Crypto bank part-owned by Trump family offers depositors way to ‘gain favor’ with White House, experts say

Two fundamentals underscore the business model of a new crypto bank partly owned by the Trump family, cryptocurrency experts tell the Guardian.

World Liberty Trust Company received conditional approval this month from the US office of the comptroller of the currency (OCC) to start a bank. An entity affiliated with Donald Trump and his family members owns about 38% of the company. The agency is led by a political appointee of the US president.

The first distinctive feature of this bank – and stablecoin operations like it – is that there is almost no risk that it can lose money. The second is the sole logical motivation for depositors to put their money into it, according to five experts: the financial connection to the president and his family.

World Liberty is not really a bank, in the conventional sense: it won’t be lending money to businesses or individuals, issuing mortgage or credit cards, or getting federal insurance on deposits.

What it will be able to do is directly issue the Trumps’ dollar-pegged stablecoin, USD1. Stablecoins, unlike other cryptocurrencies, are pegged at fixed values such as $1, and used almost exclusively to buy and sell riskier crypto assets, like bitcoin.

Because of the way stablecoins are regulated – under a law signed by Trump in 2025 – World Liberty’s bank will not be allowed to pay its depositors, the companies and individuals who buy its stablecoins, any interest. The bank, however, can earn interest for itself by putting the cash it collects from those depositors into high-quality liquid investments – US government-backed treasury bonds.