The Crypto President: Part 1

0:00Hey, everyone. It's Jess. And Ryan. A quick heads up before we begin. Our next live show is just days away. It's happening Tuesday, April 28th. The Journal podcast is going to be in Los Angeles at the El Rey Theater. We'll have Oscar and Emmy winner Riz Ahmed. And TV and film producer Franklin Leonard, who created The Blacklist. We'll be talking about the future of Hollywood, plus a few other fun surprises. And there are still a few tickets left, so grab yours now. Find the link in our show notes. See you there, April 28th. Can't wait to meet you.

0:39Join me live on Twitter Spaces at 8 p.m. this September 16th for the launch of World Liberty Financial. In September of 2024, in the final months of Donald Trump's presidential campaign for re-election, he sat down in front of a mic and camera in the library at Mar-a-Lago. He was launching a new crypto company, World Liberty Financial. It's a fledgling business, and yet it's a massive business. But it has a chance to really be something special. Also at the announcement was Trump's longtime friend, Steve Witkoff. The people of Steve Witkoff, a great friend of mine, a great businessman. Witkoff weaved in and out of the room throughout the launch.

1:24At one point, he hopped on the mic to talk about how World Liberty Financial came to be. And so we had a meeting initially with Eric, Don Jr., and the president and his council. And we said, let's go pursue it. Trump and Whitcoff had only recently gotten on board with crypto. And they credited their sons for that. Eric and Don know it so well. They do. It's almost like younger people know it a lot better than older people. Eric and Don Jr. were both at the launch too, excited about this new venture. Here's Eric. You've got countries, you've got sovereign wealth funds that are literally putting their retired fortunes into crypto.

2:03If America doesn't do it, we're going to be left behind. We can't be left behind in anything we do. Certainly not digital finance, right? Throughout Trump's presidential campaign in 2024, the Trump family had been getting increasingly involved in cryptocurrency. But World Liberty Financial was their biggest effort to join the crypto gold rush. There's no question that this is the future, guys.

2:31Trump, of course, went on to win re-election. And he appointed his friend Steve Whitcoff to a high-profile role as special envoy in the incoming administration. Over the past year, my colleagues Angus Barrick and Rebecca Ballhaus have been reporting on World Liberty Financial and how much it's grown. And they found the Trump family's crypto company has been secretly working with foreign-owned businesses. Here's Angus. You've got one of the most powerful officials in the United Arab Emirates who has put a huge amount of money into a company run by the president's family. And you've got the world's biggest crypto company, which isn't even allowed to operate in the United States because of its criminal conviction that has been boosting world liberty.

3:21And those international business associates wanted something from the U.S. government. It's something that is totally unprecedented in American politics and, you know, is something that I think previous presidents would absolutely have avoided because it calls into question the motivations behind your administration's foreign policy. World Liberty said President Trump and Steve Woodcoff haven't been involved in the company since taking office and that Woodcoff has divested. The White House said that President Trump's assets are in a trust managed by his children and that world liberty is run by the Trump and Whitcoff sons, independently of their fathers.

4:00The White House also said that there are no conflicts of interest and that President Trump, quote, only acts in the best interest of the American public.

4:11Rebecca, how much money has the Trump family made from World Liberty Financial? Yeah, it's a pretty amazing number. So World Liberty has doled out at least$1.2 billion to the Trump family. And just to put it in perspective with Trump's, you know, real estate empire, it took eight years for Trump's real estate, golf, and brand empire to make that amount of money between 2010 and 2017. So it's safe to say that Trump is seeing an influx of wealth unlike what he's ever seen before. Over the course of two episodes, We're diving into the secret dealings that put World Liberty Financial on the map, while personally enriching the Trump family.

5:02Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Jessica Mendoza. It's Friday, April 24th.

5:18This is Episode 1, A New Crypto Fortune.

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6:35In December of 2024, just a few months after World Liberty Financial's launch at Mar-a-Lago, a huge week-long party was starting on the other side of the world. and Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates. It's known as Abu Dhabi Finance Week. The week normally kicks off with the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix.

7:00Abu Dhabi is one of the most pro-crypto places on the planet, known for its super wealthy investors. That week, anyone who was anyone in the crypto world was there. People within that subculture were all there swigging champagne and watching the F1 cars tear past. There was a DJ on there. If you've got money to spend and you rent the super yacht and you park it alongside the track and then you invite all your friends and customers to come and first to watch the race and then you kind of party into the evening. The Grand Prix is a pregame to the main event, one of the most important crypto meetups, the annual Bitcoin, Middle East and North Africa Conference.

7:47This is where crypto heavyweights and policymakers in that space fly in for a couple of days. You know, obviously there's the appeal of trying to score meetings with these deep-pocketed Emirati investors. Two of the founders of the Trump family's crypto venture, World Liberty Financial, were also there. You had Eric Trump, Steve Wyckoff, who by that time had been appointed President Trump's special envoy for the Middle East. It was this incredible intersection of the biggest names in crypto and the incoming president's inner circle. Going into the Abu Dhabi conference, World Liberty Financial was still brand new.

8:31How was World Liberty received by the crypto industry, at least at first? It was not considered a very serious project. I don't think people really kind of thought that it would be kind of a serious competitor in the industry. But this conference was an opportunity for World Liberty Financial to challenge that perception. Eric Trump and Steve Woodcoff were spending time in the conference's VIP room, or what's called the whale-only backroom, which was open to attendees who'd paid$10 ,000 to get in. The whales, this kind of crypto term for like guys that have a lot of crypto wealth. You know, if you scored a whale ticket, then you had access to the whale only room, which was a kind of sectioned off part of the conference where all the big dogs would go and hang out.

9:21In that whale room, Steve Whitcoff and Eric Trump mingled with crypto titans, people like crypto billionaire Justin Sun, and representatives of Emirati investors with access to billions of dollars. Also at this conference was a whale who had kind of been washed up on the beach, Changpeng Zhao, also known as CZ, the founder of the world's largest crypto exchange, Binance. He had only recently gotten out of prison. You had CZ making one of his first conference appearances since his release from jail.

9:59In 2023, the Biden administration said that CZ had harmed national security by allowing criminal groups to move billions of dollars through Binance. Binance pleaded guilty to violating anti-money laundering rules. CZ pleaded guilty to a related charge and was forced to step down as CEO. CZ's lawyer told The Wall Street Journal that CZ's forced resignation and imprisonment were, quote, unjust. He was the emperor of the cryptoverse to suddenly be put into a prison jumpsuit. CZ's always been an industry mogul. And I think his jail sentence knocked him down a few pegs. After finishing his four-month stint, CZ's reputation had been tarnished.

10:43Here he is on a podcast interview. I just want to move on. I think it is what it is. I did the time. I addressed it. I, you know, I just took it head on. And now I can move on, you know. And his company was hurting too. Because of the charges, Binance had been barred from operating in one of its most important markets, the U.S. And according to Angus's reporting, which Binance has disputed, the company's top legal staff worried that the company was doomed. So when CZ showed up at that conference in Abu Dhabi in December of 2024, he and Binance had a lot of problems that needed to be solved. And I think CZ, he is, you know, whatever you think of him, he is most certainly a fighter.

11:31He, even in his lowest moments, I think he was searching for ways to climb back. One path to climbing back, both for CZ and for Binance, could be through a pardon from the incoming U.S. president, Donald Trump. A pardon would clear CZ's name at the federal level and open a path for Binance to do business in the U.S. again. The company viewed the pardon as the kind of key to solving the company's legal problems because, you know, Binance was still majority owned by CZ. Having this felon was really complicating their life all across the world. And a pardon, I mean, it wouldn't fix all of their problems, but in terms of reentering the U.S.

12:12markets, which they'd been banned from, the pardon would be kind of a huge step in that direction.

12:21Breaking news, President Trump just pardoned one of the most powerful people in the crypto world. Binance founder Chang-Peng Zhao, who pleaded... Less than one year after CZ attended that crypto conference, he got the pardon he wanted from President Trump. Zhao had pleaded guilty to failing to prevent money laundering on the platform. The latest recipients of a controversial presidential pardon... That pardon from the president raised eyebrows. After all, CZ and Binance had pleaded guilty to some serious charges. You know, again, like just over a year before he'd been in this jail cell, you know, he was persona non grata in the industry.

13:03And to have completed this incredible about turn within the first year of Trump's presidency, to get a pardon so swiftly was surprising. Angus and the team at the Wall Street Journal had been digging in. And they discovered that in the months that passed between the conference and the pardon, Binance and the Trump family's crypto company, World Liberty Financial, had quietly started working together. That's next.

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14:36Let's go back now to December of 2024, around the time of that crypto conference in Abu Dhabi. Trump had just won re-election. CZ had just been released from prison. And World Liberty Financial had just launched. Angus, what was World Liberty Financial at that point? I mean, it's pretty hazy. They didn't launch with a product. They didn't really launch with a kind of established roadmap to launch any product. It was kind of, you know, we're the Trump family. We're getting into crypto. You know, trust us that we're going to make this a success. But the Trump and Whitcoff families had an idea about how the business could eventually start to make a lot of money.

15:18They'd set their sights on launching their own stablecoin. A stablecoin is effectively, it's like a digital dollar. It's like a dollar that instead of sending it from bank account to bank account, you're sending it across the blockchain. In order for World Liberty to make that stablecoin idea a reality, they needed some help. And around that same time, Binance, CZ's crypto exchange, was looking for ways to get closer to the Trumps. We know from our reporting that Binance, they set up an internal task force, which consisted of a number of kind of high-level executives. And this task force, its aim was to look for ways to fix Binance's legal issues in the U.S.

16:00Binance was exploring ways they could work with World Liberty that they could then leverage into a pardon for CZ. The Abu Dhabi Crypto Conference was in December. At some point in the months after that, Binance stepped in to help World Liberty Financial. According to the Wall Street Journal's reporting, Binance built the technology behind the stablecoin that World Liberty wanted, called USD1. We know through our reporting that Binance deploys engineers to build the blockchain technology that underpins the USD1 stablecoin, which would become World Liberty's first product. In March of 2025, World Liberty launched that new USD1 stablecoin.

16:45They now had an actual cryptocurrency product they could sell to customers. It was a way for the Trump family's crypto company to start making serious money. But that was just the first step. Now, someone needed to actually buy some of that USD1 crypto money. But who would do that? It was a new and untested product. The important thing in the crypto world that people look at to assess whether a project is kind of legitimate. They look at the market capitalization. So once again, Binance stepped in. According to Angus's reporting, they found someone who was willing to invest a lot of money,$2 billion, into Binance.

17:27But before the investment happened, Binance asked the buyer to pay not in dollars or euros or yen, but with USD1, the Trump family's stablecoin. It was the first major transaction in the cryptocurrency. So suddenly it went from this minnow, which nobody was really paying any attention to, to one of the largest stablecoins by market cap on the market. Before the transaction, World Liberty's stablecoin was valued at$127 million. After, that market value jumped to$2.1 billion. Which was something that World Liberty then started trumpeting, saying that we are, look at us, we're one of the fastest growing stablecoin issuers on the planet.

18:14The transaction was a huge moment for World Liberty. It legitimized the company and USD1 in the eyes of the crypto world. And it would also ultimately give the company some serious income. It's complicated, but World Liberty couldn't just pocket the$2 billion. They needed to hold on to it as backing for their stablecoin USD1. But they could invest that money into U.S. Treasury bills. And interest on$2 billion is not nothing. What did that mean for world liberty? They suddenly had a product which was going to be generating about$80 million in income each year. About a month after that huge USD1 transaction took place, Binance formally applied for a pardon for CZ.

19:03And by the time that CZ got his pardon in October of 2025, world liberty was thriving. I gave him a pardon at the request of a lot of very good people. That was Trump at a press conference the same day the pardon became public. He was asked about it again on 60 Minutes. Why did you pardon him? Okay, are you ready? I don't know who he is. I know he got a four-month sentence or something like that, And I heard it was a Biden witch hunt. World Liberty said it played no role in CZ's pardon and that its business interactions with Binance have been routine and that there are no conflicts of interest.

19:39The company also said that neither Binance nor CZ played a role in, quote, USD1's design, coding or issuance. The company also said that Binance's help was, quote, not in exchange for anything. Binance has said neither the company nor CZ have financed or helped World Liberty and disputed that the company created a task force. Binance also said that the company's involvement with USD1 was limited to services that are similarly available to others. A lawyer for CZ said that there was no link between the pardon and any business decisions and that it came after a formal review process. So to sum it up, one year into Trump's presidency, World Liberty Financial had grown into a major crypto company.

20:25CZ got his pardon, and Binance was on its way to a comeback.

20:34But there's another player here that we haven't told you about, the buyer, who had made that huge$2 billion transaction using World Liberty's stablecoin. So instead of using dollars or any of the other kind of much, much more established kind of stable coins on the market, this investor picked a currency which at that point in time had barely been used for anything else. In May of 2025, Steve Whitcoff's son, Zach, who by this point was the CEO of World Liberty, announced who that buyer was. It's a company called MGX. We thank MGX and Binance for their trust in us, and I think it's only the beginning.

21:20MGX is a company from the United Arab Emirates, and it's run by a member of the country's royal family. This major UAE investor called MGX and World Liberty announced that MGX would use USD1 to make this$2 billion payment. MGX was the buyer, the one that had been willing to pay so much money and ended up boosting World Liberty's cryptocurrency, USD1. But why would they do it? We were always left with an open question about why would MGX be so willing to use the present family's own currency? Here's what the company said about it. An MGX spokeswoman said that Binance asked for the transaction to be settled in cryptocurrency.

22:06She also said MGX had selected World Liberty's USD1 for reasons including, quote, business suitability. A lawyer for Binance denied that the company had asked MGX to use World Liberty's USD1, saying MGX made that choice of payment method itself. World Liberty Financial denied that Binance helped to arrange the use of USD1 in the deal. For Angus and the Wall Street Journal reporting team, MGX's decision to use USD1 for the deal still seemed peculiar. At the time, it was like, that's strange. Strange that MGX would be using, this UAE investor would be using USD1 to invest in Binance. Even people who were connected to this deal, you know, raised questions about why would the Emiratis pick this very, very niche currency to make this payment when there were so many other kind of options available.

23:03After a few more months of reporting, Angus and his team discovered that there was more to the story. there was another huge deal that had been left undisclosed. I think it blew my mind. I think I was about to get on the London tube, and I think it stopped me dead. Through our reporting, we discovered that the connections between not only finance and World Liberty, but also World Liberty and MGX and the Emiratis ran much deeper than we knew previously. — A foreign government official taking a stake in the president's company right before he becomes president is a first and is not something we've seen in modern American politics.

23:49— On tomorrow's episode, Rebecca Ballhaus reveals that someone had quietly bought up half of World Liberty Financial and that they, too, would get what they wanted from the Trump administration. The fact that this was done in secret certainly makes you wonder what else we might not know about.

24:15That's all for today, Friday, April 24th. This episode was produced by Sophie Codner and edited by Laura Morris. Additional reporting in this episode by Elliot Brown, Sam Kessler, and Patricia Kausman. Fact-checking by Mary Mathis. The theme remix in today's episode is by Nathan Singapak. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal. The show is made by Catherine Brewer, Pia Gedkari, Isabella Jepal, Sophie Codner, Ryan Knudsen, Matt Huang, Colin McNulty, Annie Minoff, Laura Morris, Enrique Perez de la Rosa, Sarah Platt, Alan Rodriguez Espinosa, Heather Rogers, Pierre Singhi, Jivika Verma, Catherine Whalen, Tatiana Zamis, and me, Jessica Mendoza.