2 weeks ago
9
You have a preview view of this article while we are checking your access. When we have confirmed access, the full article content will load.
World Liberty Financial’s cryptocurrency token fell short of investors’ hopes. But a previous deal paved the way for a payment to the Trump family of potentially hundreds of millions of dollars.
Sept. 1, 2025, 6:56 p.m. ET
The Trump family’s cryptocurrency venture known as World Liberty Financial had a tepid first day of open-market trading on Monday, surging in value initially before losing most of those gains.
But because of an unusual insider arrangement, the Trump family was still assured a considerable payday as its expanding universe of crypto ventures continued to break norms for business dealings by presidential families.
The big event on Monday was the start of exchange-based trading of World Liberty Financial’s cryptocurrency token, which is traded as $WLFI. It was created last October by the Trump family and its partners, who include Zach Witkoff, the son of Steve Witkoff, the Middle East envoy for President Trump.
But until this week, the World Liberty organizers did not allow the token to be traded on public markets, meaning that after the 35,000 original buyers purchased a total of about $550 million worth of the tokens through this spring, they could not easily sell them. The organizers voted in July to lift that restriction.
That set the stage for the token’s trading debut on Monday on some of the world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchanges, including Binance, Bybit and OKX.
The original buyers were allowed to cash out of as much as 20 percent of their purchases, and some of them apparently did just that. Many of these original buyers had purchased the World Liberty token at a fraction of the price it entered the market with on Monday, meaning they were in line for considerable profits.
