| The scene looked like a gathering of the first family of crypto. Eric Trump, surrounded by a substantial security detail. Tether Chief Executive Officer Paolo Ardoino. Justin Sun, founder of the Tron blockchain. And World Liberty Financial co-founder Zach Witkoff. Gathered in the wings of Token2049, Dubai’s annual crypto conference, this once-unlikely group of men has been united by overlapping interests in fashioning a digital-assets utopia in the US and beyond. Eric held court, chatting with executives. He’d just participated in a panel discussion, during which an enthusiastic crowd was told that a stablecoin launched by World Liberty — a decentralized finance project backed by the Trumps — had recently served as the currency of choice in a $2 billion investment in Binance Holdings Ltd. by Abu Dhabi’s MGX. That deal also put the Trump family’s crypto-linked conflicts-of-interest in the spotlight, and was cited by Democratic Senator Senator Richard Blumenthal as one of the reasons why he was opening a preliminary inquiry into the president’s crypto dealings with the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.
Sun, the Tron founder who moderated a conversation with Eric at the conference, had invested about $75 million in World Liberty as of January — and became an adviser to the company last November. Lawyers for Sun and the US Securities and Exchange Commission are seeking a stay in regulatory proceedings against the crypto entrepreneur, according to a February report. Then there are the Trump family’s various crypto interests, which include memecoins — a highly volatile and speculative form of token — launched by President Donald Trump and his wife Melania. All this comes as Trump’s administration pushes to ease crypto enforcement actions, but Eric has denied claims of conflicts of interest. “There are no conflicts because I don’t work with the White House,” he said in a Bloomberg TV interview last month. While Sun and Ardoino milled around, Eric said in an interview with Bloomberg News in Dubai that World Liberty’s mission was “to take over the financial world.” Details of how, and indeed on what kinds of other services World Liberty hopes to offer, are scant. The project nevertheless aims to fix and modernize a “broken” financial system, Eric said. Zach Witkoff — the son of Steve Witkoff, a close ally of Trump’s and the president’s envoy to the Middle East — chimed in with some specifics: World Liberty will list USD1, the stablecoin used in the Binance transaction, on new venues to push up its market value and attract new holders of the stablecoin. With the Binance transaction, USD1 has already surged to a market value of over $2 billion since it debuted in April, despite only announcing its first major exchange listing on May 6. Back to Eric, who said he thinks World Liberty will be among the “fastest growing” crypto projects going forward. “Just wait for the next two months and see what happens. See what we do.” Eric’s enthusiasm for crypto isn’t confined to stablecoins. “I love Bitcoin. I believe in it as digital gold. I own a lot of it, and Trump owns a lot of it,” he said. “And I think you’re going to see exponential growth in Bitcoin over the years. It’s a big bet of mine, personally.” | 
