After President Donald Trump announced, on Saturday, February 1, tariffs of 25 percent on all goods entering the United States from Canada and Mexico, stock futures plummeted. Trump subsequently agreed to delay those tariffs by 30 days.
According to Bloomberg News reporter Muyao Shen, World Liberty Financial (WLFI) — a crypto-oriented project launched in October 2024 and connected to members of the Trump family — “appears to have added tens of millions of dollars’ worth of the Ether cryptocurrency after crypto markets crashed during the weekend as the U.S. president briefly imposed tariffs on Mexico and Canada.”
On Monday, February 3, the president’s son Eric Trump (executive vice president of the Trump Organization) tweeted, “In my opinion, it’s a great time to add $ETH. You can thank me later.”
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But Eric Trump later edited that post, removing the second sentence.
In an article published by Bloomberg News on February 4, Shen reports, “Since the launch of World Liberty in October, market observers have raised questions about potential conflicts of interest for the Trumps given the administration’s sway over regulations. Typically, a promise of a return on an investment such as what Eric Trump first alluded to could cause scrutiny from regulators such as the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, which has often seen that as indicating an asset is a security that the agency should regulate.”
Shen notes that on February 3, “digital wallets belonging to World Liberty” added “about 21,177 Ether tokens in net inflows worth about $55 million, according to blockchain data analytics firm Nansen — a figure which includes both purchases as well as the conversion of an Ether derivative to the cryptocurrency.”
“Between January 18 and February 1,” Shen explains, “Nansen also estimated that World Liberty’s digital wallets in total received net inflow of Ether worth about $340 million before the funds were sent to wallets belonging to Coinbase Prime…. World Liberty has been promoted as a DeFi lending platform, though it hasn’t become operational yet. Its purchases of a number of niche tokens in the past have put the firm at the center of the crypto market’s discussion.”
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Read the full Bloomberg News article at this link (subscription required).
