A shareholder from one of the world’s biggest digital asset companies has sued U.S. President Donald Trump for alleged crypto corruption.
The lawsuit, filed on Thursday by shareholder and former Circle employee J. Benjamin Greenberg, alleges that a member of the United Arab Emirates ruling family agreed to pay half a billion dollars into the Trump-backed World Liberty Financial business — in direct violation of the Constitution.
Circle is the fintech company behind the stablecoin, USDC. Regulators in the U.S. are fast pushing ahead with pro-crypto rules despite lawmakers last month blocking landmark digital asset legislation, which President Trump backed.
A number of lawmakers didn’t back the draft legislation — the Clarity Act — because they said that the Trump family had illicitly cashed in on crypto ventures.
“The corruption at issue is not subtle, and it is not hidden,” the lawsuit alleges. “Since returning to office, President Donald J. Trump and his family have built a cryptocurrency business and invited foreign states to route money to him by paying into it. Foreign money has answered.”
The lawsuit goes on to allege that an investment fund created by the government of Abu Dhabi also gave the president $2 billion via World Liberty Financial’s USD1 stablecoin product.
World Liberty Financial is a decentralized finance project co-founded by the president and his sons.
President Trump stopped being involved in the project after taking office in 2025.
Thursday’s lawsuit adds that the president allegedly gave the Emirati leadership access to advanced artificial intelligence chips and pardoned a convicted felon in turn for the crypto investment. It references a February Wall Street Journal article that reported the deal.
“Although the President has dressed his corrupt arrangements in the language of new technology — tokens and stablecoins, holding companies and reserve yields — that vocabulary must not obscure what this is: the oldest form of public corruption, a public official taking money from a foreign power,” the lawsuit further says.
It alleges that the president has “corruptly” profited from $2 billion via the deals.
President Trump, World Liberty, and U.S. Middle East Special Envoy Steve Witkoff are named as the defendants in the lawsuit.
The president campaigned on a ticket to help the crypto industry and received major financial backing from the space but some Washington lawmakers have criticized the way the Trump family has profited from digital asset ventures.
Trump and the White House have always denied any conflicts of interest. The president in August, ahead of the crypto Clarity Act vote, said that Democrats criticizing his family crypto ventures had made money from stock trading.
