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This is a segment from The Breakdown newsletter. To read more editions, subscribe “People who are smart love my licensing deals because you don’t have any risk [and] you make tremendous amounts of cash.”  — Donald Trump World Liberty Financial’s WLFI token became transferable for the first time on Monday, making the Trump family roughly $5 billion wealthier.  On paper, at least.  The 22.5 billion tokens that World Liberty granted to the Trump family’s DT Marks DEFI LLC are restricted, so they can’t be sold for the time being.  But the Trumps don’t need to: When World Liberty sells the WLFI tokens it created, 75% of the proceeds go to DT Marks DEFI LLC. This is…unusual.  WLFI is the governance token for World Liberty Financial, which makes it a kind of pseudo-equity in the DeFi project.  If so, the arrangement between World Liberty and the Trump family is not just unusual, but a historic first — as if Steve Jobs personally pocketed 75% of the proceeds when Apple sold shares to investors. In another sense, however, it’s only the scale of the profit-sharing that’s historic — because the arrangement between World Liberty and the Trump family is perhaps best understood as a licensing deal. WLFI tokens have no claim on revenue or assets, which makes them look less like equity in World Liberty and more like a product World Liberty sells. From that perspective, it looks like World Liberty is paying a 75% licensing fee to sell Trump-branded crypto tokens.  This has been the Trump family’s primary business strategy for some time now. Long gone are the days when private citizen Donald Trump was in the business of developing real estate projects himself, like the Grand Hyatt in 1978 and Trump Tower in 1983. After his Atlantic City casinos had failed…

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Filed under: News - @ September 2, 2025 10:30 pm