Trump family-owned Mar-a-Lago was home to traditional finance giants, US government officials and crypto executives in a crypto forum on Wednesday, hosted by the family’s sprawling crypto company.
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong and Binance co-founder Changpeng Zhao, who Donald Trump pardoned last year, were at the exclusive World Liberty Forum event alongside Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon and the heads of the Nasdaq and New York Stock Exchange.
The event saw traditional finance executives and US regulators embrace crypto, with Solomon, a long-time crypto skeptic, saying on stage that he now owns “a little Bitcoin, very little,” according to one of the attendees.
“The great irony is this whole world has gone full circle,” Bloomberg reported Eric Trump as saying at the event.
“There’s people in this room that were probably on the opposite side of us, that were canceling bank accounts for us, that were kicking us out of their big banks for no reason other than the fact that my father was wearing a hat that said, ‘Make America Great Again.’”
Commodity Futures Trading Commission chair Mike Selig, the head of an agency that is pushing to regulate the crypto industry, was also in attendance, along with Republican senators Ashley Moody and Bernie Moreno.
World Liberty announces tokenization tie-up for Trump hotel
World Liberty announced at the event that it has partnered with tokenization firm Securitize, with plans to tokenize loan revenue interests in an upcoming Trump-branded resort in the Maldives.
The company said it was part of a “broader strategy to design, structure, and distribute [World Liberty]-branded tokenized real-world asset offerings.”
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The Trump Organization said in November that it would tokenize the development of the project, which is being built by real estate developer DarGlobal. The resort is set to be completed in 2030 and feature 100 luxury villas.
World Liberty said that the offering will give investors “both a fixed yield and loan revenue streams” from the resort, giving exposure to “both potential income distributions and the potential for certain profits upon any future sale.”
It added that the offering is only available to eligible accredited investors in the US and would be accessed via “select third-party partners and wallets.”
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