USD1: The Dollar Stablecoin From Trump-Linked World Liberty
Issued and held by BitGo, backed by dollars and T-bills
USD1 is a dollar stablecoin launched in March 2025 by World Liberty Financial (WLF) and backed by dollar deposits and short-term US Treasuries. With President Trump’s family among the company’s co-founders, it drew attention and controversy from day one.
1. Who issues it
World Liberty Financial is a crypto company launched in October 2024. President Donald Trump and his sons are presented as co-founders, and Zach Witkoff is among those running it. It first sold WLFI, a governance token used for voting that began trading on exchanges in September 2025, and launched USD1 in March 2025.
Issuance and reserve custody have been handled by the US custodian BitGo. In January 2026 the WLF side applied to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) for World Liberty Trust Company, a national trust bank to issue and redeem USD1 itself; it won preliminary conditional approval in August and would take over BitGo’s role once open.
2. How it holds one dollar
USD1 is fiat-backed: for every coin, dollar deposits, short-term Treasuries and cash equivalents are held in reserve, and an independent accounting firm publishes a monthly attestation comparing reserves with tokens outstanding. An attestation checks one point in time; it is not a full audit.
Minting and redeeming are done with the issuer by customers who pass identity checks (KYC); others trade USD1 on exchanges and decentralised exchanges, and bridges such as Chainlink’s CCIP move it between chains. The company says it is aligning with the GENIUS Act, the first US federal stablecoin law, signed in July 2025.
3. Where it is used
USD1 started on Ethereum and BNB Chain and spread to TRON, Solana and others. It became widely known within months when MGX, a state-backed Abu Dhabi investor, agreed to settle a $2 billion investment in Binance in USD1, a deal announced in May 2025.
On BNB Chain, lenders such as Lista DAO and Venus and decentralised exchanges took USD1 as collateral and a trading asset, and large exchanges including Binance listed pairs. On the Crypto Nation map, USD1 stands in BNB Chain City, the chain the map treats as its home.
4. Things to know
The biggest controversy is its closeness to politics. Because a sitting president’s family benefits from a company affected by stablecoin rules and charter decisions, US lawmakers and ethics experts have repeatedly raised conflict-of-interest concerns. The OCC treated much of this as outside the scope of its charter review.
Otherwise USD1 shares the risks of any fiat-backed stablecoin: reserve management, the issuer’s power to freeze addresses, reliance on banks and custodians, and coping with a rush of redemptions. Holders earn no interest; reserve income goes to the issuer. Watch how disclosure and supervision carry over as issuance moves from BitGo to the new trust bank.
Written from information public up to October 2026. It does not recommend or rate any coin and is not investment advice. If something is wrong, please tell us through the contact page.