特朗普家族通过加密交易获利5亿美元，投资者亏损

For the last several months, I've been following the strange story of a company called ALT5 Sigma. About ten months ago, in August of 2025, Don Jr and Eric Trump showed up at the Nasdaq Stock Exchange to celebrate a crypto deal that they had just done on behalf of a company called World Liberty Financial, which is an organization that the Trumps co-founded that issues crypto tokens. A company called ALT5 Sigma, stock basically no one had ever heard of, raised $750 million from investors.

These were big hedge funds. Among them are big, well-known US hedge funds like Point72, which is owned by Mets owner Steve Cohen. They collected $750 million in total stock sales. And then they turned to the Trump family related company, World Liberty, and bought $750 million worth of crypto tokens. The crypto that we're talking about here is a token called WLFI. Most people use these crypto tokens as just a way of speculating on the value of something that they're interested in.

In this case, a little bit of essentially the Trump family's business empire. As part of this deal, World Liberty compensates the Trump family. It says in its disclosures that 75% of token sales go directly to an entity that's owned by members of the Trump family. So what this means is that the Trump family earns about $500 million as a result of this complicated transaction that sees this stock, ALT5 sigma get a bunch of World Liberty crypto on its balance sheet.

So this company is an example of something new in crypto land called a digital asset treasury. What that means is that these companies become a treasury or just a holder, a vault of a bunch of crypto assets. And the reason they do that is that sometimes it's just kind of complicated for people to buy and hold crypto assets. You have to deal with wallets and custody. And some people just don't want to do it. A lot more people are comfortable buying and selling stocks.

So lately, companies have started setting up these sort of financial wrappers in the stock market for crypto assets. Since the Trump brothers went to the Nasdaq in August, the company ALT5 Sigma has been through a lot. First of all, they've had to change their name. They're now AI Financial Corporation. They've been through a series of CEOs. They're on their third CEO. They've been through multiple auditors. They're now on their third auditor.

They announced that someone who worked for their Canadian subsidiary was convicted in Rwanda for offenses, including money laundering. That is under appeal. This crypto has lost a ton of value. And so the company's stock price has fallen quite a bit, too. That's a problem. If the company can't get its share price above $1 for 30 consecutive days, then it may get delisted from the Nasdaq. I spoke to public interest attorneys for this story, who had urged the Securities and Exchange Commission to investigate this company.

They think that there were a number of problems in the way that it disclosed some of its issues to its shareholders that suggest that shareholders might not have had enough information to make informed decisions about buying and selling this company. I asked the White House about this story. They said that the president's sons, Don and Eric, manage the president's money through the Trump Organization, and that there are no conflicts of interest.

ALT5 Sigma declined to comment for this story. They said they didn't want to participate in speculation. World Liberty also declined to comment. A spokeswoman for the Trump Organization told me that neither Eric nor Don Jr has any involvement or any visibility into ALT5. The ALT5 story is a pretty strange saga. It took a really obscure crypto company, sent its stock up and then sent it way, way, way down. If there's a lesson in here, it's that it's a lot harder to get a piece of the Trump family's success than investors might have thought.

That was really the promise of this deal that people in the stock market could buy into part of this growing new Trump business empire under the president's Second presidency. And that has really just not worked out for any of the investors who stuck around in this company.