Trump Crypto Riches Tied To Little-Known Platform
BY ANGUS BERWICK AND PATRICIA KOWSMANN
The Wall Street Journal
Aug 13, 2025
The Trump family’s crypto venture has generated more wealth since the election— some $4.5 billion—than any other part of the president’s business empire.
A major reason for the success is a partnership with an under-the-radar trading platform quietly administered by Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, whose founder is seeking a pardon from President Trump, according to people familiar with the matter.
The online trading platform, PancakeSwap, serves as an incubator of sorts, drumming up interest among traders to use coins issued by the Trump family’s main crypto company, World Liberty Financial.
The more World Liberty’s flagship coin, USD1, is used, the greater the demand to increase its circulation, and the greater the profit for World Liberty and its owners, including the Trump family.
PancakeSwap is an online marketplace for cryptocurrencies. It connects users who trade USD1 with newly created currencies such as Torch of Liberty and Eagles Landing. These patriotic-sounding coins, according to their websites, were launched this year with the main purpose of helping increase the use of USD1.
Traders, mostly writing in Chinese, gather in groups on the Telegram messaging app to talk about competing for rewards paid out to top users of USD1 and advertised by PancakeSwap.
World Liberty and PancakeSwap announced their partnership to boost USD1’s adoption in June.
Crypto trading platforms often offer rewards or prizes to drum up interest in new coins, similar to the way brokerages offer free trades or casinos give first-time customers free chips.
What wasn’t disclosed at the time is that employees inside Binance created PancakeSwap, according to people
familiar with the company.
Binance’s majority owner and founder, Changpeng Zhao, spent four months in jail in the U.S. last year after Binance agreed to pay a $4.3 billion fine for becoming a global money-laundering hub for criminals, terrorists and sanctions evaders.
His company has deepened its relationship with World Liberty at the same time Zhao has ramped up efforts to secure a pardon from Trump.
Zhao, who is considered the richest person in the crypto industry and is worth over $70 billion, according to Forbes, recently hired Ches McDowell, a lobbyist and friend of Donald Trump Jr., to push for the pardon, a person familiar with the relationship said.
A World Liberty spokesman declined to comment. A Binance spokesman and PancakeSwap didn’t respond to requests for comment.
After a March article in The Wall Street Journal, Zhao wrote on social-media platform X that “no felon would mind a pardon,” while at the same time dismissing a connection between deals and a pardon.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the “media’s continued attempts to fabricate conflicts of interest are irresponsible” and that “neither the president nor his family have ever engaged, or will ever engage, in conflicts of interest.”
Trump, a Republican, announced World Liberty’s launch during his campaign last year, writing on social media that the company planned to “help make America the crypto capital of the world.”
World Liberty unveiled USD1 in March, saying the token would assist Trump’s mission to protect the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency.
Binance played a key role from an early stage. USD1 got its first big break when Binance accepted a $2 billion investment from an outside investor paid in the World Liberty coin. The deal caused the amount of the cryptocurrency in circulation to erupt 15-fold and overnight become one of the world’s largest.
USD1 is a stablecoin, a privately invented digital currency that is backed 1:1 with U.S. dollars. World Liberty invests the money backing the coins in government bonds and moneymarket funds, without paying interest to users of the coin.
With more than $2 billion of USD1 in circulation, it can earn around $80 million a year based on current interest rates.
Binance has been holding the $2 billion in USD1 on its platform, according to blockchain data and a person familiar with the matter. By not cashing in the stablecoin, this ensures that World Liberty continues to earn money from investing the dollars that back them.
Trump and his family own 40% of World Liberty. While the company’s overall value isn’t disclosed, a large portion of it is derived from one of its cryptocurrencies. A stake the Trump family owns in that cryptocurrency is worth $4.5 billion, according to a disclosure published Monday.
World Liberty’s relationship with PancakeSwap, whose website was registered in Shanghai, and Binance is one of several in which entities and individuals with strong ties to China have supported the Trump family crypto business. One of World Liberty’s largest investors is Hong Kong-based billionaire Justin Sun.
This comes even as the White House pushes a trade war against the country and seeks to curtail U.S. corporations’ ties to China over national-security fears.
China is Binance’s largest market by trading volume, the Journal previously reported, and remained so as of the end of last year. It has been a main base for its software developers, with hundreds of coders, according to former employees, internal records and LinkedIn postings.
Binance has long maintained that it isn’t a Chinese company, saying it left Shanghai shortly after its 2017 launch. Zhao has said he is no longer a Chinese citizen, and holds Canadian and United Arab Emirates citizenship. The company, which has employees around the world, doesn’t have an official headquarters.
One of the president’s sons, Eric Trump, a World Liberty co-founder, plans to meet more potential partners in Hong Kong in August during a bitcoin conference, according to people familiar with his plans.
World Liberty in recent months talked about taking an investment from the Hong Kong crypto service provider Hashkey, whose main shareholder is Chinese conglomerate Wanxiang Group, according to people familiar with the talks.
Wanxiang’s chairman sits on China’s National People’s Congress. A Hashkey spokeswoman said discussions with World Liberty were exploratory and no commitments had been made.
Crypto companies release thousands of new coins every year. Most never catch on. To attract a following among traders, new coins need to show big trading volume.
That is where PancakeSwap stepped in. PancakeSwap doesn’t disclose its ownership and says online that it is run by a team of anonymous “chefs” with a “penchant for breakfast foods.” It compares trading cryptocurrencies to “flipping pancakes.”
According to former
employees, Binance staff created PancakeSwap inhouse in 2020 because the exchange wanted to establish a foothold in crypto’s “decentralized finance” craze. The platform has remained under Binance’s supervision, the former employees said.
PancakeSwap’s trading platform is built on Binance’s blockchain network, a software ecosystem in which developers create new programs.
Starting in late May, USD1 trading exploded on PancakeSwap, rocketing from a few tens of millions of dollars a day to regularly over $1 billion. Over 90% of USD1 trades have taken place on PancakeSwap, according to data from the platform and data tracker CoinMarketCap.
Demand for USD1 wasn’t because customers were using it for payments or to stash their crypto holdings, which is what stablecoins are typically used for. It was because investors were chasing prizes worth up to $1 million for generating as much USD1 trading as possible as part of a “Liquidity Drive,” said people who took part in the campaign and researchers who track trading data.
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