Trump family made upward of $6 billion in a day thanks to its crypto-coin launch: report

President Donald Trump and his family amassed as much as $6 billion on paper after their crypto venture opened trading for a new digital currency, The Wall Street Journal reported.

The Trump family launched the new cryptocurrency called WLFI on Monday in the crypto equivalent of an initial public offering. Before now, people who had bought the currency, which is from World Liberty Financial, had not been able to trade the tokens.

The Trump family holds about a quarter of all the tokens in existence. Trump’s three sons–Donald Trump Jr, Eric Trump and Barron Trump–are co-founders of World Liberty, while the president is named as a “Co-Founder Emeritus.”

While World Liberty says that founders and team members’ tokens remain “locked” and they cannot sell them. But trading allows for real-world valuation on their holdings, which were previously based on private sales.

Trump and his sons launched World Liberty Financial last year when he was running for president, and said he would make “America Great Again, this time with crypto.”

World Liberty also took over a publicly listed firm and raised $750 million from investors to buy the cryptocurrency. The deal stands to earn the president and his family $500 million since they keep three-quarters of the revenue from the sale of WLFI tokens.

According to the data site CoinMarketCap, trading of the tokens began on Monday and $1 billion changed hands within an hour. WLFI traded between about 24 and 30 cents per token on Binance, the most popular exchange. That is in line with the prices implied by futures contracts tied to the currency that traded on Binance last week.

The price also offers a premium on the 1.5 cents that investors paid last year to buy the token directly from World Liberty. But World Liberty said early buyers would only be able to trade a fifth of their holdings.

That makes the Trumps’ stake worth more than $6 billion on paper. In addition, Trump-owned entities control a so-called memecoin called $Trump that is worth several billion dollars.

And a Trump-owned trust holds slightly more than half of publicly-listed Trump Media, which runs his Truth Social media network. Trump Media also buys and holds cryptocurrencies. The stake is worth $2.5 million.

But the new venture is not without its own risks, as selling even a small amount of tokens can cause prices to drop.

Some fear that World Liberty creates an avenue to influence the Trump family and investors and investors use it to seek help from the Trump administration.

But White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said “neither the president nor his family have ever engaged, or will ever engage, in conflicts of interest.”

Still, World Liberty employs Zach Witkoff, the son of Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, as its chief executive. The younger Witkoff said World Liberty is non-political but that “clearly President Trump is the greatest president of all time.”