As Donald Trump and his sons push deeper into the crypto industry, their flagship project is expanding the family’s wealth by billions of dollars. On Monday, their World Liberty token began trading on crypto exchanges, quickly becoming one of the top global cryptocurrencies—and raising further concerns about the blurred line between the White House and the blockchain industry.
First announced by Eric Trump last summer, World Liberty Financial is a crypto project that promises to usher in a “new era of finance,” though it has yet to launch products outside of its WLFI token, as well as a stablecoin, USD1.
Over the past year, World Liberty held a series of private sales of the token to accredited investors, valuing them between 1.5 and 5 cents. And with Trump-affiliated entities controlling as much as 22.5 billion of the tokens, as well as a stake in the corporate parent company, the family’s wealth swelled by billions of dollars—at least on paper.
But with the token’s launch on secondary trading platforms on Monday, that stake is no longer theoretical, though the Trump entities’ holdings are still locked. Still, with the token trading at around $0.23 as of publication, the Trumps hold around $5 billion worth of WLFI alone, which doesn’t count their stake in other projects, including Trump’s memecoin, $TRUMP.
Expanding empire
Though Trump has always been a master of branding, he capitalized on his name after his first term in office to expand his business empire beyond its typical bread-and-butter of real estate into the publicly traded Trump Media & Technology Group, which owns his social media platform Truth Social, as well as his different crypto projects.
Once a skeptic of crypto, Trump embraced the sector on the campaign trail last summer as the Biden administration cracked down on companies like Coinbase and Binance, earning the support of crypto leaders along with tens of millions in campaign donations for pro-crypto candidates.
But alongside his political shift, Trump and his sons, Eric and Don. Jr., also launched a number of crypto-related projects, including World Liberty Financial, a platform designed around decentralized finance with its own token, WLFI. They have also moved into other areas of crypto, including Bitcoin mining and Ethereum.
While Trump’s eponymous memecoin, which he announced the weekend of his inauguration, has been the flashiest blockchain initiative, World Liberty Financial has more lasting potential as a financial project.
Though it is still unclear exactly which services World Liberty will offer, such as lending, it has already released a number of products, including its stablecoin and its token, WLFI, which has become popular among crypto investors. With a market cap after Monday’s launch of around $5.5 billion, WLFI is already one of the top 30 cryptocurrencies. The Trump family continues to develop around the World Liberty ecosystem, including launching a publicly traded company that holds the token in the design of Michael Saylor’s Strategy.
World Liberty’s growing popularity has also become a lightning rod of criticism for ethics experts, who argue that the Trump family’s expanding suite of crypto projects offers unprecedented opportunities for buying influence. In May, Trump held a dinner for the top holders of his memecoin, which included Justin Sun, a crypto entrepreneur who had been the target of an enforcement action by the Securities and Exchange Commission before the agency dropped the lawsuit under the Trump administration. Sun is also one of the top holders of WLFI.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration has rolled back Biden-era policies designed to create guardrails around the unregulated crypto industry, though blockchain advocates argued they restricted innovation.
“[Trump] seems poised to rack up more conflicts than ever, with even less transparency than last time,” wrote the watchdog nonprofit Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington in June.