Trump's White House Has One View of Crypto Legislation. His Family's Crypto Company ...

As the crypto industry’s most coveted piece of legislation stalls in Congress, the Donald Trump administration has pursued aggressive tactics to try and get the bill back on track—including by appearing to take shots at Coinbase, the industry giant that walked away from the bill last month.

In recent weeks, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has repeatedly denigrated crypto executives like Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong who say a crypto market structure bill should be rejected if its terms are non-ideal. Bessent has labeled such executives “nihilists” and "recalcitrant actors.” He’s even said they should leave America and “move to El Salvador.”

But when Armstrong attended a swanky crypto conference at Mar-a-Lago last week, the Trump family and its business partners had far kinder words for the Coinbase founder’s political tactics.

“We applaud you,” Zach Witkoff, CEO of the Trump family’s crypto company World Liberty Financial, told Armstrong at the event, speaking of the market structure bill.

During an on-stage interview at the World Liberty Forum about how Coinbase has navigated the bill process, Witkoff could hardly have been more supportive.

“We’re super aligned,” Witkoff told Armstrong.

Coinbase walked away from the crypto bill last month, largely due to evolving language in the legislation concerning stablecoin rewards. Stablecoins are crypto tokens typically pegged to the value of the U.S. dollar. Coinbase currently offers users yield, essentially interest payments and typically around 4%, on holdings of the popular stablecoin USDC, which the company co-created. Banks have pushed to outlaw such programs, citing concerns about how they could make traditional, low-yield bank accounts less attractive.

World Liberty has its own stablecoin, USD1, which is central to the company’s future ambitions. The firm recently rolled out an app, WLFI Markets, that allows users to earn rewards on their USD1 holdings, and also lend and borrow against those compounding funds. World Liberty just debuted a related platform that enables AI agents to zip around the internet, spending USD1 autonomously to complete tasks and make investments.

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The company also plans to soon release a consumer-facing, “Venmo”-like app that will allow users to swap their stablecoin holdings for various fiat currencies and send them abroad. Key to this intricate web of functionalities is the promise that a World Liberty user can continue to earn rewards on their USD1, even as they use the tokens to complete various tasks.