A few days before Donald Trump was sworn in for his second term, a little-known crypto company tied to his family quietly changed hands in a very big way.

 

According to reporting from The Wall Street Journal, an investment network linked to Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed al Nahyan, one of the most powerful figures in the United Arab Emirates, agreed to acquire a 49 percent stake in World Liberty Financial, a Trump-associated crypto venture. The price tag was roughly $500 million. The deal was not disclosed at the time.

 

On its own, that might sound like another splashy foreign investment in crypto. But when you line up the timing, the players involved, and what happened next in Washington, the story is far less routine.

 

 

The deal that surfaced after the fact

World Liberty Financial has been marketed as a crypto and stablecoin project aligned with the Trump brand. It has drawn attention before for its political overtones, but the WSJ reporting introduced a new layer entirely.

 

The Journal reported that the agreement gave Emirati-linked investors just under half the company, enough to wield serious influence without triggering automatic control disclosures. Under the agreement, half of the $500 million was paid upfront, with $187 million flowing to Trump family-controlled entities and at least $31 million going to entities affiliated with the family of Steve Witkoff, the real estate magnate who co-founded World Liberty and was later named U.S. Special Envoy to the Middle East. Witkoff's son Zach is the current CEO of the project. 

 

The timing did not help the optics. The deal was reached days before inauguration, when policy direction for the next four years was coming into focus and foreign governments were jockeying for position.

 

David Wachsman, a spokesperson for World Liberty Financial, said the company moved forward with Aryam’s investment because it believes the deal supports World Liberty’s long-term growth. He pushed back on the idea that the company should be held to a higher bar than other privately held U.S. firms when raising capital, calling that notion unreasonable and out of step with core American business principles.

 

Wachsman said neither President Trump nor Steve Witkoff played any role in the transaction, and that neither has been involved in World Liberty Financial’s operations since taking office. He added that Witkoff has never held an operational role at the company. According to Wachsman, the investment does not give any party access to government decision-making or policy influence, and the company follows the same rules and regulatory requirements as others in the industry.

 

 

Who is Sheikh Tahnoon?

Sheikh Tahnoon is not a Silicon Valley VC taking a flier on tokens. He is the UAE’s national security adviser, a senior royal, and a central figure in Abu Dhabi’s intelligence, defense, and investment apparatus.

 

He also oversees or influences a web of firms operating at the intersection of AI, data infrastructure, and geopolitics. That includes G42, an Emirati AI company that has faced scrutiny in the past over its international ties and access to advanced computing technology.

 

A person familiar with the investment of World Liberty said Sheikh Tahnoon and his team spent months reviewing World Liberty Financial’s business plans before committing capital, ultimately completing the deal alongside several co-investors. The person said the investment did not involve funds from G42.

 

The source also said the investment was never discussed with President Trump, either during the due diligence process or afterward, and described Tahnoon as a significant investor in the crypto sector.

 

 

The AI chip question hovering over everything

One reason this story has legs beyond crypto is what happened after the investment.

 

Following Trump’s return to office, the administration moved on policies involving advanced AI chips, an area where the UAE has been actively lobbying for expanded access. These chips are tightly controlled, highly strategic, and essential for modern AI development.

 

No reporting has established a direct quid pro quo. There is no document that says money went in and policy came out. 

 

From a governance perspective, this is exactly the kind of situation ethics experts warn about. Even if no one crosses a legal line, foreign investors with deep political ties may gain goodwill, access, or priority simply by being financially intertwined with the president’s broader business ecosystem.

 

 

The legal fight may be narrow, the political fallout less so

Some legal scholars cited in reporting have raised the emoluments clause, the constitutional provision meant to prevent U.S. officials from receiving benefits from foreign states. Trump’s defenders counter that he is not directly receiving payments and that the structure insulates him from day-to-day involvement.

 

That argument may hold up in court. It often has before.

 

But the political risk is broader. Even without a legal violation, the appearance of foreign influence is enough to trigger congressional scrutiny, especially with Trump's polarizing nature and Senate Democrats, many anti-crypto, looking for any angle to stifle crypto innovation and hang Trump out to dry...all at the same time. Some Lawmakers have already begun calling for reviews, especially given the national security dimensions of AI and crypto infrastructure.

 

 

The Bottom Line

This is not just a Trump story or a UAE story. It is a preview of how crypto-era influence works.

 

Instead of overt lobbying, capital moves through private deals. Instead of formal control, investors stop at 49 percent. Instead of campaign donations, value flows through equity, tokens, and stablecoin rails.

 

It is cleaner, quieter, and harder to regulate.

 

Whether or not this specific deal leads to formal investigations or enforcement, it highlights a structural vulnerability. Crypto allows political proximity, financial upside, and strategic infrastructure to blend in ways legacy systems never quite allowed.

 

And that is why this episode is likely to be studied long after the headlines fade.

Trump-Backed World Liberty Financial Rolls Out DeFi Lending Platform

 

World Liberty Financial, the crypto venture tied to President Donald Trump and his family, has crossed another big milestone in its effort to turn a stablecoin and decentralized finance products into a real business. The firm quietly rolled out World Liberty Markets, a new on-chain borrowing and lending platform built around its flagship stablecoin, USD1, and it’s already pulled in tens of millions in assets from early users.

The launch puts World Liberty right into one of the most competitive and risky corners of crypto: decentralized lending. This is where you can earn interest by supplying assets or borrow against your holdings without going through a bank or broker. It’s the plumbing that makes much of DeFi tick, and it’s also where huge liquidations and smart contract exploits have regularly happened. The difference here is political gravity: this project is backed by one of the most polarizing figures in modern American business and politics.

 

What World Liberty Markets Actually Offers

World Liberty Markets isn’t reinventing DeFi. The way it works is familiar if you’ve used other decentralized money markets: you supply assets to earn interest, and you can borrow against collateral you’ve locked up. At launch, supported assets include the company’s own USD1 stablecoin, its governance token WLFI, Ethereum, tokenized Bitcoin, and major stablecoins like USDC and USDT. Once you deposit, you can take a loan out in any of those supported assets based on how much you’ve put up as collateral.

The platform is built with the infrastructure of an existing DeFi protocol called Dolomite, which means World Liberty didn’t have to write an entire lending stack itself. Think of it as a branded front door and dashboard on top of established smart contract mechanics.

In the first week or so, the protocol showed some early traction, with roughly $20 million in supplied assets moving through it. That number is small compared to big DeFi players, but it’s eye-catching because of how recent the launch was and the fact that USD1 supply is growing quickly.

To jump-start liquidity, World Liberty is dangling a very high yield on USD1 deposits, along with a “reward points” program for larger suppliers. World Liberty was announced on X, writing that “WLFI Markets is built to support the future of tokenized finance by providing access to third party and WLFI-branded real-world asset products, supporting new tokenized assets as they launch, and creating deeper and wider access to USD1 across all WLFI applications. It’s designed to provide future access to WLFI’s broader RWA roadmap.”

 

Betting on USD1

Behind all this is USD1, World Liberty’s dollar-pegged stablecoin that has really become the center of the project’s story. Since its debut in early 2025, the coin has ballooned into one of the larger dollar stablecoins by market capitalization, trading alongside names people actually recognize and use every day. It’s backed by cash, short-term Treasuries, and things like dollar deposits through professional custody arrangements, and it aims to be redeemable at parity with the U.S. dollar.

That backing and that promise of redemption put USD1 in the same product category as USDC and USDT, which dominate the stablecoin market. But stablecoins only become useful when there are places for them to be spent, lent, traded or borrowed, and until now USD1 had mostly been used as a tradable asset with some big institutional deals. The lending launch is the first real step toward making it function like money in crypto’s own financial ecosystem.

World Liberty has been aggressively pushing USD1 into major venues, including listings on big exchanges and use as collateral or settlement assets in large trades. That has helped it grow in circulation fast, and have enough liquidity that a lending market now makes sense. Because USD1 is tied so directly to World Liberty’s broader business, how well the lending product does could be a big factor in whether USD1 becomes sticky in the market or remains a speculative novelty.

 

From On-Chain Products to Traditional Finance

This lending rollout comes at a moment when the company is also trying to pull USD1 and its associated services into the regulated financial world. A subsidiary of World Liberty has applied for a national trust bank charter with U.S. regulators. If approved, that would allow the entity to issue and custody stablecoins and digital assets under federal supervision, provide conversion between fiat and stablecoin, and generally operate more like a regulated institution rather than a pure DeFi startup.

That’s a trend you’re seeing across crypto right now. Regulators have started to outline formal frameworks for stablecoins through new legislation aimed at reducing risk and improving disclosure. Projects that tie themselves to those frameworks stand to get easier access to traditional players like banks, exchanges and institutional clients. But it also subjects them to a lot more scrutiny than the wild west of DeFi.

 

Will it succeed?

Here’s the hard truth: decentralized lending markets are notoriously volatile and complex. You can get liquidation events overnight if collateral values tumble. Smart contracts have flaws and exploits. Incentives can attract short-term capital that leaves as soon as the rewards stop. That’s all before you even factor in political risk, regulatory noise, or questions about reserve transparency.

Then there’s the optics of the thing. World Liberty is connected to Donald Trump and his family, who have been publicly associated with this project since the beginning. That’s drawn critics who say there are conflicts of interest embedded in how the venture promotes itself and how big deals get structured. Whether you see that as a feature or a bug, it certainly makes this different from your run-of-the-mill DeFi launch.

For anyone watching this space, the next few months will answer big questions. Will World Liberty Markets continue to draw real deposits once the initial incentives slow down? Will borrowing activity pick up in ways that look organic rather than promotional? Can USD1 maintain its peg and redemption promise under pressure? And how will regulators respond if this trust charter application moves forward?

One thing is clear: if a political figure’s name is going to be tied to a crypto product that interacts with both decentralized users and regulated finance, people in the market will watch every data point, every rate change, every on-chain metric and every regulatory filing with extra attention.

 

Whether it pans out or not will matter to traders, developers, regulators and probably a whole lot of voters too.

 

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