The Trump family just got a lot richer—at least on paper. World Liberty Financial, a cryptocurrency company controlled by the president’s family, made its governance token—a type of crypto token that grants voting rights to holders—available for public trading, ballooning the unrealized value of tokens held by the Trump family by billions of dollars. Reports that the family’s wealth has increased by upward of $5 billion have flooded media outlets ever since.
The launch of public trading for $WLFI also has ruffled some feathers on Capitol Hill, where the language of a broader crypto legislation package is beginning to take form. Crypto firms, lobbyists, and policy experts are anxiously anticipating the release by the Senate Banking and Agriculture committees of respective drafts of the “market structure bill” that represents the first legislative attempt to design a comprehensive regulatory framework for the cryptocurrency industry. While the legislation would be an important step toward legitimizing blockchain technology, controversy surrounding the Trump family’s growing involvement in the industry risks making bipartisan regulatory efforts more difficult. “There's a lot of press right now on the $5 billion from World Liberty Financial, and that's definitely starting to rub folks in the Senate a little bit and get them uneasy,” a crypto industry expert who was granted anonymity to speak freely about the industry told The Dispatch.
The origins of World Liberty Financial.
World Liberty Financial (WLF) was founded in fall 2024 by Zak Folkman and Chase Herro—two crypto entrepreneurs who were introduced to the Trump family by longtime friend Steve Witkoff, who now serves as the president’s special envoy to the Middle East. Witkoff’s sons—Zach and Alex Witkoff—and Trump’s sons—Eric, Donald Jr., and Barron Trump—are also listed as co-founders of the company. An October 2024 SEC filing by World Liberty Financial, however, identified Folkman and Herro as the only executive officers and directors of the company.
While the Trumps are not formal directors of World Liberty Financial, the company is substantially controlled by the family, which, through various LLCs, owns approximately 38 percent of WLF’s equity, according to disclosures on the company’s website. Of that ownership interest, approximately 70 percent belongs to a trust of which President Trump is the sole beneficiary, while the remaining 30 percent belongs to various other members of the Trump family.
World Liberty Financial has drawn ire from opponents of the president since its launch in October, particularly from Democrats on the House Financial Services Committee, who, in April, sent a letter to the Securities and Exchange Commission demanding “transparency regarding potential conflicts of interest and whether Trump’s financial ties have influenced SEC decision-making.”
What does World Liberty Financial do?
World Liberty Financial was launched shortly before the 2024 presidential election as a decentralized finance (DeFi) project with a mission to “democratize access to financial opportunities while fortifying the global status of the US Dollar.” DeFi typically refers to blockchain-based systems that allow people to access financial services like lending and borrowing without relying on traditional financial institutions like banks. According to the project’s “gold paper,” WLF plans to support both stablecoins backed by the U.S. dollar and DeFi applications built to “preserve the US Dollar’s status, ensuring it remains the global reserve currency for the next century.”
Almost a year after its launch, however, it is still relatively unclear what exactly World Liberty Financial’s central focus is. Many of the company’s proposed projects—including an exchange, app, and lending and borrowing platform—haven’t materialized, and few details are available about the company’s broader business plan. In the fast-moving crypto space, however, it isn’t particularly unusual for businesses—especially young ones like World Liberty Financial—to pursue many different projects at once and jump on trends as they come. “It's pretty common for these crypto businesses to morph over time, especially within the DeFi space. Pivots in crypto are pretty common, and especially very market driven,” the crypto industry expert told The Dispatch. “Especially for a group trying to chase headlines like World Liberty Financial, they’re definitely on top of trying to be on the latest trend.”
So far, World Liberty Financial has established two primary products: a governance token and a stablecoin. Governance tokens grant holders voting power over decisions about how a blockchain project is run, such as through changes to a project’s underlying protocol or fee structures. Last October, World Liberty Financial minted 100 billion of its governance tokens, $WLFI, on the Ethereum blockchain, which it began selling privately for an initial price of 1.5 cents each. A second round of sales priced the token at 5 cents. According to the company, it had sold at least $550 million worth of tokens by March 2025. The governance token has drawn controversy over potential conflicts of interest involving the White House and holders of the token. In February, for example, the SEC asked a court to pause a case against Chinese crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun, who happened to have purchased $75 million of the token.
The Trump family and entities affiliated with it collectively own 22.5 billion $WLFI tokens, according to disclosures on the token’s website—almost a quarter of the total minted supply. The president’s most recent financial disclosure report indicates that he personally holds 15.75 billion of those tokens. Along with their direct ownership of $WLFI tokens, Trump and his family are also entitled to 75 percent of all proceeds from sales of $WFLI—although the exact breakdown among the individual family members is unknown. However, according to the financial disclosure report filed in June 2025, the president had earned $57,355,532 in revenue from $WFLI token sales by the end of 2024. Those initial profits from token sales are likely only the tip of a lucrative crypto iceberg for the Trump family.
Public trading.
While early investors were able to privately purchase $WLFI tokens beginning last year, the governance tokens were not tradable, meaning they could not be sold to other investors once purchased, limiting their value as a speculative asset with a high trading volume. Instead, the tokens offered buyers only the ability to vote on proposals and changes to certain parameters of World Liberty Financial. Governance tokens like $WLFI are relatively common in the crypto universe, particularly in relation to DeFi companies.
However, on July 9, World Liberty Financial submitted a proposal to $WLFI investors to make the governance token tradable. It passed overwhelmingly, allowing a subset of the token’s investors to unlock and trade up to 20 percent of their holdings. Public trading opened for the token on September 1, with $WLFI initially trading at slightly above 30 cents per token. The price has declined steadily since then, falling to around 21 cents by Monday—still significantly more than the 1.5-cent and 5-cent cost to initial investors, many of whom chose to take profits last week by selling their unlocked tokens. “The WLFI governance launch was a tremendous success: so much has been accomplished in the last year and early supporters are thrilled,” David Waschman, a spokesman for World Liberty Financial, told The Dispatch in an email when asked about the trading debut.
It makes sense that early supporters are thrilled. At its current price, President Trump’s personal $WLFI holdings are now valued at nearly $3.5 billion—although both his and other founders’ tokens remain locked and unavailable for trading. That valuation boosts the Trump family’s combined net worth, at least on paper, by around $4.8 billion—a substantial boon to the family’s total wealth, which the Bloomberg Billionaires Index estimates to be approximately $7.74 billion not including the unrealized value of $WLFI tokens.
An additional vote is expected to take place to determine a schedule for unlocking additional $WLFI tokens, with the tokens owned by founders like Trump “expected to remain non-transferable, and in any case, subject to a longer unlock schedule,” according to World Liberty Financial’s website. So, while Trump’s personal wealth has technically increased on paper, his capacity to actually realize those gains is much less obvious than some headlines suggest.
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