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World Liberty Financial’s inaugural forum brought nearly 400 attendees to the president’s winter estate to promote USD1, but the $2 billion circulating supply, a 49% UAE stake and an OCC banking charter application tell a more complex story than a simple stablecoin launch.
The Forum and the Pitch
World Liberty Financial held its inaugural World Liberty Forum at Mar-a-Lago on February 18, an 11-hour, invitation-only event beneath the venue’s signature golden eagle. The roughly 400 attendees ranged from Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon and Coinbase founder Brian Armstrong to FIFA president Gianni Infantino, Binance founder Changpeng Zhao — making his first US appearance since receiving a presidential pardon — and rapper Nicki Minaj, who closed the event as the final panelist. From the stage, co-founders Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump presented their core thesis: the dollar needs a digital upgrade, and the private sector, not the Treasury Department, should build it. WLFI’s website brands USD1 as “The Dollar. Upgraded” and “still the US dollar, but for a new era.” In a poolside CNBC interview, Don Jr. argued that stablecoins are becoming major buyers of US government debt and that Washington lacks the agility to drive innovation. Eric Trump framed the venture as a reaction to being “cancelled” by traditional banks, taking a swing at Wall Street’s culture of six-hour days and two-hour lunches.
How USD1 Actually Works — and Who Owns It
The mechanics matter more than the marketing. Every USD1 minted is backed 1:1 by US Treasuries, cash or cash equivalents, creating structural demand for government debt. CEO Zach Witkoff — son of Special Envoy Steve Witkoff — described the logic as straightforward: perpetuating USD1 increases Treasury demand, making the national debt cheaper to service. The stablecoin launched in March 2025 and now has approximately $2.7 billion in circulating supply, though NYDIG analysis found roughly 78% sits in wallets linked to offshore exchanges. The ownership structure is where the narrative gets complicated. A Trump business entity holds 60% of World Liberty Financial and is entitled to 75% of revenue from coin sales; Bloomberg estimated total Trump crypto profits at $1.4 billion by early 2026. Before the second inauguration, interests linked to Abu Dhabi’s Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed Al Nahyan acquired a 49% stake for half a billion dollars — a transaction WLFI did not publicly disclose until reported by the New York Times. Two Tahnoun affiliates were quietly placed on the WLFI board. In May 2025, UAE-backed fund MGX used $2 billion of USD1 to finance an investment in Binance, leaving the exchange with control over roughly three-quarters of the stablecoin’s total supply at the time.
The Apex Deal and the Banking Charter
The forum’s headline business announcement was a strategic collaboration with Apex Group, a firm servicing $3.5 trillion in assets across 52 countries, which will pilot USD1 as a payment rail for subscriptions, distributions and redemptions of tokenized assets. The partnership also envisions listing WLFI tokenized assets on the London Stock Exchange Group’s Digital Market Infrastructure platform. Separately, World Liberty Trust Company applied in January for a national banking charter with the OCC to directly issue USD1 and offer custody services — a move enabled by the GENIUS Act, the stablecoin framework Trump signed in July 2025, which requires full dollar backing and annual audits but which critics say lacks adequate conflict-of-interest provisions.
Sternlicht and the Tokenization Bottleneck
Perhaps the forum’s most telling moment came from outside the WLFI orbit. Barry Sternlicht, whose Starwood Capital Group manages over $125 billion, told attendees his firm is ready to tokenize real-world assets but cannot proceed under current US regulations. “It’s ridiculous that our clients can’t do it in token,” he said, comparing tokenization’s development stage to artificial intelligence’s early days. The bottleneck is structural: tokenized real estate in the US is treated as a security, restricting participation to accredited investors with permissioned secondary markets, strict KYC and whitelisting requirements. The same friction applies across commodity markets — aluminum premiums have surged to records partly because physical trading infrastructure remains analog and tariff-distorted, exactly the kind of inefficiency tokenization promises to address. The Deloitte Center for Financial Services projects the tokenized real estate market could expand from roughly $300 billion in 2024 to $4 trillion by 2035, but that trajectory assumes regulatory clarity that does not yet exist. Firms like Propy are already moving, with plans for a $100 million expansion to acquire US title firms, but the institutional capital that Sternlicht represents remains locked out.
The Conflict-of-Interest Elephant
The forum unfolded against intensifying political scrutiny. Senators Elizabeth Warren and Jeff Merkley have demanded WLFI preserve and produce documents related to USD1, calling the stablecoin’s ties to a sitting president “an unprecedented conflict of interest.” The Democracy Defenders Fund warned that USD1’s concentrated supply creates systemic risk: if Binance were to redeem at scale, WLFI would need to liquidate significant Treasury holdings, potentially destabilizing short-term bond markets. The same report noted that major foreign investors in Trump-linked crypto have subsequently received favorable regulatory treatment, including Zhao’s pardon after his guilty plea for violating US anti-money laundering laws. Goldman’s Solomon acknowledged the dynamic with characteristic understatement, joking on stage that he was there because “his client had requested his presence.” The broader stablecoin market now exceeds $300 billion and could reach $1 trillion within two to three years, per Armstrong’s estimate — though the crypto market has shed roughly $2 trillion since Bitcoin’s October peak above $126,000, a drawdown that makes the forum’s bullish rhetoric harder to square with investor experience on the ground. But the regulatory framework that will determine USD1’s trajectory remains unfinished: market structure legislation is hung up on stablecoin yield rules, the GENIUS Act’s implementation is still being sorted by Treasury after the administration’s broader legal authority was curtailed by the Supreme Court, and the CLARITY Act that would exempt WLFI’s governance token from securities classification has stalled. The product approaches $3 billion in supply. Its founders operate from the most powerful address in American politics. The rules governing both remain a work in progress.
Sources: Benzinga, CNBC, CoinDesk
