Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan’s investment firm, which is based in the UAE, has bought a huge 49% stake in World Liberty Financial (WLFI), the Trump family’s cryptocurrency business. Eric Trump signed the $500 million deal just days before President Donald Trump’s second inauguration in January 2025. This deal was one of two big ones between WLFI and Emirati companies last year. It made the platform one of the world’s biggest issuers of stablecoins.
The deal gave Aryam Investment, an Emirati company backed by Sheikh Tahnoon, a UAE national security advisor and royal, almost half of WLFI’s shares. Two of his top aides also joined the company’s board. Eric Trump, the president’s son, signed the deal on January 16, 2025. A separate announcement at a Dubai conference in May 2025 said that MGX, another company linked to Tahnoon, was using $2 billion of WLFI’s stablecoin for investments.
World Liberty Financial, which was co-founded by members of the Trump family and Steve Witkoff (now the U.S. Special Envoy to the Middle East), has grown quickly. The Trump family owns a lot of tokens, including 22.5 billion $WLFI units, and they make money from sales and stablecoin profits. A spokesperson for WLFI pointed out that the company’s value shot up quickly after the deal.
This foreign investment in the family business of a sitting president makes people raise their eyebrows because the U.S. is trying to become the “crypto capital of the planet.” The Trump Organization promised not to make any new deals with foreign governments while he was in office, but WLFI, as a private fintech, doesn’t have to follow those rules and could make tens of millions of dollars a year. The timing is right for the UAE to get access to U.S. AI technology, but spokespeople say there is no connection between the two.
