PALM BEACH—Titans of the crypto and traditional financial worlds descended on Mar-a-Lago for World Liberty Financial’s inaugural forum on Wednesday.
The World Liberty Forum in the Grand Ballroom saw major players from the crypto world, like Coinbase Founder Brian Armstrong, and those of conventional finance, like Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon and Franklin Templeton Investments CEO Jenny Johnson, take the stage during the 11-hour event at President Donald Trump’s Palm Beach estate in Florida.
Although the president was not there, his sons, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, are co-founders, as are Special Envoy Steve Witkoff’s sons Zach and Alex Witkoff. Zach Witkoff is World Liberty Financial’s CEO.
World Liberty Financial’s stablecoin USD1 is designed to strengthen the U.S. dollar with the aim of cheapening the national debt. Zach Witkoff told Breitbart News the process is “pretty simple.”
“Every time someone purchases a USD1, we mint one dollar of U.S. Treasuries or cash or cash equivalents. So essentially, by perpetuating USD1, we’re increasing demand for the U.S. Treasury, which in effect makes the national debt much cheaper. That’s pretty much the gist of it,” he said.
“We’re creating demand for treasuries, really, around the world and historically in places where that dollar is really expensive and really tough to access,” he added.
World Liberty Financial is also the first stablecoin company to launch real-time proof of reserves, as Zach Witkoff noted in his remarks to open the forum just before 9:30 a.m., and in a pull aside with Breitbart News shortly thereafter.
“We recently launched what we call real-time proof of reserves, and what does that mean? That means at any moment in time, you can go online, and you can check the reserves that are backing USD1 on a real-time basis,” he said.
“Historically, quarterly audits have been the norm; monthly attestations. We’ve taken it a step further, and we’re showing people in real time the backing of USD1,” he added.
“You’ve got trillions of dollars that are going to come onto the U.S. currency. Like it or not, you’ve got a lot of bad currencies around the world. You’ve got a lot of really corrupt governments, a lot of really bad political systems. And guess what? All those people want the U.S. dollar because it’s a hedge against their own country. It’s protection against their own systems that have otherwise failed them. It’s a protection against inflation. So you’re going to see trillions of dollars flow into the U.S. economy,” he said.
“The consequence of that — it’s going to lower interest rates for America. It’s going to prop up our balance sheets. It’s going to make sure that we stay the reserve currency. This is a great thing for the United States of America. It’s something that Europe couldn’t pull off. It’s something that Asia couldn’t pull off. It’s something China could not pull off. It’s something that no one in South America could pull off,” he added. “We will literally harness trillions and trillions of dollars worth of inward investment to the U.S. dollar based on the fact that people want to own the dollar, and they don’t want to own their currencies that have only let them down, have only been devalued over periods of time. And do you know what the mechanism to do all of that is? Effectively a cell phone. Blockchain technology on a cell phone; digital wallets. It’s gonna revolutionize finance, and America’s leading the way. We should be very proud as Americans. As patriotic Americans, we should be very proud that America is leading the way in this revolution.”
World Liberty Financial is a decentralized finance (DeFi) blockchain-based organization that enables peer-to-peer lending without intermediaries like traditional banks.
Franklin Templeton CEO Jenny Johnson noted at the forum that the financial system should operate on blockchain rails, as Zach Witkoff highlighted during an afternoon conversation with Coinbase CEO and co-founder Brian Armstrong.
When Witkoff asked about the potential of stablecoins over the next two to three years, Armstrong noted that they are currently at about $300 billion and could eclipse $1 trillion.
During his conversation with CNBC’s Sara Eisen, Solomon noted that Goldman Sachs is active in both digitization and tokenization.
He said that both have clear impacts on Goldman Sachs’ investment banking and trade businesses, adding that investment banking and trading have evolved into major technology platforms from more analog-centric businesses over the past several decades. Solomon said Goldman Sachs leadership looks to maximize its capabilities for “whatever rails” the global financial system functions on.
Eric Trump told Breitbart News that World Liberty Financial got its start after “big banks came after” the Trump family, like they “were dogs.”
“We’re the most canceled family in the world. Many of your listeners were canceled. Probably everybody that’s listening to my voice right now was canceled,” he said. “Big banks came after us like we were dogs, all because we were conservatives, because we’re Republicans, because we all wore hats that said, ‘Make America Great Again.’ They did it to all of your readers, all of your listeners.”
Eric Trump added that the turn to stablecoins and DeFi was a very similar arc to the establishment of Truth Social, which gave his father, President Trump, a direct line of communication once again with Americans ahead of the 2024 election after he was cancelled on Twitter before Tesla CEO Elon Musk bought it and rebranded it as X.
“And we went to war against big finance, no different than we went to war when they started violating all of our freedom of speech, our First Amendment rights; we built Truth Social,” Eric Trump explained. “We did that because we were getting kicked off of Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, etc. We’re doing the same thing. We got canceled by JPMorgan. We got canceled by Capital One, every single big bank out there, for no reason whatsoever other than our political affiliation. We’re taking crypto, we’re taking DeFi — there’s nothing that DeFi can’t do better, cheaper, more transparently — and we’re going to put that at the forefront. We’re going to change finance forever. Cryptocurrency is the future, and that’s what this conference is about today.”
Donald Trump Jr. posed the rhetorical question, “If they can do it to us, who can’t they do it to?” during a panel with his brother and Erin Molan.
Donald Trump Jr. participates in a panel with Eric Trump and Erin Molan at the World Economic Forum. Nick Gilbertson / Breitbart News
In January, President Trump notably filed a lawsuit against JPMorgan Chase and its CEO, Jamie Dimon, alleging the company debanked him over politics. As AFP noted, citing the lawsuit:
Trump and his businesses were hurt “not only by the interruption to their access to JPMC’s banking services, but also by the devastating impact of plaintiff’s ability to transact and access their monies, and by having to enter into less favorable business arrangements with other financial institutions,” the complaint said.
“Plaintiffs are confident that JPMC’s unilateral decision came about as a result of political and social motivations, and JPMC’s unsubstantiated ‘woke’ beliefs that it needed to distance itself from President Donald Trump and his conservative political views.”
Trump’s suit said the president raised the issue with Dimon, who “assured” the president he would offer a detailed response. But Dimon “ultimately never did” get back to Trump, according to the complaint.
In a statement, JPMorgan said the lawsuit lacks “merit.”
Eric Trump told Breitbart News that World Liberty Financial is winning the stablecoin race and said the old guard of finance did an about-face, embracing the very systems and technologies the Trumps turned to.
“World Liberty is winning the race right now. We’re the fastest-growing stablecoin on Earth,” Eric Trump told Breitbart News. “You better believe that in an 18-month period, they did the greatest role reversal in the history of the world, the very people who canceled us, many of those people are in this room saying how they’re going to adopt the very technologies that pretty much make it very difficult for them to cancel us again, and so there is a massive, massive pendulum shift in the financial world, and that’s going to benefit the retail consumer. The retail consumer has always been left behind. They’ve always been disenfranchised by the banks, especially the small retail consumer. Cryptocurrency changes that. We’re going to change finance forever.”
The lineup of speakers and those in attendance on Wednesday — which also included NASDAQ Chair and CEO Adena Friedman, New York Stock Exchange President Lynn Martin, FIFA President Gianni Infantino, and investor Kevin O’Leary of NBC’s Shark Tank fame — speaks to World Liberty Financial’s impact and presence in the financial and crypto spheres.
Breitbart News caught up with conservative radio host and Outkick founder Clay Travis, who later spoke on stage with Small Business Administration Administrator Kelly Loeffler. Travis told Breitbart News that the heavyweight financial leaders on hand demonstrate the robust influence World Liberty Financial has, underscoring that the group is “here to stay.”
“When they sent me the list of who was going to be speaking, I couldn’t believe how impressive all of the resumes were,” he said. “To have all of those people in one place like this and be able to hit on so many different interesting, dynamic aspects of where we’re going in the crypto and prediction market space, and beyond. I was super excited to come here.”
“For this to be the inaugural event, sometimes you have to build for years to get people to buy in with what’s going to be put together. You got the head of FIFA, the head of the New York Stock Exchange, the head of NASDAQ, some of the biggest and best, most successful private equity guys, CEOs–this is as good of a speaker list as I’ve seen for any event, frankly, almost ever,” Travis added. “So I think it speaks to the influence, the fact that this group is here to stay. I think they’re probably going to be doing this event every year into the future. The first year is the toughest, and they hit a home run.”
Trump adviser and CEO of X Strategies, Alex Bruesewitz, who heads up the Team Trump accounts across social media, told Breitbart News that the World Liberty Financial cofounders achieved an incredible feat with the smash-hit inaugural World Liberty Forum.
“The Witkoff brothers and the Trump brothers, what they did today was incredible. They put together a room of the most influential business leaders in the world, specifically around crypto, and they gathered them all here at Mar-a-Lago, a place that is so critical to the global movement,” he said. “World Liberty Financial is a great company that’s bringing everybody together.”