Front Burner - Trump’s crypto bills: what does he stand to gain?

Episode Date: July 18, 2025

U.S. President Donald Trump promised to make America the cryptocurrency capital of the world and he’s been working to make good on that. This week, in what House Republicans dubbed “Crypto Week”, he pushed Congress to pass three major pieces of legislation championed by the industry.Trump hasn’t always been a fan of crypto but after his sons caught on and tens of millions from the crypto industry poured into his re-election campaign, he’s gone all in. Now, he’s got multiple ventures but none as big as World Liberty Financial, the start-up that’s earned his family an estimated $500 million so far. But who is he striking these deals with? And why are some Democrats calling it all a “vehicle for corruption”? To untangle this complex web of policymaking, moneymaking and influence, we’re joined by Jacob Silverman, the co-author of “Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud” and the host of The Naked Emperor, CBC Understood’s four part podcast series about the rise and fall of FTX CEO Sam Bankman Fried. For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

If you want to hear daily news that doesn't hurt your soul and might even be good for your soul, check out As It Happens. I'm Chris Howden. And I'm Nielke Oksal. Every day we reach people at the center of the most extraordinary stories, like the doctor who restored a patient's eyesight with a tooth. Or a musician in an orchestra that plays instruments made out of vegetables. Take the scenic route through the day's news with As It Happens, and you can find us wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Hey, everyone, I'm Jamie Plaissand. Many have called me the first crypto president. That's an honor.

I really do consider that a very big honor, actually. So Donald Trump promised that he would make America the crypto capital of the world. And this week he is pushing through a trio of bills that is seen as the most significant overhaul of U.S. crypto regulation to date. Trump is calling it Crypto Week. As we've talked about on the show before, Trump is directly benefiting from crypto through a bunch of ventures, but mostly World Liberty Financial, which is run in part by his sons. The crypto industry poured over $100 million into his re-election campaign and another

$18 million towards his inauguration. So today, how does Trump and the rest of the crypto industry stand to gain from the passage of these bills? Who is buying into World Liberty Financial and what do they want from the president? How much overlap is there between Trump's work as president and his personal business ventures? I'm talking with Jacob Silverman, the co-author of Easy Money, Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and The Golden Age of Fraud, and the host of The Naked Emperor.

CBC understood four-part podcast series about the rise and fall of FTX CEO Sam Bateman Fried. He's going to help me untangle this complex web of policymaking, moneymaking, and influence. Jacob, hey, thanks for coming on. It's always great to talk to you. Glad to be here. So the last time that we spoke, it was about how Donald Trump's embrace of crypto and promise of more lenient regulations were fueling a crypto boom. We're seeing another boom now and multiple pieces of legislation being voted on this

week. I want to talk about the Genius Act first. Trump told lawmakers in a true social post to get it on my desk ASAP. No delays, no add-ons. And you and I are talking at 1.30 Thursday afternoon. There were some delays, but it is on its way to becoming the first major piece of crypto legislation passed by US Congress. What does the Genius Act aim to do?

What's its purpose? The Genius Act is about legalizing and bringing the stablecoin industry on shore. The stablecoins are basically crypto tokens that are generally pegged to the US dollar, meaning their value is supposed to stay at a dollar. Things can happen in terms of crypto markets or acts of fraud that make it so that those token prices collapse. But stablecoins have become a popular payment system within crypto. They're often referred to as the casino chips used at all the casinos. It helps people to not have to interact with their real bank accounts and they can just use stablecoins to move between crypto exchanges.

Now, they're seeing an opportunity to use stablecoins for other purposes, for payments, for cross-border settlements, for also perhaps paying for things at big retailers in this country if companies like Amazon or Microsoft or Facebook or wherever else decides to get into the stablecoin business. So this bill is going to allow for that, which is that stablecoin companies will be able to operate more easily in the US with access to mainstream financing as long as they stick towards some basic rules about making sure that their tokens are backed by dollars or dollar-like instruments as they claim they are. Okay. And I know soon we're going to talk about how Trump actually has his own stable coin.

But before we do that, I want to talk about the second act, which I think is a broader bill than the Genius Act. And it has a lot of industry support. Crypto platform Coinbase launched a huge ad campaign ahead of the vote from print ads to actually like handing out chocolate bars in DC. And what is the point of this act? What is the industry hoping for out of this act? There's always been sort of a quiet bureaucratic turf war between the regulatory agencies in that a lot was unsettled whether the SEC would have, which is the main securities regulator in the United States would have primary jurisdiction or the CFTC, the Commodities Future Trading Commission,

which had declared Bitcoin and Ethereum to be commodities. The industry has long preferred to deal with the CFTC and their requirements. This bill basically does that. It pushes more regulatory responsibility over crypto to the CFTC and makes it so that the crypto industry doesn't really have to treat most of their tokens like securities and makes it so they're not currently unregistered securities that are violating the law. So this is really a favorable outcome for the crypto industry. At the same time, the CFTC, it's smaller, has a much smaller budget than the SEC.

It's also starting to experience layoffs just this week. So it's a small agency that's getting smaller, but that's how the crypto industry likes it. Okay. And just quickly, there is a third measure that would prevent the Federal Reserve from issuing a central bank digital currency. And what's the significance of that? In practice, not very much. I mean, this is kind of a right-wing bugaboo for a long time, which is that the government would issue a CBDC, a digital currency or digital dollar that would then be used to control people or influence them by say, the government could program it for its values

to decline if you don't spend it right away, if they want to boost economic activity in the short term or any other number of things. But it's really played into right-wing conspiracies about or libertarian conspiracies about government control and liberal authoritarian overreach. Right now, the US government doesn't have any plans to do this. There are many governments around the world who have looked into CBDCs or had pilot projects, but this is not something that really exists in the way that the right mythologizes it or fears it.

At the same time, this is a bill that will satisfy kind of its red meat for the MAGA base, I would say. LESLIE KENDRICK These trio of bills, I've seen them, they are being referred to as the most significant overhaul of US crypto regulation to date. I just wonder if you could synthesize for me, like, what is the big takeaway, the big message here when you look at them in their entirety? Well, it really codifies what's been happening since the beginning of the Trump administration more informally.

I mean, through executive orders and pardons and dropping of cases at the SEC and the DOJ and elsewhere, the government under Trump has given crypto industry pretty much everything that they wanted and really taken their foot off of the gas pedal with anything related to criminal enforcement or regulatory enforcement. There are people who admitted to huge frauds and even did prison time who were then pardoned just because we are really entering an era where deregulation is in, where the enforcement of financial crime is seemingly going to be overlooked and where people can apparently buy pardons. And now that's being, as I said, codified more in the form of the kind of permanent

regulatory regime that the crypto industry wants. I think what's interesting here is that crypto itself has a lot of influence because it seems to have a lot of money to spend on political campaigns, but it's not a hugely economically productive industry. But at the same time, what I tell folks is that we're going to be forced to play by the crypto industry's rules. It wants greater legitimacy, access to mainstream banking, and the legalization of its activities that sometimes were considered illegal under the prior administration.

And so this is the culmination of that in a lot of ways. And I think from here, it'll be pretty open for the crypto industry to do what they want. Can you talk to me a bit more about how crypto became so intertwined with mega and also Trump, who wasn't a fan originally? Well, Trump somewhat famously said that he thought crypto was a scam. Bitcoin just seems like a scam. I don't like it because it's another currency competing against the dollar. Essentially, it's a currency competing against the dollar.

I want the dollar to be the currency of the world. That's what I've always said. But yeah, he had a total 180, which seems to have happened. Like a lot of these decisions happen in politics, which is that donors and people around him kind of saw the light. And first of all, Trump's sons got very into crypto and started to see, I think, that there were money making opportunities there. Traditionally, crypto has been kind of right-wing libertarian cypherpunk, like against the state, but not certainly not wanting to be involved with the state. But there has been this transition in the last few years where that right wing libertarian element has perhaps gone away and more of the MAGA Republican side has emerged.

You have people like Senator Ted Cruz talking about how he owns a few Bitcoin mining machines. I'm proud to stand with crypto. I'm proud to stand with Bitcoin and I'm proud to stand with Bitcoin. And I am the only member of the United States Senate who is, in fact, a Bitcoin miner. I've got three miners hashing in West Texas right now. And it is beautiful. And let me say to all of crypto and all of Bitcoin, come to Texas.

Texas is the oasis for Bitcoin. Cynthia Loomis becoming, putting the laser eyes in her ex-avatar and also, of course, Kirsten Gillibrand on the Democratic side leading the Genius Act and the stablecoin legislation. But largely that sort of kind of right-wing countercultural element was turned into sort of the Republican anti-government line and somehow being part of crypto or buying Bitcoin was reconstituted as, you know, giving a middle finger to the government in a way that appeals seemingly to the MAGA base. So, while, you know, the element of independence, of anti-government liberty is kind of gone from crypto.

There's still sort of this idea that you are opposed to the established order in some way. You mentioned the Trump family and how involved they are in all this. Trump himself, I believe, has made 100 million bucks from his meme coin. But the biggest one is this company, World Liberty Financial, which is run by Trump's sons, primarily John Jr. and Eric, but also Zach Witkoff, son of Steve Witkoff, Trump's very good friend and US special envoy to the Middle East. And just tell me more about World Liberty Financial, what it does. Sure, so Trump and his sons have all had titles there of one sort or another.

The Wicuff Sons and Steve Wicuff himself helped found it. It seems to be run day to day by at least one of the Wicuff Sons and a guy named Zach Folkman. And this is where a lot of the deals surrounding Trump's crypto or another way of putting it is crypto deals where the revenue flows to Trump, it happens through World Liberty Financial. So they have this World Liberty Financial token that they've done hundreds of millions

of dollars worth of deals with and that 75% of the revenue seems to go to Trump. There are some other contractual elements involved. So that's one problem here is that we don't have exact numbers on any of this stuff, but we certainly know, you know, it's in the hundreds of millions if not higher and the potential for kind of unregulated and unknown payments to the president is almost limitless. So, that's why I think it's unprecedented here and what a lot of folks like me have been writing about and concerned about, which is that we've never really had any kind of industry tied in with the Oval Office in this way, much less one that occupies kind of such a place of political influence, but

also at times operates outside the law. Long before the internet, AI or social media, Douglas Adams imagined our future, and he didn't always like what he saw. Douglas Adams, The Ends of the Earth, is a journey into the mind of the man who foresaw the digital age in all its wonder and terror. Here are the speeches that inspired a generation of futurists and interviews with those who have followed in his footsteps, from Stephen Fry and David Bedille to innovators in technology, conservation, and even politics. Get Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth now at pushkin.fm.com.au.

World Liberty Financial has been building all these connections and attracting investors from all over the world, but there's one relationship that's drawing a lot of criticism of conflict of interest, and that's the relationship that they have with Chengpeng Zhao, or CZ, the co-founder and former CEO of crypto trading platform Binance, and he pleaded guilty in November 2023 to violating federal money laundering charges. As part of the plea agreement, Mr. Zhao, known as CZ, will step down from his role as chief executive of Binance and will pay a $50 million fine. Binance will pay a $4.3 billion fine.

The company will accept the appointment of a 4.3 billion dollar fine. The company will accept the appointment of a monitor. The company pled guilty to knowingly failing to prevent money laundering and sanctions violations on its side and allowing criminal actors to use the exchange, named by Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen as including Al Qaeda, ISIS and Hamas. And he has applied for a presidential pardon from Trump. I understand he's been very closely involved with World Liberty Financial, WLF, for some time and like, what's going on there? How deep does this connection go?

It's very deep. There was recently a report in Bloomberg that Binance actually programmed the code for the USD1 stablecoin that World Liberty Financial released. So they created it. Binance so far seems to be the main platform for trading and using the USD1 coin. It was used in a $2 billion deal in which a UAE firm bought a stake in Binance. At the same time, CZ has said publicly, I have requested a pardon from Donald Trump. And this is, again, not to even touch the other things that the company, Binance, has

done or the $4 billion it was fined under the Biden administration. But the conflicts of interest are right there and right out in the open. And the presidential pardon hasn't come yet for this money laundering case, but the Securities and Exchange Commission did drop their lawsuit against CZ, right? And Binance at the end of May, the SEC had accused them of lying to regulators about their businesses in the US for mishandling customers' money. There's another big WLF investor and associate that also got his SEC case dropped, right?

What should we know about blockchain billionaire Justin Sun? So Justin Sun is like CZ, a huge figure in the crypto industry, but also one who has had rumors and legal accusations trailing him for a lot of his career. And Justin Sun is known for hopping between jurisdictions. He's lived on different Caribbean islands and in Hong Kong, and he was in San Francisco for a while before he left the United States for a while. He apparently has felt comfortable to come back to the US, and I saw him at the Bitcoin conference in Las Vegas

a couple months ago, but it was the first time he had been in the US in a number of years. And his main company is Tron, but he is another key node here, or another key participant in all this. He runs a number of crypto companies and exchanges, and he's been close at times with CZ from Binance. And he has bought about more than $100 million worth of the Trump meme coin and I think at least $75 million worth of the World Liberty Financial Coin.

And he also attended the gala that was thrown for top Trump meme coin holders. His thing in some ways is just try to be as ubiquitous as possible in media. He does serve a lot of stunts, a lot of announcements. He bought a piece of postmodern art that was a banana on a wall, then he ate it. He paid $6 million for it. There's always something going on with him. Um, but at the same time, this is someone who had a major, major SEC case dropped against him.

And in these cases, including against CZ and Binance, like there were a lot of filings that you could look up online that already were there and they were quite incriminating. Some of these filings have been used or these documents have been used in other cases. So, um, you know, the fact that these were dropped, dropped wasn't because the government didn't have a case there, it was because policy changed. And I think you have to ask why did the policy change? And you mentioned that that deal in the UAE, right? The firm controlled by Abu Dhabi Sovereign

Wealth Fund was investing $2 billion towards Binance using the World Liberty Financial Stablecoin, right? Tell me more about what the reaction has been to that deal. I know that it happened just 12 days before Donald Trump and Steve Wittkopf went on their Gulf States tour where the president secured significant energy and AI deals with the UAE. Right. Yeah, this was a UAE-owned firm called MGX, which seems to be pretty involved in crypto and AI, which are priorities for the UAE government in terms of investment. I keep saying this all the time, these kinds of things would pretty much not be tolerated under any other US administration, or at least would have provoked serious investigations. But we certainly

live in another kind of legal and moral universe than we did a few years ago, it seems. Even something like that $2 billion purchase of tokens to invest in Binance, that was kind of something that they didn't really need to do. But you do that because you want to do a favor for Trump to jumpstart this new token that he launched and because it also is for some benefit to Binance. But they could have just wired Binance 2 billion US dollars because they probably have that money but instead they use real money to buy the stablecoin token that Trump had issued and then use that for their investment.

So there's a way in which all these deals seem to further tie these parties together and tie parties, you know, business and political relationships and futures together. These deals, I feel like they're kind of flying under the radar in many ways, probably because they're complex, but also because there's so much going on. You recently did a deep dive on a $100 million investment that World Liberty Financial received at the end of June from a company kind of shrouded in secrecy called Aqua One. And what did you find out about them? So in late June, World Liberty Financial and this previously unknown company

called Aqua One Foundation announced a $100 million deal. Aqua One Foundation issued a press release on Reuters' website that said, we are buying $100 million worth of the World Liberty Financial Token. It had also the trappings of a normal kind of business announcement and they said that we're really excited to be doing business with them.

There was only one person named in association with this company, someone named Dave Lee and he had an ex-account where he'd only posted about 11 times. I think it was by the time I started looking into him. Beyond that, there was really nothing to see about or to know about this company. Their website had been registered in late May, all the social media accounts were new. There was pretty much no data trail, couldn't find any evidence that they're registered in the UAE or any other country. And so, some people, including me, started asking, what is this?

Is this real? And so, I first wrote an article in The Nation basically asking that question, is this company real? Listing all the things that we didn't know, all the basic information. I contacted World Liberty Financial. There is an email address for Aqua One Foundation. I contacted them. I tried to contact or send messages to this Dave Lee character on X and World Liberty got back to me to say they would get back to me with some answers. They acknowledged receiving my questions, but no one answered my questions. And so I published the initial piece and then I started learning more and doing more reporting and got a good tip. And I eventually was able to figure out who this Dave Lee is with a pretty good degree of certainty. My guess so far as I can tell is that he is a Chinese Brazilian guy who now works

for a state energy firm in China and is part of this other crypto firm that has been involved in some high profile deals in Asia, but has also been accused of some bad behavior. And it's called Web 3Port. I know there are a lot of names flying around here. But my theory, at least, is that they were kind of rebranding and they chose to adopt this new name of AquaOne Foundation. But we still don't know where did they get $100 million to send to the president's crypto firm? know, where did they get $100 million to send to the president's crypto firm? Jacob, are there mechanisms to investigate what's going on here with the president and

his firm and his office? Yeah, that's a great question. Perhaps fewer than there were in the past, and Democrats are certainly in the majority in Congress and they don't have all the powers they might if they were in the majority. But I think there are still things that people in government can do. There's ability to call hearings over some issues or issue subpoenas. I also think that there needs to be more work from civil society. I mean, I'm amazed that as far as I know, there doesn't seem to be anyone funding really deep research into Donald Trump's crypto companies and the movement of crypto, especially between his

companies. I can certainly report on a lot of their activities, but I'm not an expert blockchain analyst or anything like that, but there certainly should be that going on So I think what's happening here and the fact that love is both in the open but also Kind of shrouded in mystery and there's a lack of good data about what's going on here a good reporting is a real problem But is symptomatic of kind of the decline of accountability mechanisms in our country And just why do you think there's nobody kind of funding deep research into this?

Or, you know, why are the Democrats not banging on about this more? I mean, certainly I've heard people like Senator Warren and Chris Van Hollen talk about, like, how foreign governments can curry favor with Trump and that they could use World Liberty financial or massive crypto transactions that would benefit him. But like, you don't hear a ton about it. Right. And I'm amazed that we don't hear more. I mean, I've talked to Democrats, I've quoted some of them on the record, like Rep. Sean Caston from Illinois told me in an article that I wrote a couple months ago, that a lot of his colleagues are afraid that they know

there's a lot of money on the side of crypto and that while they want to vote against the crypto industry's interest in some things and on behalf of consumer protection and against political corruption, they know that money is going to be put against them in their next race. And that is a huge factor. The other factor is that some Democrats like the crypto industry, Kirsten Gillibrand has been very proud of her work on the Genius Act. I would argue that the Genius Act directly blesses Trump's corruption because he is issuing a stable coin and this bill is

all about stable coins. And I think that would be a politically easy thing for for Democrats to talk about every day to say Trump is getting hundreds of millions of dollars in payments from who knows what kind of people. He doesn't even have to consent to them. I mean, they could just be sent to the World Liberty Wall address and then someone has put money in the president's pocket.

This is also in the direct interest, as you allude to, of pretty much every head of state in the world. There's no reason for them not to buy some of Trump's tokens because, again, it would immediately inflate the worth of what Trump has and give him some money and curry some influence in a way that he obviously responds to. Jacob, thanks so much for this. This is really interesting. Thank you. Glad to do it. Alright, that is all for this week. Frontburner was produced by Matt Amha, Ali Jains, Joytha Shendgupta, Mackenzie Cameron, Matt Muse, Marco Luciano, and Lauren Donnelly. Our YouTube producer is John Lee. Music is by Joseph Shabason. Our senior producer is

Elaine Chao. Our executive producer is Nick McKay-Blokos. And I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening, and we'll talk to you next week. MUSIC For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.