Trump Family’s Crypto Debut Stumbles While He Personally Earns $3.6 Billion
The Trump family enterprise, World Liberty Financial, launched its cryptocurrency WLFI on Monday. It reached a peak price of $0.3999 within ten minutes but fell to $0.2336 after 24 hours, a decline of 25%.
World Liberty Financial was established in October last year, with U.S. President Trump serving as honorary co-founder and his three sons as co-founders. The company created 100 billion WLFI tokens and privately sold 25 billion of them for $5.5 billion.
The "Crypto Treasury" is essentially a Nasdaq-listed blockchain company named ALT5 Sigma. According to an agreement between the two parties, ALT5 will sell $1.5 billion worth of equity to World Liberty Financial, with half of the payment made in WLFI.
Prior to WLFI, Trump had already ventured into the cryptocurrency space multiple times: He launched the meme coin $TRUMP earlier this year, earning $350 million; his media company, Trump Media, purchased $2.5 billion worth of Bitcoin in June to build a "Bitcoin Treasury"; and World Liberty Financial itself issued a dollar-pegged stablecoin, USD1, valued at $2.7 billion in April.
Despite promotional efforts by Trump’s eldest son in a "live-streaming sales" style, WLFI had a rocky start on its first trading day. Although it rose to $0.3999 within ten minutes of launch, its price quickly fell back to the $0.21–$0.23 range. It is reported that the total value of tradable WLFI currently on the market is approximately $6.4 billion, while Trump’s previously held 15.7 billion WLFI tokens are worth about $3.6 billion.
In a letter dated April, U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren and Representative Maxine Waters pointed out that the Trump family’s roles in World Liberty Financial represent an unprecedented conflict of interest.
They emphasized that this relationship provides the Trump administration with "clear motives" to push regulatory agencies like the U.S. SEC to adopt positions favorable to the cryptocurrency industry, which would directly benefit the president’s family.
