World Liberty Financial, a crypto project backed by members of the Trump family, said it plans to launch a foreign exchange and remittance platform aimed at lowering the cost of cross-border money transfers.

Speaking at the Consensus conference in Hong Kong, co-founder Zak Folkman detailed plans to utilise the project’s proprietary USD1 stablecoin to facilitate cross-border transfers through a platform dubbed World Swap, Reuters reported on Feb. 12.

Without disclosing an official date, he said the firm will launch the platform soon.

The platform aims to bypass traditional banking intermediaries, which Folkman claims “heavily tax” global money movement, by connecting users directly to debit cards and bank accounts with fees that are purportedly a fraction of the current industry standard.

Folkman said more than $7 trillion moves globally between currencies each year and argued that traditional financial intermediaries extract significant fees from those flows, positioning World Swap as a lower-cost alternative to incumbent providers.

World Liberty Financial is building the service as part of its broader push into decentralised finance using its USD1 stablecoin, which the firm launched last year.

Further, it closely follows the launch of World Liberty Markets, a lending platform designed to drive usage of its USD1 stablecoin.

Folkman said that the lending platform has recorded $320 million in lending activity and more than $200 million borrowed within four weeks of launch.

The launch of World Swap comes at a precarious time, as the project is currently embroiled in a high-profile controversy regarding a secret $500 million investment from United Arab Emirates entities.

Reports from early February 2026 indicate that Aryam Investment 1, a firm controlled by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the UAE’s national security advisor, purchased a 49% stake in the venture just days before President Trump’s second inauguration.

The deal, which allegedly steered $187 million directly to Trump family entities, has sparked intense debate over whether foreign capital is being used to gain leverage over US policy, particularly concerning semiconductor export licenses to the UAE-based AI firm G42.

The political fallout has been swift, with Representative Ro Khanna and the House Select Committee on the CCP launching formal investigations into the project. 

Lawmakers are scrutinising the timeline of the UAE investment alongside the Trump administration’s recent easing of restrictions on advanced AI chips for Emirati firms. 

Critics and ethics experts argue the arrangement may violate the Foreign Emoluments Clause of the Constitution, suggesting that the president’s personal financial interests are being “subordinated” to national security. 

The committee has demanded that WLFI’s leadership provide full capitalisation tables and internal communications by March 1, 2026.

President Trump directly addressed the controversy surrounding the secret $500 million investment from the United Arab Emirates. 

During a press conference at the White House, Trump denied any personal knowledge of the deal.

Despite the mounting legal and ethical pressure, the WLFI token has seen a sudden and aggressive price rally.

While the token spent much of 2025 in a slump, down over 50% from its initial highs, the announcement of the World Swap platform and the success of its lending arm, World Liberty Markets, triggered a fresh wave of speculative interest.

At press time, the token was up over 6% in the past 24 hours.

Market analysts suggest that the “institutionalisation” of the project through major UAE backing, despite the controversy, has ironically signalled to some investors that the platform is “too big to fail.”

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