A day after an apparent assassination attempt against former president Donald Trump, he appeared on a livestream Monday to champion his latest business venture: cryptocurrencies.
“Crypto is one of those things we have to do,” Mr. Trump said on the social-platform X. “Whether we like it or not, I have to do it.”
Beside him were his collaborators, including a family friend; Mr. Trump’s two oldest sons, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump; and two little-known crypto entrepreneurs with no experience running a high-profile business. Together, they were rolling out Mr. Trump’s crypto venture, World Liberty Financial, a project that has already raised concerns about the former president’s conflicts of interest and even alarmed some of his most vocal supporters in the industry.
Mr. Trump has promoted the venture since August, but its exact purpose remains unclear. No official launch date has been set. On the livestream, he did not address the project directly, leaving the details to the two entrepreneurs, Chase Herro and Zachary Folkman. Mr. Herro has described himself as “the dirtbag of the internet,” while Mr. Folkman used to teach classes on how to seduce women.
It’s highly unusual for a presidential candidate to embark on a new business just weeks before Election Day and even rarer for one to aggressively promote a venture designed to benefit himself and his family. But throughout his political career, Mr. Trump has engaged in business dealings that ethics experts have flagged as problematic. He is the majority owner of Trump Media and Technology Group, the publicly traded parent company of his social-media platform, Truth Social, which accounts for some US$2-billion of his personal wealth.
Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project on Government Oversight, a non-partisan watchdog group, said that if Mr. Trump was elected in November, his involvement in the crypto venture would create serious conflicts of interest. The Securities and Exchange Commission has cracked down on the industry, arguing that nearly all cryptocurrencies are unregistered securities and ought to be regulated like stocks traded on Wall Street.
Mr. Trump “would be able to push regulatory agencies to favour businesses he is involved in,” Ms. Brian said. Ethics experts have said that his ownership of the social-media company raises similar issues.
Representatives for the Trump Organization and World Liberty Financial did not respond to requests for comment.
For years, Mr. Trump was a crypto skeptic who denounced bitcoin as a “scam.” But on the campaign trail, he has morphed into a vocal supporter, speaking at a popular industry conference and drawing donations from crypto executives.
Planning for World Liberty Financial began nine months ago, according to the Trump family friend involved in the venture, Steve Witkoff, a real estate magnate who helped spearhead it. On the livestream, Mr. Witkoff said he introduced Mr. Trump’s sons to Mr. Herro and Mr. Folkman, who have overseen the venture.
By July, AMG Software Solutions, a company based in Puerto Rico, had filed a trademark for the new platform. The next month, Mr. Trump, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. started posting about it on X.
On the livestream Monday, Mr. Trump and his sons said that crypto would transform the financial system, without detailing what their business venture is designed to accomplish. But privately, some people involved in World Liberty Financial have pitched it as a borrowing-and-lending platform, according to three people with knowledge of the project. A white paper for the venture, reviewed by The New York Times, said that it would feature a new cryptocurrency called $WLFI that would be sold to the public.
On its official X and Telegram accounts, World Liberty Financial has said that the project aims to drive “mass adoption of stablecoins,” a type of cryptocurrency designed to maintain a constant value of US$1. One person briefed on the project described it as similar to an existing service called Instadapp, an application that allows users to manage their investments across a range of crypto platforms.
Several members of the Trump family have roles in the business, according to a list of team members included in the white paper. Donald Trump’s title is “chief crypto advocate.” Barron Trump, his 18-year-old son, is listed as the project’s “DeFi visionary,” a reference to the branch of crypto known as decentralized finance. Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. are each described as a “web3 ambassador.”
A disclaimer at the end of the document said the platform wasn’t owned or managed by Donald Trump, the Trump Organization or his family, though family members might receive compensation. (The white paper was earlier reported by the crypto news outlet CoinDesk.)
Behind the scenes, Mr. Witkoff has taken a hands-on role, according to a person familiar with the planning. He envisioned the project partly as a way to give Barron Trump some experience with entrepreneurship, the person said, and steer him away from memecoins, a scam-ridden segment of the crypto industry. A spokesperson for Mr. Witkoff declined to comment.
Barron Trump did not participate in the livestream, but the former president described him as a crypto enthusiast. “He’s got four wallets or something,” Donald Trump said. “He knows this stuff inside out.”
The key figures in the project are Mr. Herro and Mr. Folkman. On the livestream, Mr. Herro, who sometimes spells his surname Hero, said his aim was to give “the everyday American” access to crypto investments.
“This country’s been so good to me, and crypto has been so good to me,” Mr. Herro said.
Mr. Herro is a relatively obscure figure in the crypto world. As a young man, he has said, he was a habitual drug offender and was imprisoned, but later turned his life around and became rich. In 2022, he appeared at a crypto seminar hosted by Jordan Belfort, who inspired the 2013 movie The Wolf of Wall Street. At the event, Mr. Herro described stablecoins as “the biggest innovation since sliced bread,” and said his favourite of the coins was “vivacious and insane and almost borderline a Ponzi scheme.”
Over the years, Mr. Herro has worked closely with Mr. Folkman, who founded a company called Date Hotter Girls, which offered seminars on “attracting, dating and keeping women of beauty and quality.”
Mr. Folkman and Mr. Herro have pursued a range of business ventures together, first in the U.S. Virgin Islands and later in Puerto Rico. Both have homes in Puerto Rico, which has become a haven for crypto enthusiasts who were drawn by a generous tax break, according to public records. Mr. Folkman is listed in a government database as one of the thousands of people living in Puerto Rico who receive the tax break.
Before they set up shop in Puerto Rico, Mr. Folkman and Mr. Herro ran the Nexus Group, an internet advertising and media company in the U.S. Virgin Islands that received a similar business tax break. Mr. Herro also ran a separate crypto trading business there called Pacer Capital.
In the U.S. Virgin Islands, Mr. Herro and Mr. Folkman worked with Alex Golubitsky, a lawyer listed in the white paper as World Liberty Financial’s legal counsel.
In an e-mail, Mr. Golubitsky said he could not discuss the crypto venture. But he referred to Mr. Herro and Mr. Folkman as “talented tech entrepreneurs.”
On the livestream, Mr. Folkman said that lawyers were in the room with him, “staring daggers at me.” Because of the government crackdown on crypto, he explained, the digital currency associated with World Liberty Financial would be available in the United States only to accredited investors.
“The lawyers are getting nervous back there,” he said. “They’re sweating.”
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