USD1 | Tokenization | Owned + Controlled By Trump
Huh? Trump Family Is Jockeying To Replace The Dollar Globally As Their Wealth Soars
Technocracy.News | Patrick Wood
Clear as mud? That’s the point! Trump and his family set up an ecosystem that they control exclusively. The value started at zero in September 2024 and has grown to over $13 billion in just 18 months, as of February 2026. Today, it is poised to eat the planet with asset tokenization and payment services. This is beyond conflict of interest: it is a takeover of global finance. Let’s try to break it down.
USD1 — also marketed as the “Truth Dollar” — is a U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoin issued by World Liberty Financial, a DeFi company co-founded by the Trump and Witkoff families in September 2024. Designed to compete directly with Tether (USDT) and USDC, USD1 is backed 1:1 by short-term U.S. Treasuries and cash held in custody by BitGo Bank & Trust, N.A., a federally chartered institution that went public in January 2026. The project fits neatly into the broader regulatory framework championed by White House Crypto Czar David Sacks, whose Digital Asset Market Clarity Act of 2025 legitimized compliant stablecoins like USD1 and opened the door for trillions in institutional adoption.
The corporate structure is deliberately layered: World Liberty Financial Inc. (the operating company) is wholly owned by WLF Holdco LLC, which is in turn majority-controlled (60%) by the Trump family through DT Marks DEFI LLC, guaranteeing strategic veto power and directing 75% of net revenues to Trump-linked entities. In January 2026, UAE National Security Adviser Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan — dubbed the “Spy Sheik” — invested $500 million via his firm Aryam Investment for a 49% stake at the Holdco level, with approximately $187 million paid directly to Trump entities and $31 million to Witkoff-linked entities. Despite the headline percentages appearing to exceed 100%, these represent separate equity tranches across dilution rounds rather than a single fixed ownership pie.
BitGo‘s role as custodian is no coincidence. CEO Mike Belshe, who founded BitGo in 2013, became a major Trump political ally during the 2024 election cycle — hosting a $50K-per-plate Trump fundraiser headlined by JD Vance and donating ~$100,000 in Bitcoin to Trump’s PACs. When USD1 launched in March 2025, BitGo was the natural institutional-grade choice to manage reserves, providing the audited transparency that distinguishes USD1 from offshore rivals like Tether. The entire ecosystem — from the Clarity Act framework, to the UAE sovereign wealth injection, to BitGo’s federal charter — reflects a coordinated strategy to position USD1 as the dominant dollar-backed digital asset under a Trump-aligned financial architecture.
This CNBC article below from February 18, 2026, aligns precisely with a major strategic pivot that was publicly announced that same week: World Liberty Financial is not just issuing a stablecoin — it is building a full-stack programmable financial infrastructure with Real-World Asset (RWA) tokenization at its core.
Asset Tokenization — The Real Ambition
This is where the February 18 announcement becomes very significant. WLF launched World Liberty Financial Tokenization as a separate RWA division, embracing asset tokens. How this will mature is not clear to me just yet, but this aligns with the asset tokenization scheme promoted by David Sacks and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.
On January 6, 2026, WLF filed a de novo application to the OCC (Office of the Comptroller of the Currency) through WLTC Holdings LLC for a national trust bank charter.
On January 14, 2026, WLF signed a strategic agreement with the Government of Pakistan via SC Financial Technologies to integrate USD1 into Pakistan’s regulated digital payment architecture for cross-border payments. This is the first sovereign-level adoption of USD1 and signals the platform’s ambition to become a global dollar settlement layer for emerging markets — bypassing traditional correspondent banking entirely.
The RWA (Real World Assets) market is projected to reach $16 trillion by 2030, and WLF is positioning USD1 as the default settlement currency for a share of that market. With the Clarity Act providing regulatory cover, Securitize providing institutional infrastructure, sovereign adopters like Pakistan, and the Trump brand driving global deal flow, the architecture is designed to make USD1 indispensable — not just as a stablecoin, but as the programmable dollar backbone of a new private financial system.
The honest framing of the article below is this: USD1 is not a “dollar helper.” It is the first large-scale attempt to privatize the dollar’s settlement function — creating a parallel financial infrastructure that mimics the dollar’s value, bypasses its institutional governance, and concentrates its profits in a family-controlled holding company shielded by political power. The “dollar dominance” argument is the legitimizing narrative for what is, structurally, the dollarization of a private empire.
The Trump family is fabulously wealthy thanks to this nest of crypto companies. WLF started in September 2024, but by October, it was valued at around $1.5 billion. As of February 2026, the WLF ecosystem is worth $8 billion plus the Holdco company is valued at over $5 billion. That’s around $13 billion, all controlled by the Trump family.
Something is terribly wrong with this picture.
Here is the story from CNBC…
Trump Family Says U.S. Dollar Needs An Upgrade And They Are The Ones To Do It
CNBC.com | Eamon Javers
Since the dollar was created in 1792, U.S. presidents and their families have generally been content with the status quo of effectively giving the national government a monopoly on issuing currency and outlawing the use of foreign currency.
Consider the launch of the dollar the country’s Initial Coin Offering, back when the U.S. government was hustling to surpass the dominance of the Spanish pieces of eight then in common circulation throughout the country.
When presidents have said anything about the dollar itself, it was generally to reiterate the U.S. government’s “strong dollar” policy.
That continued more or less uninterrupted through 46 presidencies — until last March, when a company partly owned by President Donald Trump and his family began to market an alternative to the dollar, a cryptocurrency dubbed “USD1.”
On Wednesday, the president’s two oldest sons told CNBC on the sidelines of a daylong crypto event they hosted why they think that should change.
The value of USD1, which is marketed as a stablecoin, would track the dollar, much as the dollar when it was created in 1792 was initially pegged to the value of the then-dominant Spanish silver dollar.
The Trumps’ company, World Liberty Financial, touts USD1 as an improvement on official U.S. currency. The firm’s website brands its stablecoin as “The Dollar. Upgraded.” And it calls the coin “still the US dollar, but for a new era.”
On Wednesday, the firm held the World Liberty Forum at Mar-a-Lago, the club owned by the president and operated as his winter White House.
The event, coming just before the first anniversary of the release of USD1, brought together financiers, technologists, television personalities, the president of the world soccer organization FIFA and the artist Nicki Minaj.
From a Mar-a-Lago ballroom stage beneath an enormous stylized golden eagle sculpture, the message to attendees was that the old U.S. dollar needs to be modernized, that the private sector is the place to drive that innovation, and that stablecoins will help taxpayers by creating structural demand for U.S. government debt.
In fact, World Liberty backers argue, the new cryptocurrency they are building is not a threat to the dollar at all, but will help ensure the dollar remains dominant in global crypto finance — because USD1′s value is pegged to it.
But one big question is why, if the dollar needs modernizing, should that be done by the private sector.
And why should the venture be in the private hands of the president and his family, and not in the hands of the U.S. Treasury?
CNBC put those questions to the president’s sons, World Liberty Financial’s co-founders, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, in a small event space just off Mar-a-Lago’s swimming pool.
“This is actually going to preserve dollar hegemony,” Donald Trump Jr. replied.
“There’s crypto companies that are the top five buyers in the world,” he said. “That’s going to actually stabilize the US dollar and do all the things that we need to.”
He argued that the federal government — and the big Wall Street banking system — simply aren’t nimble or innovative enough to drive the needed changes.
“We’re going to lead the way as Americans,” Eric Trump said. “You’re going to leave that to who, JPMorgan, to do? You’re going to leave that to the federal government to do?”
Eric Trump sees Wall Street as overly complacent — and therefore ripe for technological disruption.
“Do you think big banks will actually do this?” he asked. “And the reason I say this is, I mean, it’s been 50 years, where bankers are working six hours a day. They have a two-hour lunch break. They’re typically out of the office at four o’clock in the afternoon.”
Eric and Donald Trump Jr. make it clear the animating force behind their venture is not the inventor’s glee at building a better mousetrap or the insider’s frustration at legacy companies that can’t or won’t adapt to the future.
Instead, what’s driving them is a raw sense of retribution.
The Trump brothers see the wider financial system as part of an establishment that unfairly ostracized them after their father left power in 2021, when, after the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol riot, the banking system broadly declined to do business with the Trump family.
“You know, we didn’t get into crypto because we were on the leading edge,” Donald Trump Jr. said in an interview Wednesday with CNBC’s Sara Eisen. “We got into it out of necessity. They basically forced us into it.”
Eric Trump told Eisen, “We were the most cancelled people in the world in 2020, 2021, and it’s really great to almost have this retribution where all of a sudden we start pushing an agenda.”
“Our agenda was to modernize finance, to allow that to never ever, ever happen to anybody again,” Eric Trump said. [Total crap, tokenization allows control over every user]
Donald Trump Jr. said he concluded that the traditional banking system is a “Ponzi scheme.” [Which it is, and its is coming to an end due to running its cycle. To be replaced by a new more controllable Ponzi scheme, digital dollar and tokenization of assets]
“They created this monster,” Trump Jr. said, pointing to the moment when he claimed “when you had every big bank in the world, for doing nothing wrong,” “debank” Trump accounts and those of other conservatives, “just based on the fact that we all wore a hat that said ‘Make America Great Again.’”
Eric Trump recalled his father’s time out of the White House between presidential terms as a traumatizing period for the family.
“These are commercial buildings, residential buildings, golf courses around the world. These aren’t political entities, and they were pulling these accounts from us like we were absolute dogs,” Eric Trump said.
“We couldn’t pay our vendors, we couldn’t pay our employees. And so we said, listen, there has to be a better way.”
To Eric Trump, the message is that the Trump family will always counterpunch: When social media companies kicked his father off their platforms, President Trump created his own Truth Social media platform. And when the banking industry declined Trump family business, the family took matters into their own hands.
And that’s why a president’s family, for the first time since 1792, is creating an upgraded American currency.
Call it Truth Dollar.
Source: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/18/trump-eric-don-jr-cryptocurrency-world-liberty-financial.html
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