World Liberty Financial was announced by Eric Trump in August 2024 and debuted on September 16, 2024, in a livestream on X with Trump, his sons and business partners, seven weeks before the election. It is led by the crypto entrepreneurs Chase Herro and Zak Folkman along with members of the Trump family and Zach Witkoff, the son of Trump's Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff; Barron Trump, then 18, was named its “DeFi visionary.” It sells a governance token, WLFI, and a dollar-backed stablecoin, USD1. Trump had once called Bitcoin a “scam.”
The company became one of his largest sources of income. His 2025 financial disclosure reports about $594 million through the entity that holds his family's stake, mostly proceeds from World Liberty token sales, up from just over $57 million in token sales the year before (see Trump's Disclosure Lists About $2 Billion Coming In During His First Year Back, $1.4 Billion of It From Crypto). The crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun announced a $30 million purchase of its tokens in November 2024. Four days before the inauguration, a firm backed by the UAE's national security adviser bought 49 percent of the company for $500 million (see A Firm Tied to the UAE's National Security Adviser Bought 49% of Trump's Crypto Company Four Days Before His Inauguration). In May 2025 its USD1 stablecoin was chosen to close an Emirati fund's $2 billion investment in Binance, whose founder Trump pardoned in October (see Trump Pardoned Binance's Founder After Binance Did Business With His Family's Crypto Firm, Then Said 'I Don't Know Who He Is').
The administration it profits from regulates its industry. The Justice Department shut down its National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team in April 2025 (see Blanche Shut Down the Justice Department's Crypto Enforcement Team While He Still Owned Crypto, as the Trump Family Built a Crypto Business). Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Jack Reed asked the Justice Department and the Treasury in November 2025 for information on any investigations of World Liberty, citing reports that it sold tokens to buyers linked to North Korea, Russia and other illicit actors. A staff report by House Judiciary Committee Democrats estimated the family's crypto holdings at “as much as $11.6 billion,” an upper-bound estimate. The company's bid for a federal bank charter is covered in Trump's Family Crypto Firm Wins Conditional Approval for a Federal Trust Bank Charter From a Trump-Appointed Regulator.
Correction (September 25, 2026): this entry's title valued the family's crypto holdings at $11.6 billion, and its text put that at 73 percent of Trump's net worth. The $11.6 billion figure was in none of the entry's cited sources; it comes from a House Judiciary Democrats staff report, now cited and described as an upper-bound estimate, and the 73 percent figure could not be found in any source and has been removed. The entry also said World Liberty launched its lending platform in March 2025 (it launched in January 2026), described it as built on Aave (outdated), cited December 2025 profit figures that were not in its sources, said an Abu Dhabi state fund invested in World Liberty (the Emirati fund MGX invested in Binance, using World Liberty's stablecoin), and quoted Trump calling crypto “a disaster waiting to happen,” a phrase no source contains. Those passages have been corrected or removed.