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'The $750 million circular transaction—with the same party as buyer and seller—is more common in the crypto world than in traditional finance
The Trump family engineered a new deal for its flagship crypto venture that stands to earn over half a billion dollars.
One unusual element: Trump-backed companies are on both sides of the deal.
Crypto has become the Trump family’s dominant business interest, overshadowing the real-estate empire the president spent half a century developing.
At the center of those crypto riches is World Liberty Financial, the Trump-family vehicle launched last year. In a move earlier this month, World Liberty took over a pain–treatment-turned-payments firm, which then bought World Liberty’s recently created cryptocurrency, according to public disclosures...
“We are in strange and uncharted territory in the securities world. People are making investment decisions that they wouldn’t make in other times,” said Howard Fischer, a former senior trial counsel at the Securities and Exchange Commission during the Obama administration and the first Trump administration.
The transaction will take on greater importance when World Liberty launches trading of the WLFI digital currency, the crypto equivalent of an initial public offering. The trading debut of the currency, also known as a token, is scheduled for Monday.
The Trump family’s WLFI holdings are valued at more than $6 billion on paper—with President Trump holding two-thirds of these WLFI tokens personally, according to calculations based on futures prices on crypto exchanges, blockchain data and the president’s personal financial disclosures.
The Trump family could in theory over time earn billions of dollars more from the public sale of the 33 billion WLFI tokens World Liberty itself holds, on top of the value of the tokens they keep for themselves. '