The World Liberty Financial website arranged on a smartphone in New York, US, on Wednesday, Feb. 12, 2025.
Gabby Jones | Bloomberg | Getty Images
World Liberty Financial, the decentralized finance venture backed by President Donald Trump and his family, has launched a stablecoin, joining an increasingly crowded market.
The company said Tuesday that the stablecoin, dubbed USD1, will be pegged to the U.S. dollar and be backed by short-term U.S. government treasuries, U.S. dollar deposits, and other cash equivalents. It will soon go live on the Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain networks.
“USD1 provides what algorithmic and anonymous crypto projects cannot — access to the power of DeFi underpinned by the credibility and safeguards of the most respected names in traditional finance,” said World Liberty Financial co-founder Zach Witkoff. “We’re offering a digital dollar stablecoin that sovereign investors and major institutions can confidently integrate into their strategies for seamless, secure cross-border transactions.”
The development comes as the market cap for dollar-backed stablecoins — cryptocurrencies that promise a fixed value peg to another asset — has been climbing to new all-time-highs this year and has grown more than 46% in the past year, according to CryptoQuant. The market has long been dominated by Tether (USDT) and, more recently, Circle’s USDC.
Since its October launch, World Liberty Financial has raised $550 million through two token sales, including $250 million announced last week. The Trump family-backed project, which describes itself as a crypto banking platform, disclosed that entities connected to the family could receive up to 75% of the venture’s net revenue.
The sales have drawn more than 85,000 verified participants and high-profile backers like Tron founder Justin Sun, who upped his stake to $75 million in January while negotiating a potential settlement with the SEC over a civil fraud case.
WLFI’s rapid rise comes as the Trump administration accelerates its crypto agenda.
Earlier this month, President Trump signed an executive order to create a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, and David Sacks, the administration’s AI and crypto czar, disclosed the sale of over $200 million in digital asset investments to avoid conflict-of-interest concerns. Witkoff says the project is “on track to supercharge DeFi,” even as scrutiny mounts around its financial structure and political entanglements.
An increasingly crowded market
Stablecoins, which have become a “systemically important” part of the market to some analysts, are largely used for trading on centralized and decentralized exchanges and as collateral in DeFi. Crypto investors watch them closely for evidence of demand, liquidity and activity in the market.
WLFI is the latest company to join the increasingly crowded market. PayPal and Gemini are among the many U.S. stablecoin issuers. In December, Ripple announced its new stablecoin, called ripple USD, or RLUSD. A month earlier, a consortium of companies including Robinhood, Galaxy Digital and Kraken launched their Global Dollar, or USDG, and joint stablecoin network, the Global Dollar Network.
The drumbeat for using stablecoins to help preserve the hegemony of the U.S. dollar has also grown louder in recent months. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said at this month’s inaugural White House Crypto Summit that “we are going to keep the U.S. the dominant reserve currency in the world and were going to use stablecoins to do that.”
At last week’s Digital Asset Summit in New York City, Trump addressed attendees virtually, saying the industry “will unleash an explosion of economic growth, and with the dollar back, stablecoins, you’ll help expand the dominance of the U.S. dollar.”
Stablecoin legislation is widely seen as the lowest hanging fruit for crypto legislation, which most market participants hope will be passed and implemented sometime this year. The GENIUS Act, which seeks to provide a framework for regulating stablecoins, was recently advanced out of the Senate banking committee with bipartisan support. When the U.S. does get legislation on stablecoins, it’s expected that banks will begin issuing their own as well to take advantage of their ability to make payments faster, cheaper and more transparent.
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