Banks on Brink: Crypto or Catastrophe? Eric Trump Issues a 10-Year Deadline 😲

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What to know:

  • In a moment ripened with the despair of a Dostoevskian winter, Eric Trump intoned that banks—those old temples to Mammon—are careening towards extinction, unless they bow to blockchain. Our ancient system, he sneered, is as “broken” and “slow” as a conversation between landowners and starving peasants. ⌛
  • Preparing to address the masses at CoinDesk’s Consensus 2025, Trump praised decentralized finance with an evangelical zeal—noting that even a bureaucrat plagued by gout could transfer money faster through blockchain than the molasses-paced SWIFT system.
  • He muttered darkly that banks have become instruments of vengeance, turned against the salt of the earth—Americans and Trumpistas alike—like some spectral shadow over the steppe. Was it outrage or breakfast indigestion? Who can say?

Eric Trump—son of America’s bespectacled patriarch, a sort of modern Raskolnikov in a boardroom—warned that only by donning the vestments of digital currency can banks avoid becoming fossils admired by no one but economic archaeologists (and perhaps, hipsters).

“The financial system! A vast cathedral of inefficiency,” Trump proclaimed to CNBC, his voice echoing like a monologue in a Petersburg garret. “All that can be done by these clerks with trembling hands and leather-bound ledgers, the blockchain does better. And SWIFT? A disaster so complete it would make even Svidrigailov weep!”

For those gathering like restless spirits in Toronto this May, Trump promises an indictment of the system’s sclerotic arteries and sings, perhaps, a dirge—or a cha-cha—for SWIFT. The man and his brother have gambled in the crypto bazaar, most recently flinging out a stablecoin named USD1, as if to say, “Here is a single, unblemished ruble for your consideration.”

Yes, cry the champions of Decentralized Finance, send your funds from wallet to wallet as effortlessly as confessions in a confessional—no priest, no fees, perhaps not even guilt. Bankers, once gods among men, now resemble last season’s snow: cold, drifting, irrelevant.

Eric, struck by the profound inequity of bankers favoring the few and mighty—oh, the horror!—felt himself drawn inexorably to crypto. “I beheld our banks, weaponized against the masses—against the unwealthy, against the red-hatted exiles. So I, like Ivan Karamazov, rejected the system and entered the dank cellar of crypto.” The warning resounds: adapt, or find yourself among the skeletons of history, dusted off once a decade by think-piece writers and podcasters.

Some, JPMorgan among them, already flirt with blockchain—to the mild arousal of shareholders everywhere. Biden’s administration once came down upon the crypto world like a Dostoevskian police chief. But hope springs eternal (or at least post-election): regulatory darkness may be lifting for Now.

Meanwhile, fintech SoFi emerges—Lazarus walking out of Silicon Valley’s tomb—proclaiming a new dawn for crypto. “The shift,” declaims CEO Anthony Noto, “is fundamental.” Dostoevsky, could he have envisioned such drama, would probably still have preferred roulette.

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2025-04-30 18:20