SINGAPORE: World Liberty Financial, a crypto venture backed by the family of US President Donald Trump, plans to launch a debit card as early as this year, CEO Zach Witkoff told a crypto conference today.
“We are definitely rolling out a debit card that’ll bridge … crypto assets with everyday spending … we’ll be rolling out a pilot programme here in the next quarter, and that debit card will either be live (in) Q4 or Q1 26,” he said.
Witkoff was speaking on a panel at the TOKEN2049 crypto conference in Singapore alongside World Liberty co-founder Donald Trump Jr.
Speaking to a full audience, Witkoff and Trump reiterated their bullish stance on cryptocurrencies and spoke at length about the progress the industry has made under the Trump administration.
Their comments were at times met with cheers from the floor.
Launched last fall, World Liberty’s goal is to allow people to access financial services using cryptocurrencies – without intermediaries like banks – in what is called decentralised finance, or DeFi.
In September, it launched a digital token, known as $WLFI, which allowed holders the right to vote on some changes to the business.
The token last traded 0.5% higher at US$0.2011, according to data from CoinGecko.
In response to a question about tokenisation, Witkoff said the company is “working on it”.
“Whether it comes to tokenising some of these asset classes like real estate, oil and gas, etc., we’re looking at actively tokenising that ourselves,” he said.
“But we also want USD1 to be the base pair for these assets, because we view it as the most trustworthy and the most transparent and the most cultured stablecoin on Earth,” Witkoff said, referring to World Liberty’s dollar-pegged stablecoin.
‘Not a political organisation’
Critics have said that the Trump family is profiting from crypto as the president eases regulations and enforcement on the industry.
Today, Donald Trump Jr said it was “100% true” World Liberty is not a political organisation.
Since the company’s launch, the Trump family has made around US$500 million from the project, according to Reuters calculations based on the company’s terms and conditions, transactions traced by crypto analysis firms and publicly disclosed deals.
The US president’s name was invoked a number of times during Wednesday’s panel discussion.
“My father was the first guy to run as sort of a pro-crypto president,” Donald Trump Jr. said.
Witkoff said “nobody really believed in us in the beginning”.
He said that last year, during a panel discussion at TOKEN2049 that featured blockchain platform Aptos, “the old leadership … sat up here and they called us a joke, they called us a memecoin”.
“They said we would never amount to anything,” he said, before saying World Liberty met with the new leadership of Aptos and they “will be bringing USD1 to Aptos”.
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