Trump Family's Crypto Token Just Made Them $5 Billion Richer

upstart writes:

The Trump family just became $5 billion richer (on paper) thanks to its latest crypto venture:

The Trumps' new digital currency WLFI began trading on Monday with about $1 billion worth of the tokens changing hands within an hour. Despite the token plunging in price on its first day of trading, the family gained as much as $5 billion in hypothetical wealth following the debut, the Wall Street Journal said in a report.

The launch was sort of a crypto version of an initial public offering: early investors who bought the token from Trump's venture World Liberty Financial were not able to sell any of it until Monday, when they got to do so with high premiums. The token is now available on major exchanges like Binance and Coinbase.

The Trump family and other founders' tokens still remain locked, but now that the digital currency is trading, those token holdings have real-world valuation. The Trump family, including the President, holds just under a quarter of all WLFI tokens, the WSJ reported.

With its current valuation, WLFI is the Trump family's most valuable asset, according to the WSJ, even more so than the property portfolio that the family was originally known for.

But crypto is volatile and prone to crashes, and the value of the tokens can shift at any time.

Monday's news was just the latest in a string of major crypto wins that the President and his family have made headlines for in the past year. Simultaneously, over the past seven months, Trump has overseen deregulatory wins for the cryptocurrency industry that helped install him in office, all the while administration officials cast aside concerns over the ethics and legality of these conflicts of interest.

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