The Trump administration conditionally approved a charter that would allow his family’s crypto venture to act like a bank, in an unprecedented arrangement that will enable the president’s family to pocket interest earned from corporate transactions.
World Liberty Financial, the stablecoin and trading platform co-founded by President Donald Trump and his three sons, was conditionally approved for a national trust bank charter on Friday. The move allows the cryptocurrency company to issue its dollar-backed stablecoin USD1 to institutional clients, convert other stablecoins to its own digital token and operate as a fiduciary for digital assets, according to a letter written by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, an independent Treasury Department bureau.
WLF’s conditional approval comes a little over a month after Trump reported more than $1.1 billion in crypto earnings in financial disclosures from last year, a sum that included more than $515 million from WLF token sales and $65 million from sales of equity in the venture’s holding company.