Last month, the Aqua 1 Foundation, founded by Dave Lee, purchased $100 million worth of tokens from the Trump family’s cryptocurrency venture World Liberty Financial (WLF. Someone putting cash directly into the President’s coffers is a normal thing in the Trump era, but there’s something odd about this particular purchase. According to Reuters, Aqua 1 is now the largest publicly known holder of World Liberty Financial tokens, but no one seems to know what the business is or who runs it.
Aqua 1 put out a press release last month announcing its purchase of $WLFI coins, claiming to be a “pioneering Web3-native fund” based in the United Arab Emirates. Per Reuters, the financial center for Abu Dhabi said Aqua 1 “is not registered, licensed, or affiliated” with the government “in any capacity.” The publication also couldn’t find Aqua 1 or its founder registered in the Dubai International Finance Centre, and the government’s Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority had no record of the foundation, either.
The company barely has a footprint anywhere, as its website is just 44 days old according to Whois records related to the domain’s registration, set up in late May—about a month before dropping $100 million into the Trump family’s pockets.
It also doesn’t appear to have much going on in terms of investments other than giving money to Trump and friends. Reuters cites data from crypto tracker Arkham that shows the company transferring $80 million to World Liberty Financial in June. Prior to that, it made transfers of $9 million in March and $3 million in April to unidentified wallets and received some $90 million from a single account on the OKX crypto exchange. So basically, all of the money it has is now invested in $WLFI.
The founder, Dave Lee, is also a bit of a ghost. He has a small social footprint—his X account was registered in 2023, and he barely posts. In fact, he just started posting to announce Aqua 1’s work with World Liberty Financial. He claims in one post that his foundation was “building with World Liberty Financial” behind the scenes and that Aqua 1 had “Backed it, partnered with it, and now watching it make history.” He provides no details on what is involved in that supposed partnership, other than giving WLF money.
For what it’s worth, there appears to be people helping WLF behind the scenes and without disclosures: Bloomberg reported that Binance assisted the company with the coding work prior to the launch of the company’s stablecoin, USD1—which made the token functional and allowed it to be used the United Arab Emirates to buy a $2 billion stake in Binance. In this case, we know exactly who runs Binance: Changpeng Zhao, who was charged by the U.S. government for money laundering in 2023 and is now seeking a presidential pardon. Probably a coincidence.
