Disgraced “Pharma Bro” Martin Shkreli claims he and Barron Trump — Donald Trump’s 18-year-old son — are behind a mysterious Trump-branded cryptocurrency that has soared in value this week.
Shkreli, who was convicted of securities fraud in 2017 after jacking up the price of a life-saving drug, said he was first approached by an acquaintance of Barron Trump to make the coin, which has been called DJT TrumpCoin.
Rumors of possible ties to the 45th president sent DJT TrumpCoin up 385% in value within 24 hours on Tuesday, amassing a trading volume of $363 million.
“About three months ago I started working with two other guys, one of whom was a member of the Trump family 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] it seems like a good idea,” he said during the X Spaces event. “He wants to make money.”
The existence of the “Trump Coin” token was first reported by Fox Business on Monday after it was registered on the Solana blockchain platform.
Shkreli repeatedly said during the X exchange that he had evidence of Barron Trump’s involvement in the project that eventually had about 50 people working on it.
Shkreli had previously told online crypto investigator ZachXBT how he worked with Donald Trump’s youngest son to launch the coin.
“I have over 1,000 pieces of evidence that I created with Barron,” Shkreli wrote in that exchange.
However, Shkreli has yet to release any of the evidence linking Barron Trump to the currency he is alleged to be in possession of.
Online sleuths had been trying 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 are affiliated with the coin, which carries the same symbol DJT as his social media platform.
The rise in DJT currency comes as investors continued to dump shares in parent company Trump Media, which fell 15% after trading opened on the Nasdaq Thursday at around $27 a share.
The MAGA coin, a Trump token not associated with the 45th President, has fallen more than 20% since Tuesday, with a price of $6.82 per coin and a market value of just over 328 million dollars.
The Post has reached out to a spokesperson for Trump and Truth Social for comment on Shkreli’s claims.
Shkreli, 41, first gained notoriety in 2015 as chief executive of Turing Pharmaceuticals when he ordered the price of the antiparasitic drug Daraprim to rise overnight by more than 4,000% to $750 per tablet.
He later served more than four years in prison after his 2017 conviction for defrauding investors in two hedge funds and defrauding investors in another pharmaceutical firm. A court subsequently banned him from the industry for life.
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 that this brings financial freedom, but their value can also be extremely volatile, making it a potentially risky asset for investors.
Transactions are recorded and verified on an open source digital platform known as blockchain. The system is similar to a virtual spreadsheet where every cryptocurrency trade is recorded.
By design, there is a limit of 21 million bitcoins that can be purchased, and about 90% have already been mined.
Last week, Trump wrote on Social Truth that the remainder of all available Bitcoins should be produced in the United States.
It marks another U-turn for the presidential candidate, who told Fox Business in 2021 that the digital currency was “a fraud on the dollar.”