The purchase may have been backed by Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed Al Nahyan, a member of the Abu Dhabi royal family, sources told the publication. The value of the deal, concluded four days before Trump's inauguration, was $500 million. On behalf of WLFI, the contract was signed by the president's son, Eric Trump.
The buyer paid an advance of $187 million, transferring it to companies associated with the Trump family, according to the publication. Another at least $31 million was transferred to organizations affiliated with the family of the U.S. president's special representative Steve Witkoff, who is a co-founder of WLFI.
Immediately after the publication of the WSJ article, the governance token of the WLFI company began to fall. In a day, the quotes dropped by 16.3% to $0.12. The trading volume reached $234.5 million, and the coin's market capitalization fell from $4.5 billion to $3.5 billion.
For the first time, the connections of World Liberty Financial with the UAE were reported by Reuters in July. Journalists spoke about the investments of the Aqua1 fund in a cryptocurrency project worth $100 million, but the sources of the organization's capital were never disclosed. At that time, Reuters calculated that since the project's launch, the Trump family has earned $500 million.
A year after Donald Trump's inauguration, his family received $1.4 billion from cryptocurrency projects, with the main share of profits coming from the WLFI company — through the issuance of the stablecoin USD1, the sale of WLFI tokens, and operations with shares creating a reserve of WLFI tokens by the company Alt5 Sigma, reported Bloomberg. The family of the American president is a major holder of WLFI tokens, with the total value of this package estimated at approximately $3.8 billion. The coins are formally in a vesting mode — they cannot be sold until certain conditions are met.