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Investors in the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial token voted this week in favor of making the cryptocurrency tradable on public exchanges. The decision could boost the token’s price and directly benefit President Trump and his family, who hold billions of the tokens and have already reaped hundreds of millions from its early sales.
The vote was announced on X by the Trump-branded project, marking a major step forward for a venture that has quietly become one of the president’s most lucrative businesses. According to Reuters, the Trump family has earned around $500 million from the project since it launched last fall. As of the end of last year, Trump personally held 15.75 billion of the 100 billion total tokens and had earned about $57 million from token sales, according to a financial disclosure posted in June. If public exchange trading drives up demand, the value of Trump and his family’s tokens could rise significantly, though their holdings are subject to a longer unlock schedule, meaning they cannot liquidate immediately.
World Liberty Financial (WLFI) launched in September 2024 and raised $550 million through token sales to accredited and foreign investors. Buyers received governance tokens that gave them voting power over major decisions, including this week’s approval of public trading. Trump’s sons were involved in launching the project, alongside the son of longtime Trump real estate adviser Steve Witkoff.
The rapidly-growing crypto project is just one of the ways Trump is profiting from his power and influence derived primarily from the presidency, on top of his memecoin, merchandise sales, and overseas business deals. This week, Trump helped wrangle House Republicans to support passage of the CLARITY Act, which would deregulate crypto tokens like WLFI by protecting them from securities laws.
In late June, a shadowy investor called the Aqua 1 Foundation announced purchasing $100 million worth of WLFI tokens, netting $75 million in proceeds for Trump in one of WLFI’s largest transactions so far. The group claims to be based in the United Arab Emirates, but reporters have not been able to find a corporate registration for Aqua 1 in the country and little is publicly known about its founder, “Dave Lee.” Financial reporter Jacob Silverman has linked Aqua 1 to a Chinese company called Web3Port that has been banned from several exchanges over market manipulation because of a shared server and personnel overlaps. Web3Port has a partner named Dave Li. However, Lee has told reporters that Aqua 1 operates independently, though he did not clarify whether he is the same person as the Aqua 1 partner.
Speed Read:
OpenSecrets: On Tuesday, a federal district judge blocked a Maine law recently passed by ballot initiative that would strictly limit the amount of money anyone could contribute to a super PAC — a political committee that by definition may raise and spend unlimited amounts of money.
Wired: A key operative from DOGE initiated plans to potentially kill Direct File, the free tax filing tool developed by the IRS, after offering assurances it would be spared from cuts.
BBC: Mark Zuckerberg and a group of Meta shareholders have agreed to settle a multibillion dollar lawsuit with shareholders over how the top executives handled repeated privacy violations by Facebook.
