Note: Transcripts may contain errors. If you wish to re-use all, or part of, a transcript, please contact CBC for permission. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print. Copyright © CBC 2025

Front Burner Transcript for July 18, 2025

Host: Jayme Poisson

JAYME POISSON: Hey everyone, I'm Jayme Poisson.

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

DONALD TRUMP: Many have called me the first crypto president. That's an honour. I really do consider that a very big honour, actually.

JP: So Donald Trump promised that he would make America the crypto capital of the world. And this week he is pushing through a trio of bills that is seen as the most significant overhaul of U.S. crypto regulation to date. Trump is calling it "Crypto Week." As we've talked about on the show before, Trump is directly benefiting from crypto through a bunch of ventures, but mostly World Liberty Financial, which is run in part by his sons. The crypto industry poured over $100 million into his re-election campaign and another 18 million towards his inauguration. So today: how does Trump and the rest of the crypto industry stand to gain from the passage of these bills? Who is buying into World Liberty Financial and what do they want from the president? How much overlap is there between Trump's work as president and his personal business ventures? I'm talking with Jacob Silverman, the co-author of Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and The Golden Age of Fraud, and the host of The Naked Emperor, CBC Understood's four-part podcast series about the rise and fall of FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried. He's going to help me untangle this complex web of policy-making, money-making and influence.

[Music: Theme]

JP: Jacob, hey, thanks for coming on. It's always great to talk to you.

JACOB SILVERMAN: Glad to be here.

JP: So the last time that we spoke, it was about how Donald Trump's embrace of crypto and promise of more lenient regulations were fueling a crypto boom. We're seeing another boom now and multiple pieces of legislation being voted on this week. I want to talk about the GENIUS Act first. Trump told lawmakers in a Truth Social post to "Get it [to] my desk, ASAP -- no delays, no add-ons." And you and I are talking at 1:30, Thursday afternoon. There were some delays, but it is on its way to becoming the first major piece of crypto legislation passed by U.S. Congress. What does the GENIUS Act aim to do? What's its purpose?

JACOB SILVERMAN: The GENIUS Act is about legalizing and bringing the stablecoin industry on shore. The stablecoins are basically crypto tokens that are generally pegged to the U.S. dollar, meaning their value is supposed to stay at a dollar. Things can happen in terms of crypto markets or acts of fraud that make it so that those token prices collapse. But, uh, stablecoins have become a popular payment system within crypto. They're often referred to as the casino chips used at all the casinos. It helps people to not have to interact with their real bank accounts and they can just use stablecoins to move between crypto exchanges. And now they're seeing an opportunity to use stablecoins for other purposes -- for payments, for cross-border settlements. For also perhaps paying for things at big retailers in this country, if companies like Amazon or Microsoft or Facebook or wherever else decides to get into the stablecoin business. So, this bill is going to allow for that, which is that stablecoin companies will be able to operate more easily in the U.S., with access to mainstream financing, as long as they stick towards some basic rules about making sure that their tokens are backed by dollars or dollar-like instruments as they claim they are.

JP: Okay. And I know soon we're going to talk about how Trump actually has his own stablecoin. But before we do that, I want to talk about the second act, which I think is a broader bill than the GENIUS Act, and it has a lot of industry support. Crypto platform Coinbase launched a huge ad campaign ahead of the vote, from print ads to actually like handing out chocolate bars in D.C. And what is the point of this act? What is the industry hoping for out of this act?

JACOB SILVERMAN: There's always been sort of a quiet bureaucratic turf war between the regulatory agencies, in that a lot was unsettled whether the SEC would have -- which is the main securities regulator in the United States -- would have primary jurisdiction, or the CFTC, the Commodities Future Trading Commission, which had declared Bitcoin and Ethereum to be commodities. And the industry has long preferred to deal with the CFTC and their requirements. And this bill basically does that. It pushes more regulatory responsibility over crypto to the CFTC. And makes it so that the crypto industry doesn't really have to treat most of their tokens like securities, and makes it so there are not currently unregistered securities that are violating the law. So this is really a favourable outcome for the crypto industry. At the same time, the CFTC, it's smaller, it has a much smaller budget than the SEC. It's also starting to experience layoffs just this week. So it's a small agency that's getting smaller, but that's how the crypto industry likes it.

JP: Okay. And just quickly, there is a third measure that would prevent the Federal Reserve from issuing a central bank digital currency, and what's the significance of that?

JACOB SILVERMAN: In practice, not very much. I mean, this is kind of a right-wing bugaboo for a long time, which is that the government would issue a CBDC, a digital currency or a digital dollar that would then be used to control people or influence them by, say, the government could program it for its value to decline if you don't spend it right away if they want to boost economic activity in the short term. Or any other number of things. But it's really played into right-wing conspiracies about or libertarian conspiracies about government control and, you know, liberal authoritarian overreach. And right now, the U.S. government doesn't have any plans to do this. And there are many governments around the world who have looked into CBDCs or had kind of pilot projects, but this is not something that really exists in the way that the right sort of mythologizes it or fears it. But at the same time, this is a bill that will satisfy kind of-- It's red meat for the MAGA base, I would say.

JP: These trio of bills, I've seen them-- they are being referred to as the most significant overhaul of U.S. crypto regulation to date. I just wonder if you could synthesize for me, like, what is the big takeaway, the big message here when you look at them in their entirety?

JACOB SILVERMAN: Well, it really codifies what's been happening since the beginning of the Trump administration more informally. I mean, through executive orders and pardons and dropping of cases at the SEC and the DOJ and elsewhere, the government under Trump has given crypto industry pretty much everything that they wanted and really taken their foot off of the gas pedal with anything related to criminal enforcement or regulatory enforcement. And there are people who admitted to huge frauds and even did prison time who were then pardoned. Just because we are really entering an era where deregulation is in, where financial-- the enforcement of financial crime is seemingly going to be overlooked, and where people can apparently buy pardons. And now that's being, as I said, codified more in the form of the kind of permanent regulatory regime that the crypto industry wants. I think what's interesting here is that, you know, crypto itself has a lot of influence because it seems to have a lot of money to spend on political campaigns. But it's not a hugely economically productive industry. But at the same time, what I tell folks is that we're going to be forced to play by the crypto industry's rules. It wants greater legitimacy, access to mainstream banking, and the legalization of its activities that sometimes were considered illegal under the prior administration. And so this is the culmination of that in a lot of ways. And I think from here, it'll be pretty open for the crypto industry to do what they want.

[music]

JP: Can you talk to me a bit more about how crypto became so intertwined with MAGA, and also Trump, who wasn't a fan originally?

JACOB SILVERMAN: Well, Trump somewhat famously said that he thought crypto was a scam.

SOUNDCLIP

DONALD TRUMP: Bitcoin, it just seems like a scam. I don't like it because it's another currency competing against the dollar. Essentially, it's a currency competing against a dollar. I want the dollar to be the currency of the world. That's what I've always said.

JACOB SILVERMAN: But yeah, he had a total 180. Which seems to have happened like a lot of these decisions happen in politics, which is that donors and people around him kind of saw the light. And-- First of all, Trump's sons got very into crypto, and started to see, I think, that there were money-making opportunities there. Traditionally, crypto has been kind of right-wing libertarian, cypherpunk, like, against the state, but not-- certainly not wanting to be involved with the state. But there has been this transition in the last few years where that right-wing libertarian element has perhaps gone away and more of the MAGA Republican side has emerged. You have people like Senator Ted Cruz talking about how he owns a few Bitcoin mining machines.

SOUNDCLIP

TED CRUZ: I'm proud to stand with crypto, I'm proud to stand with Bitcoin, and I am the only member of the United States Senate who is, in fact, a Bitcoin miner. I've got three miners hashing in West Texas right now, and it is beautiful. And let me say to all of crypto and all of Bitcoin: Come to Texas! Texas is the oasis for Bitcoin!

[Audience cheers]

JACOB SILVERMAN: Cynthia Lummis becoming, uh, putting the laser eyes in her X avatar, and also, of course, Kirsten Gillibrand on the Democratic side, leading the GENIUS Act and the stablecoin legislation. But largely that sort of kinda right-wing countercultural element was turned into sort of the Republican anti-government line. And somehow being part of crypto or buying Bitcoin was reconstituted as, you know, giving a middle finger to the government in a way that appeals seemingly to the MAGA base. So while, you know, the element of independence, of, of anti-government liberty is kind of gone from crypto, there's still sort of this idea that you are opposed to the established order in some way.

JP: You mentioned the Trump family and how involved they are in all this. Trump himself, I believe, has made a hundred million bucks from his meme coin. But the biggest one is this company, World Liberty Financial. Which is run by Trump's sons, primarily Don Jr. and Eric, but also Zach Witkoff -- son of Steve Witkoff, Trump's very good friend and U.S. special envoy to the Middle East. And just tell me more about World Liberty Financial, what it does.

JACOB SILVERMAN: Sure. So Trump and his sons have all had titles there of one sort or another. The Witkoff sons and Steve Witkoff himself helped found it. It seems to be run day to day by at least one of the Witkoff sons and a guy named Zak Folkman. And this is where a lot of the deals surrounding Trump's crypto or... or another way of putting it is crypto deals where the revenue flows to Trump, it happens through World Liberty Financial. So they have this World Liberty Financial token that, um, they've done hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of deals with. And that-- 75% of the revenue seems to go to Trump. There are some other contractual elements involved. So, that's one problem here, is that we don't have exact numbers on any of this stuff. But we certainly know, you know, it's in the hundreds of millions if not higher, and the potential for kind of unregulated and unknown payments to the president is almost limitless. So, um, that's what I think is unprecedented here and what a lot of folks like me have been writing about and concerned about, which is that we've never really had any kind of industry tied in with the Oval Office in this way, much less one that occupies kind of such a place of political influence, but also at times operates outside the law.

[music]

JP: World Liberty Financial has been building all these connections, attracting investors from all over the world, but there's one relationship that's drawing a lot of criticism of conflict of interest, and that's the relationship that they have with Changpeng Zhao, or "CZ," the co-founder and former CEO of crypto trading platform Binance. And he pleaded guilty in November 2023 to violating federal money laundering charges.

SOUNDCLIP

REPORTER: As part of the plea agreement, Mr. Zhao, known as "CZ," will step down from his role as chief executive of Binance and will pay a $50 million fine. Binance will pay a $4.3 billion fine. The company will accept the appointment of a monitor. The company pled guilty to knowingly failing to prevent money laundering and sanctions violations on its side, and allowing criminal actors to use the exchange, named by Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen as including al-Qaeda, ISIS, and Hamas.

JP: And he has applied for a presidential pardon from Trump. I understand he's been very closely involved with World Liberty Financial, WLF, for some time. And like, what's going on there? How deep does this connection go?

JACOB SILVERMAN: It's very deep. There was recently a report in Bloomberg that Binance actually programmed the code for the USD1 stablecoin that World Liberty Financial released. So, they created it. And Binance so far seems to be the main platform for trading and using the USD1 coin. It was used in a $2 billion deal in which a UAE firm bought a stake in Binance. And at the same time, CZ has said publicly, "I have requested a pardon from Donald Trump." And this is, again, not, not to even touch the other things that the company Binance has done or the $4 billion it was fined under the Biden administration. But the conflicts of interest are right there and right out in the open.

JP: And the presidential pardon hasn't come yet for this money laundering case, but the Securities and Exchange Commission did drop their lawsuit against CZ, right? And Binance at the end of May. The SEC had accused him of lying to regulators about their businesses in the U.S. for mishandling customers' money.

JACOB SILVERMAN: Right.

JP: But there's another big WLF investor and associate that also got his SEC case dropped, right. What should we know about blockchain billionaire Justin Sun?

JACOB SILVERMAN: So Justin Sun is like CZ, a huge figure in the crypto industry, but also one who has had kind of rumors and legal accusations trailing him for a lot of his career. And Justin Sun is known for kind of hopping between jurisdictions. He's lived in-- on different Caribbean islands and in Hong Kong. And he was in San Francisco for a while before he left the United States for a while. He apparently has felt comfortable to come back to the U.S. And I saw him at the Bitcoin Conference in Las Vegas a couple months ago. But it was the first time he had been in the U.S. in a number of years. And his main company is Tron, but he is another key node here or another key participant in all this. He runs a number of crypto companies and exchanges, and he's been close at times with CZ from Binance. And he has bought about more than 100 million dollars' worth of the Trump meme coin, and I think at least 75 million dollars' worth of the World Liberty Financial coin. And he also attended the gala that was thrown for top Trump meme coin holders. His thing in some ways is just try to be as ubiquitous as possible in media. He does sort of a lot of stunts, a lot of announcements. He bought a piece of postmodern art that was a banana on a wall, then he ate it. He paid $6 million for it. You know, there's always kind of something going on with him. But at the same time, this is someone who had a major, major SEC case dropped against him. In these cases, including against CZ and Binance, like there were a lot of filings that you could look up online that already were there. And they were quite incriminating. Some of these filings have been used or these documents have been used in other cases. So, you know, the fact that these were dropped, it wasn't because the government didn't have a case there. It was because policy changed. And I think you have to ask: why did the policy change?

JP: And you mentioned that, that deal in the UAE, right? The firm controlled by Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund was investing $2 billion towards Binance using the World Liberty Financial stablecoin, right. Tell me more about what the reaction has been to that deal. I know that it happened just 12 days before Donald Trump and Steve Witkoff went on their Gulf States tour, where the president secured like significant energy and AI deals with the UAE.

JACOB SILVERMAN: Right. Yeah, this was a UAE-owned firm called MGX, which is-- seems to be pretty involved in crypto and AI, which are priorities for the UAE government in terms of investment. You know, I, I keep saying this all the time. These kinds of things would pretty much not be tolerated under any other U.S. administration, or at least would have provoked serious investigations. But we certainly live in another kind of legal and moral universe than we did a few years ago, it seems. Even something like that $2 billion purchase of tokens to invest in Binance -- that was kind of something that they didn't really need to do. But that-- you do that because you want to do a favour for Trump, to jumpstart this new token that he launched, and because it also is for some benefit to Binance. But, you know, they could have just wired Binance $2 billion US because they probably have that money, but instead they use real money to buy the stablecoin token that Trump had issued and then used that for their investment. So, there's a way in which all these deals seem to further tie these parties together, and tie parties, you know, business and political relationships and futures together.

[music]

JP: These deals, I feel like they're kind of flying under the radar in many ways. Probably because they're complex, but also because there's so much going on. You recently did a deep dive on a hundred-million-dollar investment that World Liberty Financial received at the end of June from a company kind of shrouded in secrecy called Aqua1. And what did you find out about them?

JACOB SILVERMAN: So in late June, World Liberty Financial and this previously unknown company called Aqua1 Foundation announced a hundred-million-dollar deal. Aqua1 Foundation issued a press release on Reuters's website that said, 'We are buying a hundred million dollars' worth of the World Liberty Financial token.' It had also the trappings of a normal kind of business announcement. And they said that 'We're really excited to be doing business with them.' There was only one person named in association with this company, someone named Dave Lee. And he had an X account where he'd only posted about 11 times, I think it was, by the time I started looking into him. And beyond that, there was really nothing to see about-- or to know about this company. Their website had been registered in late May; all of the social media accounts were new. There was pretty much no data trail. Couldn't find any evidence that they're registered in the UAE or any other country. And so some people, including me, started asking, what is this? Is this real? And so I first wrote an article in The Nation basically asking that question, is this company real? Listing all the things that we didn't know, all the basic information. I contacted World Liberty Financial. There is an email address for Aqua1 Foundation. I contacted them. I tried to contact or send messages to this Dave Lee character on X. And World Liberty got back to me to say they would get back to be with some answers. They acknowledged receiving my questions. But no one answered my questions. And so I published the initial piece, and then I started learning more and doing more reporting and, um, got a good tip. And I eventually was able to figure out who this Dave Lee is with a pretty good degree of certainty. And my guess, so far as I can tell, is that he is a Chinese-Brazilian guy who now works for a state energy firm in China, and is part of this other crypto firm that has been involved in some high-profile deals in Asia, but has also been accused of some bad behaviour. And it's called Web3Port. I know there are a lot of names flying around here. But my theory, at least, is that they were kind of rebranding and they chose to adopt this new name of Aqua1 Foundation. But we still don't know: where did they get a hundred million dollars to send to the president's crypto firm?

JP: Jacob, are there mechanisms to investigate what's going on here with the president and his firm and his office?

JACOB SILVERMAN: Yeah, that's a great question. Perhaps fewer than there were in the past, but. And Democrats are certainly in the minority in Congress, and they don't have all the powers they might if they were in the majority, but I think there are still things that people in government can do. There's ability to call hearings over some issues or issue subpoenas. And I also think that there needs to be more work from civil society. I mean, I'm amazed that there's... as far as I know, there doesn't seem to be anyone funding really deep research into Donald Trump's crypto companies, and the movement of crypto, especially, between his companies. I mean, I can certainly report on a lot of their activities, but I'm not an expert blockchain analyst or anything like that. But there certainly should be that going on. So I think what's happening here, and the fact that a lot of it is both in the open but also kind of shrouded in mystery, and there's a lack of good data about what's going on here or good reporting, is a real problem. It is symptomatic of kind of the decline of accountability mechanisms in our country.

JP: And just why do you think there's nobody kind of funding deep research into this or, you know, why are the Democrats not banging on about this more? I mean, certainly, I've heard people like Senator Warren and Chris Van Hollen talk about like how foreign governments can curry favour with Trump and that they could use World Liberty Financial or massive crypto transactions that would benefit him. But like, you don't hear a ton about it.

JACOB SILVERMAN: Right. And I'm amazed that we don't hear more. I mean, I've talked to Democrats. I've quoted some of them on the record. Like rep-- Sean Casten from Illinois told me in an article that I wrote a couple months ago that a lot of his colleagues are afraid. That they know there's a lot of money on the side of crypto, and that while they want to vote against the crypto industry's interest in some things and on behalf of consumer protection and against political corruption, they know that money is going to be put against them in their next race. And that is a huge factor. The other factor is that some Democrats like the crypto industry. Kirsten Gillibrand has been very proud of her work on the GENIUS Act. I would argue that the GENIUS Act directly blesses Trump's corruption because he is issuing a stablecoin and this bill is all about stablecoins. And I think that would be a politically easy thing for Democrats to talk about every day, to say Trump is getting hundreds of millions of dollars in payments from who knows what kind of people. He doesn't even have to consent to them. I mean, they could just be sent to the World Liberty wall address and then someone has put money in the president's pocket. And this is also in the direct interest, as you alluded to, of pretty much every head of state in the world. There's no reason for them not to buy some of Trump's tokens, because, again, it would immediately inflate the worth of what Trump has and give him some money and curry some influence in a way that he obviously responds to.

JP: Jacob, thanks so much for this. This was really interesting. Thank you.

JACOB SILVERMAN: Glad to do it.

[Music: Theme]

JP: All right, that is all for this week. Front Burner was produced by Matt Amha, Allie Jaynes, Joyita Sengupta, Mackenzie Cameron, Matt Meuse, Marco Luciano, and Lauren Donnelly. Our YouTube producer is Jon Lee. Music is by Joseph Shabason. Our senior producer is Elaine Chau. Our executive producer is Nick McCabe-Lokos, and I'm Jayme Poisson. Thanks so much for listening, and we'll talk to you next week.

For more Front Burner transcripts, please click here.

Trump's crypto bills: what does he stand to gain? - Transcript

Social Sharing