Inside Trump’s surreal Mar-a-Lago crypto summit

PALM BEACH, Fla. — Attending World Liberty Financial’s forum at Mar-a-Lago felt less like a high-powered summit and more like an intimate gathering — if the guest list included people who control trillions in assets and the future of finance.

Tucked beneath chandeliers and gold-painted trim, the guest list read like a who’s who of the industry’s old guard and rising disruptors. There were no name tags needed. Everyone seemed to know everyone, or at least know someone who did.

Conversations floated from the future of finance to how it might fix what’s been broken in the past — ambitious visions of tokenized assets, regulatory overhauls, and reimagined capital markets. But just as easily, the talk turned to the upcoming FIFA World Cup tournament and press-on nails, courtesy of a few unexpected names who probably had no business being there, and yet somehow made the whole thing feel even more surreal.

The event was not targeted toward an exclusively U.S. audience; attendees hailed from a number of countries. Several attendees flew from Consensus Hong Kong last week directly to Palm Beach to attend the World Liberty Forum. One attendee said they had flown in on Wednesday morning from ETHDenver, and several others said they would be flying to the Colorado conference following the forum.

‘Punitive finance’

In any other context, the event would seem to be a typical crypto conference; speakers from traditional financial backgrounds explaining how they’re using blockchain or why they’re discussing crypto to a dimly lit room.

However, the backdrop loomed: This was a conference put on by World Liberty Financial, the crypto company launched and owned in part by the family of U.S. President Donald Trump, held at his golf club Mar-a-Lago, with several attendees tied to his business interests. Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, in his first U.S. appearance since receiving a pardon from Trump, was spotted at the event. Goldman Sachs’ David Solomon joked on stage that he was there because his client had requested his presence.

Many of the panels themselves were high-level; World Liberty Financial co-founder Alex Witkoff asked U.S. Senator Ashley Moody to walk the audience through her background, or Eric Trump and Donald Trump, Jr. reiterating their past grievances with the banks.

“It was forced and maybe opportunistic but we lived a life that opened our eyes to maybe how corrupt the system was … banks [canceled our accounts] for no reason other than my father was wearing a hat that said ‘Make America Great Again,'” Eric Trump claimed. “We realized how antiquated finance was, how punitive finance was.”

Amid these sessions, some speakers walked through their arguments for the digital assets sector. Franklin Templeton CEO Jenny Johnson laid out the rationale for the U.S. dollar remaining the global reserve currency, saying the European Union was too uncoordinated for the euro to take the dollar’s place and other currencies just didn’t meet the moment.

“About 50% of trade today is done in dollars, another 30% is in the euros, [but] there’s no single European debt market. They can’t even coordinate around the euro … so that’s not going to be the next reserve,” she said.

China’s renminbi and India’s rupee are contenders, but neither is free-floating, and so that makes it unlikely either of those currencies can take on the role, she said.

“As long as people are still looking for their stablecoin to be backed by the most risk-free currency, it’s going to be the dollar,” she said.

Many of the panels nevertheless only had a passing focus on digital assets themselves. The audience reflected this, with crowds mingling outside the actual room to chat during several panels.

It wouldn’t have been a Trump gathering without the biggest real estate moguls in the room — and that’s when tokenization (putting assets on blockchain) became a topic. Hotel billionaire Barry Sternlicht, whose Starwood Capital manages over $125 million in assets under management, said the firm was ready to tokenize real-world assets such as real estate, but continues to be unable to do so given the regularity uncertainty.

Similarly, Kevin O’Leary told listeners that sovereign wealth funds, with whom he speaks regularly, won’t touch crypto because they’re afraid of the regulatory risk that comes with it in the U.S.

Glamour and celebrities

From O’Leary to Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon to FIFA president Gianni Infantino, if the day’s lineup were ranked by celebrity status, the organizers surely saved the best for last — and probably the least relevant.

Nicki Minaj closed out the event as the final panelist, but the first that caused half the room to take out their phones to snap a picture. Her presence may not make sense in the context of finance or crypto specifically — when moderator Alex Bruesewitz informed her that people gathered to talk about a new innovation in finance, she said she “can like it” — but given her recently developed close relationship with President Donald Trump, it wasn’t entirely surprising to see her support the family’s event.

The World Liberty Forum wasn’t just a conference, it was the kind of room where fortunes are steered, not pitched, and where the side chatter was just as telling as the main agenda.