To break into the cryptocurrency mining industry, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. are teaming up with executives who previously founded a miner with the backing of investors implicated in an illegal penny-stock pump-and-dump operation.

The Trump sons and other investors created a new company and merged it with publicly-traded miner Hut 8 Corp., led by Chief Executive Officer Asher Genoot and Chief Strategy Officer Michael Ho. Those executives came to Hut 8 in 2023 when the company bought another miner the two founded called US Bitcoin, which was formed with financial backers who in 2018 settled accusations by the Securities and Exchange Commission of illegal promotion and manipulative trading of microcap stocks.