The pitch from “ZMoney” arrived on the encrypted messaging app Signal just days before Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration.

“ZMoney” was Zachary Folkman, an entrepreneur who once ran a company called Date Hotter Girls and was now representing World Liberty Financial, the cryptocurrency firm that Trump and his sons had recently unveiled. Folkman was writing to a crypto startup in the Cayman Islands, offering a “partnership” in which the firms would buy each other’s digital coins, a deal that would bolster the startup’s public profile.

But there was a catch, The New York Times found. For the privilege of associating with the Trumps, the startup would have to make, in effect, a secret multimillion-dollar payment to World Liberty.

“Everything we do gets a lot of exposure and credibility,” Folkman wrote, asserting that other business partners had committed between $10 million and $30 million to World Liberty.

The Cayman startup rejected the offer, as did several other firms that received a similar pitch from World Liberty, executives said. They considered the deal unethical, concluding that World Liberty was essentially selling an endorsement — and hiding the arrangement from the public.

World Liberty’s executives, who have maintained that they did nothing improper, were undeterred.

They successfully pitched similar deals to other firms while also marketing their coin to buyers around the world, reaping more than $550 million in sales, with a large cut earmarked for the president’s family.

Trump’s return to the White House has opened lucrative new pathways for him to cash in on his power, whether through his social media company or new overseas real estate deals. But none of the Trump family’s other business endeavors pose conflicts of interest that compare to those that have emerged since the birth of World Liberty.

Trump is now not only a major crypto dealer; he is also the industry’s top policymaker. So far in his second term, Trump has leveraged his presidential powers in ways that have benefited the industry — and in some cases his own company — even though he had spent years deriding crypto as a haven for drug dealers and scammers.

He has filled his administration with sympathizers to the crypto cause, including by appointing a former adviser to industry players as chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission. In addition, the Justice Department recently disbanded a crypto crimes task force, continuing a broader unwinding of Biden-era scrutiny of the industry.

A Times examination of World Liberty’s rapid ascent from fledgling startup to international force highlights the range of conflicts of interest trailing the company:

• World Liberty has directly benefited from Trump’s official actions, such as his announcement of a federal crypto stockpile that would include a digital currency the firm has invested in. The president’s announcement caused a temporary jump in the value of World Liberty’s holdings.

• World Liberty has sold its cryptocurrency to investors abroad, including in Israel and Hong Kong, according to interviews and data obtained by the Times, establishing a new avenue for foreign businesses to try to curry favor with Trump.

• Several investors in World Liberty’s coin managed firms that the federal government accused of wrongdoing. They include an executive whose fraud case was suspended after he invested millions of dollars in World Liberty. Other investors and business partners, some of whom haven’t been publicly identified before, are looking to expand in ways that will require the Trump administration’s approval.

• World Liberty proposed swapping cryptocurrencies with at least five startups, and often used the Trump name to solicit steep payments as part of the deals. Even in an industry with a disreputable history, the deals raised alarm among veteran executives.

“It’s a black spot on our industry,” said Andre Cronje, a founder of SonicLabs, a crypto firm that turned down World Liberty’s pitch. Anyone who accepted would “obviously think they’re going to make money because it’s the officially endorsed Trump project.”

A spokesperson for World Liberty, David Wachsman, disputed that any of the company’s deals constituted a “one-sided payment for services rendered.” But he acknowledged that the company has engaged in “mutual investment deals,” and said that its deal-making had resulted in “thoughtful, strategic exchanges between parties who stand to mutually benefit.”

Wachsman also said it would be “false, absurd and dangerous to suggest that investments or partnerships with World Liberty Financial were conducted as some sort of political quid pro quo.”

Still, the company’s deal-making benefits the president’s family. A Trump business entity owns 60% of World Liberty, according to the company’s website, and is entitled to 75% of certain revenue from coin sales, which could be converted into cash.

“It’s one of the more successful things we’ve ever done,” Eric Trump, the president’s son who runs the family business, said in an interview this month at the Trump Doral golf course in Florida.

He and his older brother, Donald Trump Jr., are actively involved in World Liberty, though they rely on three partners to oversee the daily operations. Two of them, Folkman and Chase Herro, have a mixed track record in crypto. The other is Zach Witkoff, the son of Donald Trump’s envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, who is also a World Liberty founder.

Trump has noted that conflict of interest laws do not apply to him, and that he has broad immunity for official actions he takes as president.

In a statement, a spokesperson for Trump noted that his “assets are in a trust managed by his children,” and that as a result, “there are no conflicts of interest.” (The trust still benefits Trump directly.)

World Liberty’s supporters are unbothered by questions about conflicts.

“Trump wants to make a lot of money in crypto,” Konstantin Kuznetsov, a Russian citizen living in Miami whose Gibraltar-based firm bought $1 million of World Liberty’s coins, said in an interview. “We can join in this wave.”

Chief crypto advocate

As a businessperson who made his name in the tactile world of real estate, Trump never aspired to build a digital coin empire.

Indeed, at the end of his first term, Trump turned to social media to express disdain for cryptocurrencies.

They “are not money,” he warned. Their “value is highly volatile and based on thin air.”

By last year, his views had begun to shift.

His older sons had become enthusiastic crypto proponents after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol effectively exiled the family business from the mainstream financial system.

“We built and sold and held real estate forever. And for a long period of time, I had access to everyone in the world,” Donald Trump Jr. explained in a live video appearance at a crypto conference in Washington last month. “All of a sudden that became really difficult. And I sort of realized very quickly just how much discrimination there is in the ordinary financial markets.”

The change of heart also coincided with an influx of millions of dollars in campaign contributions from the crypto industry into the Trump reelection effort. Under the Biden administration, the industry had faced nearly 100 enforcement actions by the SEC, and crypto executives wanted a leader to champion their interests in Washington.

During his campaign stumps, Donald Trump’s qualms about crypto appeared to vanish. At a bitcoin conference in July, he vowed to turn the United States into the “crypto capital of the planet.”

Herro and Folkman were unusual choices to partner with a president.

Folkman, who has short curly hair and tattoos, ran a company in his 20s tutoring forlorn men on how to pick up women. In numerous podcast appearances, Herro has recounted his life’s redemption arc, describing a wild youth in which he was charged with marijuana possession and spent a couple of weeks in a Wisconsin jail.

The two men had worked together for years, selling everything from colon cleanses to get-rich-quick advice, before pivoting to crypto with uneven results.

It’s not clear exactly how the pair earned the Trumps’ trust. In October, Herro and Folkman got to work on the company’s first initiative — selling a new cryptocurrency, which it called $WLFI, with the goal of $300 million in sales.

These coins would be different from $TRUMP — the so-called memecoin that spiked in January after Donald Trump marketed it to his followers before it abruptly crashed.

World Liberty, at least according to its marketing pitch, eventually plans to operate as a new type of internet bank that would allow customers to borrow and lend money in various digital currencies. Initially, there were few buyers. By the end of October, World Liberty had sold only $2.7 million worth of the coins, a tiny fraction of its goal.

Election Day was a game changer.

A flood of investors

With polls closed in most of America and Trump on his way to victory, the World Liberty account on the social platform X posted a celebratory message on Nov. 5: “Big things on the horizon.”

Soon a surge of investment flowed into World Liberty’s cryptocurrency.

An analysis performed for the Times by the forensics firm Nansen, drawing on crypto industry data, showed that many of the investors were based abroad in places such as Singapore, South Korea, Hong Kong and the United Arab Emirates.

Federal law prevents foreigners from donating to presidential campaigns or inaugural funds, but World Liberty’s coin sale offered a new, legal way to back Trump.

“The main reason for purchasing such a token was to support Trump’s inauguration, as he was the first crypto-friendly president of the United States,” said Keer Lau, chief strategy officer at Orbiter Finance, a Hong Kong-based entity.

The Stars align

World Liberty executives soon announced what they called “a transformative initiative” to partner with other crypto outfits and invest in their coins. The strategy, the executives said in February, would leverage World Liberty’s growing clout to help their lesser-known partners.

“It’s like taking care of your brother in the space,” Herro said at a crypto event in New York that month.

But World Liberty’s public pronouncements omitted a key aspect of its private pitch to several crypto startups, executives at these companies told the Times. World Liberty wanted to sell its own coin — not just to invest in others’. It was proposing a currency swap.

Here is the deal World Liberty offered, according to executives at three crypto firms approached by the company: The startups would spend between $10 million and $30 million on a large chunk of World Liberty’s coins. In return, World Liberty would buy a smaller amount of each startup’s own cryptocurrency. World Liberty would keep the rest of the money for itself — a premium as high as 20%.

World Liberty’s purchases would signal to the market that Trump’s firm had deemed the startups worthy of investment. But the market would have no way of knowing that World Liberty had been compensated for that endorsement. Some details of a similar pitch from World Liberty were previously reported by Blockworks, an industry news outlet.

“They kept telling us, ‘We’re like, we’re super close to Trump,’” said Mike Silagadze, CEO of Ether.Fi, a crypto startup that World Liberty approached.

“We immediately rejected,” said Dominik Schiener, who founded the IOTA Foundation, a Berlin-based group that also received the pitch. “It’s a very dishonest approach.”

In his statement, Wachsman, the World Liberty spokesperson, said the Times’ reporting contained “fundamental misunderstandings about standard industry practices” and called the company’s business arrangements “not only common in the blockchain industry but essential for creating lasting economic alignments in business, generally.”

“These arrangements establish skin in the game for all parties,” he added.

The benefits of a partnership were enough to attract at least five crypto firms to strike other deals with World Liberty, without disclosing details of the financial arrangements, the Times found.

‘Thank me later’

In February, Eric Trump passed along some investment advice to his followers on X: “In my opinion, it’s a great time to add $ETH.”

It was the ticker symbol for a digital coin called ether. “You can thank me later,” he added, before deleting that line.

His advice proved prescient.

The next month, his father announced the creation of a “U.S. Crypto Reserve” — a Fort Knox-like repository of cryptocurrencies intended to help bolster the industry.

Donald Trump’s announcement included a list of digital currencies to go into the stockpile. Along with bitcoin, he included ether, saying it would be “at the heart of the Reserve.”

Ether’s price surged more than 13%.

The spike had an immediate beneficiary: World Liberty. Over the previous few months, the company had bought $240 million worth of ether, according to Arkham, a crypto data firm.

That same pattern — Trump making policy pronouncements or posting messages that intersected with World Liberty’s business interests — occurred again in March.

In a video feed at a crypto conference in New York, Trump called on Congress to pass legislation governing stablecoins, a type of crypto designed to maintain a value of $1.

Both the Senate and the House have introduced bills that would make it easier for firms issuing stablecoins to operate in the United States. In his remarks last month, Trump said that the rise of stablecoins would “expand the dominance of the U.S. dollar.”

A week later, World Liberty announced it was releasing its own stablecoin, USD1. The overlap between Trump’s policy pronouncements and his business interests have alarmed congressional Democrats, who moved recently to amend the pending stablecoin legislation to bar the Trump family from issuing one.

The amendment failed, and none of the concerns about World Liberty have disrupted its momentum.