Trump visits a crypto-themed bar in New York City in September, the month he unveiled World Liberty Financial.
Spencer Platt/Getty Images
Around the time that Donald Trump took office, he Trump Organization made moves to sell a stake in one of the president’s crypto companies.
That revelation was buried in a letter that an independent monitor overseeing the president’s business submitted to a New York judge last month. The letter noted that the Trump Organization had repurposed an old entity to enter into an agreement related to World Liberty Financial, a decentralized-finance project that sold at least $550 million of crypto tokens, much of it in a mania-fueled blitz leading up to the inauguration.
“In January 2025, the monitor’s team was notified that a portion of this entity would be sold to a third party,” states the letter, which did not specify the price of the transaction, size of the stake or identity of the purchaser. Forbes was not able to confirm whether the deal closed.
No one involved seems eager to talk about it. A White House spokesperson directed questions to the Trump Organization, which did not respond to a request for comment. A press representative for World Liberty stayed mum, as did one of its cofounders, Alex Witkoff. Same with crypto magnate Justin Sun, who announced a $45 million World Liberty Financial investment on Jan. 19, the day before Trump’s inauguration. It remains unclear whether Sun merely purchased tokens that World Liberty Financial distributed or if he instead bought a stake in Trump’s entity.
The deal seems to say something about the Trump family’s intentions in crypto. In public, the Trumps pump up their projects, with the president posting on social media about his efforts and his sons insisting they are “all in.” In private, however, the first family appears to be dumping least a portion of its holdings.
Donald Trump announced World Liberty Financial in September. A “gold paper”—Trump’s twist on the industry-standard white paper—detailed plans for a token sale. The first $30 million would apparently stay inside the venture, but the rest would be split up among insiders, with 75% going to one of Trump’s companies, 12.5% going to two entrepreneurs who helped set everything up, and the remaining 12.5% going to a company connected to the family of Steve Witkoff, a real-estate developer who now serves as ambassador at large in the Trump administration.
Trump renamed one of his existing entities to enter into an agreement related to the token, according to a different letter the monitor sent to the New York judge. The new name for the entity appears to be DT Marks DEFI LLC, registered in Delaware on Jan. 4, 2016, according to state records. A financial disclosure report that Trump filed in 2017 shows 12 companies created that day. Eleven of those entities appeared on the most recent disclosure Trump filed, in August 2024. At that time, the president held a 100% interest in all 11.
World Liberty Financial struggled to get much traction at first, selling an estimated $15 million of tokens by Nov. 2. But Trump won the election three days later, apparently piquing the interest of Sun, a crypto entrepreneur accused of fraud by the Securities and Exchange Commission. In late November, Sun announced a $30 million investment into World Liberty Financial, without specifying exactly what he had purchased.
Sales crept up from there, reaching an estimated $94 million by Jan. 18, two days before the inauguration. Then things got out of hand. The president-elect released a separate memecoin, sparking a frenzy that extended to the World Liberty tokens. By the night of Jan. 19, World Liberty Financial announced that it had offloaded $300 million worth of tokens, an estimated two-thirds of that coming in a 29-hour period leading up to the inauguration. Sun also disclosed his $45 million add-on investment. World Liberty released more tokens, raising another $250 million.
Last month, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. took the stage at a Bitcoin conference in Las Vegas, where they opened up talking about their father. “We finally have a competent president in the White House,” Eric said to a cheering crowd. “And we have a president who loves this industry and is behind this industry 100%.”
Except, it seems, when he finds a good opportunity to sell.
