Eric Trump: Wall Street’s crypto shift is only the beginning

At the Consensus 2026 conference in Miami, Eric Trump told attendees that major Wall Street firms including Merrill Lynch, Charles Schwab and JPMorgan have integrated cryptocurrency into client services. He said JPMorgan now permits home mortgages secured by clients’ bitcoin and placed that change within an 18-month period.

Trump described the recent period as a crypto boom and predicted further market growth. He highlighted that several large financial firms are offering digital assets as a portfolio option and accepting them as collateral, which affects how some clients manage wealth and access credit.

He pointed to specific firms as examples and offered a direct account: “Every single day, you see Merrill, you see Schwab, you see JPMorgan… now they are allowing people to take out home mortgages against their bitcoin holdings at JPMorgan. This happened in a period of 18 months, my friends.”

Trump also framed cryptocurrency as a way to expand access to financial services and to reduce fees charged by traditional banks. He argued that bank fee structures, which he described as spreads of several points, disadvantaged ordinary customers and said crypto reduced many of those charges. He said, “Crypto was able to remove those fees… It democratized finance in a way that it had never been done before. It made banking so much more transparent, the flow of money cheaper, faster in every way, shape, or form.”

At the event he identified himself as a “hard-asset person.” Trump said his interest in bitcoin grew after his family’s business lost banking relationships following the January 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol riot. He is co-founder and chief strategy officer of American Bitcoin, is involved with World Liberty Financial, and has invested in the prediction market platform Polymarket through 1789 Capital.

Trump criticized traditional banking models for their fee structures and said the integration of crypto into mainstream finance gives some consumers more direct control over assets and access to services that were previously tied to legacy banking processes.