Last month, Paolo Ardoino, the chief executive of the cryptocurrency company Tether, joined business executives and U.S. lawmakers for a private lunch at the Willard, a luxury hotel near the White House.

For years, Tether had faced accusations that it lied about its finances and allowed crime to flourish on its platform. But at the Willard, Mr. Ardoino and other crypto leaders were warmly greeted by Senator Bill Hagerty, a Tennessee Republican on the Senate Banking Committee, who attended the lunch and participated in a group discussion about digital currency regulations and national security, according to four people with knowledge of the event.

The episode was a sign of the changing landscape for crypto firms as President Trump has embraced the industry. Once an elusive overseas operator with little public footprint in the United States, Tether is capitalizing on the shift to establish a presence in Washington.

Since Mr. Trump’s inauguration, Tether has pushed to reshape crypto regulations as it considers starting an operation in the United States. The company’s main product is a cryptocurrency known as a stablecoin, which is designed to maintain a price of $1. Tether is pushing Congress to influence a Senate bill, introduced this year by Mr. Hagerty, that outlines rules for stablecoins. And it has launched a public-relations campaign that featured ads in an insider Washington publication trumpeting its cooperation with U.S. law enforcement.

For years, Tether had been regarded with suspicion. Its stablecoin has proved to be a popular tool for criminals. In 2021, it paid $18.5 million to settle a fraud investigation by the New York attorney general.

But within days of taking office, Mr. Trump, who started a crypto business with his sons last year, ended a Biden administration crackdown on digital assets. Crypto companies that once avoided the country, fearful of regulatory sanctions, now enjoy astonishing access to Congress and the White House.

No crypto executive has illustrated the shift more than Mr. Ardoino, an Italian who had never visited the United States until this year. On his trip to Washington in March, he met with lawmakers, joined a forum hosted by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and mingled with fellow executives at a party sponsored by Coinbase, a crypto exchange.

In recent interviews and social media posts, Mr. Ardoino has cast himself as a simple foreigner enjoying a scenic tour of America, posting pictures of himself at the U.S. Capitol and the White House and recounting visits to the Central Park Zoo and the Museum of Natural History.

“I’m very naïve,” he said in an interview with The New York Times. “There should be a movie on an Italian in New York for the first time at 40 years old.”

Privately, Mr. Ardoino has boasted that Tether has powerful allies. The firm’s most prominent business partner is the investment bank Cantor Fitzgerald, which until this year was run by Howard Lutnick, now Mr. Trump’s commerce secretary. One of Tether’s main lobbyists is Jeff Miller, an influential figure in Republican politics who also represents Cantor Fitzgerald in discussions about the stablecoin bill.

On his recent trip, Mr. Ardoino said, he also met with Zach Witkoff, a leader of Mr. Trump’s crypto company, World Liberty Financial, and a son of the White House envoy to the Middle East. And Tether has turned for advice to Watchtower Strategy, a corporate public affairs firm whose founders include Mr. Miller and Kevin McCarthy, the former Republican speaker of the House.

“We met Kevin a few times,” Mr. Ardoino said. “We are in good relationship.” He did not meet with Mr. Lutnick because “we are respecting the line of not engaging with Howard while he is in the administration,” he added.

A representative for Mr. Lutnick did not respond to a request for comment.

In a statement, Mr. Miller called Tether “the ultimate American ally” and said he was “proud to represent them.” A spokesman for Mr. Hagerty said the senator attended the lunch in March “to speak about digital assets and the nexus of national security.”

Even in the wild world of crypto, Tether’s origin story stands out for its cast of characters. The company was founded 11 years ago by a former child actor, Brock Pierce. Mr. Pierce and a business partner later handed control of the firm to Giancarlo Devasini, an Italian who used to work as a plastic surgeon.

Now a crypto billionaire, Mr. Devasini lives in Switzerland and rarely speaks publicly. For much of the past decade, Mr. Ardoino, a former software developer who joined a Tether affiliate in 2014, has served as the company’s public face.

Tether’s product is designed to address a key shortcoming of traditional cryptocurrencies, which constantly swing in value, making them inconvenient to use for payments and other standard transactions. Because stablecoins maintain a price of $1, many crypto investors prefer using them for trades.

In many ways, Tether and other issuers operate like banks. A trader deposits $500 and receives 500 stablecoins; the issuer generates revenue by investing a portion of those deposits and keeping any returns for itself. But the system works only if the issuer has $1 in reserve for each coin it sends into circulation, allowing customers to redeem their holdings at any time.

For years, Tether’s critics pointed to evidence that the money it held in reserve would be insufficient to cover a surge of redemptions. When the New York attorney general’s office announced the 2021 settlement, it said Tether had lied about the composition of its reserves and called its cryptocurrency “a stablecoin without stability.”

“Tether’s reputation should concern everybody,” Representative Maxine Waters of California, the top Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, said in an interview.

Still, Tether has repeatedly weathered downturns. The company now publishes audits of its accounts, showing that roughly two-thirds of its reserves, or about $94 billion, are invested in U.S. Treasury bills.

Last year, Tether recorded profits of more than $13 billion, making it one of the world’s wealthiest crypto operations. In December, it invested $775 million in Rumble, a right-wing streaming platform that has worked closely with Trump Media & Technology Group, the president’s social media company. It also unveiled plans to build a headquarters called Tether Tower in El Salvador.

Tether’s most powerful U.S. ally is Mr. Lutnick. Cantor Fitzgerald holds billions of dollars of Tether’s U.S. Treasuries, giving the crypto firm a sheen of mainstream credibility. At a Bitcoin conference last summer, Mr. Lutnick told the crowd that he could personally confirm that Tether’s coins were fully backed.

“We found every penny,” he said at the event.

After Mr. Lutnick was confirmed as commerce secretary, he turned over control of Cantor Fitzgerald to his sons. Now Cantor Fitzgerald and Tether are working with Mr. Miller, the lobbyist, to shape stablecoin rules in Washington, according to lobbying disclosure forms. The Senate version of the stablecoin legislation, the GENIUS Act, lays out guidelines for U.S. issuers to ensure that the firms maintain proper reserves.

But the legislation, formally the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins Act, includes a clause that would allow foreign issuers to sell their coins without following the new rules as long as they complied with certain law enforcement requests. At a recent Banking Committee hearing, Democratic senators criticized that clause, calling it a “giant loophole” to help Tether.

“It seems that my Republican colleagues are worried about facing backlash from one of Donald Trump’s close friends and our nation’s commerce secretary,” Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, said at the hearing.

Ultimately, the Banking Committee voted to advance the bill to the full Senate.

In the interview, Mr. Ardoino said he was “very excited” to see the language in the GENIUS Act requiring cooperation with law enforcement, because his company already works closely with the U.S. authorities. Tether is considering opening a U.S. arm, he said, and offering a “domestic stablecoin” tailored to financial institutions.

Mr. Ardoino plans to return to the United States frequently. He called Washington “very clean,” though he had reservations about the food. And he said he relished the prospect of challenging U.S. crypto firms on their own turf.

“How fun that would be,” Mr. Ardoino said.

President Trump, whose administration has insisted it could not bring Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia back from El Salvador to the United States, said he does have the ability to help return the wrongly deported Maryland man, but is not willing to do so because he believes he is a gang member.

“You could get him back, there’s a phone on this desk,” said Terry Moran, an ABC News correspondent, noting a Supreme Court order to “facilitate” the release of Mr. Abrego Garcia.

“I could,” Mr. Trump replied.

Mr. Moran said Mr. Trump could call Mr. Bukele and get Mr. Abrego Garcia back immediately.

“And if he were the gentleman that you say he is, I would do that,” Mr. Trump said. “But he is not.” Mr. Trump added that government lawyers do not want to help bring Mr. Abrego Garcia back to the United States.

Mr. Trump’s comments not only undermined previous statements by his top aides, but were a blunt sign of his administration’s intention to double down and defy the courts. Before the interview with ABC News, the administration had dug in on its refusal to heed the Supreme Court order to help return Mr. Abrego Garcia, who is a Salvadoran migrant. Trump officials have said that because he was now in a Salvadoran prison, it was up the Salvadoran government to release him.

The Justice Department has argued that it can respond to the Supreme Court’s demand that the administration “facilitate” Mr. Abrego Garcia’s release by doing little more than letting him enter if he manages to present himself at a port of entry.

“That’s up to El Salvador, if they want to return him,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said during an Oval Office meeting between Mr. Trump and Mr. Bukele this month. “That’s not up to us.”

During that meeting, Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump’s deputy chief of staff and the architect of his immigration agenda, also argued that any question about releasing Mr. Abrego Garcia needed to be directed to Mr. Bukele rather than Mr. Trump.

“It’s very arrogant even for American media to suggest that we would tell El Salvador how to handle their own citizens as a starting point,” Mr. Miller said. “That is the president of El Salvador. Your questions about the court can only be directed to him.”

Mr. Bukele also refused to help bring Mr. Abrego Garcia back to the United States, arguing it would be akin to releasing a terrorist from prison.

But Mr. Trump appeared to acknowledge during his interview with ABC News that he did have the power to help bring Mr. Abrego Garcia back to the United States.

The White House did not respond to requests for comment on Tuesday night.

Mr. Trump also told ABC News his administration was right to send Mr. Abrego Garcia to a prison in El Salvador designed for terrorists, known as CECOT, despite various government officials previously saying in court that the deportation was an “administrative error.” Mr. Abrego Garcia, who entered the United States illegally in 2012, was arrested in March of 2019 while looking for work near a Home Depot.

In October 2019, an immigration judge ruled that Mr. Abrego Garcia could not be deported back to El Salvador because he faced a credible fear of persecution from the gang Barrio 18. The judge allowed him to stay in the United States under a status called “withholding of removal,” and he obtained a work permit.

But despite that order forbidding his deportation, the administration arrested him in March of this year, accused him of having ties to MS-13 and deported him to the prison in El Salvador.

“This is a MS-13 gang member,” Mr. Trump said during the interview.

Mr. Abrego Garcia has never been charged with or convicted of being a member of a gang. During his deportation proceedings, some evidence was introduced that he belonged to MS-13, and judges decided it was enough to keep him in custody while the matter was resolved. But other judges have expressed doubt about that evidence.

“The ‘evidence’ against Abrego Garcia consisted of nothing more than his Chicago Bulls hat and hoodie, and a vague, uncorroborated allegation from a confidential informant claiming he belonged to MS-13’s ‘Western’ clique in New York — a place he has never lived,” Judge Paula Xinis, who is overseeing the efforts to bring Mr. Abrego Garcia back to the United States, wrote in an order this month.

During the interview with ABC News, Mr. Trump also argued Mr. Abrego Garcia’s tattooed hands were evidence of his gang ties. Mr. Trump has accused him of being a member of MS-13, previously sharing a photograph of the tattoos, altered with the label MS-13 above the symbols.

The tattoos themselves appear to be real, but some gang experts have questioned whether they are truly MS-13 symbols.

The pitch from “ZMoney” arrived on the encrypted messaging app Signal just days before Donald J. Trump’s presidential inauguration.

“ZMoney” was Zachary Folkman, an entrepreneur who once ran a company called Date Hotter Girls and was now representing World Liberty Financial, the cryptocurrency firm that Mr. Trump and his sons had recently unveiled. Mr. Folkman was writing to a crypto startup in the Cayman Islands, offering a “partnership” in which the firms would buy each other’s digital coins, a deal that would bolster the startup’s public profile.

But there was a catch, The New York Times found. For the privilege of associating with the Trumps, the startup would have to make, in effect, a secret multimillion dollar payment to World Liberty.

“Everything we do gets a lot of exposure and credibility,” Mr. Folkman wrote, asserting that other business partners had committed between $10 million and $30 million to World Liberty.

The Cayman startup rejected the offer, as did several other firms that received a similar pitch from World Liberty, executives said. They considered the deal unethical, concluding that World Liberty was essentially selling an endorsement — and hiding the arrangement from the public.

World Liberty’s executives, who have maintained that they did nothing improper, were undeterred. They successfully pitched similar deals to other firms while also marketing their coin to buyers around the world, reaping more than $550 million in sales, with a large cut earmarked for the president’s family.

Mr. Trump’s return to the White House has opened lucrative new pathways for him to cash in on his power, whether through his social media company or new overseas real estate deals. But none of the Trump family’s other business endeavors pose conflicts of interest that compare to those that have emerged since the birth of World Liberty.

The firm, largely owned by a Trump family corporate entity, has erased centuries-old presidential norms, eviscerating the boundary between private enterprise and government policy in a manner without precedent in modern American history.

Mr. Trump is now not only a major crypto dealer; he is also the industry’s top policy maker. So far in his second term, Mr. Trump has leveraged his presidential powers in ways that have benefited the industry — and in some cases his own company — even though he had spent years deriding crypto as a haven for drug dealers and scammers.

He has filled his administration with sympathizers to the crypto cause, including by appointing a former adviser to industry players as chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. In addition, the Justice Department recently disbanded a crypto crimes task force, continuing a broader unwinding of Biden-era scrutiny of the industry.

A Times examination of World Liberty’s rapid ascent from fledgling startup to international force — and Mr. Trump’s conversion from crypto skeptic to industry cheerleader — highlights the range of conflicts of interest trailing the company:

• World Liberty has directly benefited from Mr. Trump’s official actions, such as his announcement of a federal crypto stockpile that would include a digital currency the firm has invested in. The president’s announcement caused a temporary jump in the value of World Liberty’s holdings.

• World Liberty has sold its cryptocurrency to investors abroad, including in Israel and Hong Kong, according to interviews and data obtained by The Times, establishing a new avenue for foreign businesses to try to curry favor with Mr. Trump.

• Several investors in World Liberty’s coin managed firms that the federal government accused of wrongdoing. They include an executive whose fraud case was suspended after he invested millions of dollars in World Liberty. Other investors and business partners, some of whom haven’t been publicly identified before, are looking to expand in ways that will require the Trump administration’s approval.

• World Liberty proposed swapping cryptocurrencies with at least five start-ups, and often used the Trump name to solicit steep payments as part of the deals. Even in an industry with a disreputable history, the deals raised alarm among veteran executives.

“It’s a black spot on our industry,” said Andre Cronje, a founder of SonicLabs, a crypto firm that turned down World Liberty’s pitch. Anyone who accepted would “obviously think they’re going to make money because it’s the officially endorsed Trump project.”

A spokesman for World Liberty, David Wachsman, disputed that any of the company’s deals constituted a “one-sided payment for services rendered.” But he acknowledged that the company has engaged in “mutual investment deals,” and said that its deal-making had resulted in “thoughtful, strategic exchanges between parties who stand to mutually benefit.”

Mr. Wachsman also said it would be “false, absurd and dangerous to suggest that investments or partnerships with World Liberty Financial were conducted as some sort of political quid pro quo.”

“Never has an investor or partner requested any political favoritism,” he said. “Nor would we ever entertain such a possibility.”

Still, the company’s deal-making benefits the president’s family. A Trump business entity owns 60 percent of World Liberty, according to the company’s website, and is entitled to 75 percent of certain revenue from coin sales, which could be converted into cash.

“It’s one of the more successful things we’ve ever done,” Eric Trump, the president’s son who runs the family business, said in an interview this month at the Trump Doral golf course in Florida.

He and his older brother, Donald Trump Jr., are actively involved in World Liberty, though they rely on three partners to oversee the daily operations. Two of them, Mr. Folkman and Chase Herro, have a mixed track record in crypto. The other is Zach Witkoff, the son of Mr. Trump’s envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, who is also a World Liberty founder.

In recent days, Zach Witkoff, Mr. Folkman and Mr. Herro were in Pakistan meeting with the country’s prime minister, Muhammad Shehbaz Sharif, and other top government officials to discuss World Liberty. The trip, complete with limousines, a dance performance and police escorts, seamlessly blended the president’s business interests with the trappings of a state visit. (Mr. Wachsman said no U.S. government officials were involved in the meetings.)

President Trump has noted that conflict of interest laws do not apply to him, and that he has broad immunity for official actions he takes as president.

In a statement, a spokeswoman for President Trump noted that his “assets are in a trust managed by his children,” and that as a result, “there are no conflicts of interest.” (The trust still benefits President Trump directly.)

World Liberty’s supporters are unbothered by questions about conflicts.

“Trump wants to make a lot of money in crypto,” Konstantin Kuznetsov, a Russian citizen living in Miami whose Gibraltar-based firm bought $1 million of World Liberty’s coins, said in an interview. “We can join in this wave.”

Chief Crypto Advocate

As a businessman who made his name in the tactile world of real estate, Donald Trump never aspired to build a digital coin empire.

Indeed, at the end of his first term, Mr. Trump turned to social media to express disdain for cryptocurrencies.

They “are not money,” he warned. Their “value is highly volatile and based on thin air.”

By last year, his views had begun to shift.

His older sons had become enthusiastic crypto proponents after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol effectively exiled the family business from the mainstream financial system.

“We built and sold and held real estate forever. And for a long period of time, I had access to everyone in the world,” Donald Trump Jr. explained in a live video appearance at a crypto conference in Washington last month. “All of a sudden that became really difficult. And I sort of realized very quickly just how much discrimination there is in the ordinary financial markets.”

The change of heart also coincided with an influx of millions of dollars in campaign contributions from the crypto industry into the Trump re-election effort. Under the Biden administration, the industry had faced nearly 100 enforcement actions by the S.E.C., and crypto executives wanted a leader to champion their interests in Washington.

During his campaign stumps, Mr. Trump’s qualms about crypto appeared to vanish. At a Bitcoin conference in July, he vowed to turn the United States into the “crypto capital of the planet.”

Bitcoin

Bitcoin is the original cryptocurrency and still the most valuable by far. At current prices, one Bitcoin is worth about $94,000.

Two months later, Mr. Trump completed his conversion, announcing that he and his sons would enter the crypto marketplace with a new venture called World Liberty Financial.

Mr. Trump delivered the news in a livestream at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, where he had gathered with Eric and Donald Jr., along with Mr. Herro and Mr. Folkman.

“Crypto is one of those things we have to do,” Mr. Trump said. “Whether we like it or not, I have to do it.”

Mr. Herro and Mr. Folkman were unusual choices to partner with a president.

Mr. Folkman, who has short curly hair and tattoos, ran a company in his 20s tutoring forlorn men on how to pick up women. In numerous podcast appearances, Mr. Herro has recounted his life’s redemption arc, describing a wild youth in which he was charged with marijuana possession and spent a couple of weeks in a Wisconsin jail.

The two men had worked together for years, selling everything from colon cleanses to get-rich-quick advice, before pivoting to crypto with uneven results.

In 2022, Mr. Herro urged a roomful of crypto enthusiasts to invest in the currency TerraUSD, calling it “one of the coolest assets in history.” The coin imploded a month later, erasing billions of dollars in wealth. Mr. Herro’s most recent venture with Mr. Folkman was a crypto platform called Dough Finance, which was hacked in July, leading to the theft of $2 million.

It’s not clear exactly how the pair earned the Trumps’ trust. But Steve Witkoff said last year that he met them through his son, and then introduced them to the family.

On the livestream introducing World Liberty, Donald Trump Jr. hailed the men as first-class financial minds.

“You could put them in a boardroom at Goldman Sachs, and they’re going to smoke the people in the room,” he said.

In October, Mr. Herro and Mr. Folkman got to work on the company’s first initiative — selling a new cryptocurrency, which it called $WLFI, with the goal of $300 million in sales.

These coins would be different from $TRUMP — the so-called memecoin that spiked in January after Mr. Trump marketed it to his followers before it abruptly crashed.

Memecoin

A memecoin is a type of cryptocurrency based on an online joke or celebrity mascot. It has no practical function other than speculation. After $TRUMP’s initial surge, its price plummeted, costing investors a cumulative $2 billion.

World Liberty, at least according to its marketing pitch, eventually plans to operate as a new type of internet bank that would allow customers to borrow and lend money in various digital currencies. Anyone who bought the $WLFI coins would get to vote on certain bank business decisions like shareholders in a traditional company.

Mr. Trump was at the core of the pitch. The company published a 13-page “Gold Paper” that described its mission and leadership team. On the cover was a portrait of Mr. Trump, styled to look as if gold paint had been splashed across the page.

He would serve as the company’s “Chief Crypto Advocate,” the paper said.

When World Liberty launched, the Trump family and its affiliates were given 22.5 billion units of the crypto coins — a stash now worth at least $1.1 billion on paper, depending on the various prices used in recent sales.

Under the company’s rules, the Trumps and other World Liberty investors are not allowed to sell their coins on the open market, though the company has said it might eventually lift that restriction if other buyers of the coin agree.

Initially, there were few buyers. By the end of October, World Liberty had sold only $2.7 million worth of the coins, a tiny fraction of its goal.

Election Day was a game changer.

A Flood of Investors

With polls closed in most of America and Mr. Trump on his way to victory, the World Liberty account on X posted a celebratory message on Nov. 5: “Big things on the horizon.”

Soon a surge of investment flowed into World Liberty’s cryptocurrency.

Most crypto purchases are recorded on a public ledger called the blockchain, with the buyers and sellers largely anonymized. But World Liberty has said it performs extensive checks on investors in its coin, so it knows who they are.

Blockchain

The blockchain is the publicly viewable ledger of all cryptocurrency transactions. Every time someone spends money with a digital coin, it shows up as an entry, allowing investigators to track the flow of funds. In most cases, the identities of the buyers and sellers are concealed behind strings of letters and numbers.

An analysis performed for The Times by the forensics firm Nansen, drawing on crypto industry data, showed that many of the investors were based abroad in places like Singapore, South Korea, Hong Kong and the United Arab Emirates.

Federal law prevents foreigners from donating to presidential campaigns or inaugural funds, but World Liberty’s coin sale offered a new, legal way to back Mr. Trump.

“The main reason for purchasing such a token was to support Trump’s inauguration, as he was the first crypto-friendly president of the United States,” said Keer Lau, chief strategy officer at Orbiter Finance, a Hong Kong-based entity.

Some investors, domestic and overseas, have managed firms that ran afoul of U.S. regulations. One was Yoni Assia, an Israeli who founded eToro, an online trading platform whose U.S. subsidiary reached a $1.5 million settlement with the S.E.C. last year for crypto-related violations. Troy Murray, a Puerto Rico-based investor, also bought World Liberty’s coin. Before that, he had helped create BarnBridge, which in late 2023 agreed to pay the S.E.C. $1.7 million to settle its own crypto-related accusations.

Since Mr. Trump took office, some World Liberty investors have pushed the government for regulatory approvals, or are poised to interact with the administration as they try to build or expand businesses in the United States.

In March, Mr. Assia’s company notified the S.E.C. that it intended to go public in the United States. DWF Labs, a crypto firm based in the United Arab Emirates, announced this month that it had bought $25 million of $WLFI — and that it was opening a New York office.

“Our visibility in the U.S. has been increased because of this deal,” Andrei Grachev, the managing partner of DWF Labs, said in an interview. “We would like to have direct dialogue with the policymakers.”

The crypto executive with perhaps the most to gain from his affiliation with World Liberty is Justin Sun, a Chinese billionaire who founded the crypto platform Tron.

Mr. Sun gained global attention late last year, when he spent $6.2 million at an art auction to buy a banana that had been duct taped to a wall. Not long after, Mr. Sun made another headline-grabbing maneuver: He spent $75 million on $WLFI coins.

The investment drew widespread criticism given that Mr. Sun had a clear incentive to gain favor with the Trump White House. During the Biden administration, the S.E.C. sued Mr. Sun, arguing that he had fraudulently inflated the price of a Tron cryptocurrency.

Mr. Sun has denied the S.E.C.’s charges, and in a text message to The Times last year, he said his World Liberty investment was simply a vote of confidence in the Trump family’s “excellent project.”

In late February, the S.E.C. asked a federal judge to halt proceedings in Mr. Sun’s case: The agency said it was exploring “a potential resolution.” The judge granted the stay.

The Stars Align

Justin Sun gave World Liberty a big lift. But Mr. Trump’s company wanted more money. Much more.

So World Liberty executives soon announced what they called “a transformative initiative” to partner with other crypto outfits and invest in their coins. The strategy, the executives said in February, would leverage World Liberty’s growing clout to help their lesser-known partners.

“It’s like taking care of your brother in the space,” Mr. Herro said at a crypto event in New York that month.

But World Liberty’s public pronouncements omitted a key aspect of its private pitch to several crypto startups, executives at these companies told The Times. World Liberty wanted to sell its own coin — not just to invest in others’. It was proposing a currency swap.

Here is the deal World Liberty offered, according to executives at three crypto firms approached by the company: The startups would spend between $10 million and $30 million on a large chunk of World Liberty’s coins. In return, World Liberty would buy a smaller amount of each startup’s own cryptocurrency. World Liberty would keep the rest of the money for itself — a premium as high as 20 percent.

World Liberty’s purchases would signal to the market that Mr. Trump’s firm had deemed the startups worthy of investment. But the market would have no way of knowing that World Liberty had been compensated for that endorsement. Some details of a similar pitch from World Liberty were previously reported by Blockworks, an industry news outlet.

“They kept telling us, ‘We’re like, we’re super close to Trump,’” said Mike Silagadze, the chief executive of Ether.Fi, a crypto startup that World Liberty approached.

“We immediately rejected,” said Dominik Schiener, who founded the IOTA Foundation, a Berlin-based group that also received the pitch. “It’s a very dishonest approach.”

In his statement, Mr. Wachsman, the World Liberty spokesman, said The Times’s reporting contained “fundamental misunderstandings about standard industry practices” and called the company’s business arrangements “not only common in the blockchain industry but essential for creating lasting economic alignments in business, generally.”

“These arrangements establish skin in the game for all parties,” he added.

The benefits of a partnership were enough to attract at least five crypto firms to strike other deals with World Liberty, without disclosing details of the financial arrangements, The Times found.

In one deal, the Sui Foundation, a U.S.-based group, announced that World Liberty would buy an unspecified amount of its cryptocurrency, prompting Sui’s price to jump more than 10 percent. As part of the arrangement, the foundation was slated to receive World Liberty’s coins in return, said two people familiar with the deal who requested anonymity to discuss private negotiations.

Other World Liberty partnerships have shown how Mr. Trump is mixing his official role with his business. In December, the company announced that it would use technology designed by a startup based in Lisbon, Ethena Labs. It also bought more than $5 million of Ethena’s cryptocurrency.

One of Ethena’s investors is Arthur Hayes, a crypto entrepreneur who pleaded guilty to violating the Bank Secrecy Act in 2022 and was sentenced to six months of home detention. Last month, Mr. Trump granted Mr. Hayes a pardon. (A spokesman who represents both Ethena and Mr. Hayes declined to comment.)

Another World Liberty partner is Ondo Finance, a New York-based startup backed by Founders Fund, the conservative billionaire Peter Thiel’s venture capital firm.

World Liberty made its first purchase of Ondo’s coins in December, buying more than 130,000 of them. The transaction at least briefly helped drive up the price of Ondo’s coin, drawing headlines in crypto news sites celebrating World Liberty’s bet.

In January, Ondo donated $1 million to Mr. Trump’s inauguration, securing an invite to a candlelight dinner at the National Building Museum in Washington, where the guest list included several of Mr. Trump’s cabinet nominees. Ondo also helped sponsor an inauguration event called the Crypto Ball. Soon after, Donald Trump Jr. and World Liberty’s management team were headliners at a conference Ondo organized in New York.

“This is a moment we weren’t sure was gonna happen,” Ian De Bode, Ondo’s chief strategy officer, said from the stage. “But sometimes the stars align.”

‘Thank Me Later’

In February, Eric Trump passed along some investment advice to his followers on Elon Musk’s social media platform, X: “In my opinion, it’s a great time to add $ETH.”

It was the ticker symbol for a digital coin called Ether. “You can thank me later,” he added, before deleting that line.

His advice proved prescient.

The next month, his father announced the creation of a “U.S. Crypto Reserve” — a Fort Knox-like repository of cryptocurrencies intended to help bolster the industry.

Ether

Ether is the second-most valuable cryptocurrency behind Bitcoin, worth about $1,800 at current prices. Many of the most influential crypto companies use the coin to conduct transactions and build financial applications.

Mr. Trump’s announcement included a list of digital currencies to go into the stockpile. Along with Bitcoin, he included Ether, saying it would be “at the heart of the Reserve.”

Ether’s price surged more than 13 percent.

The spike had an immediate beneficiary: World Liberty. Over the previous few months, the company had bought $240 million worth of Ether, according to Arkham, a crypto data firm.

The day the president announced the crypto reserve, the value of World Liberty’s Ether stash rose by $33 million, assuming it had not sold any of its holdings. That gain was later lost as Ether declined in value.

That same pattern — Mr. Trump making policy pronouncements or posting messages that intersected with World Liberty’s business interests — occurred again in March.

In a video feed at a crypto conference in New York, Mr. Trump called on Congress to pass legislation governing stablecoins, a type of crypto designed to maintain a value of $1.

Stablecoin

Stablecoins are a type of cryptocurrency that maintain a constant price of $1. They differ from traditional digital currencies like Bitcoin, which constantly fluctuate in price, making them easier to use for certain types of transactions. Companies that issue stablecoins operate similarly to banks: The issuers make money by taking deposits from investors, giving them coins in return and then investing those deposits to generate a yield that the companies keep.

Both the Senate and the House have introduced bills that would make it easier for firms issuing stablecoins to operate in the United States. In his remarks last month, Mr. Trump said that the rise of stablecoins would “expand the dominance of the U.S. dollar.”

A week later, World Liberty announced it was releasing its own stablecoin, USD1. “The future is here, and it is so bright!” Zach Witkoff wrote on X.

Jordi Alexander, a crypto executive who helped World Liberty with its plans to launch its stablecoin, said in an interview that the company had already secured commitments of at least $1 billion from investors to buy the stablecoin once it hits the market. On Tuesday, Zach Witkoff confirmed that World Liberty had reached that mark.

The new venture will only compound World Liberty’s ethical conflicts. The company plans to offer USD1 on a platform developed by Binance, a giant exchange that settled criminal charges with the Justice Department in 2023. This week, Mr. Witkoff, Mr. Herro and Mr. Folkman met with Changpeng Zhao, Binance’s founder and former chief executive, in Abu Dhabi.

Mr. Zhao, who served four months in federal prison for money-laundering violations, has been seeking a pardon from the Trump administration, according to people familiar with the matter, who requested anonymity to discuss a sensitive topic. The pardon effort was first reported by The Wall Street Journal.

The overlap between Mr. Trump’s policy pronouncements and his business interests have alarmed congressional Democrats, who moved recently to amend the pending stablecoin legislation to bar the Trump family from issuing one.

The amendment failed, and none of the concerns about World Liberty have disrupted its momentum.

Last month, Mr. Witkoff was among a group of executives invited to the White House for a first-of-its-kind industry summit.

After the meeting, Mr. Witkoff posted a photograph on social media of him smiling outside the White House next to Mr. Herro and Mr. Folkman.

“Thank you Mr. President,” Mr. Witkoff wrote.

Susan C. Beachy contributed research.

A former athletic director at a Baltimore area high school who was accused of using artificial intelligence to create a racist and antisemitic audio clip impersonating the school’s principal was sentenced on Monday to four months in jail as part of a plea deal, according to prosecutors.

The former director, Dazhon Darien, 32, pleaded guilty to disturbing school operations, a misdemeanor charge, according to the Baltimore County State’s Attorney’s Office. Mr. Darien had previously faced additional charges, including theft, stalking and retaliating against a witness.

According to The Associated Press, Mr. Darien entered an Alford plea to the disturbing school operations charge, which allows defendants to maintain their innocence while pleading guilty.

Mr. Darien, the former athletic director of Pikesville High School, fabricated an audio clip that included a rant about “ungrateful Black kids who can’t test their way out of a paper bag” and disparaging comments about Jewish students, according to a statement of facts in the case used to support the guilty plea. According to police records, the audio was an attempt to smear the school’s principal, Eric Eiswert.

According to the statement of facts, Mr. Eiswert said that there had been “conversations” with Mr. Darien about his contract not being renewed because of “his poor performance at the school, his inability to follow clearly laid out procedures and his unwillingness to follow the chain of command.” Problems with Mr. Darien began in late 2023, leading up to the audio’s release, according to the statement.

A lawyer listed for Mr. Darien did not respond to calls and messages on Tuesday. The Baltimore County Public Schools district declined to comment on the case. Efforts to reach Mr. Eiswert on Tuesday were unsuccessful.

After his sentencing, Mr. Darien was returned to federal custody as he is facing charges that he sexually exploited children and received child pornography.

The fabricated recording, which was posted on Instagram in January 2024, quickly spread, roiling Baltimore County Public Schools, which serves more than 100,000 students. While the district investigated, Mr. Eiswert, who denied making the comments, had multiple threats to his safety, the police said. He was also placed on administrative leave, the school district said.

According to police documents, Mr. Darien developed a grievance against Mr. Eiswert in December after the principal began investigating him. Mr. Darien had authorized a district payment of $1,916 to his roommate, the police said, “under the pretense” that the roommate was working as an assistant coach for the Pikesville girls’ soccer team.

Soon after, the police said, Mr. Darien used the school district’s internet services to search for artificial intelligence tools, including from OpenAI, the developer of the ChatGPT chatbot, and Microsoft’s Bing Chat.

(The New York Times sued OpenAI and its partner, Microsoft, in December 2023, for copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems.)

A public defender representing Mr. Darien declined to comment on the case.

It has never been easier to make realistic fabricated videos, often called deepfakes. Where it once took elaborate software to put one person’s face onto another’s, many of those tools are now common and can be found on smartphone apps. This has put some A.I. researchers on edge about the dangers the technology poses.