How Crypto Has Earned the Trump Family Billions
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Hundreds of National Guard troops begin patrolling Washington, D.C. Plus, we look at the recipe behind the Trump family's cryptocurrency haul and how booze has become a new front in the U.S.-Canada trade war.
Eight of the country's 10 provinces have stopped buying U.S. alcohol, which is really hurting many U.S. distillers who depend on Canada as their largest export market.
It's Wednesday, August 13th. I'm Azhar Sukri for The Wall Street Journal. Here is the AM edition of What's News, the top headlines and business stories moving your world today. The Trump family's crypto venture has generated more wealth since the election, some $4.5 billion, than any other part of the president's business empire. A major reason for the success is a partnership with trading platform PancakeSwap. It's quietly administered by the world's largest crypto exchange, Binance, whose founder is seeking a pardon from President Trump. So write journal crypto reporters Angus Berwick and Patricia Kausman. Patricia, this sounds like a lot of money. Tell us about this partnership.
Yeah, so BankingSwap is an online trading platform, basically, where people can buy and sell cryptocurrencies. And we have a company called World Liberty Financial, which is the crypto venture of the Trump family. This company created a cryptocurrency called USD1, which is basically pegged with the U.S. dollar. What World Liberty did and PancakeSwap did were they announced a partnership to boost USD1's adoption. And that happened in June. And that partnership basically created incentives for people on the PancakeSwap platform to trade USD1 for other tokens. Those included some projects that said they were created specifically with the intent of helping to increase the use of USD1. So the result basically is that the trading volume of USD1 skyrocketed with this announcement and this partnership.
And the way World Liberty makes money out of the USD1 is that it basically invests the money back in the coin in things like government bonds and money market funds. So the more USD1 is in circulation, the more it can invest and actually make money. There are more than $2 billion of USD1 in circulation. And based on our calculations, it can earn around $80 million a year. based on the current interest rates.
Okay, so that's how this partnership is generating money for the Trump family's business. And then you write that the founder of crypto exchange Binance is also involved.
So according to our reporting, PancakeSwap was created by Binance, which is the world's largest centralized crypto exchange, a few years ago. So we have here PancakeSwap helping drive USD1 trading volumes. And in parallel, we have reported and it's been public that Binance's founder, CZ, is seeking a pardon from President Trump. It's important to note that CZ has kind of dismissed the connections between deals and a pardon. Binance got into trouble. back in 2023 for basically very relaxed or almost non-existent anti-money laundering controls at the exchange. And as a result, CZ actually spent four months in prison in the U.S. last year, and Binance agreed to pay a $4.3 billion fine to settle the case.
And what has the White House had to say about all of this?
So the White House press secretary told us that the media continues to try to create conflicts of interest where they don't exist and said that neither the president nor his family have ever engaged or will ever engage in conflicts of interest.
Patricia Kausman is a senior reporter for The Wall Street Journal.
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