Benzinga - A couple of weeks ago, former President Donald Trump unveiled a collection of 1,000 Trump sneakers at Sneaker Con in Philadelphia. The shoes, which sold out quickly for $399 per pair, could be bought with Bitcoin.
Here's what Trump said about the shoes in an interview on CNBC: "Sometimes we’ll let people pay through Bitcoin … it’s an additional form of currency".
This statement was huge coming from the former president, who has said that Bitcoin is a disaster waiting to happen in 2021. His stance has changed since then. According to Trump, "Bitcoin has taken on a life of its own" and he "can live with it one way or the other."
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Trump seems to be going even further by letting people buy his shoes with Bitcoin. The action accepts that Bitcoin is "an additional form of currency," a huge change from his past stance on crypto.
Trump has been in conversations with former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who is pro-crypto and has endorsed Trump. The conversations were centered around the creation of a central bank digital currency (CBDC), which Ramswamy is against. He pointed out the potential harm it could cause Trump. In turn, Trump promised to "never allow" CBDCs, showing that he values Ramaswamy's opinion on crypto.
In the interview, Trump also discusses crypto projects he is involved in, saying that he "does little things for fun" and "make[s] money with it." While this does not mean that he directly bought Bitcoin, it is likely a reference to the Trump Digital Trading Cards non-fungible token (NFT) project. Trump collected trading royalties on the project, amassing a stash of over 1,400 ETH. Trump sold 1,075 of those tokens for $2.4 million.
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Though Trump was not directly involved in the NFT project, he was directly involved with the shoes, which seemed to garner a lot more attention. According to Trump, the last pair of shoes, which were a special edition, sold for $450,000. "People were going crazy for these sneakers. You probably were, too. Everybody was," Trump said.
Trump also added that "so many [of the sneakers] were paid for with the … cryptocurrency." Bitcoin was created to be a store of value and a form of payment. However, it has struggled to get mainstream adoption in terms of transactional use. The former president offering the ability to pay using Bitcoin could open the floodgates in this regard.
However, Trump also noted that he "would not allow countries to go off the dollar, because when we lose that standard, that will be like losing a revolutionary war." Trump may be OK with Bitcoin but don't expect it to overtake the U.S. dollar if Trump wins the presidential election in November.
Bitcoin breached the $72,000 level and set new all-time highs on the morning of the interview, up nearly 5% on the day.
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