Coffeezilla digs into Trump's crypto empire and a quiet $500M UAE stake

Coffeezilla dropped a long investigation into how the Trump family's crypto ventures pulled in hundreds of millions of dollars while the administration overseeing the industry took shape. He made it with crypto researcher Molly White, and it walks through World Liberty Financial, the family's memecoins, foreign money and business ties to companies that have faced federal scrutiny. Coffeezilla says he asked Trump, Melania Trump, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. for comment before publishing. None of them responded.

The headline find: four days before Trump's January 2025 inauguration, an investment vehicle tied to Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the UAE's national security adviser, agreed to buy 49% of World Liberty Financial for $500 million. The deal stayed quiet, according to Wall Street Journal reporter Sam Kessler, who told Coffeezilla it was remarkable that a transaction involving a foreign official and a company connected to the incoming president never surfaced. MGX, the Abu Dhabi investment firm chaired by Tahnoon, then used World Liberty's USD1 stablecoin to route its $2 billion investment in Binance. USD1 was barely off the ground at the time, and Kessler said keeping billions in circulation could mean substantial earnings for the issuer over several years.

World Liberty rejects any suggestion of political favoritism. It says MGX chose USD1 on the merits and that the company had no say in government policy. The firm is also chasing a federal banking charter, which has pulled its regulatory relationships into sharper focus. Binance helped out, listing USD1 and running promotional campaigns that, per White, offered customers annualized yields of 20% for holding the token.

Then there's Justin Sun, who put $75 million into World Liberty while fighting an SEC civil fraud case, later became an adviser, and then fell into a public fight over WLFI token governance. The SEC eventually resolved its case against Sun and his companies. Separately, the Trump administration handed Binance founder Changpeng Zhao a presidential pardon. World Liberty's line is that USD1's growth comes from demand and ordinary commercial arrangements with crypto platforms.

The memecoins get their own chapter. Coffeezilla traces the family's crypto push to the TRUMP token's launch shortly before Trump returned to office in January 2025, citing roughly $600 million generated through it and about $6 million from Melania Trump's crypto and NFT projects. White said the TRUMP and MELANIA tokens have since shed about 95% and 99% of their peak values. Plenty of holders are sitting on heavy losses.

Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. show up in American Bitcoin, a mining and treasury company built through a deal with Hut 8. The report also covers Trump Media & Technology Group's Bitcoin treasury plans and its Crypto.com partnership, struck after the SEC closed its investigation into the exchange. Don Jr.'s advisory roles at prediction market operators Kalshi and Polymarket get airtime too, along with his firm 1789 Capital backing Vulcan Elements, a rare earth magnet maker that later landed federal support, per ProPublica reporting cited in the video. The firm says its picks were driven by commercial opportunity and national economic priorities, not politics.