Trump Family Business Lands $5B Windfall After Crypto Launch: WSJ
(AP Photo/Altaf Qadri)
The Trump family’s flagship token WLFI began open trading on Monday and reportedly catapulted their fortune to as much as $5 billion and instantly made crypto the Trump empire’s most valuable asset.
Trading volume surged to roughly $1 billion within an hour of launch, according to the Wall Street Journal, with prices fluctuating between about 30 cents and 20 cents. At the top of that range, the family’s stake briefly cleared $6 billion.
WLFI’s debut, akin to a stock listing, allows public trading for the first time. The Trump family holds just under a quarter of all tokens, while founders’ allocations remain “locked,” limiting immediate sales.
Even so, Monday’s prices vaulted past the 1.5 cents early backers paid, handing insiders a notional fortune.
Trading, however, was frenetic from the open, with about $1 billion in WLFI changing hands within the first hour across exchanges. On Binance, WLFI opened near 30 cents before easing toward 20 cents; at the high, the family’s stake topped $6 billion.
World Liberty, the Trump-aligned venture behind WLFI and a dollar-pegged stablecoin USD1, insisted to the Journal that politics isn’t the business model.
Chief executive Zach Witkoff, the son of special envoy Steve Witkoff who co-founded the company with the president’s sons Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., said it “doesn’t get involved in politics,” though “clearly President Trump is the greatest president of all time.”
In addition, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told the outlet that “neither the president nor his family have ever engaged, or will ever engage, in conflicts of interest.”
