Written by: Ethan (@ethanzhang_web3)

On March 4, Trump posted on Truth Social, explicitly criticizing the banking industry for threatening and undermining the GENIUS Act. He urged Congress to advance the cryptocurrency market structure bill as soon as possible and warned that if the framework is delayed, the United States will lose its advantage in the cryptocurrency sector to other countries. His language was fierce and his tone urgent, portraying him as a defender speaking out for the industry.

However, if you know that Trump’s family-owned World Liberty Financial (WLFI) is the issuer of the stablecoin USD1, the implications of his statement become much more nuanced. One of the most direct beneficiaries of the GENIUS Act happens to be the family business of the person issuing this post from the White House.

This is not the first time. Since Trump returned to the White House in January 2025, his cryptocurrency empire has never truly been separated from his presidential identity. The two hats have always been worn on the same head — only in the past few weeks has the overlap between them become harder to ignore than ever before.

On one hand, the family project USD1 faced a coordinated attack in late February, briefly decoupling from its peg, after which the WLFI team transferred large amounts of tokens to centralized exchanges over two consecutive days, online signals stirring the market’s imagination; on the other hand, the president himself was in Washington advocating for stablecoin legislation, directly countering the lobbying efforts of the banking group.

The two lines are running simultaneously, intersecting at the same family, at the same time, on the same issue. This is what makes Trump's current cryptocurrency narrative particularly interesting.

Stress Testing USD1

In March 2025, World Liberty Financial officially launched USD1, a stablecoin pegged 1:1 to the US dollar, with reserve assets comprised of short-term US Treasury bonds, dollar deposits, and cash equivalents, managed by the crypto custodian BitGo, and monthly reserve proofs issued by the accounting firm Crowe. In terms of its design framework, it benchmarks regulatory compliance rather than those offshore stablecoins with vague reserves and questionable transparency.

The market entry timing was precise. Just as the legislative discussion around the GENIUS Act was heating up and market expectations for compliant stablecoins were increasing, USD1 made a striking entrance: I am the dollar, I am compliant, I have the endorsement of the presidential family. In May 2025, Abu Dhabi sovereign fund MGX announced a strategic investment of $2 billion in USD1, catapulting USD1 from a newcomer in the crypto world to a significant player on the global stablecoin landscape overnight.

By March 2026, USD1’s circulating market value had reached approximately $4.5 billion, firmly securing a spot among the top five global stablecoins. However, behind this scale, some details are worth noting: Research from data analysis platform Kaiko shows that over half of USD1’s liquidity on PancakeSwap comes from market maker wallets associated with the WLFI team, rather than genuine market trading demand; the monthly active user numbers in USD terms show a significant gap compared to established players like USDT and USDC. Political backing is the strongest marketing resource, but it cannot replace genuine market depth.

On February 23, 2026, a sudden stress test shattered this delicate balance.

On that morning, USD1 briefly decoupled, with the price dropping to $0.994, deviating approximately 0.6% from the $1 peg. WLFI immediately raised an alarm on the X platform, characterizing this fluctuation as a coordinated attack with multiple points of control: attackers infiltrated the social media accounts of several WLFI co-founders, employed KOLs to disseminate panic-driven information, while simultaneously short-selling WLFI tokens, attempting to profit from the artificially created chaos.

WLFI spokesperson David Wachsman subsequently informed the media that the project's engineering and security teams successfully thwarted the coordinated attacks from multiple directions, and that the day's event precisely demonstrated the strength of USD1's design, which can be relied on under any conditions. USD1 later recovered to around $0.998, and the 1-to-1 redemption mechanism effectively maintained its peg without triggering a deeper trust crisis.

Looking at the results, this attack indeed did not succeed. However, in terms of context, this attack occurred at a highly sensitive time—just days prior, WLFI had hosted a high-profile crypto summit at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, with attendees including government officials, traditional bank executives, and Binance’s former CEO CZ.

The decoupling, although temporary, exposed a structural issue: political endorsement can bring market value, but it may not guarantee resilience under pressure. When the biggest selling point of a stablecoin is the name of the presidential family, any attack targeting that name will also equate to an attack on that stablecoin.

The Team Starting to Offload?

About 10 days after the attack, another set of on-chain data emerged, further amplifying the market's interpretive space.

On-chain analysis revealed that since March 4, WLFI had transferred a large amount of WLFI tokens to centralized exchanges over two consecutive days: on the first day, they transferred approximately 146.4 million WLFI to OKX and Bitget, equivalent to about $15.4 million at the time; on the second day, they transferred about 16.71 million WLFI to OKX, equivalent to about $1.74 million. The total transfer equaled approximately 163 million tokens, with a total value exceeding $17 million.

In the on-chain world, transferring tokens to centralized exchanges is often seen as a highly indicative behavior, usually implying potential selling intent. While not all transferred tokens will be immediately liquidated, this move alone is enough to trigger participants' associations and alertness, particularly in the context of multiple pressures facing the project.

This association appears particularly reasonable at this moment. The USD1 stablecoin had just experienced a brief decoupling event on February 23, 2026, with the price dropping to about $0.994, and even touching $0.98 at certain moments. Although the price returned to near $0.998 within hours, this event had already intensified external doubts regarding the robustness of the WLFI project.

Simultaneously, the political controversy surrounding WLFI remains unresolved—on February 4, 2026, the US House of Representatives launched an investigation, requiring WLFI to provide ownership records, fund flows, governance documents, and details of board changes, focusing on the transaction wherein Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, a member of the Abu Dhabi royal family, secretly acquired approximately 49% of WLFI for $500 million (signed four days before Trump's second inauguration on January 16, 2025), with a deadline set for March 1, 2026. In addition, Senators Elizabeth Warren and Andy Kim urged the Treasury to conduct a CFIUS review of the transaction on February 13, highlighting national security risks and potential conflicts of interest.

Notably, WLFI has not publicly commented on this batch of on-chain transfers. This silence has itself become part of the market interpretation.

Of course, another interpretation also holds: the project is strategically positioning itself for CEX liquidity in preparation for future market operations; or this is a predetermined liquidity management action in the tokenomics design, unrelated to external conditions. Both narratives cannot be entirely ruled out, which is the paradoxical nature of on-chain data—it provides facts but does not offer intent.

However, according to WLFI’s operating agreement, entities controlled by the Trump family can receive 75% of the project's profit share. Trump's holding entity, DT Marks Defi LLC, holds about 60% of WLFI's shares, while family members and their affiliates have been allocated approximately 22.5 billion WLFI tokens. Any market movement of these tokens is not merely a financial decision at the project level but also reflects the family's asset monetization path in the cryptocurrency market.

Currently, WLFI’s token price has dropped more than 50% from its historical peak. At this point, any large-scale transfer action will inevitably be re-evaluated against the backdrop of this decline.

Another Battle for the President in Washington

On March 4, Trump posted on Truth Social, his wording more urgent than usual. He explicitly criticized the banking industry for threatening and undermining the GENIUS Act and called for Congress to expedite the cryptocurrency market structure bill, warning that if the United States acts slowly, the advantage in cryptocurrency will be handed over to other countries.

This rhetoric is familiar—packaging domestic policy disputes as great power competition and portraying the opposing side as traitors. Trump has used this many times, and it has worked each time.

He is speaking up for the industry and also for himself. Only these two matters are wrapped into the same statement.

The GENIUS Act itself is not complex. It is the first piece of legislation in US history to establish a federal regulatory framework for stablecoin issuance, clarifying issuance qualifications, reserve requirements, and anti-money laundering obligations. After multiple revisions, it was enacted in 2025, with a positive direction, though debates remain in the details.

The banking lobby is focusing on one clause: whether stablecoins can provide yields to holders. The logic is straightforward—if stablecoins can pay interest, why would the public still deposit money in banks? A loss of deposits is the most undesirable outcome for the banking sector. Thus, lobbying groups began pushing to amend relevant clauses, extending their resistance to another piece of cryptocurrency legislation, the CLARITY Act, creating a package: if you want stablecoin legislation, you must first agree to my conditions.

Trump's reaction was to directly criticize the banking industry on social media. This stance sent a signal: the legislative process is not smooth. A true confident advocate does not need to pressure through postings. He needs to post to indicate that the chips at the negotiating table are still insufficient.

However, what complicates this game is not the resistance from the banking sector but a blank space in the text of the GENIUS Act.

This law contains no clauses preventing the president or family members from profiting from stablecoin issuance. This gap sparked debate during the legislative process, with some senators attempting to add prohibitory clauses, but ultimately they were not included. Thus, a peculiar structure emerged: a president acting both as a promoter of legislation and as a potential beneficiary of that legislation could exercise veto power based on how the legislative content affected his personal interests—this logical loop might be the deepest background of this Washington game.

Conclusion: The Intersection of Two Lines

Place the three events on the same timeline: On February 23, USD1 decouples facing a coordinated attack, then quickly recovers; several days after the attack, WLFI transfers large amounts of tokens to CEX over two consecutive days; on March 4, Trump posts on Truth Social, launching a direct counterattack against the banking industry obstructing the GENIUS Act.

These three events occurred within less than two weeks. Although there is no simple causal relationship between them, the protagonists are from the same family—current US President Trump's cryptocurrency empire: on one side, the family project is facing genuine market pressures from external attacks, opaque on-chain actions, and political inquiries from Congress; on the other side, the president is using his most mobilizable resources—the White House’s voice and political credibility—to shield stablecoin legislation.

The intersection of these two lines is Trump himself. He is not switching between being a businessman and a president; he is fighting on two fronts simultaneously, and these two fronts point in the same direction: to let USD1 and WLFI survive, to grant them legitimacy, scale, and profit under a regulatory framework he personally champions.

There has been ongoing external skepticism about this overlap, which has noticeably intensified in early 2026. The investigation led by Congressman Ro Khanna focuses on the transaction wherein the UAE royal family secretly acquired approximately 49% of WLFI for $500 million, probing fund flows, governance transparency, and potential national security risks—especially, shortly after the UAE royal family's stake in WLFI, the Trump administration approved a plan to export hundreds of thousands of advanced chips to the UAE company G42 owned by Tahnoun, despite this decision having been shelved previously on national security grounds.

The legal community has labeled this transaction as a potential constitutional violation (violating constitutional clauses prohibiting the president from accepting foreign gifts). The White House's response is that Trump has never participated in any transactions or decisions involving WLFI and has maintained distance from the company since taking office.

This assertion may hold at a legal level, but at a real level, it describes an almost unobservable state of isolation that cannot be independently verified by external parties. When a president's family business continually appreciates due to favorable policy, while the president simultaneously creates beneficial policies for this industry, whether interests exist and whether connections are substantiated become a structural gray area.

The deeper issue is not whether Trump has committed unlawful acts but whether the current system has sufficient tools to address this new type of power-business overlap. The stablecoin industry is highly reliant on regulatory clarity, and when the promoter of regulatory clarity is also a market participant, the formulation of the entire game’s rules itself becomes a topic requiring reevaluation.

Trump's two hats are no longer a secret he is intentionally hiding. They exist with a degree of publicity, continually scrutinized by the market, the media, and some members of Congress.

It is precisely because it can theoretically be constrained by mechanisms—Congressional legislation, presidential signature, regulatory rule-making—that each part has his hand present. The mechanism of constraint itself is held in the hands of the person who needs to be constrained.

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