What Happened
World Liberty Financial, the crypto venture co-founded by Donald Trump and partly owned by his family, is under fresh scrutiny following a Times investigation published on April 7, 2026. The report found that WLFI partnered with AB DAO, a Southeast Asia-based blockchain project, to integrate its USD1 stablecoin into the platform. The partnership was announced in November 2025.
What WLFI apparently did not know: AB DAO had, until weeks before the partnership was announced, been actively promoting a resort project linked to figures associated with Cambodia’s Prince Group. U.S. authorities have designated Prince Group a major transnational criminal network. Coordinated U.S. and U.K. sanctions targeting Prince Group founder Chen Zhi and associates were issued for alleged involvement in large-scale fraud around the same time the partnership was being finalized.
WLFI said it conducted due diligence before the integration and has no relationship with any sanctioned individuals. The company’s position is that it was unaware of AB DAO’s prior promotional activity. The Times investigation suggests the due diligence process failed to catch a connection that was publicly visible until weeks before the partnership was announced.
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Broader Context: A Pattern of Scrutiny
The AB DAO episode is the latest in a series of governance and foreign-ties concerns around WLFI. Earlier this year, reporting confirmed that UAE security adviser Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed Al Nahyan acquired a 49% stake in WLFI for $500 million shortly before Trump’s inauguration. The deal was not publicly disclosed. Two of Tahnoun’s lieutenants, including the CEO and general counsel of his tech firm G42, were placed on the WLFI board without disclosure.
WLFI has also faced congressional scrutiny. Senators Elizabeth Warren and Jack Reed previously wrote to the DOJ and Treasury requesting an investigation into the company, citing token sales with alleged links to sanctioned entities in North Korea, Russia, and Iran. Those specific allegations were partially disputed by on-chain analysts who identified false positives in the methodology used by the original watchdog report.
On the revenue side, the Trump family receives 75% of net proceeds from WLFI token sales and a cut of USD1 stablecoin profits through DT Marks DEFI LLC. By December 2025, the family had collected approximately $1 billion in proceeds while holding an estimated $3 billion in unsold tokens. The White House has maintained that no conflicts of interest exist.
What It Means
The Prince Group connection, even if inadvertent, raises a specific question about WLFI’s partner vetting process: if a blockchain project that AB DAO was actively promoting carried sanctions-linked individuals until weeks before the deal was signed, why did WLFI’s due diligence not surface it?
For USD1, which had approximately $2 billion in circulation as of early 2026 and is used for significant institutional transactions including a $2 billion MGX investment into Binance, the reputational risk of partnerships traced to sanctioned networks is not trivial. WLFI has applied for a national trust bank charter in the U.S. That application is pending review by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.
“WLFI conducted due diligence and has no relationship with sanctioned figures.” — World Liberty Financial response to The Times
