A Blockchain Company Invested in a Trump Family-Backed Cryptocurrency. It Has Been a Disaster for Shareholders.

Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, and their business partners rang the opening bell at the Nasdaq on Aug. 13, 2025. (Adam Gray/Bloomberg)

In mid-August, President Donald Trump’s sons Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. joined their business partners to ring the Nasdaq opening bell to mark the start of a new partnership: a deal with blockchain company ALT5 Sigma that would have it invest in a cryptocurrency the Trump family has a stake in.

Since the deal was struck, ALT5 has suspended its CEO, delayed the filing of its third-quarter earnings report, and lost four-fifths of its value in the stock market.

ALT5 is one of the new wave of “digital asset treasury” companies, which are publicly traded stocks that hold a reservoir of cryptocurrencies. The largest of these companies, Michael Saylor’s Strategy, holds Bitcoin . ALT5 instead holds a cryptocurrency token issued by World Liberty Financial, a privately held company co-founded by Donald Trump and the two sons, among other executives. As of October, ALT5 held 7.28 billion of WLFI, a so-called governance token.

World Liberty also issues one of the fastest-growing stablecoins, called USD1, and says it is developing other blockchain projects. Stablecoins, such as USD1, are typically pegged to the dollar and backed by an equivalent amount of reserves, while other tokens, such as WLFI, swing in price on exchanges depending on investor demand.

According to World Liberty’s website, a limited liability company affiliated with Donald Trump and “certain of his family members” owns about 38% of World Liberty’s holding company. The LLC and certain Trump family members also own 22.5 billion of the WLFI token, and the LLC is entitled to receive fees from the proceeds of token sales, according to the website. Those tokens would be worth $3.4 billion at Monday’s price.

The ALT5 strategy to hold the WLFI token could increase demand for it. ALT5’s holdings effectively wrap crypto tokens inside a stock that investment advisors and other investors could buy, even if they don’t buy cryptocurrency directly. Other treasury companies operate similarly. A higher token price, in turn, could drive up ALT5’s share price, and the company could issue shares to purchase yet more tokens, a circular process that some crypto investors have credited with driving up the price of other cryptocurrencies with treasury companies.

The partnership so far hasn’t worked out well for ALT5’s investors. Since the close on Aug. 8, the last trading day before World Liberty announced the partnership, ALT5’s share price has fallen to $1.78 as of Monday’s close from $8.97 a share, an 80% drop, according to Dow Jones Market Data. The company’s current market value, at $216.5 million, is less than the value of the WLFI tokens it says that it owns.

ALT5 didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Barron’s sent a request for comment to World Liberty, citing ALT5’s declined share price and information in public Securities and Exchange Commission filings. A World Liberty spokesman forwarded the request to defamation counsel from law firm Clare Locke.

“WLF conducted extensive due diligence before the deal with ALT5,” wrote Clare Locke attorney Tom Clare to an attorney for Dow Jones, Barron’s parent company.

The attorneys and the World Liberty spokesman didn’t respond to requests for comment sent after the initial email.

Digital asset treasury companies tend to do well when crypto markets are rising. Some of their stock prices have traded above the value of the tokens they hold, giving the companies the chance to issue more shares and use those proceeds to buy more of the cryptocurrency.

World Liberty executives said that was the plan when they entered the ALT5 partnership.

By following that process, “ALT5 believes that it can grow the number of tokens per share in a highly accretive manner,” said World Liberty co-founder Zach Witkoff in a statement in the press release announcing his appointment as chairman of ALT5.

Witkoff is the son of Steve Witkoff, Donald Trump’s U.S. special envoy to the Middle East.

When ALT5’s stock trades below the value of its underlying tokens, Witkoff said it could also buy back shares “as a complementary lever to drive accretion.”

The WLFI token didn’t trade on major crypto exchanges at the time the deal was struck. ALT5 in August agreed to sell $1.5 billion in shares and use the proceeds to establish its WLFI treasury strategy. As part of the deal, World Liberty would receive ALT5 stock, and Witkoff would become chairman of ALT5’s board, while Eric Trump was initially slated to be a director. Later, ALT5 in a filing said Eric Trump had been appointed a board observer instead.

Since the announcement of the WLFI treasury strategy, ALT5 shareholders have been hit by bad news, some of which stemmed from events that took place before ALT5 struck the deal.

On Aug. 29, ALT5 in a filing said that its board had just been made aware that a Rwandan court in May found one of its subsidiaries and a former executive criminally liable for offenses including illicit enrichment and money laundering. The subsidiary and former executive were appealing the decision and maintained that the subsidiary itself was “the victim of fraud,” ALT5’s filing said.

The company said the board wasn’t aware of the judgment at the time of the World Liberty deal and formed an independent committee to recommend actions.

“The matters under review include, but are not limited to, potential misstatements or omissions in the financial statements of the Company and omissions of material information by certain members of management and personnel of the Company,” ALT5 said in the disclosure.

In mid-October, ALT5 said it had suspended CEO Peter Tassiopoulos with pay. Forbes last week reported that he had been put on leave weeks before in September. Tassiopoulos, who is still employed by ALT5, isn’t the executive involved in the Rwandan case. Tassiopoulos didn’t respond to requests for comment.

In the middle of November, ALT5 in a filing said it wouldn’t be able to file on time its earnings report for the third quarter, citing the issues it had disclosed in August.

ALT5’s fortunes haven’t been helped by a sharp decline in the overall crypto market. Bitcoin hit an all time of about $126,000 in early October and since then has dropped about 30%. WLFI tokens started trading on major crypto exchanges in September and since that time have dropped about 34%, according to CoinGecko.

Like some other digital asset treasury companies, ALT5 now trades below the value of the tokens it holds. As of Monday afternoon, the company had a market value of about $191 million. Its WLFI tokens at Monday’s price of about $0.15 would be worth about $1.1 billion.

Write to Joe Light at joe.light@barrons.com