The Trump family just became $5 billion richer (on paper) thanks to its latest crypto venture.
The Trumps’ new digital currency WLFI began trading on Monday with about $1 billion worth of the tokens changing hands within an hour. Despite the token plunging in price on its first day of trading, the family gained as much as $5 billion in hypothetical wealth following the debut, the Wall Street Journal said in a report.
The launch was sort of a crypto version of an initial public offering: early investors who bought the token from Trump’s venture World Liberty Financial were not able to sell any of it until Monday, when they got to do so with high premiums. The token is now available on major exchanges like Binance and Coinbase.
The Trump family and other founders’ tokens still remain locked, but now that the digital currency is trading, those token holdings have real-world valuation. The Trump family, including the President, holds just under a quarter of all WLFI tokens, the WSJ reported.
With its current valuation, WLFI is the Trump family’s most valuable asset, according to the WSJ, even more so than the property portfolio that the family was originally known for.
But crypto is volatile and prone to crashes, and the value of the tokens can shift at any time.
Monday’s news was just the latest in a string of major crypto wins that the President and his family have made headlines for in the past year. Simultaneously, over the past seven months, Trump has overseen deregulatory wins for the cryptocurrency industry that helped install him in office, all the while administration officials cast aside concerns over the ethics and legality of these conflicts of interest.
Trump’s burgeoning crypto empire
Trump’s three sons, Donald Jr, Eric, and Baron, are listed as co-founders of World Liberty Financial, which launched the WLFI token. Trump is listed as “co-founder emeritus.”
The Trump family launched the crypto venture almost exactly a year ago, in the midst of Trump’s very pro-crypto presidential campaign.
The Trumps’ crypto firm also struck a massive deal last month to sell up to $1.5 billion WLFI tokens to a publicly traded fintech company called ALT5 Sigma, and to install Eric Trump as a board member at the fintech company. The deal also saw Zach Witkoff, World Liberty co-founder and son of Trump advisor Steve Witkoff, become the new chairman of ALT5 Sigma.
The family and its related entities have also profited from $TRUMP, a Trump-backed memecoin that has seen its fair share of highs with $14.7 billion market capitalization right before the inauguration, and its fair share of lows with a $2 billion crash in July that wiped out more than $12 billion in market value.
Investors in that memecoin were invited to a special dinner with the President at his golf club in Virginia in May, with the top investors getting invited to a separate VIP reception with Trump.
Trump’s sons Eric and Donald Jr. also launched American Bitcoin earlier this year, which Eric claims is one of the “biggest Bitcoin mining companies on Earth.” That company plans to go public soon through a merger with the Nasdaq-listed Gryphon Digital Mining.
How is this legal?
According to a June 2025 ethics disclosure, Trump earned $57.4 million from his ownership of tokens tied to World Liberty Financial last year.
He is also not the only high-ranking person in his administration with a vested interest in the future of cryptocurrency: Trump’s vice president JD Vance said at a crypto conference in May that he holds “a fair amount of bitcoin,” before adding that he was “eliminating the rules, the red tape, and the lawfare that we saw aimed at crypto” by previous administrations.
Under the Trump administration, a previously aggressive SEC has now turned into one that openly embraces cryptocurrency. Some enforcement actions against crypto firms like Coinbase, Crypto.com, and Kraken were dropped. Trump himself spearheaded and signed into law legislation that legitimized stablecoins just a couple of months after World Liberty Financial debuted its own stablecoin USD1.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt has pushed back on anyone claiming Trump’s crypto deals pose a conflict of interest. But it’s hard to deny that Trump and his family have indeed benefitted massively from the administration’s regulatory push to legitimize cryptocurrency in the mainstream financial system, and now they have another $5 billion (on paper) to show for it.
