Trump fortune balloons by billions after family firm’s crypto token starts trading

The Trump family’s cryptocurrency venture, World Liberty Financial, put its namesake digital tokens up for sale on Monday, adding some $5bn in paper value to Donald Trump’s family fortune. The token, known as $WLFI, fell in value on Monday in their first day of trading.

The World Liberty tokens were sold to investors after the Trump family and its business partners last year launched the venture, a decentralized finance platform that has also issued a stablecoin, a cryptocurrency meant to maintain a specific price by tying its value to a specific asset.

Investors in the tokens voted in July to make them tradable, paving the way for their sale and purchase – and potentially boosting the value of the president’s holdings of them.

Early investors can sell up to 20% of their holdings, World Liberty has said. The tokens initially traded above $0.30 in their Monday debut but later fell in price to $0.20. Per data from CoinMarketCap, roughly $1bn worth of the tokens changed hands within the first hour of the opening of trading.

That gave the token a total market capitalisation of just below $7bn, making WLFI the 31st largest crypto token in circulation, according to data from trading analysis firm CoinGecko.

Several of the world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchanges, including Binance, OKX and Bybit, are offering $WLFI tokens on their platforms.

Since World Liberty’s launch last year, the Trump family has made around $500m from the project, according to Reuters calculations based on the company’s terms and conditions, transactions traced by crypto analysis firms, and publicly disclosed deals.

Ownership of roughly a quarter of World Liberty’s tokens has added roughly $5bn to the Trump family fortune, according to the Wall Street Journal. Trump himself, referred to as a “co-founder emeritus” on the company’s website, owns an unspecified amount of $WLFI, but he is barred from selling them, as are other members of the team, including his sons, according to World Liberty. Trump has used the Oval Office to expand crypto-friendly regulations in the US.

The tokens were not made tradable at their initial sale. Instead, they gave holders the right to vote on some changes to the business, such as its underlying code. Early investors have said the primary draw of $WLFI was the connection to Trump and their expectations that the tokens would grow in value due to his backing.

Making the tokens tradable allows investors to determine their price, enabling speculation, earning trading fees for exchanges that list them, and likely stoking interest from a wider swath of crypto investors than when they were merely privately available.

World Liberty and Trump’s other crypto businesses have faced criticism from Democratic lawmakers and government ethics experts who say the Trump family’s forays into the cryptocurrency businesses, at the same time as the president reshapes the regulatory framework that governs digital currencies, represent profound conflicts of interest.

The White House has said repeatedly that Trump’s assets are in a trust managed by his children and that there are no conflicts of interest.