Crypto Compliance? How WLF Turns a Pardon into a Trump Family Paycheck!

Charlene Lensburg
Tue, 04 Nov 2025 11:32:26 +0000
Court Cases, Crypto Compliance, Money Laundering, Stablecoins, ticker, Binance, Changpen Zhao, CZ, MGX, Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed, USD1, WLF, World Liberty Financial, Zach Witkoff

World Liberty Financial, the Trump-family crypto vehicle behind stablecoin USD1, now sits at the centre of the CZ pardon controversy. A $2 billion Abu Dhabi–Binance deal executed in USD1 turned the president’s private stablecoin into a global money rail – and a long-term income stream for his own household.

World Liberty Financial: the president’s DeFi side business

In September 2024, Trump announced that his sons would enter the cryptocurrency marketplace with a new venture called World Liberty Financial (WLF). Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. are actively involved in the management of the company, and rely on three partners, Zachary Folkman, Chase Herro, and Zach Witkoff, to maintain daily operations.

World Liberty Financial (WLF) is a DeFi and crypto company founded in 2024 and marketed quite openly as a Trump-family venture. A Trump-controlled business owns about 60% of WLF and is entitled to roughly 75% of revenue from token sales; the family also received 22.5 billion WLFI tokens. Independent analyses estimate that WLF has already generated hundreds of millions of dollars for the Trumps and helped add several billion to the family’s net worth since Trump’s second inauguration.

The Justin Sun Case

In March 2023, the U.S. SEC sued the crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun and his companies for fraud and securities manipulation (Source: SEC).

In October, WLF announced its first cryptocurrency called $WLFI. In 2025, Justin Sun acquired $WLFI tokens, reportedly for at least $75 million. Sun was also named a WLF advisor (Source: The Defiant). In February 2025, shortly after Trump took office as president for the second time, the U.S. SEC paused a civil fraud case against Sun and, according to multiple observers, effectively dropped after Sun’s WLF investment and Trump’s return to office (Source: Reuters).

The picture is not “some relatives doing a side hustle.” It is a head-of-state effectively sitting on the cap table – and at the top of the revenue waterfall – of a high-leverage crypto platform.

USD1: “public” stablecoin, private cash flow

USD1, launched in March 2025, is WLF’s dollar-pegged stablecoin, advertised as being backed by U.S. Treasuries, cash and equivalents. Around $2 billion of USD1 is now in circulation, much of it parked on Binance and partner venues (Source: CoinMarketCap)

Those reserves are invested in bonds and money-market funds that generate around $80 million a year in interest for WLF. Wikipedia. If the Trump entity indeed receives 75% of WLF’s revenues, that single stablecoin product plausibly channels about $60 million per year towards the president’s family – before any upside from WLFI-token price appreciation. (That figure is an inference based on public numbers, but it gives a sense of scale.)

This is why the oft-repeated line that USD1 is “just another stablecoin” is misleading. Economically, USD1 is a presidential family income stream wrapped in a DeFi wrapper.

The MGX–Binance transaction that turbo-charged USD1

The real inflection point came in May 2025. Abu Dhabi-backed MGX announced it would use $2 billion of USD1 to finance an investment into Binance. On stage in Dubai, WLF co-founder Zach Witkoff boasted that USD1 had been selected as the “official stablecoin” for the deal (Source: Reuters). It also reported that Witkoff and two other World Liberty co-founders met with CZ in Abu Dhabi.

Reuters and other outlets later traced an anonymous wallet that accumulated nearly the full $2 billion in USD1 in April and linked the transaction to parallel negotiations over U.S. export approvals for cutting-edge AI chips to a UAE-controlled firm close to Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed (Source: Wikipedia), a member of the Abu Dhabi royal family and National Security Advisor of the United Arab Emirates (UAB).

In one stroke, a niche Trump-family stablecoin became a top-tier global stablecoin, with Binance as its main balance-sheet and liquidity partner – and the Trumps collecting the interest float.

Why this matters for CZ’s pardon

Now overlay the timelines. Binance is under U.S. criminal investigation; CZ pleads guilty over systemic AML failures; WLF launches USD1; MGX chooses USD1 for the $2 billion Binance investment; USD1 interest becomes a recurring cash stream for the Trumps; and, months later, President Trump pardons Changpeng “CZ” Zhao.

Formally, no authority has proven a quid pro quo. Substantively, the structure looks like a compliance nightmare:

a politically exposed stablecoin,

foreign state-linked money,

a crypto exchange whose founder just escaped the long-term consequences of an AML conviction.

For banks, exchanges and fintechs, the conclusion is hard to dodge: USD1, WLF and any Binance USD1 liquidity programmes belong in the “high-risk, politically exposed” bucket – and anyone still doing business there should assume that regulators will one day ask why this looked like a normal counterparty.

Key Data World Liberty Financial

Category | Data

Trading / Brand Name | World Liberty Financial (often shortened to WLFI).

Primary Legal Entity | World Liberty Financial, Inc., a corporation incorporated in Delaware, USA (Source: sec.gov).

Core Products / Tokens

• USD1 – U.S. dollar stablecoin branded by World Liberty Financial; USD1 issuance and reserves are handled via BitGo, while World Liberty Financial owns the USD1 brand and platform (Source: worldlibertyfinancial.com).
• WLFI – governance / platform token for the World Liberty protocol (Source: worldlibertyfinancial.com)

Main Domain | worldlibertyfinancial.com – corporate and ecosystem site (“Where DeFi meets TradFi”).

Key Product Pages | • USD1 overview: https://worldlibertyfinancial.com/usd1 worldlibertyfinancial.com • Legal docs (ToS, risk disclosures, etc.) linked under /terms, /privacy-policy, and dedicated WLFI / USD1 Risk Disclosures pages.

X (Twitter) | @worldlibertyfi – official X account: https://x.com/worldlibertyfi.

Telegram | Public channel “World Liberty Financial – Official Trump DeFi Channel”, ~99k subscribers, at https://t.me/defiant1s.

LinkedIn | Company page at https://www.linkedin.com/company/worldlibertyfi/ (content blocked to our crawler by robots.txt but referenced from the official site footer).

Medium | Official Medium publication “World Liberty Financial” at https://medium.com/@wlfi. Medium

Ownership & Economic Interest | A Trump business entity reportedly owns 60% of World Liberty Financial and is entitled to 75% of all revenue from coin sales; the Trump family and affiliates received 22.5 billion WLFI tokens (Sources: Wikipedia, Wepopedia).

Key Related Individuals (Founders / Execs) | From the official “About” page: Donald J. Trump – Co-Founder Emeritus; Eric Trump – Co-Founder; Donald Trump Jr. – Co-Founder; Barron Trump – Co-Founder; Chase Herro – Co-Founder; Zak (Zachary) Folkman – Co-Founder; Steven Witkoff – Co-Founder Emeritus; Zach Witkoff – Co-Founder; Alex Witkoff – Co-Founder; Corey Caplan – Chief Technology Officer; Ryan Fang – Head of Growth; Brandi Reynolds – Chief Compliance Officer.

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