World Liberty Financial

Overview

World Liberty Financial raised more than half a billion dollars to build a decentralized-finance platform — and then, without a press release, the Trump family quietly took control of the company and the overwhelming bulk of the money (Reuters). In January 2025, disclosed only through changes in the fine print on World Liberty’s website, crypto entrepreneurs Zak Folkman and Chase Herro were replaced as the controlling parties of the venture by an entity in which the Trump family holds a 60% stake (Reuters). Under the new terms, Trump entities claim 75% of net revenues from token sales — currently about $400 million — and 60% of World Liberty’s operations once the core business gets going, leaving the venture with 5% of the $550 million raised to build the platform (Reuters). A project marketed as a bridge between traditional finance and DeFi ended up, in the words of Marquette finance professor David Krause, structured so it “pretty much excludes public investors or token holders from any meaningful financial participation” (Reuters).

The takeover in the fine print

The takeover was not announced; Reuters found it by reviewing changes in the website’s fine print, and said the changes had not been previously reported (Reuters). Initially, Herro and Folkman were listed as the “sole directors and members” of World Liberty Financial Inc., the main entity developing the platform, according to terms last updated in October (Reuters). Then, on January 19 and 20 — the day of Trump’s inauguration — World Liberty raised almost $300 million in a frenzy of token sales, according to Reuters’s analysis of blockchain data (Reuters). Around that time, the website was updated to say WLF Holdco LLC now controlled World Liberty Financial Inc., with Trump’s company DT Marks DeFi LLC holding about 60% of WLF Holdco — though who owns the rest was not disclosed (Reuters). The president’s son Eric also gained a seat on WLF Holdco’s board of managers (Reuters). Reuters said it could not ascertain the terms of any deals between Trump and his partners that produced the changes (Reuters).

From Dough Finance to the White House

The two men who lost control of World Liberty arrived at the Trumps with a wrecked platform behind them. Herro and Folkman were co-founders of Dough Finance, a small DeFi trading platform that sold users on “looping” — borrowing against crypto holdings to buy more of the same asset, over and over (Reuters). On July 12, 2024, unidentified hackers exploited a vulnerability in the code and made off with about $2.5 million; Dough admitted the mistake in a July 23 post-hack report (Reuters). A professional counter-hacking outfit recovered about $281,000, distributed pro-rata — eight users told Reuters they received no repayment at all (Reuters). Jonathan Lopez, a Miami investor who had put about $1 million into Dough, sued Herro in January 2025 for fraud, misrepresentation and breach of fiduciary duties; the case was set for trial in April 2026 in Miami federal court (Reuters). Herro’s attorneys filed for dismissal or arbitration, and the judge set the trial date (Reuters).

By August 18, 2024, the founders had stopped updating Dough’s Telegram chat and X account; Herro deleted another Telegram group for early Dough users, according to former participants (Reuters). Two months later they resurfaced with World Liberty Financial and new partners: Donald Trump and his three sons, Don Jr., Eric and Barron (Reuters). Trump is listed as “Chief Crypto Advocate”; his sons are “Web3 Ambassadors” (Reuters). The pair had entered Trump circles through the family of real estate mogul Steve Witkoff, now Trump’s Middle East envoy; Witkoff set up the meeting with Donald Trump and his two oldest sons, and, as Witkoff told it, “We said, ‘Let’s go pursue it’” (Reuters).

The venture’s first lifeline came less than three weeks after the election: on November 25, 2024, Hong Kong-based crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun — then fighting a U.S. securities fraud lawsuit — announced he had sunk $30 million into $WLFI, the amount the company said it needed to jumpstart operations (Reuters). Sun’s investment has since risen to $75 million, according to Sun’s own account, and he became an adviser to the project (Reuters). In February 2025, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission paused its case against him, citing the public interest (Reuters).

What the token holders got

The tokens sold in the $550 million raise, which go by the symbol $WLFI, give holders the right to vote on changes to the project’s underlying code and to signal their opinion on its direction — but they could not be traded (Reuters). Compared with the five largest DeFi lending platforms, as ranked by data site DefiLlama, World Liberty is an outlier: the five either gave most of their governance tokens away for free, sold them to venture capitalists to fund building, or paid them to partners (Reuters). World Liberty’s tokens also lack a feature the others offer — letting holders vote for the platform to pay them a share of its profits — and the company told token holders that any vote to breach its existing deals with Trump and other backers would have no force (Reuters). Georgetown’s Jim Angel, who has written about DeFi regulation, said: “It’s hard for me to see any economic benefit to the owner of these tokens” (Reuters). Nearly 70% of the money raised came from wallets that spent at least $100,000, and more than half came in buys of $1 million or more — with the identities of nearly all those big spenders hidden behind anonymous crypto wallets (Reuters).

USD1 and the sovereign thread

In March 2025, World Liberty said it would launch a stablecoin, USD1, backed by assets such as U.S. Treasuries and redeemable for a dollar (Reuters). Two months later the token got its biggest real-world use: MGX, a state-controlled Abu Dhabi investment company, used the World Liberty stablecoin to buy a $2 billion equity stake in Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange (Reuters). In January 2026, Pakistan signed a memorandum of understanding with SC Financial Technologies — a Delaware-registered company described as an “affiliated entity” of World Liberty that co-owns the USD1 brand — to explore using the stablecoin for cross-border payments; the deal was announced during a visit by World Liberty’s co-founder and chief executive Zach Witkoff, the son of U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff (Reuters). Government ethics experts have called the growth of the Trump family’s crypto initiatives a conflict of interest as Trump oversees U.S. crypto policy; the White House has denied that any such conflicts exist (Reuters).

Trading day and the Sun feud

On September 1, 2025, $WLFI began public trading: Binance was the first major exchange to list it, with Bybit, Bitget and KuCoin following, on a total supply of 24.66 billion tokens (CoinTelegraph). The token debuted at a $6.4 billion market capitalization and climbed 14% to $0.26 (CoinTelegraph). The rosy relationship with Sun did not survive trading: in April 2026 Sun sued World Liberty, saying the company had illegally frozen his tokens and had secretly installed tools to prevent their sale after they became tradeable in September 2025; Sun denied shorting WLFI (Reuters). In May, World Liberty countersued in Florida state court, accusing Sun of a “public smear campaign” — alleging he had improperly transferred some of his tokens to Binance and short-sold the token to push its price down as public trading began (Reuters). Sun called the suit “a meritless PR stunt” and said he would defeat it in court (Reuters). The token rallied about 12% on news of the countersuit but was still down about 72% since trading began, with Sun’s 4 billion tokens worth around $264 million (Reuters). The feud has not dented the family’s take: the Trump family has already made more than $1 billion from World Liberty, according to a Reuters analysis, and the venture’s bylaws route 75% of the revenue from WLFI token sales to the Trumps (Reuters).

What this profile does not claim

This profile does not take a position on who is right in the 2026 lawsuits — the freeze, short-selling and smear-campaign claims are competing allegations, not findings. It does not report the outcome of the Lopez fraud suit against Herro, which was scheduled for trial in April 2026 but had no verified outcome in the sources read for this profile. It does not assert a current $WLFI price or token supply beyond the dated datapoints cited. It does not present unverified claims about the venture’s ownership structure beyond what Reuters documented, and it does not assess $WLFI or USD1 as investments.