This is what I've been harping on for years about shittypants and he's all in. And it's all criminals and snake oil. djt/dwac is a full on laundering scam. And they're laundering untraceable crypto while doing it. He's got at least 5 different but related crypto scams and they're all inbred. And fuckface pardoned this guy to help him. One evil fuck. "He also repeated a pledge to free Silk Road’s Ulbricht. (In January, Trump pardoned Ulbricht.)"
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TOKEN INVESTMENTS
Trump collected some of his N.F.T. fees in the form of digital currency, giving him his first incentive to start talking it up. In December, 2023, Arkham, a research firm, reported that a digital wallet linked to Trump held about four million dollars’ worth of crypto. On his most recent disclosure form, Trump reported that his digital wallet contained at least a million dollars’ worth of crypto.
Trump, in contrast with Eric, has said that his love affair with crypto began in 2024. At a bitcoin conference that July, he warned the audience that “most people have no idea what the hell it is—you know that, right?” But his Presidential campaign had begun receiving big contributions in crypto. If he still sounded hazy about how it all worked, he nonetheless promised the conference attendees that he’d make the U.S. “the crypto capital of the planet.” He also repeated a pledge to free Silk Road’s Ulbricht. (In January, Trump pardoned Ulbricht.)
Around the time of that conference, Donald, Jr., and Eric started dropping hints about a new crypto venture of their own. It formally appeared in September, 2024, under the name World Liberty Financial. The company entered a sector known as “decentralized finance” that involves the borrowing, lending, and trading of cryptocurrency. Competitors already filled the field, and nobody at World Liberty had a successful track record in decentralized finance. The startup offered few details about its plans, saying only that it would begin selling digital tokens that entitled a buyer to vote, at some point, on what its future plans would entail. The tokens somewhat resembled stock certificates, except that they conferred no share of the company’s profits, couldn’t be sold or transferred, and came under scant government regulation. Accordingly, only non-Americans and certain big investors could legally buy them. The founders said that they intended to raise three hundred million dollars by selling the tokens, but by the start of November World Liberty had brought in only $2.7 million.
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Soon, however, World Liberty had an edge—the President. The company billed itself as the only decentralized-finance company “inspired by Donald J. Trump.” A photograph of Trump raising his fist dominated the company’s website, which called him its “chief crypto advocate.” Trump participated in a desultory two-hour live stream introducing the company, in which he portrayed investing in crypto as a kind of national duty, “whether we like it or not.” The President’s youngest son, Barron, an N.Y.U. freshman, was also involved in the company, as were Steve Witkoff’s sons, Zach and Alex. Most of World Liberty’s profits belonged to the Trumps, too. The company’s website said that the President had agreed “to promote the WLF and the WLF protocol from time to time,” and in exchange a shell company controlled by his family would receive roughly three-quarters of the revenue from the voting token. World Liberty initially said, on its website, that the Trumps would own sixty per cent of its eventual business; around June, it lowered that to forty per cent, without explanation. White, the crypto skeptic, told me that it was still unclear what, if anything, the Trumps might have contributed other than their name: “The whole thing has been a Trump business that aimed to give some plausible deniability to the Trumps.” (Cynical buyers of the token may have bet that if Trump won the election and loosened crypto rules, World Liberty might let investors resell their tokens, potentially at a profit. The rules did indeed relax, and in July the company announced that it will allow trading. The Trumps, as part of their deal to promote World Liberty Financial, were given millions of tokens, which they will be able to unload.)
The Trump connection began paying off shortly after his election, beginning with a bellwether investment by Justin Sun, a Chinese-born crypto billionaire. Sun founded a crypto network called Tron and his own cryptocurrency, Tronix. In 2023, the S.E.C. accused him of orchestrating bogus trades in order to fraudulently inflate prices. The S.E.C. also said that he’d made undisclosed payments to Lindsay Lohan, Lil Yachty, and other celebrities to get them to hype his crypto; the celebrities agreed to turn over more than four hundred thousand dollars in penalties and illicit gains. The S.E.C. further alleged that, although Sun could not legally sell to Americans, he had found furtive ways to do so. (He has denied any wrongdoing.) Nonetheless, crypto traders revered him for his riches. After Trump’s 2024 victory, Sun bought $75 million in World Liberty tokens and signed on as a formal adviser. Not long after the Inauguration, Sun’s imprimatur had helped bring in $550 million; the Trump family’s cut appears to be about $412.5 million. (Trump reported an initial $57.4 million from World Liberty on his latest financial disclosure.) Trump’s new Administration soon ended virtually all legal or regulatory actions against crypto traders, and on February 26th the S.E.C. put its case against Sun on hold, with the aim of negotiating a resolution.
Estimated gain: $412.5 million
Running total: $1.4 billion
THE CRYPTO GULF
In March, World Liberty announced that it would sell a type of cryptocurrency known as stablecoin. Unlike buying bitcoin or other digital assets, purchasing stablecoin is supposed to resemble putting money into a checking account. A buyer can pass them to other digital wallets the way you might transfer money from one checking account to another; an owner of stablecoin should always be able to redeem them for dollars, at a constant value. Until July, stablecoins were largely unregulated, and the best known have become a mainstay of money laundering; some issuers, meanwhile, have diverted supposedly secure deposits into crypto Ponzi schemes.
World Liberty, however, offered the special credibility of a Presidential endorsement, and promised to back its stablecoin, USD1, with short-term U.S. Treasury bills. In the interval between the sale of USD1s and their redemption for dollars, the company stood to profit from interest that it would earn on those T-bills. At present Treasury yields, World Liberty can earn more than four per cent annually on the value of any stablecoin it sells—a profitable business with little risk, if the company can persuade buyers to embrace USD1.
On May 1st, Zach Witkoff, flanked by Justin Sun and Eric Trump, announced at a crypto conference in Dubai that a company owned by the U.A.E.’s ruling family had become World Liberty’s first major stablecoin customer, buying two billion dollars’ worth of USD1. Doing business with the U.A.E.’s rulers posed an obvious conflict of interest for the Trumps. But it was equally significant that the Emiratis planned to use USD1 as payment for a stake in Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange. Binance and its controlling shareholder, Changpeng Zhao, known as C.Z., pleaded guilty in 2023 to evading U.S. sanctions and violating anti-money-laundering laws. He served two months in prison; Binance agreed to pay $4.3 billion in fines and forfeiture, and to submit to government monitoring. Binance will now determine when to cash in the two billion dollars in stablecoin from the Emiratis, thus controlling World Liberty’s ability to collect interest on it. That gives C.Z. leverage over the Trumps at the same time that government-appointed monitors are supervising Binance. In May, C.Z. acknowledged on a podcast that he’d applied for a pardon. Binance has reportedly also sought to have its monitoring withdrawn.
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Cartoon by Christopher Weyant
Bloomberg News recently reported that Binance accounts for ninety per cent of the USD1 in circulation. If C.Z. holds on to it for the remainder of Trump’s term, and Treasury interest rates stay at or above their current level, World Liberty will likely make more than $280 million. Under the ownership split at the time of the sale, about $168 million would go to the Trumps. I’d be surprised if Binance sells while Trump is in office.
Two weeks after World Liberty’s announcement in Dubai, Trump declared that the U.S. would provide the U.A.E. with advanced technology for a joint ten-square-mile artificial-intelligence data center. This decision overrode long-standing American concerns that the U.A.E.’s close ties to China made it vulnerable to espionage and to the theft of sensitive technology. Some news outlets have reported that those security concerns might yet stop the project; but, if completed, it could vault the tiny monarchy to the forefront of the A.I. race—and lock the U.S. in to dependence on Abu Dhabi.
With the data center awaiting final approval, a shadowy new Emirati fund, the Aqua 1 Foundation, announced on June 26th that it would buy a hundred million dollars in World Liberty voting tokens. Aqua 1, which has no public history, said in a statement that it would make the hundred-million-dollar payment “to participate in governance of the decentralized finance platform inspired by President Donald J. Trump.” Since World Liberty has said that the Trump family gets roughly seventy-five per cent of the proceeds from sales of those tokens, that’s seventy-five million in Trump profits. This would bring the family’s profits from Emirati deals with World Liberty to $243 million.
Estimated gain: $243 million
Running total: $1.7 billion
AMERICAN BITCOIN
The origins of the Trump family’s third crypto business date back about five years, to when Donald, Jr., and Eric got to know Kyle Wool, a stockbroker who had recently left Morgan Stanley. Wool wore his hair in the slicked-back style of Michael Douglas in “Wall Street” and golfed at the Trump club in Jupiter. At the time, he oversaw wealth management at an obscure brokerage, Revere Securities. (Morgan Stanley paid fifty thousand dollars to settle a lawsuit claiming that Wool had made unauthorized trades with a client’s money—one of several similar allegations he has faced. He has denied any wrongdoing.)
Wool’s career path from there has been convoluted. He joined the board of Aikido Pharma, a penny-stock biotech company that had reported no revenue for years. Wool helped Aikido transform itself into another small brokerage, called Dominari Holdings. The company rented office space in Trump Tower, and in 2023 Wool became the C.E.O. of its main business, Dominari Securities. It has reported losses of more than fourteen million dollars in each of the past three years.
In early February, Donald, Jr., and Eric joined Dominari’s board of advisers and were given a roughly six-million-dollar stake in the company. In the days before this was announced, Dominari’s share price doubled, to six dollars—it’s not clear why—and afterward it doubled again, giving the Trumps a sizable paper profit. On February 18th, Dominari and the Trump brothers announced a new joint venture—a third of it owned by Dominari, virtually the rest by the Trumps—which would invest in A.I. data centers.
A month later, they sold most of that nebulous partnership, at a windfall profit, to Hut 8, a publicly traded bitcoin miner. (“Mining” refers to computing involved in tracking and recording bitcoin transactions on the blockchain—that spreadsheet in the sky. Under the software protocol governing bitcoin, miners receive new bitcoin as payment for this computational labor.) Hut 8 had agreed to buy eighty per cent of the Trump-Wool partnership. As payment, it contributed to the new company almost all of its mining operation—including equipment that, according to a press release, was worth a hundred million dollars.
It’s unclear what the Trump brothers added to the new company, to be called American Bitcoin, aside from their family name. They haven’t disclosed any financial contribution or payment, but they will own about thirteen per cent of the company—indirectly owning thirteen million dollars’ worth of equipment. Molly White told me that many people in the industry believe that, to a crypto company like American Bitcoin, “the Trump name alone is worth thirteen million.” Investors would bid up the company’s price purely “because it is associated with the President,” she argued. In a press release, Hut 8 said that Eric Trump would be American Bitcoin’s “chief strategy officer,” and praised his “commercial acumen, capital markets expertise, and commitment to the advancement” of crypto.
Other metrics suggest that the Trumps’ stake could be worth a lot more than thirteen million dollars. American Bitcoin plans to become publicly traded by merging with a penny-stock bitcoin miner, Gryphon Digital Mining. Bitcoin miners typically trade for three or four times the value of the crypto they produce in a year. At current prices and recent mining rates, that could put the value of American Bitcoin at about $610 million, making the Trumps’ stake worth about $79 million. In an interview with a crypto website, Eric Trump said that he got “a little special twinkle” in his eye whenever he saw the Dominari team, adding, “They’ve brought a lot of great things to us in the past, and so many of those great things have worked out so incredibly well.”
The executives of Hut 8, Dominari, and American Bitcoin all declined to talk to me, or to answer e-mailed questions about why the transaction seemingly gives the Trumps so much for so little. Mining bitcoin is an increasingly difficult way to make money. To limit the total amount of bitcoin on the market, the software protocol governing the cryptocurrency caps the amount that can ever be “mined.” About ninety-five per cent of that has already been mined, and the protocol preserves that limit by periodically halving the amount of “new” bitcoin rewarded for the work of tracking transactions. Since that game is getting harder, the Trumps and their partners in American Bitcoin have said that they intend to use mining as part of a more speculative strategy. Instead of merely selling the bitcoin they mine, they will follow a current trend in the crypto industry, pioneered by the financier Michael Saylor, and borrow money to buy more when the price falls. This makes speculating in bitcoin even riskier. But that leverage multiplies the payoff if bitcoin’s price keeps rising.
That may be where Donald, Jr., and Eric come in. With the special credibility of being sons of the President, they have become tireless salesmen for crypto, touting bitcoin in particular as “digital gold.” At a recent bitcoin conference in Las Vegas, Donald, Jr., implored every “average American” to “buy as much as you can.” He and Eric promised the public that even the smallest amount of bitcoin would soon be worth “an absolute fortune,” and they emphasized that the President and his crypto-policy team now had a personal stake in cryptocurrency. “The people who are making these rules,” Donald, Jr., said, are now “invested in it themselves.”
If bitcoin crashes, ordinary Americans who heeded the Trump brothers’ advice to buy as much as possible could lose their savings. As for Wool, his friendship with Eric and Donald, Jr., has already paid off, through Dominari’s stake in American Bitcoin. And in June Justin Sun and his family hired Dominari to arrange a takeover. The Sun family agreed to pay as much $210 million to transform a publicly traded maker of theme-park knickknacks into a vehicle for Sun’s crypto.
The Trump brothers, through the stake in Dominari they were given, stand to profit from the Sun transaction, too. Their stake is currently worth about nine million dollars. But, since Dominari’s stock would likely tumble if they sold, I won’t count that as profit.
If the price of bitcoin soars “to the Moon,” as the Trumps predict it will, their stake in American Bitcoin could deliver profits far beyond the current value of its assets. Until that happens, though, I will take the current value of their stake in the venture’s mining equipment as a conservative estimate of their profits so far: thirteen million dollars.
Estimated gain: $13 million
Running total: $1.71 billion
TRUMP MEDIA GOES CRYPTO
The family’s fourth crypto venture is an attempt by Trump Media & Technology Group to reinvent itself. In April, the company capitalized on the new Administration’s crypto-friendly policies by announcing a plan to sell volatile crypto assets to ordinary investors. The technical difficulty of buying crypto has long deterred most small and unsophisticated investors. But, under Trump, the S.E.C. has made it much easier for investment companies to sell crypto to anyone with a standard brokerage account, through shares in what are known as exchange-traded funds, or E.T.F.s, that track the price of bitcoin, Ethereum, or other digital assets. The policy change represents a giant advance for the crypto industry. Trump Media jumped on the bandwagon, making plans to sell Trump-branded E.T.F.s, which will trade on the New York Stock Exchange. To do so, the company formed a partnership with Crypto.com, a Singapore-based exchange that was fighting an S.E.C. enforcement action for violating the agency’s regulations. Crypto.com had sought to win Trump’s favor by donating a million dollars to his Inauguration; a few days after its deal with Trump Media, it announced that the S.E.C.’s investigation had ended.
Dozens of better-established investment firms are also setting up crypto E.T.F.s. But Trump Media, which trumpets slogans about the Patriot Economy, is the only one tied to the President. Devin Nunes, the C.E.O. of Trump Media and a former Republican congressman, said in a statement that its E.T.F.s would offer an alternative to “woke funds” and cater to “investors who believe in America First principles.” The size of the market for Trump Media’s planned E.T.F.s remains to be seen.
Not long after the Trump brothers put American Bitcoin in motion, Trump Media began speculating on crypto. This past spring, the company, taking advantage of its high meme-stock share price, raised more than $2.3 billion by selling shares and convertible bonds in private transactions to about fifty big investors. Then, in July, Trump Media said it had spent that money on bitcoin and on options for more.
In the past year, Trump Media has also been quietly raising cash by selling off other new shares in private transactions, ending the first quarter with $759 million in cash and short-term investments. With its bitcoin stockpile, the company held $3.1 billion in liquid assets. Trump Media could now arguably maximize its returns simply by shuttering its money-losing Truth Social platform. Trump Media’s crypto strategy is a gamble: in the past year, the price of a bitcoin has fallen below fifty-five thousand dollars before rising again to its current price, about a hundred and fifteen thousand. Yet while the price remains at this level those liquid assets put a floor under the stock price. All the equity that the company has issued has reduced the President’s stake to about forty-two per cent. (The potential conversion of notes to shares could someday lower it further.) At current bitcoin prices, Trump’s stake in that stockpile of bitcoin and cash is equivalent to $1.3 billion. If the company chose, it could conceivably sell that hoard and pass all the money to shareholders as a dividend—thus passing that stake to Trump in cash. Astonishingly, for now, the financial alchemy of turning a meme stock into cash and bitcoin has added some $1.3 billion in Presidential profit to our tally. Dubinsky, the forensic accountant, told me the gambit was “just north of selling snake oil.”
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