09-01-2026 
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President Donald Trump’s new crypto-focused bank is 49% owned by the same United Arab Emirates sheikh who owns 49% of Trump’s token-issuing platform, but nobody is claiming ownership of a new memecoin that advertised a Trump affiliation.
- Sheikh’s stake in World Liberty Bank comes as regulators drop ‘reputational’ risk
- Binance confirms WLF deal, denies preferential treatment of USD1
- New $GOLD token pumps, dumps using Trump-linked platforms
- Hyperliquid, Kraken talking U.S. perpetual futures partnership
- Kalshi pays for letter from ex-CFTC/SEC execs urging policy to benefit Kalshi
- SEC pads enforcement stats ahead of fiscal year-end
On August 27, the Treasury Department’s Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) issued a joint final rule defining the term ‘unsafe or unsound practice’ as it applies to their supervision of U.S. banks.
Specifically, the new rule prioritizes guarding against “material harm to financial condition” while removing ‘reputational risk’ from the criteria. The move follows the two agencies’ 2025 decision to eliminate ‘reputational risk’ when weighing whether financial institutions’ crypto-related activities pose a threat to customers’ financial safety.
The change, which will take effect in 60 days from the order’s publication, originated via a 2025 executive order from President Trump that aimed to address the crypto bro conspiracy theory known as Operation Choke Point 2.0, aka the alleged Biden-era witch hunt against blockchain operators who dared seek greater access to U.S. fiat financial rails.
As luck would have it, the OCC/FDIC guidance was issued the same day the Wall Street Journal reported that the new bank-in-waiting from the Trump-linked World Liberty Financial (WLF) is 49% owned by the same UAE sheikh who took a 49% stake in WLF in January 2025. That WLF stake reportedly cost $500 million, of which $263 million reportedly flowed directly to Trump family-controlled entities.
WLF’s proposed national trust bank, World Liberty Trust Company (WLTC), was recently granted conditional approval by the OCC. WLTC’s five-member board doesn’t include any representatives with obvious ties to the UAE.
And yet the WSJ reported that Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed al Nahyan, known as the UAE’s ‘spy sheikh’ for his role as the country’s national security advisor, along with some co-investors, had taken a 49% stake in WLTC via an entity called StringZ Holding RSC.
When it conditionally approved WLTC’s application, the OCC said it had required three shareholders—including StringZ—to sign so-called ‘passivity commitment’ documents limiting them to passive involvement in the bank’s activities. The WSJ reported that this was intended to ‘stave off further scrutiny from Congress’ and marked only the second time the OCC has required an applicant to sign such documents since Trump returned to the White House in January 2025.
WLF’s application for a national trust charter was discussed at a Senate Banking Committee hearing in February, but OCC chief Jonathan Gould deflected requests to share WLF’s non-public ownership structure with the Senate, saying he needed to confer with OCC staff. The OCC subsequently declined to share this information with Congress.
In the wake of the WSJ’s report, CNBC tried and failed to get WLF execs to comment on the new bank’s ownership structure. A WLF spokesperson said only that “no one at World Liberty works for the U.S. government and there are no conflicts of interest.”
In another bit of curious timing, Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) recently declared that it was permanently revoking rules requiring U.S. companies to “report beneficial ownership information.” It’s almost as if Orwell was on to something when he wrote ‘ignorance is strength.’ Are you a weakling? No? So stop asking questions.
Binance says no preferential treatment for USD1
WLF previously stated that it sought the bank license to boost adoption of USD1, its dollar-denominated stablecoin. A bank license will enable WLF to bring custody services for USD1’s fiat reserves in-house, rather than continue paying fees to its current third-party custodian BitGo (NASDAQ: BTGO).
The WSJ report also confirmed that WLF has a partnership with the Binance exchange to provide ‘marketing and promotional support’ for USD1. Such relationships aren’t unheard of in the stablecoin sector, as Circle (NASDAQ: CRCL) has its own ‘distribution’ deal with Binance to promote its USDC token.
But Circle’s CEO Jeremy Allaire didn’t receive a presidential pardon from Trump, as Binance CEO Changpeng ‘CZ’ Zhao did last October (the WLF-Binance deal was signed last December). Binance also played a key role in boosting USD1’s profile in April 2025 when the UAE state-run investment firm MGX took a $2 billion stake in the exchange. For reasons known only to itself, MGX chose to do the deal in USD1 rather than cash.
At the time, USD1’s market cap was only ~$128 million, but the MGX-Binance deal helped put the token into serious stablecoin player territory. As of August 31, USD1’s market cap stands at nearly $4.2 billion, the fifth-highest sum among dollar-backed tokens.
While 90% of USD1 is held on Binance and its proprietary BNB Smart Chain network, a Binance spokesperson told the WSJ that it supports over 15 stablecoins from a variety of issuers and doesn’t offer any “preferential treatment” to WLF “or its products.”
Trump launches new $GOLD token… or did he?
The Trump family’s various crypto ventures—WLF, the $TRUMP memecoin, the American Bitcoin Corp (NASDAQ: ABTC) block reward mining/BTC ‘treasury’ firm, the AI Financial Corp (formerly ALT5 Sigma) treasury firm that stockpiles WLF’s ‘governance’ token WLFI, and more—were previously estimated to have left investors sitting on losses (paper or otherwise) of $4.6 billion. Meanwhile, the president earned well over $1 billion last year from his crypto ventures.
On August 27, the Public Citizen watchdog group issued its own calculation of those losses, arriving at a similar figure of $4.7 billion. The $TRUMP token accounted for the bulk ($3.2 billion) of these losses, followed by WLFI ($1 billion), the $450 million BTC treasury losses of Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG) (NASDAQ: DJT), plus at least $9.3 million from Trump’s ‘digital trading cards’ (Trump-themed non-fungible tokens).
Just as the watchdog’s report was issued, it appeared that the Trump crypto empire had added yet another token to its roster. On August 28, Lookonchain reported that the @realtrumpcoins X account, which is followed by the president’s official X account, had announced a new Solana-based token called $GOLD.
The $GOLD token was also promoted via the RealTrumpCoins.com domain, a site that Trump advertised in 2024 as the exclusive place to buy Trump-themed precious-metal ‘medallions.’
In its initial report, Lookonchain urged caution, noting that the supply of $GOLD appeared highly concentrated among wallets linked to the issuer. Sure enough, these wallets soon dumped 224.5 million $GOLD tokens for a $312,000 profit.
The @realtrumpcoins account deleted the tweets shortly thereafter, then issued a tweet claiming that reports of Trump Coins having “launched, promoted, or authorized a digital token are categorically false and the work of third-party bad actors.” The tweet went on to claim it was “actively working with the appropriate authorities to investigate this matter and bring these bad actors to justice.”And yet, days after this tweet was issued, the website continues to promote $GOLD as the “Trump Foundation’s most ambitious crypto project to date.” A ‘buy now’ button takes you to Jupiter, a Solana-based decentralized exchange, where $GOLD is paired with WLF’s USD1 stablecoin.
Sleuths eventually discovered that the website’s WHOIS data was updated on August 29, which may have given the new controllers access to the affiliated X account’s email, allowing it to reset the account’s password. Others pointed out that the Trump Foundation was dissolved by court order in 2018 following several legal violations.
All told, it’s another brutal caveat emptor that what you see online isn’t always what you get. It’s also a sad commentary on how the president’s crypto profiteering is so ubiquitous that the $GOLD token didn’t seem out of character, and helps explain why Democrats are pushing so hard to include ‘ethics’ language in the Senate’s digital asset market structure legislation (the CLARITY Act).
Hyperliquid talking US return via Kraken deal
Trump’s decision to give a shoutout to the Hyperliquid decentralized exchange from the White House last week was reportedly not as random as it seemed at the time. Trump, who said the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) was “working hard” to bring the Singapore-based Hyperliquid to the U.S. “in a fully legal and compliant fashion,” reportedly made the statement at the request of CFTC chair Michael Selig.
Politico reported that Selig requested to demonstrate the CFTC’s ‘commitment to bring crypto companies onshore.’ Hyperliquid has engaged lobbying firm BGR Group and the law firm Sullivan & Cromwell (whose attorneys represent Trump in some of his personal lawsuits) to help smooth its U.S. transition.
On Monday, Bloomberg reported that Hyperliquid was in ‘advanced talks’ with Payward, parent company of the Kraken
digital asset exchange. The goal is to bring certain types of Hyperliquid’s crypto-based perpetual futures products to the U.S. via another Payward entity, Bitnomial, the CFTC-regulated derivatives and designated contract market (DCM) platform.
Hyperliquid’s international platform allows users to trade directly via their digital wallets without any ‘know your customer’ scrutiny. Bloomberg reported that Payward has already pitched the CFTC on the proposed routing of the selected products through Bitnomial, thereby shining a brighter light on the users accessing these futures.
In a bit of (possibly) unfortunate timing, CoinDesk reported Monday that it had reviewed Arkham data showing the Lazarus Group, North Korea’s state-sponsored hacking collective, had moved over $30 million in BTC via Hyperliquid in the past three weeks. The data reportedly shows the BTC being converted to the Ethereum network’s native token ETH, and then transferred to digital asset exchanges like KuCoin, LBank, and (ironically enough) Kraken.
Swapping safety for speed
It seems unlikely that the Lazarus revelations would be enough to deter the Trump administration, which appears bound and determined to bring an ever-wider variety of crypto products to U.S. shores.
Case in point: both the CFTC and Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) have been soliciting public comments on whether to update their definitions of swaps, security-based swaps, and other derivative products.
Last week, a group of five former SEC/CFTC execs, including former CFTC chair Christopher Giancarlo, submitted a joint comment that urges their former employers to consider the economic substance and real-world consequences of new financial instruments to protect both investors and market integrity.
However, the document concludes that a failure to act, or acting too slowly, will result in the “offshore migration” of financial activity, and “once trading activity and market leadership move abroad, they are difficult to win back.” So the regulators are urged to “act expeditiously, rather than allow this inquiry to unfold over the course of months.”
There’s a significant footnote to this letter, revealing that the document was “sponsored” by prediction market operator
Kalshi, which engaged boutique law firm Bellementis PLLC “to assist with drafting” its text. The five ex-regulators insist “the views expressed herein are the result of a process independent from Kalshi” and that they “did not receive any compensation to participate in this letter.”
Kalshi is currently at war with numerous U.S. states for offering sports-based ‘event contracts’ that the states consider to be sports betting in everything but name. Kalshi has argued in court that its ‘swaps’ are the sole regulatory purview of the CFTC, a view CFTC chair Selig has loudly supported in press releases and court filings.
SEC ‘stat padding’ to mask record low enforcement actions
In its first fiscal year since Trump returned to the White House, the SEC saw the number of enforcement actions it launched fall by nearly one-half. And keep in mind that the SEC was still under former chair Gary Gensler’s ‘lock ‘em up’ regime for the first three months of that fiscal year.
The SEC was on pace for an even smaller number of new enforcement actions in its current fiscal year, which ends September 30. That is, until last week, when the SEC announced it had filed 38 separate civil complaints against entities that falsely promoted themselves to U.S. investors as legitimate SEC-registered advisory firms.
The 38 filings allege that the defendants claimed to operate from Colorado-based addresses but actually used IP addresses outside the U.S. The entities also listed phone numbers that were either disconnected or belonged to unrelated, legitimate businesses.
Laura D’Allaird, chief of the SEC Enforcement Division’s Cyber and Emerging Technologies Unit, said that when the SEC discovers “bad actors using fraudulent SEC filings to feign legitimacy with retail investors, we will act decisively to disrupt these operations.”
However, former SEC internet enforcement director John Reed Stark tore a strip off the SEC and chairman Paul Atkins for what he called “stat padding” intended to mask the fact that the SEC “is on track to post the worst enforcement numbers in SEC history. FY2026 is pacing toward roughly 120 SEC enforcement actions, a pathetically low level with no modern precedent.”
While the SEC filed 38 new complaints, “these aren’t 38 investigations. This is one investigation, sliced 38 ways, and a trivial one at that: a clerk cross-checking addresses on a form. No victims made whole. No fraud unraveled.”
Stark called this activity “exactly the kind of period-end financial engineering the SEC hauls CFOs into court over. If a public company booked 38 ‘sales’ to counterparties who won’t return calls, timed to land in the last quarter, the SEC of yesteryear would call it what it is. But the SEC of today mimics it all instead.”
Stark claims Atkins’ “hypocrisy knows no bounds … When a company does this to its numbers, it’s charged as fraud. When the SEC does it to its own numbers, it’s trumpeted in a press release.”
Stark’s disappointment at what the regulator has become under Atkins has taken on a new stridency of late. Last week, Stark tweeted a link to a court filing he claims will “Take Down the SEC’s Crypto Deregulation Rule.” That rule, known under SEC parlance as ‘Reg Crypto,’ would allow crypto platforms greater freedom to raise funds by issuing tokens without obtaining prior SEC approval, a move some critics say won’t end well.
