Trump and sons' stake in crypto firm worth $5bn

The crypto token backed by the Trump family has started publicly trading, giving the holdings owned by the US president and his sons a value of roughly $5bn (£3.7bn).

The Trumps launched crypto firm World Liberty Financial in the middle of the presidential campaign last year, drawing questions about potential conflicts of interest as he became entangled in a industry he would be poised to regulate.

The company raised money by selling its eponymous digital tokens to investors, who were initially barred from selling.

But investors voted in July to allow early purchasers, not including founders like Trump family, to sell up to 20% of their holdings of the coin, which trades as WLFI.

As of Tuesday, WLFI was trading at around $0.22 on exchanges such as Binance and Coinbase, after sinking roughly 50% since the start of trading on Monday.

While the fall indicates tepid demand, the coin is still trading at a higher price than what many early buyers would have paid initially, putting them in line for profit.

“We’re setting a new standard for financial freedom; built on trust, speed, and U.S. values,” Eric Trump wrote on social media. “This is a huge moment for the future of money!”

According to financial disclosures, Trump himself holds roughly 15.75 billion WLFI tokens worth more than $3.4bn, making crypto the most significant source of his fortune.

The Trumps overall controls just under a quarter of the roughly 100 billion WLFI coins that it created last year, giving them claim to holdings worth roughly $5bn, as of Tuesday’s prices.

Trump and his sons also get a cut of the revenues generated by coin sales, an arrangement that has already helped to bring in more than $500m, according to Reuters calculations.

That revenue got a boost last month after World Liberty Financial joined forces with another publicly traded firm that had raised $750m from investors to buy the cryptocurrency, a deal that puts World Liberty Financial in the unusual position of being both buyer and seller of the WLFI token.

Democrats have consistently raised alarm about Trump’s crypto dealings, arguing that World Liberty Financial and other coins he has backed are vehicles for corruption, conflict of interest and grift.

The Trump administration has just as consistently dismissed the criticism, even as the president has dramatically shifted the government’s posture toward the industry.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the administration’s policies were “driving innovation and economic opportunity for all Americans”.

“The media’s continued attempts to fabricate conflicts of interest are irresponsible and reinforce the public’s distrust in what they read,” Ms Leavitt said in a statement. “Neither the President nor his family have ever engaged, or will ever engage, in conflicts of interest.”

Token offerings, like the one from World Liberty Financial, faced intense scrutiny under the Biden administration, which argued that they were essentially a kind of stock sale and subject to existing rules governing publicly traded companies on issues such as conflicts of interest and disclosure.

Trump, who said during the campaign he wanted to make the US the “crypto capital of the world”, had vowed a more hands-off approach.

Last month, the Department of Justice disbanded its task force focused on crypto crimes.

Financial regulators have also explicitly disavowed the Biden administration’s guidance on securities.

“Despite what the SEC has said in the past, most crypto assets are not securities,” his top financial regulator Paul Atkins, the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, said in a speech in July.

“We need a regulatory framework for crypto asset securities that allows these products to flourish within American markets.”