(Bloomberg) -- World Liberty Financial Inc., one of the Trump family’s crypto ventures, has discussed doing business with the world’s largest digital-asset exchange, Binance Holdings Ltd., whose founder pleaded guilty to failing to take required measures to prevent terrorists, child abusers and entities in sanctioned nations from using its services, according to four people with knowledge of the talks.
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It's not clear what stage the discussions have reached or whether they’ll result in any transactions or ventures, said the people, who asked not to be named because the talks are private. Two of them said conversations have included the possibility of Binance developing a stablecoin — a dollar-backed cryptocurrency — with World Liberty, which President Donald Trump and his sons began promoting in September. The Trumps receive three-quarters of World Liberty’s net revenue, according to its founding documents.
In addition, representatives of the Trump family have held talks with Binance about taking a stake in its US arm, Binance.US, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter. In posts on X Thursday, Binance founder Changpeng Zhao said he has not held discussions about a Binance.US deal with anyone and that he and Binance “have no business deals with” with World Liberty or its principals. He didn’t address whether other potential deals have been discussed.
Zhao pleaded guilty in 2023 to anti-money laundering failures that allowed Binance to be used by criminal groups and terrorist organizations, including Hamas. Zhao, known as “CZ,” was released from a halfway house in Long Beach, California, in September after serving a four-month sentence. Binance paid a $4.3 billion fine. Zhao has been pushing for the Trump administration to grant him a pardon, according to the Wall Street Journal’s report.
Three months after leaving the halfway house, Zhao met with Steve Witkoff, a co-founder of World Liberty, in Abu Dhabi at the Bitcoin MENA 2024 conference, two of the people said. Witkoff is the president’s Middle East envoy. He is slated to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin this week as part of the Trump administration’s efforts to halt the fighting that began when Russia invaded Ukraine three years ago.
The substance of Witkoff’s meeting with Zhao in December isn’t clear. Talks between the crypto companies they founded have taken place since then, according to the four people with knowledge of the matter. Representatives for World Liberty didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Witkoff didn’t respond to a request for comment. An administration official responded to questions about Binance by saying that Witkoff has not been part of any talks or negotiations. The official declined to respond to questions about accounts of a December meeting between Witkoff and Zhao in Abu Dhabi. A person familiar with the matter said the White House is unaware of any talks about a potential pardon for Zhao.
Witkoff has said he’s in the process of divesting from his crypto assets as well as his holdings in real estate, transferring holdings to his sons to manage potential conflicts of interest. White House Deputy Press Secretary Anna Kelly said in response to questions that President Trump has placed his assets in a trust managed by his children. “There are no conflicts of interest,” she said.
Doing business with Binance would be an escalation of the Trump family’s involvement in the crypto industry as the Trump administration is currently rewriting regulations that would affect Binance and its competitors. Under Trump, the Securities and Exchange Commission has put crypto enforcement largely on hold, including a lawsuit against Binance and Zhao. That lawsuit, which wasn’t resolved by Zhao’s guilty plea or Binance’s fine, alleges that the company improperly allowed US customers to use the exchange, commingled investors’ assets with Zhao’s and engaged in manipulative trading.
Zhao is still Binance’s controlling shareholder, with a net worth of $36.9 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. He stepped down as its chief executive officer in November 2023, when he pleaded guilty to failing to maintain an anti-money laundering program. Richard Teng, who replaced Zhao as CEO, said in February that he sees an opportunity for a “fresh reset and a restart” under Trump, though he didn’t specify any plans.
Trump had called Bitcoin a “scam” as recently as 2021. But during his second presidential campaign, he reversed course, appearing at a Bitcoin conference in Nashville in July 2024 and vowing to make the US the “crypto capital of the planet.” In addition to cutting regulation, his administration is proposing to boost crypto by having the government own a stockpile of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
A few weeks after the Nashville conference, Trump and his sons started promoting World Liberty, which says it is developing a platform for dealing in cryptocurrencies. “We’re embracing the future with crypto and leaving the slow and outdated big banks behind,” Trump said in a video posted on social media.
World Liberty was founded by two little-known entrepreneurs with unusual resumes. They were introduced to the Trumps by Witkoff, a Florida real-estate developer who golfs with the president. One of them, Chase Herro, had previously sold weight-loss “colon cleanses” and a $149-a-month get-rich-quick class. He once called himself the “dirtbag of the internet.”
Trump and his sons promoted World Liberty in a livestream from Mar-a-Lago in September, but sales of its proprietary cryptocurrency were slow until Trump was elected president. The company has now sold $300 million of World Liberty tokens, according to Dune Analytics, a crypto data site, even though buyers of the tokens aren’t allowed to resell them yet and aren’t entitled to any profit.
The Trumps receive 75% of net revenue, including the proceeds of token sales, as a fee, according to World Liberty’s offering document. Witkoff and his sons receive 12.5%, according to the document, which lists Trump’s title as “Chief Crypto Advocate.” His sons Eric, Barron and Don Jr. are listed as “Web3 Ambassadors.” (World Liberty is separate from Trump’s memecoin, TRUMP, which was launched a few days before his inauguration. That token’s value spiked to above $70 but has since crashed to about $10.)
The company has hinted at plans for a stablecoin since October, when its organizers praised them in a livestream on X. Stablecoins, which have their values pegged at $1 because they’re backed by hard assets, are the most lucrative part of the crypto industry. Tether Holdings Ltd., issuer of the world’s most popular stablecoin, earns transaction fees for trades and collects interest on the reserve assets that back its coins. Its profit last year was $13 billion. Stablecoins are generally traded on exchanges; Binance, which accounts for more than half of all crypto trading, is one of the largest marketplaces for them.
On March 7, during a meeting with crypto executives at the White House, Trump pledged to support congressional efforts to “provide regulatory certainty for dollar-backed stablecoins.”
The Trump Organization, the family’s company, submitted an ethics plan ahead of Trump’s second term that puts no restrictions on pursuing new business transactions with foreign companies, a break from its approach to managing conflicts of interest when he first took office in 2017. Trump has said that his business interests will be placed in a trust managed by his children and that he will have no role in decision-making and limited access to financial information.
“There's going to be, obviously, a very large wall between anything having to do with our company and anything to do with government,” Eric Trump told Reuters in December, in an interview at the Bitcoin conference in Abu Dhabi.
Binance, founded by Zhao in Shanghai in 2017, flitted from country to country, avoiding establishing a headquarters in any jurisdiction and leaving a trail of regulators who’ve accused the exchange of ignoring rules. It was once popular in the US, but its market share there dwindled as a result of regulatory issues.
The investigation that resulted in Zhao’s guilty plea was wide-ranging. The US alleged that Binance, in its rush to expand, flouted anti-money laundering rules. Prosecutors said that the company allowed $898 million in transactions from Iran, which was under US sanctions, and that executives were well aware that bad actors were using the exchange. In announcing guilty pleas from the company and Zhao, prosecutors quoted a message written by an employee in the Binance compliance department: “we need a banner ‘is washing drug money too hard these days — come to binance we got cake for you.’”
The US Commodity Futures Trading Commission called Binance’s compliance program a “sham” and said the company engaged in a “calculated strategy of regulatory arbitrage.” That lack of controls allowed terrorist groups including Hamas, Al Qaeda, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria to receive funds through the exchange, according to the US Treasury Department.
“Its willful failures allowed money to flow to terrorists, cybercriminals and child abusers through its platform,” then-Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said at the time of the settlement.
Binance says it now has better controls and follows rules worldwide. But the company is still being investigated in some countries. French prosecutors stepped up a money-laundering investigation into Binance in January. Nigeria sued Binance in February, seeking more than $80 billion for what the country alleges are economic losses and back taxes.
--With assistance from Erik Schatzker, Ava Benny-Morrison and Annie Massa.
(Updates with additional comment, beginning in third paragraph)
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