May 14, 2026
“The SEC must be willing to enforce the law even when potential wrongdoers include those with powerful political connections.”
“As Congress considers crypto market structure legislation, it is critical that it both protects investors and shuts down the President and his family from profiting off of cryptocurrency while in office.”
Washington, D.C. – U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Ranking Member of the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee, sent a letter to Paul Atkins, Chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), urging the agency to investigate whether the Trump family’s cryptocurrency company, World Liberty Financial, Inc. (WLF), misled investors or otherwise violated securities laws in connection with its recent decision to borrow $75 million using its own tokens as collateral.
“The SEC must be willing to enforce the law even when potential wrongdoers include those with powerful political connections. As Congress considers crypto market structure legislation, it is critical that it both protects investors and shuts down the President and his family from profiting off of cryptocurrency while in office,” wrote the Senator.
In early April, WLF borrowed $75 million using roughly $440 million of its own WLFI tokens as collateral — tokens that investors have explicitly been prohibited from selling. WLF reportedly conducted the transaction through Dolomite, a decentralized lending protocol co-founded by Corey Caplan, WLF’s own advisor and Chief Technology Officer. In the transaction, WLF “dumped 5 billion WLFI tokens into Dolomite as collateral and pulled out $65.4 million in its own USD1 stablecoin plus $10.3 million in USDC.” The announcement caused WLFI’s price to fall 10% to a record low, and the transaction was so large that depositors who had parked stablecoins on Dolomite to earn yield could not pull their money out.
Just days after the Dolomite transaction, WLF announced a proposed token unlock schedule — under which no investors would be able to sell their holdings for at least two years — that left many investors “blindsided.” Ranking Member Warren noted the vote on the proposed schedule left investors in a bind: accept terms they found unacceptable, or reject the schedule and remain “locked indefinitely under prior terms, effectively removing any clear path to liquidity.”
“WLF’s activities appear to have benefited the Trump family at the expense of investors, who have found themselves facing unanticipated challenges with accessing their tokens. Early investors remain locked out of 80% of their token holdings, unable to sell into a market that has already moved sharply against them,” the Senator wrote. “Securities antifraud protections for investors apply to all securities transactions — regardless of technological form or whether the company is connected to the President and his family.”
Senator Warren is requesting answers from the SEC by May 26, 2026.
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