Hut 8 tightens Trump family ties through American Bitcoin

Hut 8, a Bitcoin miner tied to the Trump family, is building a new office in Dubai, locking in on the city’s crypto-friendly environment.

The company, which is based in Miami, officially registered its expansion last week through the Dubai International Financial Centre, with a spokesperson confirming it’s recruiting staff to lead trading and Bitcoin hoarding operations out of the UAE.

According to Bloomberg, CEO Asher Genoot said the Dubai expansion will “enhance the precision and efficiency of Hut 8’s capital strategy.” The company, which ran mining operations in Texas, New York, and Alberta through 2024, had a team of 220 employees as of December.

Genoot didn’t elaborate on headcount for the Dubai team but said the capital plan is about going after efficiency. Dubai’s free zones and zero corporate tax offer that edge, and it’s a city that’s been openly courting crypto companies in a push to move its economy away from fossil fuels.

Hut 8 tightens Trump family ties through American Bitcoin

While expanding in Dubai, Hut 8 is also entangled in a new crypto venture with Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump. The brothers have partial ownership of American Bitcoin, a fresh company that’s absorbing most of Hut 8’s existing mining hardware.

The plan is to take American Bitcoin public later in 2025 by merging with another listed firm. Once that goes through, Hut 8 will walk away with an 80% stake in the combined company. Genoot and several others from Hut 8 are also joining the board of directors.

Despite the overlap, a spokesperson for the company clarified that the Dubai setup isn’t part of American Bitcoin. It’s a separate buildout focused entirely on trading and accumulation, not public listings or family business. That said, the connections are impossible to ignore — the Trump name is now linked to both sides of Hut 8’s future strategy, one targeting the Middle East, and one consolidating its position back in the US

Altcoins bleed out as Bitcoin dominance surges in 2025

This all comes during a year that’s been brutal for everything not named Bitcoin. While Bitcoin smashed past its previous all-time high, helped by a second Trump administration and a bullish legislative outlook, more than $300 billion in altcoin value has already disappeared.

Coins that once claimed to be the next big thing have been slaughtered. “I think they’re just going to die, frankly,” said Nick Philpott, co-founder of Zodia Markets. “They’ll just wither away. Technically, a lot of this stuff will just sit there and gather dust in perpetuity.”

Bitcoin’s share of the entire crypto market has jumped nine points to 64%, its highest point since early 2021. That’s left the rest of the sector in a chokehold.

A MarketVector index tracking the lower half of the top 100 coins — which briefly doubled after Trump’s November 5 election win — has collapsed and is now down nearly 50% in 2025. Even Ether, the second-largest token by market cap, is still halfway below its all-time high, despite minor boosts from ETF inflows.

“Historically, Bitcoin’s moved and then that’s passed down into altcoins,” said Jake Ostrovskis, an OTC trader at Wintermute. “We’ve not really seen that yet this cycle.” And many don’t expect to. The altcoin market is starting to look like a graveyard of abandoned projects. Back in 2022, the collapse of TerraUSD and FTX triggered the fall of hundreds of tokens. Now, even more coins are going dead — with nothing left but ghost chains and token wallets with zero activity.

Regulation is the key difference in 2025. This time, institutional money is involved, and that money is going almost entirely into Bitcoin and stablecoins. The stablecoin market alone has grown $47 billion in value in the last year.

Even Amazon is exploring its own stablecoin. That kind of institutional entry has killed the idea that altcoins are still a path to innovation. Instead, developers are considering merging projects and transferring governance to more active chains, just to survive.

At the same time, more firms are copying the Michael Saylor model: hoarding Bitcoin. A new company, Twenty One Capital, launched in April with backing from Cantor Fitzgerald, Tether, and SoftBank, seeded with $4 billion in Bitcoin. Meanwhile, Trump Media has raised $2.3 billion to create a Bitcoin treasury of its own.

Smaller attempts are happening with coins like Solana, BNB, and Ether, but none are touching Bitcoin’s volume. Bitcoin has become the clear winner in 2025, and everyone else is being left behind.

Not everything is burning, though. A few altcoins like Maker and Hyperliquid have shown strength thanks to real-world revenue from decentralized finance projects. But that’s the exception. The big players — Hut 8, the Trumps, and the institutional whales — are all circling Bitcoin. And Dubai, with its lax laws and no taxes, just became the next base of operations.

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