A UAE-backed funding car quietly agreed to purchase almost half of World Liberty Monetary, a cryptocurrency startup linked to President Donald Trump, simply days earlier than he returned to the White Home, in keeping with a report by The Wall Road Journal.
Aryam Funding 1, an Abu Dhabi entity backed by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, signed a deal in January 2025 to buy a 49% stake in World Liberty Monetary for $500 million, the Journal saidciting paperwork and folks acquainted with the matter.
Half of that quantity was paid upfront, sending $187 million to Trump family-controlled entities, with extra tens of thousands and thousands flowing to entities tied to co-founders, together with relations of US Center East envoy Steve Witkoff, per the report.
The settlement was reportedly signed by Eric Trump. The Journal reported that the deal had not been publicly disclosed, regardless of World Liberty later revealing that the Trump household’s stake had fallen sharply.
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Tahnoon, the brother of the president of the United Arab Emirates and the nation’s nationwide safety adviser, has been central to Abu Dhabi’s push to change into a worldwide chief in synthetic intelligence. Underneath the Biden administration, his efforts to safe superior US-made AI chips had been restricted amid considerations that delicate expertise may attain China, notably by way of corporations similar to G42.
Following Trump’s election, these efforts gained momentum. Tahnoon met a number of occasions with Trump and senior US officers, and inside months the administration dedicated to granting the UAE entry to a whole lot of hundreds of superior AI chips yearly.
The Journal reported that executives from G42 helped handle Aryam Funding 1 and took board seats at World Liberty as a part of the deal, making Aryam the startup’s largest exterior shareholder. Weeks earlier than the US-UAE chip framework was introduced, one other Tahnoon-led agency, MGX, used World Liberty’s stablecoin to finish a $2 billion funding into Binance.
World Liberty and the White Home have reportedly denied any wrongdoing. Spokespeople instructed the Journal that President Trump was not concerned within the deal and that it didn’t present any affect over US coverage.
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World Liberty faces US probe calls
Final yr, Democratic senators referred to as on US authorities to research alleged hyperlinks between World Liberty Monetary’s token gross sales and sanctioned overseas actors. In and Nov. letter to the Justice Division and Treasury, Senators Elizabeth Warren and Jack Reed cited claims that WLFI governance tokens had been purchased by blockchain addresses tied to North Korea’s Lazarus Group, in addition to Russian- and Iranian-linked entities.
The controversy is heightened by WLFI’s possession construction, which supplies Trump family-linked entities management over the vast majority of token income. Lawmakers argue that this creates a direct battle of curiosity, as most proceeds from token gross sales stream to the president’s household.
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