Trump family profits even with tepid launch of World Liberty crypto tokens

WASHINGTON – The Trump family’s cryptocurrency venture, known as World Liberty Financial, had a tepid first day of open-market trading on Sept 1, surging in value initially before losing most of those gains.

But because of an unusual insider arrangement, the Trump family was still assured of a considerable payday as its expanding universe of crypto ventures continued to break norms for business dealings by presidential families.

World Liberty’s cryptocurrency token, which is traded as $WLFI, was created in October 2024 by the Trump family and its partners, who include Mr Zach Witkoff, the son of Mr Steve Witkoff, the Middle East envoy for US President Donald Trump.

But until this week, the World Liberty organisers did not allow the token to be traded on public markets, meaning that after the 35,000 original buyers purchased a total of about US$550 million (S$707 million) worth of the tokens through this spring, they could not easily sell them. The organisers voted in July to lift that restriction.

That set the stage for the token’s trading debut on some of the world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchanges, including Binance, Bybit and OKX.

The original buyers were allowed to cash out of as much as 20 per cent of their purchases, and some of them apparently did just that. Many of these original buyers had purchased the World Liberty token at a fraction of the price it entered the market with on Sept 1, meaning they were in line for considerable profits.

The price of the token started trading at 8am at 20 US cents and surged in the first five minutes to as high as about 40 US cents.

It then fell rapidly, settling around 22 US cents as at 5pm, lower than many followers of World Liberty, at least on social media, had expected.

To help prop up the trading price, one major $WLFI holder, Mr Justin Sun, announced on Sept 1 that he had no immediate plans to sell his tokens. Mr Sun had been targeted by securities investigators during the Biden administration, only to see his case frozen once Mr Trump returned to office.

The Trump family itself controls about 22.5 billion $WLFI tokens, suggesting that its holdings as of the afternoon of Sept 1 were worth about US$5 billion, making it one of the most valuable Trump assets, worth far more than its real estate holdings, such as its hotels and golf courses.

The Witkoff family separately controls 3.75 billion tokens, as do other investors in World Liberty Partners, including Mr Chase Herro and Mr Zachary Folkman, suggesting a cumulative trading value of about US$1.7 billion for these partners, although that is just a value on paper.

That is because the holdings of the management team – including the Trump family, Witkoff family and other partners – remain locked, meaning those tokens cannot yet be sold, according to a posting on Sept 1 by the company, as the trading launched.

Still, there was a big windfall on Sept 1 for the Trump and Witkoff families, disclosure filings by World Liberty suggest.

That is because before the initial crypto exchange sale of the $WLFI tokens started on Sept 1, World Liberty had arranged an unusual deal with a relatively unknown, Nasdaq-traded company called Alt5 Sigma.

Alt5 announced in August that Mr Zach Witkoff had become its chair, while the US President’s son Eric became a member of the company’s board of directors and Mr Folkman, the chief operating officer of World Liberty, became a board observer, according to a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. That put three senior executives from World Liberty in positions of power at Alt5.

As that leadership change was announced, Alt5 also disclosed plans to use US$1.5 billion it had raised as part of that shift to buy World Liberty’s token once it began trading.

This is what allowed the Trump family to profit from World Liberty’s less-than-impressive launch. When the company was set up, in exchange for the President’s endorsement of the effort and the family’s help in managing it, World Liberty agreed to pay a Trump family entity called DT Marks DeFi “75 per cent of $WLFI token sale proceeds after deduction of agreed reserves, expenses and other amounts”. The other executives also get a cut of the net revenues.

World Liberty said in a statement on Sept 1 that after the start of trading, more than 7.5 billion tokens, or about 8 per cent of the total supply of 100 billion tokens, had been set aside for Alt5. This was the single largest number of tokens being offered for trading on Sept 1, the statement said, as a total of 24.7 billion tokens are now free to be exchanged.

It is unknown how much the deduction for expenses will be on that sale of 7.5 billion tokens to Alt5, which bought in at 20 US cents per token.

But the payment to the Trump family’s DT Marks for this investment is probably worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

The close corporate ties between Alt5 and World Liberty might have attracted an investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission in the past. Mr Trump this year named a crypto-friendly securities lawyer to lead the commission. It is possible that the ties are now being reviewed, as some trade news organisations have reported recently, although Alt5 has disputed this reporting. Alt5 did not respond on Sept 1 to a request for comment. NYTIMES