MAGA Inc.: World Liberty Financial

The Trump family cashed in on DeFi just before the 2024 U.S. election by creating a new entity called World Liberty Financial, which is partly owned by a Trump family corporate entity, DT Marks DEFI LLC.

(Click here for the table of contents of MAGA Inc.: A Guide to Trump's World of Crypto Czars, Tech Titans and Prison Profiteers.) 

President Trump and his Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, are listed as cofounders emeritus on WLF’s website. Trump’s three sons, Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump and Barron Trump, are also listed as cofounders, as are Alex and Zach Witkoff, the sons of Steve Witkoff. (Daily operations are overseen by Zach Witkoff as well as two other partners, Zachary Folkman - a businessman who previously oversaw a company called Date Hotter Girls - and Chase Herro - a snake oil salesman and self-labelled “dirtbag on the internet.”)

World Liberty Financial offers the WLFI digital token as well as the USD1 stablecoin. The company takes 75 percent of certain revenue from coin sales, which can be converted into cash. This arrangement has already raked in more than US$500 million for the Trump family, according to calculations by the Reuters news agency.

President Trump personally holds about 15.75 billion WLFI coins, worth over US$3.4 billion at one point, making crypto the largest source of his fortune. Collectively, the Trump family holds 22.5 billion of the roughly 100 billion WLFI tokens it created in 2024, which, in early September 2025, were worth roughly US$5 billion. 

“It’s one of the more successful things we’ve ever done,” Eric Trump, the president’s son who helps run WLF, said in an interview with the New York Times newspaper. “We’re setting a new standard for financial freedom; built on trust, speed, and U.S. values,” Eric Trump wrote on social media.

The Trump administration is jam-packed with crypto enthusiasts like Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy. A July 2025 Washington Post investigation showed that some 70 nominees and officials of Trump's administration had invested in crypto and blockchain companies or bought cryptocurrency.

On March 7, 2025, Trump hosted the first-ever “crypto summit” at the White House, where he vowed to end former president Joe Biden’s “war on crypto.” (This is despite the fact that Trump himself criticized crypto as recently as 2021 and called bitcoin a scam.)

“I promised to make America the bitcoin superpower of the world and the crypto capital of the planet,” he told crypto industry executives. “And we’re taking historic action to deliver on that promise.” 

In March 2025, Trump called on the U.S. Congress to pass legislation governing stablecoins. He got his wish with the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins Act (known by its acronym – the Genius Act.) Signed into law in July 2025, the Genius Act establishes federal regulations for stablecoins, which classifies them as “commodities” instead of “securities,” effectively guaranteeing less oversight. 

Since Trump’s return to the White House, the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission has paused or ended over a dozen cases involving cryptocurrency fraud.

Also under Trump, the U.S. Department of Justice has disbanded its task force on crypto crimes and dropped a Biden-era “extreme care” warning about 401k retirement plans investing in crypto. 

Perhaps the greatest gift Trump has given WLF is a surefire path to foreign deals.

One lucrative deal involves MGX, an investment firm owned by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan and his megarich ruling family in the United Arab Emirates, which used WLF’s USD1 stablecoin to complete a US$2 billion investment in Binance, a huge crypto exchange.

Soon after this, Trump visited Abu Dhabi to personally sign an agreement under which the Emirates was granted special permission to buy high-powered artificial intelligence chips made by Advanced Micro Devices and Nvidia to use in a major new data center.

And, on April 27, 2025, the Pakistani government announced a deal between WLF and Pakistan’s crypto council “to accelerate blockchain innovation, stablecoin adoption, and decentralized finance (DeFi) integration across Pakistan.”

WLF has also sold its digital tokens to foreign businesses - from Hong Kong to Israel - who are hoping to win Trump's attention.

“It is foreign policy for sale,” Robert Weissman, copresident of consumer rights at nonprofit advocacy group Public Citizen, told Wired magazine. “Never before in American history have foreign governments, as well as people and corporations under investigation, so overtly and directly funneled vast sums to the president of the United States and his family,” he added. “This is far more than is captured by the term ‘conflict of interest.’”

For its part, the White House has dismissed criticism, noting that Trump’s assets are in a trust managed by his children. “The media’s continued attempts to fabricate conflicts of interest are irresponsible and reinforce the public’s distrust in what they read,” Karoline Leavitt, White House press secretary, said in a statement. “Neither the president nor his family have ever engaged, or will ever engage, in conflicts of interest.”