Trump Slashes Crypto Stake, Sparks Fresh Scrutiny
Donald Trump’s family has quietly cut its stake in World Liberty Financial (WLFI) from 60 percent to 40 percent, causing a stir in the blockchain world. A small change on WLFI’s website between June 8 and June 19, 2025, made this change known. The Trump-WLFI connection has always been controversial, but the latest change has made people in the market, ethics, and politics take notice.
The family had an even bigger holdback in late 2024, close to 75 percent. After hiring a court monitor, that number dropped to 60 percent by January 2025. Based on WLFI’s estimate of the market value of $1.7 billion, Trump may have unlocked almost $190 million worth of tokens with this new exit. If this is true, it could mean that about $135 million goes back to the Trumps. But was this just a smart way to handle money, or was it a way to get ahead of more scrutiny?
Selling Crypto Dreams or Getting Rid of Political Weight?
WLFI has made a lot of big promises, like a stablecoin called USD1 that is backed by a huge $2 billion investment from Abu Dhabi’s Phoenix Group. It says it will work with platforms like Binance in the future, but it is still not fully functional and doesn’t have a real use case for token holders yet. Some people say that the so-called “governance tokens” don’t really give you any power or the ability to share profits.
Trump’s stake is getting smaller at the same time that people are becoming more worried about how politics and crypto interests affect each other. After he got back to the White House, more than a dozen important SEC and DOJ cases were put on hold. These included investigations into Justin Sun, a major WLFI investor. People have noticed this timing.
Financial ethics experts like Jim Angel from Georgetown and Matthew Krause from Marquette have spoken out about the basic imbalance in how WLFI tokens are set up. People who own tokens don’t have real economic or voting power, and the Trump camp still controls things behind the scenes. At the same time, deregulation is still going on in the crypto world, which raises concerns about conflicts of interest.
We don’t know yet if this 20% exit means a bigger strategic withdrawal or just smart optics before the government pushes back. But one thing is for sure: the combination of political power and unregulated crypto is still one of the most dangerous things in modern finance.
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