Cryptocurrency news can be hard to follow. For instance, I recently encountered the term “tokenized coin” and spiraled until I could calm myself down with a beveragized drink.
But a new Reuters report on the Trump family’s crypto profits makes things real easy to understand:
According to Reuters’ own analysis, The Trump family has been able to “generate at least $2.3 billion in profit from investors since Trump retook the presidency,” while losses for the approximately one million people who put their money in Trump-related crypto investments “totaled $2.3 billion at the end of April.”
It’s symmetrical, and also sad.
According to the report, the Trumps profited most of all from sales of $WLFI, the World Liberty Financial governance token, created by World Liberty Financial, a Trump family crypto venture. The Trumps reportedly took a 75% cut of Token sales, and has a 60% stake in the company.
That calculation included sales that were disclosed, along with an estimate of additional sales based on Reuters’ own investigation. World Liberty Financial told Reuters that token was “not an investment product” and that World Liberty “does not validate third-party methodologies for valuing governance tokens or estimating aggregate investor positions.”
The $WLFI story is one of mostly steady decline since August of 2024. One token started out worth about $0.31, but as of this writing is down to about $0.05.
Other sources of Trump family profit, according to Reuters, included the $Trump memecoin. Losses were calculated by analyzing the blockchain itself, since the $Trump memecoin project doesn’t provide revenue disclosures.
Justin Sun, founder of the Tron blockchain, accused World Liberty financial of misconduct back in April. That month he sued World Liberty financial, claiming it had frozen his tokens illegally. World Liberty Financial characterized Sun’s actions as a smear campaign, and countersued for defamation.
Reuters’ tally of investors included “retail buyers”—average Joes and Janes, who fired up their wallet apps and made purchases—along with indirect investors who bought other Trump-exposed financial products like ETFs. Reuters notes, however, that “a small number of large traders who were early buyers and sellers of $TRUMP made big profits.”
In an SEC filing last month, a publicly traded company called AI Financial, which invested heavily in World Liberty Financial tokens, expressed doubt that it could survive another year. A Forbes report from April found that another publicly traded crypto company, American Bitcoin, had declined in in value by $500 million in less then a year, even as its co-founder and CTO, Eric Trump, saw his net worth grow dramatically over the same period.
