I like Hunter Biden's Art

[Engorgeous George 2,216]

Yep. 

[Maximum Overkill 1,825]

Just now, Engorgeous George said:

Yep. 

Ukrainians like his artwork even better. 

So much so that they're willing to pay millions 

[Engorgeous George 2,216]

1 minute ago, Maximum Overkill said:

Ukrainians like his artwork even better. 

So much so that they're willing to pay millions 

I will wait for the liguidation sale before I buy any of it, but I like his use of color.

[Maximum Overkill 1,825]

Just now, Engorgeous George said:

I will wait for the liguidation sale before I buy any of it, but I like his use of color.

He prefers to work in the shades of Pedo and Crackhead. 

[Engorgeous George 2,216]

Someday I hope to run across some of his pieces at a garage sale or at the Hotel/Motel art show, assuming I ever went to one of those.

[SaintsInDome2006 439]

 

President Trump to Host Dinner With Holders of His Memecoin

 

President Donald Trump will have dinner with the top 220 holders of the Trump memecoin, the issuers of the cryptocurrency announced on Wednesday.

At the “intimate private dinner” on May 22 at Trump National Golf Club near Washington, Trump will talk about the future of crypto, according to the organizers. People who want to participate have to register, and a leader board of the top Trump coin holders will be kept to determine attendees. The top 25 Trump coin holders will also be invited to a reception before the dinner with the president, and will be given a tour of the White House.

“From April 23 to May 12, your average $TRUMP balance determines your spot,” according to the Website advertising the dinner. “Get $Trump Memes and climb the ranks.”

The planned event did not sit well with Craig Holman, lobbyist for Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy group that seeks to limit special-interest influence in Washington.

“It’s buying influence with the president, there’s no ifs ands or buts about it,” said Holman, adding that the memecoin sales run counter to Trump’s statement, made when he first entered politics, that he was so wealthy that he couldn’t be bought. “We’ve never had a president who is so in love with money as this one,” he said.

...

The Trump memecoin debuted several days before Trump’s inauguration and has lost much of its value since, plunging from a peak market value of nearly $15 billion to about $2.8 billion currently, according to tracker CoinMarketCap.

The coin’s price rallied 56% to $14.02 as of 5:25 p.m. on Wednesday, according to CoinMarketCap.

Last week, crypto traders braced for the start of what are known as unlocks, or releases of a large swathes of the memecoin to its investors and insiders. Some 200 million Trump memecoins became available at launch on Jan. 17, and another 40 million were unlocked last week. CIC Digital LLC, an affiliate of the Trump Organization, and Fight Fight Fight LLC collectively own 80% of the coins that are subject to the unlock schedule, according to the coin’s website.

The Trump family has been expanding its crypto investments, which started with Trump-themed collections of nonfungible tokens and expanded to ventures involving memecoins, mining and decentralized finance. Previously, Trump hosted dinners with buyers of his NFT collections.

Crypto markets have seen a proliferation of memecoins, which are tokens with questionable inherent value that sometimes briefly surge in price if they catch a social media tailwind before plunging as attention turns elsewhere.

[jbycho 666]

On 12/13/2024 at 2:12 PM, Engorgeous George said:

Yep. 

Cool. Eroded George likes garbage picking. 

[lickin_starfish 1,906]

It's weird that he's not on any foreign executive boards now that Potato Joe is out of office.

[jbycho 666]

1 minute ago, lickin_starfish said:

It's weird that he's not on any foreign executive boards now that Potato Joe is out of office.

I have no idea why he isn't. This is just so perplexing. 

[Voltaire 5,237]

17 minutes ago, jbycho said:

I have no idea why he isn't. This is just so perplexing. 

Its a mystery. Like his art, just a few months ago he was in such high demand for corporate board rooms across every field imaginable.

[SaintsInDome2006 439]

26 minutes ago, lickin_starfish said:

It's weird that he's not on any foreign executive boards now that Potato Joe is out of office.

Hunter Biden gave up his law & consulting career while Biden was in office. His career was effectively over by 2021 if not sooner.

[SaintsInDome2006 439]

>>Three crypto data firms, including Merkle Science and Chainalysis, analyzed the blockchain, a publicly available ledger that shows all transactions involving $Trump, for Reuters. They estimated that the $Trump token had generated between $86 million and $100 million in trading fees by Jan. 30.

The estimates far exceed what has been previously reported.

One of the entities behind the crypto coin is a company owned by Trump, called CIC Digital. The official website for $Trump says CIC Digital will “receive trading revenue derived from trading activities” of the meme coin. Reuters could not determine what portion of the fees so far, if any, had accrued to Trump personally, nor the ownership of the other entities behind the coin.<<

[SaintsInDome2006 439]

34 minutes ago, Voltaire said:

Like his art, just a few months ago he was in such high demand for corporate board rooms across every field imaginable.

WSJ: Trump’s bitcoin surges 70% in value after promotion of tour of the White House is announced.

[iam90sbaby 2,518]

46 minutes ago, Voltaire said:

Its a mystery. Like his art, just a few months ago he was in such high demand for corporate board rooms across every field imaginable.

I’d buy one if I could get one for $2-3k. It’d be a funny conversation piece and I could probably sell it for 6 figs for my retirement 

[SaintsInDome2006 439]

2 minutes ago, iam90sbaby said:

I’d buy one if I could get one for $2-3k.

>The president and his team of advisers have already gotten richer off the $TRUMP coin, making a reported $100 million in fees alone even as the people who bought into the project lost over $2 billion in value since the coin’s high earlier this year.<

[iam90sbaby 2,518]

Just now, SaintsInDome2006 said:

>The president and his team of advisers have already gotten richer off the $TRUMP coin, making a reported $100 million in fees alone even as the people who bought into the project lost over $2 billion in value since the coin’s high earlier this year.<

Trump owns you

[SaintsInDome2006 439]

21 minutes ago, iam90sbaby said:

Trump owns 

That’s funny. It’s likely he has a Swiss bank account where he can be bought & sold like one of those Chinese made trinkets he sells at his merch stores.

[iam90sbaby 2,518]

1 minute ago, SaintsInDome2006 said:

That’s funny. It’s likely he has a Swiss bank account where he can be bought & sold like one of those Chinese made trinkets he sells at his merch stores.

I’m not even talking about trump stop being a weirdo 

[jbycho 666]

1 hour ago, Voltaire said:

Its a mystery. Like his art, just a few months ago he was in such high demand for corporate board rooms across every field imaginable.

It's simply a joke now for liberals.

Prior to this, it was what we know it was. Money for Dumbass Joe. 

Liberals are so dumb..

[SaintsInDome2006 439]

1 minute ago, iam90sbaby said:

I’m not even talking about trump

I thought you were talking about selling influence at $2,300 for art that might support the legal defense of a president’s son. I mean that’s a lot of money.

[BunnysBastatrds 2,336]

10 minutes ago, iam90sbaby said:

I’d buy one if I could get one for $2-3k. It’d be a funny conversation piece and I could probably sell it for 6 figs for my retirement 

  I bought these two Rodrique Blue Dogs, which are very sought out after he passed.the Clinton/aGore one walking across the White House lawn. Best offer, 999.99

 The Bush one where the blue dog is wearing red cowboy boots, 8,000.00 

 

[iam90sbaby 2,518]

28 minutes ago, SaintsInDome2006 said:

I thought you were talking about selling influence at $2,300 for art that might support the legal defense of a president’s son. I mean that’s a lot of money.

Weird 

[SaintsInDome2006 439]

Big Orange lardons convicted son of donor who played a role in scheme to disseminate Biden dirt.

[EternalShinyAndChrome 3,929]

6 minutes ago, SaintsInDome2006 said:

Big Orange lardons convicted son of donor who played a role in scheme to disseminate Biden dirt.

Wait...you think the Biden's are clean? 

[SaintsInDome2006 439]

>>President Trump has pardoned a Florida health care executive whose mother played a role in trying to expose the contents of Ashley Biden’s diary.

The pardon of the executive, Paul Walczak, was signed privately on Wednesday and posted on the Justice Department’s website on Friday. It came less than two weeks after he was sentenced to 18 months in prison and ordered to pay nearly $4.4 million in restitution, for tax crimes that prosecutors said were used to finance a lavish lifestyle, including the purchase of a yacht.

Mr. Walczak’s mother, Elizabeth Fago, who was also involved in the health care industry in Florida, is a longtime Republican donor and fund-raiser who played a role in a surreptitious effort to help Mr. Trump by undermining Joseph R. Biden Jr. in the 2020 presidential election.

During the campaign, Ms. Fago was contacted by a man who was in possession of a diary kept by Mr. Biden’s daughter, Ashley, as she recovered from addiction, The New York Times previously reported.

When first told of the diary, Ms. Fago said she thought it would help Mr. Trump’s chances of winning the election if it was made public, two people familiar with the matter later told The Times. The man, Robert Kurlander, circulated the diary at a fund-raiser at Ms. Fago’s house in Jupiter, Fla., in September 2020.

Ms. Fago’s daughter passed along a tip about the diary to Project Veritas, a conservative group that had become a favorite of Mr. Trump’s. Project Veritas later paid $40,000 to Mr. Kurlander and an associate, Aimee Harris, for the diary.

The Justice Department investigated the theft and handling of the diary, which included scrutiny of Ms. Fago and her daughter. Neither they nor anyone from Project Veritas was charged, but Mr. Kurlander and Ms. Harris were convicted in connection with the scheme.<<

[SaintsInDome2006 439]

11 hours ago, EternalShinyAndChrome said:

Wait...you think the Biden's are clean? 

Of course not. It’s not like Mike Johnson who claims he doesn’t have a bank account or Trump who sells untraceable bitcoins in the hundreds of millions, but yes of course the Bidens have made money off of connections.

[seafoam1 2,838]

1 minute ago, SaintsInDome2006 said:

Of course not. It’s not like Mike Johnson who claims he doesn’t have a bank account or Trump who sells untraceable bitcoins in the hundreds of millions, but yes of course the Bidens have made money off of connections.

You need to make shlt up to try to overshadow the biden crime family dealings. You are a good lapdog. 

[SaintsInDome2006 439]

1 minute ago, seafoam1 said:

You need to make shlt up to try to overshadow the biden crime family dealings. You are a good lapdog. 

If only there was someone in the FBI & DOJ who we could trust to finally investigate these things properly.

[seafoam1 2,838]

6 hours ago, SaintsInDome2006 said:

If only there was someone in the FBI & DOJ who we could trust to finally investigate these things properly.

It's what they are working on now. Liberals have been screaming about how they wanted to clean up government mess for years now. 

But now that Trump is doing it, all they do is cry about it. 

I want the government out of everything other than the few obvious things a county needs from a government perspective. Military, homeland security, foreign affairs, and the like. 

Biden was absolutely mentally incapable, he was/is a crook, he is a pedo (just ask his daughter), and he's a bad guy in general (just ask his grand daughter that he ignores because he is embarrassed that Hunter is a freaking moron).  

[SaintsInDome2006 439]

Secret Deals, Foreign Investments, Presidential Policy Changes: The Rise of Trump’s Crypto Firm

World Liberty Financial has eviscerated the boundary between private enterprise and government policy in ways without precedent in modern American history.

The pitch from “ZMoney” arrived on the encrypted messaging app Signal just days before Donald J. Trump’s presidential inauguration.

“ZMoney” was Zachary Folkman, an entrepreneur who once ran a company called Date Hotter Girls and was now representing World Liberty Financial, the cryptocurrency firm that Mr. Trump and his sons had recently unveiled. Mr. Folkman was writing to a crypto startup in the Cayman Islands, offering a “partnership” in which the firms would buy each other’s digital coins, a deal that would bolster the startup’s public profile.

But there was a catch, The New York Times found. For the privilege of associating with the Trumps, the startup would have to make, in effect, a secret multimillion dollar payment to World Liberty.

“Everything we do gets a lot of exposure and credibility,” Mr. Folkman wrote, asserting that other business partners had committed between $10 million and $30 million to World Liberty.

 

The Cayman startup rejected the offer, as did several other firms that received a similar pitch from World Liberty, executives said. They considered the deal unethical, concluding that World Liberty was essentially selling an endorsement — and hiding the arrangement from the public.

World Liberty’s executives, who have maintained that they did nothing improper, were undeterred. They successfully pitched similar deals to other firms while also marketing their coin to buyers around the world, reaping more than $550 million in sales, with a large cut earmarked for the president’s family.

Mr. Trump’s return to the White House has opened lucrative new pathways for him to cash in on his power, whether through his social media company or new overseas real estate deals. But none of the Trump family’s other business endeavors pose conflicts of interest that compare to those that have emerged since the birth of World Liberty.

The firm, largely owned by a Trump family corporate entity, has erased centuries-old presidential norms, eviscerating the boundary between private enterprise and government policy in a manner without precedent in modern American history.

Mr. Trump is now not only a major crypto dealer; he is also the industry’s top policy maker. So far in his second term, Mr. Trump has leveraged his presidential powers in ways that have benefited the industry — and in some cases his own company — even though he had spent years deriding crypto as a haven for drug dealers and scammers.

 

He has filled his administration with sympathizers to the crypto cause, including by appointing a former adviser to industry players as chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. In addition, the Justice Department recently disbanded a crypto crimes task force, continuing a broader unwinding of Biden-era scrutiny of the industry.

A Times examination of World Liberty’s rapid ascent from fledgling startup to international force — and Mr. Trump’s conversion from crypto skeptic to industry cheerleader — highlights the range of conflicts of interest trailing the company:

• World Liberty has directly benefited from Mr. Trump’s official actions, such as his announcement of a federal crypto stockpile that would include a digital currency the firm has invested in. The president’s announcement caused a temporary jump in the value of World Liberty’s holdings.
• World Liberty has sold its cryptocurrency to investors abroad, including in Israel and Hong Kong, according to interviews and data obtained by The Times, establishing a new avenue for foreign businesses to try to curry favor with Mr. Trump.
• Several investors in World Liberty’s coin managed firms that the federal government accused of wrongdoing. They include an executive whose fraud case was suspended after he invested millions of dollars in World Liberty. Other investors and business partners, some of whom haven’t been publicly identified before, are looking to expand in ways that will require the Trump administration’s approval.
• World Liberty proposed swapping cryptocurrencies with at least five start-ups, and often used the Trump name to solicit steep payments as part of the deals. Even in an industry with a disreputable history, the deals raised alarm among veteran executives.

“It’s a black spot on our industry,” said Andre Cronje, a founder of SonicLabs, a crypto firm that turned down World Liberty’s pitch. Anyone who accepted would “obviously think they’re going to make money because it’s the officially endorsed Trump project.”

A spokesman for World Liberty, David Wachsman, disputed that any of the company’s deals constituted a “one-sided payment for services rendered.” But he acknowledged that the company has engaged in “mutual investment deals,” and said that its deal-making had resulted in “thoughtful, strategic exchanges between parties who stand to mutually benefit.”

Mr. Wachsman also said it would be “false, absurd and dangerous to suggest that investments or partnerships with World Liberty Financial were conducted as some sort of political quid pro quo.”

“Never has an investor or partner requested any political favoritism,” he said. “Nor would we ever entertain such a possibility.”

 

Still, the company’s deal-making benefits the president’s family. A Trump business entity owns 60 percent of World Liberty, according to the company’s website, and is entitled to 75 percent of certain revenue from coin sales, which could be converted into cash.

“It’s one of the more successful things we’ve ever done,” Eric Trump, the president’s son who runs the family business, said in an interview this month at the Trump Doral golf course in Florida.

He and his older brother, Donald Trump Jr., are actively involved in World Liberty, though they rely on three partners to oversee the daily operations. Two of them, Mr. Folkman and Chase Herro, have a mixed track record in crypto. The other is Zach Witkoff, the son of Mr. Trump’s envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, who is also a World Liberty founder.

In recent days, Zach Witkoff, Mr. Folkman and Mr. Herro were in Pakistan meeting with the country’s prime minister, Muhammad Shehbaz Sharif, and other top government officials to discuss World Liberty. The trip, complete with limousines, a dance performance and police escorts, seamlessly blended the president’s business interests with the trappings of a state visit. (Mr. Wachsman said no U.S. government officials were involved in the meetings.)

President Trump has noted that conflict of interest laws do not apply to him, and that he has broad immunity for official actions he takes as president.

 

In a statement, a spokeswoman for President Trump noted that his “assets are in a trust managed by his children,” and that as a result, “there are no conflicts of interest.” (The trust still benefits President Trump directly.)

World Liberty’s supporters are unbothered by questions about conflicts.

“Trump wants to make a lot of money in crypto,” Konstantin Kuznetsov, a Russian citizen living in Miami whose Gibraltar-based firm bought $1 million of World Liberty’s coins, said in an interview. “We can join in this wave.”

Chief Crypto Advocate

 

They “are not money,” he warned. Their “value is highly volatile and based on thin air.”

By last year, his views had begun to shift.

His older sons had become enthusiastic crypto proponents after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol effectively exiled the family business from the mainstream financial system.

“We built and sold and held real estate forever. And for a long period of time, I had access to everyone in the world,” Donald Trump Jr. explained in a live video appearance at a crypto conference in Washington last month. “All of a sudden that became really difficult. And I sort of realized very quickly just how much discrimination there is in the ordinary financial markets.”

 

At the conference, Mr. Trump said cryptocurrency “It’s the future of our financial systems.”Credit...Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times

The change of heart also coincided with an influx of millions of dollars in campaign contributions from the crypto industry into the Trump re-election effort. Under the Biden administration, the industry had faced nearly 100 enforcement actions by the S.E.C., and crypto executives wanted a leader to champion their interests in Washington.

During his campaign stumps, Mr. Trump’s qualms about crypto appeared to vanish. At a Bitcoin conference in July, he vowed to turn the United States into the “crypto capital of the planet.”

 

Two months later, Mr. Trump completed his conversion, announcing that he and his sons would enter the crypto marketplace with a new venture called World Liberty Financial.

Mr. Trump delivered the news in a livestream at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, where he had gathered with Eric and Donald Jr., along with Mr. Herro and Mr. Folkman.

 

“Crypto is one of those things we have to do,” Mr. Trump said. “Whether we like it or not, I have to do it.”

Mr. Herro and Mr. Folkman were unusual choices to partner with a president.

Mr. Folkman, who has short curly hair and tattoos, ran a company in his 20s tutoring forlorn men on how to pick up women. In numerous podcast appearances, Mr. Herro has recounted his life’s redemption arc, describing a wild youth in which he was charged with marijuana possession and spent a couple of weeks in a Wisconsin jail.

The two men had worked together for years, selling everything from colon cleanses to get-rich-quick advice, before pivoting to crypto with uneven results.

In 2022, Mr. Herro urged a roomful of crypto enthusiasts to invest in the currency TerraUSD, calling it “one of the coolest assets in history.” The coin imploded a month later, erasing billions of dollars in wealth. Mr. Herro’s most recent venture with Mr. Folkman was a crypto platform called Dough Finance, which was hacked in July, leading to the theft of $2 million.

It’s not clear exactly how the pair earned the Trumps’ trust. But Steve Witkoff said last year that he met them through his son, and then introduced them to the family.

 

On the livestream introducing World Liberty, Donald Trump Jr. hailed the men as first-class financial minds.

“You could put them in a boardroom at Goldman Sachs, and they’re going to smoke the people in the room,” he said.

In October, Mr. Herro and Mr. Folkman got to work on the company’s first initiative — selling a new cryptocurrency, which it called $WLFI, with the goal of $300 million in sales.

These coins would be different from $TRUMP — the so-called memecoin that spiked in January after Mr. Trump marketed it to his followers before it abruptly crashed.

 

World Liberty, at least according to its marketing pitch, eventually plans to operate as a new type of internet bank that would allow customers to borrow and lend money in various digital currencies. Anyone who bought the $WLFI coins would get to vote on certain bank business decisions like shareholders in a traditional company.

Mr. Trump was at the core of the pitch. The company published a 13-page “Gold Paper” that described its mission and leadership team. On the cover was a portrait of Mr. Trump, styled to look as if gold paint had been splashed across the page.

He would serve as the company’s “Chief Crypto Advocate,” the paper said.

When World Liberty launched, the Trump family and its affiliates were given 22.5 billion units of the crypto coins — a stash now worth at least $1.1 billion on paper, depending on the various prices used in recent sales.

Under the company’s rules, the Trumps and other World Liberty investors are not allowed to sell their coins on the open market, though the company has said it might eventually lift that restriction if other buyers of the coin agree.

 

Initially, there were few buyers. By the end of October, World Liberty had sold only $2.7 million worth of the coins, a tiny fraction of its goal.

Election Day was a game changer.

A Flood of Investors

 

With polls closed in most of America and Mr. Trump on his way to victory, the World Liberty account on X posted a celebratory message on Nov. 5: “Big things on the horizon.”

Soon a surge of investment flowed into World Liberty’s cryptocurrency.

Most crypto purchases are recorded on a public ledger called the blockchain, with the buyers and sellers largely anonymized. But World Liberty has said it performs extensive checks on investors in its coin, so it knows who they are.

---

Blockchain

The blockchain is the publicly viewable ledger of all cryptocurrency transactions. Every time someone spends money with a digital coin, it shows up as an entry, allowing investigators to track the flow of funds. In most cases, the identities of the buyers and sellers are concealed behind strings of letters and numbers.

 

An analysis performed for The Times by the forensics firm Nansen, drawing on crypto industry data, showed that many of the investors were based abroad in places like Singapore, South Korea, Hong Kong and the United Arab Emirates.

Federal law prevents foreigners from donating to presidential campaigns or inaugural funds, but World Liberty’s coin sale offered a new, legal way to back Mr. Trump.

“The main reason for purchasing such a token was to support Trump’s inauguration, as he was the first crypto-friendly president of the United States,” said Keer Lau, chief strategy officer at Orbiter Finance, a Hong Kong-based entity.

Some investors, domestic and overseas, have managed firms that ran afoul of U.S. regulations. One was Yoni Assia, an Israeli who founded eToro, an online trading platform whose U.S. subsidiary reached a $1.5 million settlement with the S.E.C. last year for crypto-related violations. Troy Murray, a Puerto Rico-based investor, also bought World Liberty’s coin. Before that, he had helped create BarnBridge, which in late 2023 agreed to pay the S.E.C. $1.7 million to settle its own crypto-related accusations.

 

Since Mr. Trump took office, some World Liberty investors have pushed the government for regulatory approvals, or are poised to interact with the administration as they try to build or expand businesses in the United States.

In March, Mr. Assia’s company notified the S.E.C. that it intended to go public in the United States. DWF Labs, a crypto firm based in the United Arab Emirates, announced this month that it had bought $25 million of $WLFI — and that it was opening a New York office.

“Our visibility in the U.S. has been increased because of this deal,” Andrei Grachev, the managing partner of DWF Labs, said in an interview. “We would like to have direct dialogue with the policymakers.”

The crypto executive with perhaps the most to gain from his affiliation with World Liberty is Justin Sun, a Chinese billionaire who founded the crypto platform Tron.

 

Eric Trump called World Liberty one of the family’s most successful ventures.Credit...Tamir Kalifa for The New York Times

Mr. Sun gained global attention late last year, when he spent $6.2 million at an art auction to buy a banana that had been duct taped to a wall. Not long after, Mr. Sun made another headline-grabbing maneuver: He spent $75 million on $WLFI coins.

The investment drew widespread criticism given that Mr. Sun had a clear incentive to gain favor with the Trump White House. During the Biden administration, the S.E.C. sued Mr. Sun, arguing that he had fraudulently inflated the price of a Tron cryptocurrency.

Mr. Sun has denied the S.E.C.’s charges, and in a text message to The Times last year, he said his World Liberty investment was simply a vote of confidence in the Trump family’s “excellent project.”

In late February, the S.E.C. asked a federal judge to halt proceedings in Mr. Sun’s case: The agency said it was exploring “a potential resolution.” The judge granted the stay.

 

The Stars Align

Justin Sun gave World Liberty a big lift. But Mr. Trump’s company wanted more money. Much more.

So World Liberty executives soon announced what they called “a transformative initiative” to partner with other crypto outfits and invest in their coins. The strategy, the executives said in February, would leverage World Liberty’s growing clout to help their lesser-known partners.

“It’s like taking care of your brother in the space,” Mr. Herro said at a crypto event in New York that month.

But World Liberty’s public pronouncements omitted a key aspect of its private pitch to several crypto startups, executives at these companies told The Times. World Liberty wanted to sell its own coin — not just to invest in others’. It was proposing a currency swap.

Here is the deal World Liberty offered, according to executives at three crypto firms approached by the company: The startups would spend between $10 million and $30 million on a large chunk of World Liberty’s coins. In return, World Liberty would buy a smaller amount of each startup’s own cryptocurrency. World Liberty would keep the rest of the money for itself — a premium as high as 20 percent.

World Liberty’s purchases would signal to the market that Mr. Trump’s firm had deemed the startups worthy of investment. But the market would have no way of knowing that World Liberty had been compensated for that endorsement. Some details of a similar pitch from World Liberty were previously reported by Blockworks, an industry news outlet.

 

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

“They kept telling us, ‘We’re like, we’re super close to Trump,’” said Mike Silagadze, the chief executive of Ether.Fi, a crypto startup that World Liberty approached.

“We immediately rejected,” said Dominik Schiener, who founded the IOTA Foundation, a Berlin-based group that also received the pitch. “It’s a very dishonest approach.”

 

Ondo, a crypto start-up backed by Peter Thiel, helped sponsor the Crypto Ball, an inauguration event.Credit...Jason Andrew for The New York Times

In his statement, Mr. Wachsman, the World Liberty spokesman, said The Times’s reporting contained “fundamental misunderstandings about standard industry practices” and called the company’s business arrangements “not only common in the blockchain industry but essential for creating lasting economic alignments in business, generally.”

 

“These arrangements establish skin in the game for all parties,” he added.

The benefits of a partnership were enough to attract at least five crypto firms to strike other deals with World Liberty, without disclosing details of the financial arrangements, The Times found.

In one deal, the Sui Foundation, a U.S.-based group, announced that World Liberty would buy an unspecified amount of its cryptocurrency, prompting Sui’s price to jump more than 10 percent. As part of the arrangement, the foundation was slated to receive World Liberty’s coins in return, said two people familiar with the deal who requested anonymity to discuss private negotiations.

Other World Liberty partnerships have shown how Mr. Trump is mixing his official role with his business. In December, the company announced that it would use technology designed by a startup based in Lisbon, Ethena Labs. It also bought more than $5 million of Ethena’s cryptocurrency.

One of Ethena’s investors is Arthur Hayes, a crypto entrepreneur who pleaded guilty to violating the Bank Secrecy Act in 2022 and was sentenced to six months of home detention. Last month, Mr. Trump granted Mr. Hayes a pardon. (A spokesman who represents both Ethena and Mr. Hayes declined to comment.)

Another World Liberty partner is Ondo Finance, a New York-based startup backed by Founders Fund, the conservative billionaire Peter Thiel’s venture capital firm.

 

World Liberty made its first purchase of Ondo’s coins in December, buying more than 130,000 of them. The transaction at least briefly helped drive up the price of Ondo’s coin, drawing headlines in crypto news sites celebrating World Liberty’s bet.

In January, Ondo donated $1 million to Mr. Trump’s inauguration, securing an invite to a candlelight dinner at the National Building Museum in Washington, where the guest list included several of Mr. Trump’s cabinet nominees. Ondo also helped sponsor an inauguration event called the Crypto Ball. Soon after, Donald Trump Jr. and World Liberty’s management team were headliners at a conference Ondo organized in New York.

“This is a moment we weren’t sure was gonna happen,” Ian De Bode, Ondo’s chief strategy officer, said from the stage. “But sometimes the stars align.”

‘Thank Me Later’

In February, Eric Trump passed along some investment advice to his followers on Elon Musk’s social media platform, X: “In my opinion, it’s a great time to add $ETH.”

It was the ticker symbol for a digital coin called Ether. “You can thank me later,” he added, before deleting that line.

 

His advice proved prescient.

The next month, his father announced the creation of a “U.S. Crypto Reserve” — a Fort Knox-like repository of cryptocurrencies intended to help bolster the industry.

Ether is the second-most valuable cryptocurrency behind Bitcoin, worth about $1,800 at current prices. Many of the most influential crypto companies use the coin to conduct transactions and build financial applications.

Mr. Trump’s announcement included a list of digital currencies to go into the stockpile. Along with Bitcoin, he included Ether, saying it would be “at the heart of the Reserve.”

 

Ether’s price surged more than 13 percent.

The spike had an immediate beneficiary: World Liberty. Over the previous few months, the company had bought $240 million worth of Ether, according to Arkham, a crypto data firm.

The day the president announced the crypto reserve, the value of World Liberty’s Ether stash rose by $33 million, assuming it had not sold any of its holdings. That gain was later lost as Ether declined in value.

That same pattern — Mr. Trump making policy pronouncements or posting messages that intersected with World Liberty’s business interests — occurred again in March.

In a video feed at a crypto conference in New York, Mr. Trump called on Congress to pass legislation governing stablecoins, a type of crypto designed to maintain a value of $1.

 

Stablecoin

Stablecoins are a type of cryptocurrency that maintain a constant price of $1. They differ from traditional digital currencies like Bitcoin, which constantly fluctuate in price, making them easier to use for certain types of transactions. Companies that issue stablecoins operate similarly to banks: The issuers make money by taking deposits from investors, giving them coins in return and then investing those deposits to generate a yield that the companies keep.

 

Both the Senate and the House have introduced bills that would make it easier for firms issuing stablecoins to operate in the United States. In his remarks last month, Mr. Trump said that the rise of stablecoins would “expand the dominance of the U.S. dollar.”

A week later, World Liberty announced it was releasing its own stablecoin, USD1. “The future is here, and it is so bright!” Zach Witkoff wrote on X.

Jordi Alexander, a crypto executive who helped World Liberty with its plans to launch its stablecoin, said in an interview that the company had already secured commitments of at least $1 billion from investors to buy the stablecoin once it hits the market. On Tuesday, Zach Witkoff confirmed that World Liberty had reached that mark.

 

The new venture will only compound World Liberty’s ethical conflicts. The company plans to offer USD1 on a platform developed by Binance, a giant exchange that settled criminal charges with the Justice Department in 2023. This week, Mr. Witkoff, Mr. Herro and Mr. Folkman met with Changpeng Zhao, Binance’s founder and former chief executive, in Abu Dhabi.

Mr. Zhao, who served four months in federal prison for money-laundering violations, has been seeking a pardon from the Trump administration, according to people familiar with the matter, who requested anonymity to discuss a sensitive topic. The pardon effort was first reported by The Wall Street Journal.

The overlap between Mr. Trump’s policy pronouncements and his business interests have alarmed congressional Democrats, who moved recently to amend the pending stablecoin legislation to bar the Trump family from issuing one.

The amendment failed, and none of the concerns about World Liberty have disrupted its momentum.

Last month, Mr. Witkoff was among a group of executives invited to the White House for a first-of-its-kind industry summit.

After the meeting, Mr. Witkoff posted a photograph on social media of him smiling outside the White House next to Mr. Herro and Mr. Folkman.

“Thank you Mr. President,” Mr. Witkoff wrote.

[SaintsInDome2006 439]

Wayyy too long, not gonna read it I know.

Bottom line: the Trump family has profited to the tune of roughly $1 billion through foreign investment from places like the UAE, directly through Trump's crypto entities.

 

[Hardcore troubadour 15,084]

If only there were an investigative body to look into this.  lol. 

[MDC 7,194]

1 minute ago, SaintsInDome2006 said:

Wayyy too long, not gonna read it I know.

Bottom line: the Trump family has profited to the tune of roughly $1 billion through foreign investment from places like the UAE, directly through Trump's crypto entities.

 

Drain the Swamp crowd doesn’t care. 

[thegeneral 3,037]

1 minute ago, Hardcore troubadour said:

If only there were an investigative body to look into this.  lol. 

She’s too busy doing the math on the hundreds of millions of lives Trump saved and investigating journalists who are big meanies.

[jbycho 666]

Just now, thegeneral said:

She’s too busy doing the math on the hundreds of millions of lives Trump saved and investigating journalists who are big meanies.

Trump is kicking ass..And it hurts you. 

[SaintsInDome2006 439]

Trump has eliminated the US’s agency dedicated to fighting transnational crime organizations.

[SaintsInDome2006 439]

Top Trump Crypto Buyers Vying for Dinner Seats Are Likely Foreign, Data Shows

Quote

The majority of top holders of Donald Trump’s memecoin have used foreign exchanges that say they ban US users, suggesting many purchasers are based abroad

Quote

 

76% of the token value held among the top 220 wallets likely belongs to foreign owners because the wallets used exchanges that are not available to US residents

Many Top World Liberty Token Holders Are Foreign-Based

Holdings of the 50 wallets with the most WLF tokens, by likely location of wallet holder

WLF tokens are designed for governance — instead of being used for trading, they bestow voting rights in the World Liberty project

Huge Foreign Purchases Followed Dinner Announcement

Trump token purchases greater than $100,000 in April

2 purchases worth a combined $3.6Mby a foreign-based wallet, hours after the announcement

3 purchases worth a combined $1.5M7 purchases worth a combined

5 purchasesworth a combined $4.5M 

More than half of the top holders of President Donald Trump’s memecoin — who are jockeying for dinner with the president — have used foreign exchanges that say they ban US users, suggesting that many of the purchasers are based outside the US.

Buyers of the Trump token, a cryptocurrency the president began marketing days before his inauguration, drove sales higher in the past two weeks after its issuers announced an unprecedented promotion: More than 200 of the memecoin’s largest holders would be invited to attend a May 22 dinner with Trump at his Virginia golf club, while the top 25 would qualify for an exclusive reception beforehand and what the memecoin’s website describes as a “VIP” tour.

Now, an analysis by Bloomberg News shows that all but six of the top 25 holders who have registered on the website’s leaderboard used foreign exchanges that say they exclude customers living in the US. More broadly, at least 56% of the leaderboard’s top 220 holders used similar offshore exchanges. The prevalence of these likely foreign buyers echoes concerns that congressional Democrats have expressed about the ethics of marketing the coin with a promise of presidential access. And it raises questions about how attendees at the promotional dinner, who are publicly identified only by three- or four-letter usernames they’ve chosen, will be vetted.

In the website’s fine print, organizers say attendees must pass a background check. “We will also screen your wallet for KYC & compliance purposes. You are having Dinner with the President of the USA!” the website reads. (Wallets are digital tools that store the private keys owners use to access and manage cryptocurrencies. And “KYC” is a common term for the steps financial institutions take to know their customers.) The website provides no explanation of how such vetting would be conducted.

The memecoin’s promoters didn’t respond to a request for comment, nor did White House officials.

In order to appear on the official leaderboard, those who’ve bought the memecoin have to register with its website, which says it ranks them based on the number of tokens and the length of time they’ve been held. Many large holders have yet to register. But a second Bloomberg analysis of all the biggest purchasers — regardless of whether they’re on the leaderboard — revealed that more than half of this broader pool of buyers also used foreign exchanges.

It’s possible that some US purchasers found ways to use foreign exchanges despite prohibitions – say, by using a virtual private network, or VPN, to mask a US-based IP address. Most exchanges say they take steps such as collecting users’ personal information to try to prevent such workarounds. The three foreign exchanges that top Trump coin holders used most often to fund their accounts or to purchase the Trump memecoin are Binance, Bybit and OKX, all of which have imposed restrictions on US users. (Bloomberg’s analysis found that six holders on the Trump coin leaderboard made purchases on OKX before the company launched a trading platform in the US on April 15. An OKX spokeswoman said that until then, the company did not allow purchases by US residents.) Representatives for Binance and Bybit didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Two of the three exchanges have run afoul of US law previously. Binance paid the US more than $4 billion after it pleaded guilty in November 2023 to violating federal anti-money laundering and sanctions laws through lapses in internal controls. OKX pleaded guilty to anti-money laundering violations in February and forfeited more than $420 million.

This is not the first time that Trump-related crypto ventures have attracted significant interest from foreign investors.

Justin Sun, a Hong Kong-based crypto entrepreneur, became an adviser to World Liberty Financial, a separate crypto project promoted by the president and his sons, after Sun announced that he’d bought tens of millions of dollars of that project’s proprietary token. Sun, who said at the time that he didn’t expect any favors from Trump in return for the investment, may also be a top holder of the president’s memecoin, according to a Bloomberg analysis of crypto wallet transactions.

World Liberty is promoting a stablecoin. Zach Witkoff, one of the company’s founders and the son of Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, announced at a conference on Thursday that the stablecoin would be used to close a deal between Binance and an investment firm founded by Abu Dhabi’s government. World Liberty executives didn’t respond to a request for comment.

“Congress should demand the President disclose who’s paying him tribute in the shadows to assess whether the public interest is being compromised,” said Tony Carrk, executive director of Accountable.US, a nonprofit interest group that has set up a “Trump Accountability War Room” online. Accountable found that at least 14 of the top 50 holders of World Liberty Financial tokens have also used cryptocurrency services that aren’t available in the US. Bloomberg’s own analysis found an additional eight wallets that did so. World Liberty disclosed in November that its initial $300 million offering was primarily being marketed offshore.

As the president, who once called Bitcoin a “scam against the dollar,” moves further into cryptocurrencies, his administration has begun to dismantle the regulatory and law enforcement teams that oversee these digital assets. Shortly after he took office, for instance, staff members who investigated crypto at the Securities and Exchange Commission were reassigned and many of their cases were dropped. In April, the Justice Department disbanded its crypto task force.

In a letter last month, Democratic senators Adam Schiff and Elizabeth Warren called for an investigation of the Trump coin dinner promotion by the US Office of Government Ethics. They said the May 22 event presents a “severe risk that President Trump and other officials may be engaging in ‘pay to play’ corruption by selling presidential access to individuals or entities, to include foreign nationals and corporate actors with vested interests in federal action, while personally enriching the President and his family.”

The Trump family benefits from increases in the memecoin’s price because a company it controls maintains a large stock of the tokens. Although the Trumps aren’t allowed to sell any coins for some time under the terms of the coin’s issuance, any fluctuation in the price changes their fortunes on paper. The April 23 announcement of the dinner caused the price to rise from around $9 to about $14 while 436 new transactions of more than $100,000 took place over the next five days. The largest of these transactions involved accounts interacting with exchanges that don’t operate in the US. (The price of the token has since dropped to $10.82 as of 6 p.m. New York time on May 6).

To qualify for the dinner with Trump, coin holders must register a “self-custodied” wallet — one that’s fully controlled by its holder, rather than a third-party exchange.

Bloomberg analyzed the transactions of the top 220 wallets on the website’s leaderboard as of May 5 to determine whether their holders are likely foreign-based. A separate analysis examined all the self-custodied wallets that held enough Trump coins as of April 30 to qualify for a spot in the top 220, leaving aside any time-weighting. Many of the wallets with the largest holdings are not listed on the leaderboard, which suggests they have not yet registered or their time-weighted holdings may differ significantly from current holdings. Some may be strategically waiting to register.

While it is difficult to identify the people behind these accounts, there have been public clues for some. The entities at the top of the leaderboard have been swapping positions for the past few days — with at least one of them bragging about it online. The wallet called “MeCo” belongs to an entity called “Memecore,” which describes itself as an “EVM-compatible L1 multi-chain cross-staking mainnet secured by Proof of Meme.”

On X, the firm said: “We’re not just aiming for #1 on the $TRUMP leaderboard — we’re here to conquer the entire meme space.” Memecore has asked users to send it their Trump coins in order to climb the rankings. The coins will be returned to users with a bonus, the company said.

“The memecoin space is currently seen as stagnant — and we want to challenge that narrative. By showing up at this event, we want to signal that a meme is emerging again,” MemeCore’s Chief Business Development Officer Cherry Hsu said in a statement over Telegram.

The holder that Memecore is chasing at the top of the list has chosen the username “Sun,” and is using a wallet belonging to HTX, according to Bloomberg’s analysis of blockchain data. HTX has been linked to Justin Sun and lists him as an adviser. Sun himself, who has publicly acknowledged buying World Liberty Financial’s tokens, has so far not said whether he’s behind the wallet atop the memecoin’s leaderboard. He did not respond to requests for comment.

The wallet labeled “Sun” began amassing a total of $17.9 million worth of the Trump coin when it was initially launched in January. It has acquired $4.5 million worth since the Trump dinner promotion was announced.

The SEC sued Justin Sun in 2023, alleging that he worked with companies he owns and controls to engineer the offer and sale of unregistered securities. Sun’s attorneys denied those allegations and said the regulator’s claims went “too far and should be rejected.” In February, after Sun spent at least $75 million to buy World Liberty Financial coins, the SEC paused its case against him, saying it was in both sides’ interest to consider a potential resolution.

Holders Data and Analysis
Bloomberg compiled data on the top 220 wallets from the $TRUMPLeaderboardwebsite. Bloomberg individually checked each wallet’s activity using SolScan and categorized the account based on whether it made transactions through cryptocurrency exchanges that operate in the US (e.g. Coinbase, Kraken, Robinhood, etc.) or with foreign exchanges that are not available to US residents (e.g. Binance, ByBit, Kucoin, Gate.io, etc.), to buy Trump tokens, or to fund their account before purchasing the tokens on a decentralized exchange. Wallets that had no transactions through US or foreign centralized exchanges were categorized as having an unknown location. Wallets that interacted both with US and foreign exchanges were either categorized as having an unknown location or categorized based on where a large majority of trading activity happened. Some US exchanges also have operations overseas, but the data does not indicate which version of an exchange is being used.

 

Using the Dune API, Bloomberg also compiled data on the 220 crypto wallets holding the largest number of Trump memecoin tokens. Bloomberg individually checked each wallet’s activity using SolScan and categorized the account using the same methodology as for the accounts listed on the Trump Dinner leaderboard. Bloomberg removed accounts tagged by SolScan as official exchange wallets, market maker wallets and accounts tagged by Arkham Intelligence as “Official Trump Meme” wallets.
 

Bloomberg similarly collected data on top holders of WLF tokens from EtherScan. As with Trump tokens, Bloomberg individually checked each wallet’s transactions and categorized the account based on whether it interacted with centralized cryptocurrency exchanges operating in the US or with foreign exchanges that say they are not available to US residents.
 

Transaction Data and Analysis
Using the Dune API, Bloomberg collected data on all Trump memecoin transactions since coin launch through April 30. Bloomberg cross-referenced the wallets that made individual purchases greater than or equal to $100,000 with the list of the top 220 holders to highlight transactions made by top accounts that used either foreign or US cryptocurrency exchanges.

[SaintsInDome2006 439]

On 12/13/2024 at 1:14 PM, Maximum Overkill said:

Ukrainians like his artwork even better. 

So much so that they're willing to pay millions 

Quote

Justin Sun, a Hong Kong-based crypto entrepreneur, became an adviser to World Liberty Financial, a separate crypto project promoted by the president and his sons, after Sun announced that he’d bought tens of millions of dollars of that project’s proprietary token. Sun, who said at the time that he didn’t expect any favors from Trump in return for the investment, may also be a top holder of the president’s memecoin, according to a Bloomberg analysis of crypto wallet transactions.

Quote

In February, after Sun spent at least $75 million to buy World Liberty Financial coins, the SEC paused its case against him, saying it was in both sides’ interest to consider a potential resolution.

Hong Kong is in China.

[thegeneral 3,037]

Making Hunter Biden’s paintings look like chimp change.

[SaintsInDome2006 439]

CBS Evening News Trump family's net worth has increased by $2.9 billion thanks to crypto investments, new report says

President Trump's venture into crypto products has increased his family's wealth by billions in the last six months, according to a new report, as his administration continues to loosen the federal government's regulatory approach to the digital currency industry as a whole. 

The group State Democracy Defenders Action estimated in a new report that the president's crypto holdings now represent nearly 40% of his net worth — or approximately $2.9 billion. That increase is due in part to his release of the $TRUMP and $MELANIA meme coins, in addition to a large stake in World Liberty Financial, a crypto exchange affiliated with the Trump family that launched in October 2024. State Democracy Defenders Action identifies itself as non-partisan, but it is overseen by frequent critics of President Trump, with an agenda focused on "the autocratic threat to our nation."

The president's net worth is expected to get another bump, with World Liberty Financial's announcement this week that a Abu Dhabi-backed firm will invest billions of dollars in the Trump family-affiliated crypto fund. The Emirati firm, MGX, will purchase $2 billion in a stablecoin product offered by World Liberty, the company said in a statement to CBS. The currency, called "USD1" will then be used to invest in Binance, one of the world's largest cryptocurrency exchanges.

World Liberty has ties to the president and his sons. The fine print on the company's website says an entity affiliated with Mr. Trump and his family members own a 60% stake in the company.

According to the company's public reports, a Trump family entity also holds 22.5 billion of the $WLF tokens –- and takes an additional 75% in net revenue from future token purchases.

Details of the MGX deal have not been released, so it is unclear how much the Trump family stands to benefit from this transaction.

In a statement to CBS News, World Liberty said the deal represents the "single largest-ever investment in a crypto company" and sets a "historic precedent." It did not respond to questions about how much the Trump family stands to make from the investment.

The White House responded to a request for comment by telling CBS News to "report on something people actually care about." A spokesperson provided links to several White House technology initiatives.

As the president's investments in crypto have grown, the Securities and Exchange Commission has paused investigations into a dozen crypto companies since his inauguration, a CBS News analysis found.

"The bottom line is it appears like he's profiting off of his public office," said Virginia Canter, State Democracy Defenders chief counsel for ethics and anticorruption. Canter, who co-authored the new report, served as senior ethics counsel for the Treasury Department under both Republican and Democratic administrations. 

"In terms of prior presidents in the modern age, they've all divested their assets, or they've rolled them over into what we call blind trusts," Canter said. "President Trump did not do that in his first term, and it seems as if in the second term he's doubled down and he is all in (on) the crypto industry."

The report leans heavily on past media reports, including a Fortune magazine article that reviewed the Trump family's financial disclosures and provided the original estimates of the president's net worth.

Crypto companies are not legally required to disclose who is buying and selling on their platforms to the public, so little is known about who has invested in Trump family-affiliated crypto products. 

Canter says this makes it more difficult to identify potential conflicts of interest. 

"In his first administration, we could see who was walking in and out of the Trump hotels," she said.

Trump hopes U.S. will be the "crypto capital of the world"

The president, who as recently as 2021 described crypto currency as a "scam," has since embraced digital currency, saying he hopes to make the United States the "crypto capital of the world."

Since his inauguration, Mr. Trump has made several moves to unwind the regulatory environment that many industry insiders say crippled crypto businesses. 

He has issued multiple executive orders to promote cryptocurrency, including one that seeks to promote the growth of digital currencies and another that instructed the Treasury Department to create a strategic cryptocurrency reserve. 

Mr. Trump has also used his office to pardon the three founders of cryptocurrency exchange BitMEX, who pleaded guilty in 2022 to failing to prevent money laundering on their platform, according to a report by Reuters. 

The value of Mr. Trump's crypto assets have at times fluctuated with his policy decisions and social media posts.

The value of $TRUMP increased 18.1% in early March after the president issued an executive order promoting a strategic cryptocurrency reserve, according to the report. A few weeks later, on March 23, the president posted "I Love $TRUMP– SO COOL!! The Greatest of them all!!!!" on Truth Social, which led to an increase in the price of the meme coin from $10.93 to $12.24.

Whether or not the $TRUMP coin increases in value, the president's business collects trading fees when people buy or sell the coin. A Reuters analysis found that business entities behind the $TRUMP coin could have made nearly $100 million in fees in less than two weeks of trading.

World Liberty Finance: The Trump family's crypto exchange

Aside from meme coins, the Trump family's more recent foray into cryptocurrency may become its most profitable. 

In October, then-candidate Trump helped launch World Liberty Finance, a decentralized or "defi" cryptocurrency exchange. Its website, which heavily features the president's image, offers users the opportunity to buy into the exchange using $WLFI tokens. 

"Good News, the World Liberty Financial token is now live. Crypto is the future, let's embrace this incredible technology and lead the world in the digital economy. Go to World Liberty Financial.com," Mr. Trump posted on X in October, before the presidential election. 

The website says World Liberty is "inspired by Donald J. Trump" and Mr. Trump is listed as chief crypto advocate. His sons, Eric, Donald Jr. and Barron, are all listed as Web3 ambassadors. 

Donald Trump Jr. promoted World Liberty Financial in March, at the D.C. Blockchain conference, where crypto industry insiders rubbed shoulders with members of Congress and the administration.

"I'm just super excited about what this can mean for the future of banking for the future of financial systems," said Trump Jr., who joined World Liberty's panel remotely. Founders Chase Herro, Zak Folkman and Zach Witkoff appeared on stage to promote World Liberty's stablecoin offering.

"We want Republicans, Democrats, whether it be black, blue, brown, white, to be using our stable coin," said Zach Witkoff, the son of Steven Witkoff, the White House special envoy to the Middle East. "We think it democratizes finance." 

World Liberty says it has raised more than $550 million from investors who purchase the $WLF governance token. The majority of these investors remain anonymous to the public. For now, these $WLFI tokens are non redeemable, meaning that once they are purchased, users cannot exchange them. 

World Liberty denied CBS' multiple requests for an interview.

Justin Sun, the crypto billionaire famous for buying and eating a $6.2 million banana duct-taped to the wall, is one of World Liberty's few publicly known investors. 

Sun, who was being investigated for securities fraud in the Biden administration, said he invested $30 million shortly after Mr. Trump's election, at the time claiming in a post on X to be World Liberty's"largest investor."

Days before Mr. Trump's inauguration, Sun said he invested another $45 million, which he also disclosed in a post on X. A few weeks later, the Securities and Exchange Commission reversed itself and asked the judge to grant a stay in Sun's case, citing "public interest." The pause in Sun's case was part of a larger push by the SEC to dismiss cases against crypto companies. 

A spokesperson for Sun and the SEC declined to comment. 

Last month, Democrats on the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee sent a letter to the Federal Reserve and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency about the potential for conflict of interest as the Trump administration considers regulations of companies like World Liberty Financial.

"President Trump's involvement in this venture, as he strips financial regulators of their independence…presents an extraordinary conflict of interest that could create unprecedented risks to our financial system," said the letter, which was signed by five Democrats, including Senators Elizabeth Warren, Ron Wyden and Chris Van Hollen. 

World Liberty Financial says 85,000 investors have gone through a standard Know Your Customer process to determine "participation eligibility," and the company says it is arranging for a third-party accounting firm to audit its new venture into the U.S.-debt-backed stablecoins. 

As president, Mr. Trump is not subject to the criminal conflict-of-interest law. But he is required to disclose his assets and income under the Ethics in Government Act, including his crypto assets. The next financial disclosure report deadline for the president is May 15.