By Michelle Conlin and Tom Wilson
NEW YORK/LONDON (Reuters) -On Sunday, just before Donald Trump’s inauguration, crypto investor Mike Dudas bought more than $145,000 worth of tokens from World Liberty Financial, a fledgling crypto company partly owned by the U.S. president.
Unlike typical crypto investments, the World Liberty Financial tokens give their holders a vote on decisions about product features and marketing. Crypto tokens such as bitcoin and ether can be used for payments or developing applications.
Dudas said he invested because he was friendly with the project’s advisers and was excited about their plan to make decentralized finance (DeFi) more accessible. DeFi is a financial network run on crypto, without traditional gatekeepers like banks.
“I think they’ll appreciate greatly in value,” Dudas told Reuters, explaining why he bought the tokens. “I believe a Trump DeFi company can be worth very much and that the public sale price was attractive.”
Reuters has identified five others–in locations including Gibraltar and Puerto Rico–who have bought millions of $WLFI tokens, based on interviews and data from Singapore-based blockchain analysis firm Nansen.
To identify these people, Reuters reviewed the data from Nansen – which uses algorithms, investigations and user submissions to pinpoint the people behind anonymous crypto wallets. Reuters then confirmed their investments through interviews and analysis of public comments on social media.
A primary draw for some of them: the connection with Trump, according to interviews with Dudas and two other investors.
World Liberty Financial is “directly connected to our new crypto president Donald Trump,” said Sigil Fund, a Gibraltar-based fund whose chief investment officer is one of the investors.
The CIO, who goes only by the pseudonym “Fiskantes,” spent 40 ether tokens, worth around $130,000 on Wednesday on $WLFI tokens, it said via email.
“Fiskantes did ape some WLFI,” the fund said, using a slang term popular in the crypto world for investing in new projects without doing due diligence.
World Liberty Financial was announced just two months before the U.S. election by Trump, his three sons and one of his top advisors, the billionaire real estate businessman Steve Witkoff. The firm has so far raised at least $300 million selling the tokens, known as $WLFI, according to Reuters calculations based on World Liberty’s website and its social media posts.
Trump’s crypto ventures, including a meme coin known as $TRUMP that has become worth $7.7 billion in just a few days, are raising concerns among ethics experts, market participants and others about the dangers of conflicts of interest and potential of influence over the administration. Trump has long licensed out his name to sell everything from steaks to condos to real estate courses, such as at the now-defunct Trump University.
Ethics experts said Trump does not appear to have violated any laws. While federal rules prohibit executive branch employees from being involved in policy issues that will affect their financial interests, that law does not apply to the president or vice president.
The Trump administration, the Trump Organization, World Liberty Financial and Steve Witkoff, who is Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, did not respond to requests for comment.
SUN IS BUYING
So far, Justin Sun, the Chinese-born crypto entrepreneur who founded the blockchain network Tron, has emerged as the most prominent buyer of the token, spending at least $75 million, according to his posts on X. Sun’s purchase into an entity where Trump directly benefits financially has raised concerns about potential conflicts of interest and ethics due to Tron’s alleged use by militant groups and pending charges against him by U.S. securities regulators.
The purchases by Tron have come as World Liberty Financial has made its own acquisitions of Tron’s token.
On Monday, World Liberty Financial said on X that to commemorate Trump’s inauguration it had made “strategic purchases” of crypto tokens, including TRX, Tron’s cryptocurrency.
World Liberty Financial now holds 30 million TRX valued at $7.43 million, according to crypto analytics firm Arkham Intelligence. On Wednesday, Sun posted on X: “In my view, if I have made money in cryptocurrency, all credit goes to President Trump.”
Since Sun first purchased the WLF tokens on November 25, and WLF’s announcement the next day that Sun was now a World Liberty Financial advisor, Tron’s price has increased 29% to 25 cents, although that is far off its December high of 43 cents.
World Liberty Financial and Sun did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the recent dealings.
BIG REWARDS?
Trump and other unnamed affiliates are set to reap 75% of some World Liberty Financial revenues and own about 22.5 billion $WLFI tokens through subsidiaries. The project had by Wednesday sold another 22 billion of its tokens to investors. It is not clear how much of that money, if any, goes to Trump, according to World Liberty’s “gold paper” listed on its website.
Unlike factories and warehouses, the costs in setting up crypto companies is negligible, said Jeff Hauser, director of the nonprofit Revolving Door Project, which scrutinizes executive branch employees. “So political investment is the way to influence it.”
Trump said earlier this month he will hand over daily management of his business assets to his children on entering the White House.
Asked on Tuesday whether he would continue to sell products such as his $TRUMP coin that debuted over inauguration weekend and that could that benefit himself while president, Trump said: “I don’t know much about it other than I launched it. I heard it was very successful. I haven’t checked it. Where is it today?”
Dudas, who founded crypto media outlet The Block, bought 9.7 million of the tokens at 1.5 cents each, according to blockchain records he shared with Reuters. The World Liberty Financial tokens cannot be resold to other investors.
When asked if he worried about the prospect of any conflict of interest, Dudas rejected the idea. “This is very different from a meme coin in the President’s name,” said Dudas, referring to the $TRUMP coin brandished with an image from the President’s assassination attempt. Dudas stressed that World Liberty was about the future of decentralized finance.
Once a Democrat but now a registered Independent, Dudas said he donated to Republicans during the last election cycle, citing what he described as the Biden administration’s hostility to the crypto industry.
THE INVESTORS
The sales of the tokens are recorded anonymously on the blockchain, the public ledger that underpins crypto transactions.
Nansen identified a number of other holders which Reuters could not independently confirm. Reuters also could not ascertain the number of individual holders of the token.
Tron’s Sun is the largest outside investor in the token, according to this analysis.
In 2023, the SEC charged Sun with fraud linked to crypto trading and hiding payments to celebrities to promote his companies. The case is pending. The Swiss-based entrepreneur has said the SEC charges “lack merit.” He did not respond to a request for comment. The SEC did not respond to a request for comment.
Another buyer of the tokens is Troy Murray, a crypto entrepreneur based in Puerto Rico, according to the Nansen data. Murray bought about 666,000 $WLFI tokens, the data show.
In 2023, Murray was hit by the SEC with a cease-and-desist order over a blockchain company he developed for selling complex investments via crypto asset vehicles, in violation of securities laws. The case was settled that year.
“I was curious about the legal structure they set up around selling the tokens, and once I had gotten through all the steps I kind of figured, why not?” Murray told Reuters in a message on X, adding the “whynot” emoji.
(Reporting by Michelle Conlin in New York and Tom Wilson in London, additional reporting by Elizabeth Howcroft in Paris and Luc Cohen in New York; Editing by Megan Davies, Paritosh Bansal and Anna Driver)
