A strange legend of a dark UAE company’s $100 million investment in world free finance, Trump’s unanimous cryptocurrency merchant
Justin Sun, head of Tron Crypto Exchange (L), held in Dubai with World Freedom Finance co-founder Zach Vikov (C) and Trump’s Eric Trump
(Giuseppe Cacace/AFP via Getty Images)
On June 26, a Dubai-based company called Aqua 1 Foundation announced a $100 million investment in world free finance, a cryptocurrency company that is closely linked to the families of President Donald Trump and the Trump administration’s Middle East Diplomacy. As typical of such transactions, Aqua 1 is buying $100 million worth of WLFI, a crypto token created by World Free Finance. Trump earned 75% of his revenue from token sales under the terms of the deal between Trump and the world’s free finance, meaning the president may now have $75 million. The Aqua 1 Foundation (which was completely unknown at the time before the June 26 press release), became one of Trump’s biggest benefactors in cryptocurrency business, surpassing Tron’s founder Justin Sun, who put $75 million into WLFI $WLFI and about $19 million into Trump $. (Short after this purchase, the SEC announced that it was suspending its multibillion-dollar fraud cases.)
The $100 million Aqua 1 Foundation deal is more than just a bigger scale: there is little evidence that the Aqua 1 Foundation exists at all. The Aqua 1 website was registered on May 28, 2025 and contains any information about the company except for certain fintech buzzwords and email addresses. The company’s original X account was suspended, the account of an obvious company called BlockRock RWA (“RWA” refers to the practice of creating blockchain tokens for “real world assets”). Searching public databases, including businesses in the United Arab Emirates, I cannot find any company registration, official documents or other documents that prove the existence of the world’s latest and largest investors.
The only publicly identified person associated with the Aqua 1 Foundation is a man named Dave Lee, who claims to have co-founded the company with. On Lee’s X account, who registered and owned avatar in December 2023, he posted only a few times, and all the messages appeared after June 27, 2025. This is where the trail ends. I have never found other social media or professional profiles related to Dave Lee because he is the leader of a Middle Eastern cryptocurrency fund that runs its first family business.
Dave Lee did not respond to a few X messages asking for comment. The Aqua 1 Foundation did not respond to an email sent to the addresses listed on its website. David Wachsman, CEO of a communications company that works with World Free Finance, admitted to receiving a series of questions about Ablaqua 1’s company registration, funding and personnel, but did not provide answers before publication.
In the crypto industry media, the Aqua 1 Foundation investment is properly reported to be another lucrative agreement for the leading crypto entrepreneur in the United States. Some blockchain observers point out that the official crypto wallet of World Free Finance sent $800 million worth of WLFI tokens to the wallet in three separate transactions in early June. Aqua1.Eth wallet has sent another $80 million worth of USDT to Tether Stablecoin, which is fixed in USD.
The Aqua 1 Foundation appears to have obtained USDT from a wallet on Bybit, an exchange that North Korean hackers recently plundered for $1.5 billion, and a wallet on OKX, a large cryptocurrency exchange earlier this year that pleaded guilty to violating US Anti Anti-Money Lande Launding laws and agreed to pay a $504 million fine.
Current Problem
It is not clear at this time the real currency that the deal powers the deal. Cryptocurrencies allow for a certain degree of discretion and pseudonym (even if not total privacy) in financial transactions. Someone can start a website and press releases and send $80 million worth of cryptocurrency to colleagues of the U.S. president without leaving the couch. The Aqua 1 Foundation may be a real emirate company, but it may also be a front for any number of foreign financial or political interests to seek Trump’s favor.
As I reported nationPresident Trump has entered the depths of the stinky waters of the cryptocurrency industry, working with entrepreneurs and companies that have previously been under federal criminal and regulatory investigations. Andrei Grachev, the head of DWF laboratory, invested $25 million in World Liberty Financial, and he pleaded guilty in the Russian criminal court. Tron executive Justin Sun recently bounced between the Caribbean and Asia on his passport on St. Kitts, and his SEC troubles have recently disappeared. (He exposed the scheduled space flight on one of Jeff Bezos’ blue original rockets in 2021, which brought him back $28 million, citing “arranged conflicts”; he is now discussing catching up with future blue original flights.)
Although Trump has made hundreds of millions of dollars from lending his name to the crypto program, he will do more work, especially if his dollar fixed stablecoin (called USD1) takes off. In the last day, USD1 is the third Stablecoin traded in the cryptocurrency market, with a volume of $3.37 billion. Congress is about to pass legislation that will help further legalize Stablecoins and give them better access to U.S. banks and markets. In the new, regulated cryptocurrency scenario, Trump and his colleagues can make billions of dollars.
With USD1, Trump has some strong industry partners to support tokens, including DWF Labs, Sun’s Tron Network, Tron Network, a wealthy Hong Kong family office, a “decentralized hedge fund” called RE7 Labs, and Binance, Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange. Binance co-founder Changpeng Zhao (CZ) said he is seeking Trump’s pardon after serving four months in federal prison, as part of a plea agreement for Binance’s violation of anti-fine laws. Emirati Investment Fund MGX recently completed a $2 billion Binance investment using World Liberty Financial’s USD1 Stablecoin.
“We believed it from the very beginning.” Dave Lee, co-founder of the Aqua 1 Foundation, quoted the company’s passion for USD1 in one of his few public posts. Lee wrote in another post: “We @aqua1fund behind the scenes @worldlibertyfi has been established for some time – this $100 million move is just the beginning of public.”
If the Aqua 1 Foundation has been working with the world’s free finance since its launch in September 2024, there is little evidence for the relationship in the public record. Trump did travel to the UAE in May 2025, where he announced that “commercial deals between the United States and the United Arab Emirates exceed $200 billion.” Two weeks later, someone started signing up for the Aqua 1 Foundation’s website and social media accounts.
The president’s latest crypto helper benefactors, whoever they are, will make a huge profit from a $100 million investment. So far, the $WLFI token is just a “governance token”, granting its holders the right to vote on the proposed changes to the World Free Financial Platform. But the token itself is non-transferable, which means that anyone who buys it puts money into tokens that cannot be sold or relocated. That’s going to change. World Liberty Financial recently voted to “unlock” $wlfi tokens so that they are moved between wallets, a change that has won wealthy support from $WLFI holders. Soon, $wlfi will be traded in the public market, and its early supporters will be able to cash out, ensuring that the most blatantly corrupt president in U.S. history will be lined up in his pocket again.
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