By Tom Wilson, Lawrence Delevingne and David Gauthier-Villars
(Reuters) -Of all the riddles wrapped in the digital wallets sending funds to President Donald Trump’s World Liberty Financial crypto business, a little-known entity last month became the biggest.
A venture calling itself Aqua 1 Foundation and saying it is based in the United Arab Emirates announced in late June it had bought $100 million worth of World Liberty’s crypto tokens, becoming the largest publicly known investor in the business. Yet a review by Reuters of corporate registries, Aqua 1’s digital profile and other public information reveal almost nothing about the source of its capital or the person it named as its founding partner, Dave Lee.
Reuters could not find a way of contacting Lee directly. An Aqua 1 press release, which was published on Reuters.com as sponsored content, listed an email for a person named Dora Lee as a media contact. In response to a Reuters request, the company last month provided an unsigned statement, saying: “At this stage, we are not disclosing additional information beyond what has been publicly shared.”
It added: “Aqua 1 is backed by a group of long-term, mission-aligned partners and led by Dave Lee and a global team with deep expertise in web3 and digital asset infrastructure.” Aqua 1 did not respond to a detailed set of questions for this story.
The Trump family receives three-quarters of all token proceeds from World Liberty, meaning the purchase by Aqua 1 will have injected tens of millions of dollars into their personal coffers.
The Trumps have now earned around $500 million from World Liberty since the crypto platform was launched last fall, Reuters calculations show.
White House deputy press secretary Anna Kelly told Reuters that while pursuing a pro-crypto agenda, the president has taken steps to insulate himself from his family’s gains.
“President Trump is dedicated to making America the crypto capital of the world and revolutionizing our digital financial technology,” Kelly said in an emailed statement. “His assets are in a trust managed by his children, and there are no conflicts of interest.”
World Liberty and the Trump Organization did not respond to requests for comment.
The identities of nearly all of the million-dollar buyers of the World Liberty tokens, which go by $WLFI, are hidden behind anonymous digital wallets.
The personal and business backgrounds of several of the top buyers of the tokens, however, are widely known, including those of China-born investor Justin Sun, who with a $75 million investment was the previous biggest publicly known buyer, and Dubai-based market maker DWF Labs, whose managing partner is Andrei Grachev, a crypto entrepreneur from Russia.
Representatives for DWF Labs, which in April announced the purchase of $25 million in World Liberty tokens, said the firm does not know Aqua 1 or Lee.
Abu Dhabi’s state-affiliated investment fund MGX, which chose World Liberty’s crypto stablecoin for its $2 billion investment in the Binance exchange, did not respond to a request for comment on Aqua 1, nor did Sun’s company Tron.
Aqua 1 had said in its June 26 announcement that World Liberty would also support its launch of a separate fund aimed at boosting the Middle East’s “digital economy transformation.” Aqua 1 said it would list the new fund in the Abu Dhabi Global Market financial centre. A day later, World Liberty said on social media that it was “excited to continue to build the next generation of DeFi” with Aqua 1 and Dave Lee.
Contacted by Reuters, the Abu Dhabi financial centre said by email: “Aqua 1 is not registered, licensed, or affiliated” with it “in any capacity.”
World Liberty and Trump’s other crypto businesses are facing growing criticism from his U.S. political rivals and ethics experts over their potential for influence peddling. The potential for conflicts of interest that has accompanied Trump’s crypto ventures as his administration shapes regulations on the sector have also drawn criticism.
In March, UAE officials committed to a 10-year, $1.4 trillion investment plan in the United States after meeting with Trump.
Richard Painter, a professor at University of Minnesota’s law school and former chief ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush said the lack of transparency on investors in the Trump family’s crypto business, such as Aqua 1, undermined public confidence in the government. Without more information, Painter said, “everybody assumes the worst” in terms of foreign actors trying to influence the White House.
“We ought to know who is sending money to the president,” he said.
MINIMAL PROFILE
Aqua 1 describes itself on its website as a “Web3-native fund based in UAE with a global outlook.” Such funds invest in blockchain and crypto firms making products for a futuristic idea of a decentralized internet.
Crypto funds seeking to register in the UAE typically choose Abu Dhabi Global Market, the Dubai International Finance Centre or the UAE’s Securities and Commodities Authority, said Zainab Kamran, a lawyer at NeosLegal who specializes in digital assets.
Registration typically takes between six and 12 months for crypto funds, with funds gravitating towards Abu Dhabi because of its well-developed crypto framework and focus on institutional finance, she said.
“The bar is very high,” in the UAE, Kamran said.
Reuters could not confirm under which authority, if any, Aqua 1 had registered.
A spokeswoman for the regulator of the Dubai International Finance Centre directed Reuters to its public register. The news agency could not identify any entity by the name of Aqua 1 or Aqua 1 Foundation, or anyone by the name of Dave Lee.
That was also the case at the register of Dubai’s crypto regulator, VARA, a spokesman for which said it “has not engaged with Aqua 1 or Mr. Dave Lee.”
Aqua 1 or Aqua 1 Foundation do not appear in the register of UAE Securities and Commodities Authority-licensed companies, either. The authority did not respond to a request for comment.
Aqua 1’s website was created in May, a month before it announced its investment, according to two web domain trackers, with the names of its registrants redacted. The website contains no information on Aqua 1’s leadership or financial backers.
Scant public information exists about Lee.
An X account in his name, registered in 2023, has made only a handful of posts, starting with an announcement of the World Liberty deal. The account calls Lee an “investor and dreamer,” with a profile picture that features a manga-style portrait of a young man in a bow tie, along with Brazilian, Chinese and U.S. flags. It cites as his locations Sao Paulo, New York, Hong Kong and Abu Dhabi.
Aqua 1’s prior crypto trades suggest a thin investment record.
Data from crypto tracker Arkham shows the only large outgoing trades from a wallet tagged “aqua1.eth” were two transfers totaling $80 million to World Liberty in early June. It had also made transfers of $9 million in March and $3 million in April, both to anonymous crypto wallets. Between March and June, it received about $90 million from an account at the OKX crypto exchange.
Aqua 1’s assets under management total $100 million, according to a profile on the Medium social publishing platform, suggesting that the World Liberty deal is its only current investment.
(Reporting by Tom Wilson, Lawrence Delevingne and David Gauthier-VillarsAdditional reporting by Federico Maccioni in DubaiEditing by Tom Lasseter and Michael Learmonth)
Comments