Four days before Donald Trump took the oath of office in January 2025, two lieutenants of Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan signed a contract to funnel $500 million into a cryptocurrency company tied to the incoming president’s family.
Sheikh Tahnoon is the UAE’s national security adviser. He manages the country’s largest sovereign wealth fund. He is the brother of the president of the United Arab Emirates. Western intelligence services call him the “spy sheikh.”
Eric Trump signed the deal. It gave the Emirati-backed entity a 49 percent stake in World Liberty Financial. According to the Wall Street Journal, $187 million went to Trump family entities. Another $31 million went to entities affiliated with Steve Witkoff’s family — Witkoff being the man Trump would install as his top Middle East envoy. The Journal called the transaction unprecedented in modern American political history.
That was the opening move. Everything that followed was built on top of it.
Follow the money. It’s not complicated once you stop letting people make it complicated.
World Liberty Financial launched USD1 in March 2025. A stablecoin. A digital token pegged one-to-one to the U.S. dollar, backed by reserves — cash and short-term Treasuries, managed by Fidelity Investments. The more money that flows through a stablecoin, the larger the reserve base grows. The reserves generate income. That income flows to whoever owns the system.
A Trump business entity, DT Marks DEFI LLC, controls the holding company that owns World Liberty Financial. As of early 2025, it held approximately 60 percent of the equity. The Trump family is entitled to 75 percent of net revenue from token sales.
Reuters did the math. From the $550 million raised through early token sales, the Trump family’s claim was approximately $400 million. After the co-founders took their cut, World Liberty Financial was left with about 5 percent of the money it raised to actually build the platform.
The family took 75 percent. The company kept 5 percent.
That ratio tells you what the product is.
In May 2025, MGX — an Abu Dhabi state-backed investment firm — announced a $2 billion investment in Binance, the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world. The deal used USD1 as the settlement currency. Zach Witkoff, co-founder of World Liberty Financial and son of Trump envoy Steve Witkoff, announced it at a crypto conference in Dubai. He was standing next to Eric Trump. Within weeks, USD1’s market capitalization surged past $2.6 billion.
A foreign government–backed entity used a financial instrument tied to the president of the United States to settle a $2 billion transaction on a global exchange. The reserves grew. The income flowed to a system the president’s family owns.
