The Trump family’s cryptocurrency venture known as World Liberty Financial had a tepid first day of open-market trading on Monday, surging in value initially before losing most of those gains.
But because of an unusual insider arrangement, the Trump family was still assured a considerable payday as its expanding universe of crypto ventures continued to break norms for business dealings by presidential families.
The big event on Monday was the start of exchange-based trading of World Liberty Financial’s cryptocurrency token, which is traded as $WLFI. It was created last October by the Trump family and its partners, who include Zach Witkoff, the son of Steve Witkoff, the Middle East envoy for President Trump.
But until this week, the World Liberty organizers did not allow the token to be traded on public markets, meaning that after the 35,000 original buyers purchased a total of about $550 million worth of the tokens through this spring, they could not easily sell them. The organizers voted in July to lift that restriction.
That set the stage for the token’s trading debut on Monday 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 percent 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 Monday, meaning they were in line for considerable profits.
The price of the token started Monday at 8 a.m. at 20 cents and surged in the first five minutes to as high as about 40 cents.
It then fell rapidly, settling at about 22 cents as of 5 p.m., 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, Justin Sun, announced on Monday 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 of the $WLFI tokens, suggesting that its holdings as of Monday afternoon were worth about $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 Chase Herro and Zachary Folkman, suggesting a cumulative trading value of about $1.7 billion for these partners as of Monday afternoon, although that is just a value on paper.
That is because the holdings for 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 Monday by the company, as the trading launched.
Still, there was a big windfall on Monday 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 Monday, World Liberty had arranged an unusual deal with a relatively unknown, Nasdaq-traded company called Alt5 Sigma Corporation.
Alt5, based in Las Vegas, announced in August that Zach Witkoff had become its chairman, while the president’s son Eric Trump became a member of the company’s board of directors and Mr. Folkman, the chief operating officer of World Liberty Financial, became a board observer, according to a filing with the 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 $1.5 billion it had raised as part of that shift to buy World Liberty’s token once it began trading on Monday.
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 Donald J. Trump’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 percent 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 Monday that after the start of trading, more than 7.5 billion tokens, or about 8 percent 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 Monday, the statement said, as a total of 24.7 billion tokens are now free to be exchanged. (The rest are still locked up and controlled by the founders and other parties.)
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 cents per token, Zach Witkoff said on Monday in a CNBC television interview.
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 organizations have reported recently, although Alt5 has disputed this reporting. Alt5 did not respond on Monday to a request for comment.
Eric Trump and World Liberty did not respond on Monday to requests for comment. But Eric Trump was in Japan after a stop in Hong Kong, where he participated in two crypto-related events, promoting the company’s crypto offerings.
John Reed Stark, a lawyer who spent two decades at the S.E.C., including a period in which he helped regulate cryptocurrency, said that perhaps most startling about the business ventures was how transparent the Trump family had been about their moneymaking efforts.
“They have this obvious conflict of interest, given Donald J. Trump’s role as president,” Mr. Stark said. “One thing you have to give them credit for: They are doing just everything in plain view. Way back when, you would hide these associations. The president’s family celebrates them like a badge of honor.”
Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., in fact, both celebrated the start of $WLFI exchange platform sales on Monday.
“Big day – @WorldLibertyFi just launched the $WLFI token,” Donald Trump Jr. wrote on social media. “This isn’t some meme coin, it’s the governance backbone of a real ecosystem changing how money moves. Freedom + finance + America FIRST. Home Team.”
President Trump, who has promoted World Liberty and $TRUMP offerings in the past, was quiet about the trading launch on Monday. He was at his golf club in Virginia. According to a tally by one White House reporter, it was his 66th visit to one of his golf courses since he returned to office in January.
Eric Lipton is a Times investigative reporter, who digs into a broad range of topics from Pentagon spending to toxic chemicals.
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