President Donald Trump's family made as much as $5 billion with the launch of a new cryptocurrency token, according to a new report by the Wall Street Journal on Monday evening.
The debut of the token, per the report, "is akin to an initial public offering, in which the cryptocurrency, called WLFI, can now be bought and sold on the open market like a listed company’s shares. Beforehand, people who had privately bought WLFI from the Trump venture, World Liberty Financial, hadn’t been able to exchange their tokens."
Around a quarter of all WLFI tokens that have been issued are held by the Trump family, including President Donald Trump himself, the report noted; furthermore, "Trump’s three sons are co-founders of World Liberty, while it names the president a 'Co-Founder Emeritus.'"
This means that the Trump family's crypto holdings are likely the largest asset they hold, said the report, eclipsing even the value of their real estate holdings, which is their core business for several decades.
"World Liberty says founders and team members’ tokens remain 'locked,' meaning they still can’t sell them," noted the report. "But the trading launch now puts a real-world valuation on their holdings, which previously were valued based on private sales."
The Trump family's founding of a crypto business has raised alarm bells from the start, with Democratic officials warning that the Trump family is leveraging the power of the president's office to boost the crypto industry and their own holdings' worth by extension. This was a major sticking point that briefly held up passage earlier this year of the GENIUS Act, legislation that imposed the first-ever regulatory framework for stablecoins.