Nasdaq debut. Unlike Don Jr.’s infamous GrabaGun experiment (the “Amazon but for guns” concept that never really left the clearance aisle) this one actually stuck the landing. ABTC ripped out of the gate, doubling within the first few hours of trading before cooling down to a still-sexy 36% gain… which is still the kind of first-day performance most companies would happily toss their CFO into traffic to replicate.

(Source: Fortune)

So how did American Bitcoin sneak its way onto the Nasdaq? Not the old-school IPO route with bankers in suits schmoozing investors over steak dinners. Nope… this was a reverse merger, Wall Street’s version of hitting the “skip intro” button. Less than a year ago, the Trumps spun up American Data Centers, pulled in Canadian miner Hut 8 for the hardware and know-how, and then fused it with Gryphon Digital Mining, a public shell company no one’s mom has ever heard of. Boom… instant Nasdaq listing. It’s faster and cheaper than a normal IPO, but also a little sketchier (reverse mergers are the red-headed stepchild of capital markets). Still, in a hype cycle like crypto, speed wins… and the Trump name doesn’t exactly hurt.

And if you look at the ownership structure today, it’s heavily tilted toward insiders. The Trump brothers and Hut 8 collectively own 98% of the company, leaving prior Gryphon investors with little more than bragging rights. Eric Trump even carries the title of “chief strategy officer,” which (if we’re being blunt) probably translates to posting bullish Bitcoin takes on Fox Business, while Don Jr. pretty much plays the DJ Khaled of this thing… shouting “ANOTHER ONE” every time Bitcoin clears another milestone.

The trading part of the debut itself was absolutely chaos. Nasdaq had to halt ABTC shares five times in the first 90 minutes. At one point, shares touched $14, more than double Gryphon’s prior $6.90 close, before settling back into the $9-10 range. Nearly eight million shares traded hands compared to the usual 1.7 million, which tells you everything you need to know. The WallStreetBets crowd, SuperStonk basement dwellers, and every other speculative flow chaser were piling in, feeding off the mix of Trump headlines and Bitcoin’s latest pump.

Speaking of Bitcoin, it might as well have strapped ABTC to its back and said, “Fine, I’ll carry.” BTC ticked up 1% to $112K (its best level in over a week) and when your whole business model is “BTC good, stonk good,” that’s kind of everything. American Bitcoin’s already hoarding 2,443 coins worth about $160M, and instead of relaxing, they immediately filed with the SEC to raise another $2.1B so they can YOLO into stacking even more.

Say what you want about the Trump clan… they never miss a chance to cash in. Congrats, Don Jr. and Eric… Hunter Biden cracked so you could IPO.

At the time of publishing this article, Stocks.News doesn’t hold positions in companies mentioned in the article.