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 under chandeliers and gold-painted decorations, the guest list read like a who’s who of the industry’s old guard and rising disruptors. No name tags were necessary. Everyone seemed to know everyone, or at least know someone who did.
Conversations ranged from the future of finance to how it could fix what’s broken in the past — ambitious visions of tokenized assets, regulatory overhauls and reimagined capital markets. But just as easily, talk turned to the upcoming FIFA World Cup tournament and press on nails, thanks to a few unexpected names that probably had nothing to do with being there, and yet made it all feel even more surreal.
The event was not aimed at an exclusively American audience; participants came from a number of countries. Several participants flew from Consensus Hong Kong last week directly to Palm Beach to attend the World Liberty Forum. One attendee said they had flown in Wednesday morning from ETHDenver, and several others said they would fly to the Colorado conference after the forum.
‘Criminal financing’
In any other context, the event appears to be a typical crypto conference; speakers from traditional financial backgrounds explaining how they use blockchain or why they discuss crypto to a dimly lit room.
However, the backdrop emerged: This was a conference organized by World Liberty Financial, the crypto company launched and partially owned by the family of US President Donald Trump, held at his Mar-a-Lago golf club, with several attendees linked to his business interests. Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, in his first US appearance since receiving a pardon from Trump, was seen 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 of a high standard; World Liberty Financial co-founder Alex Witkoff asked US Senator Ashley Moody to walk the audience through her background, or Eric Trump and Donald Trump, Jr. reiterated their previous complaints against 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 other reason than my dad was wearing a hat that said ‘Make America Great Again,'” Eric Trump claimed. “We realized how outdated finance was, how punitive finance was.”
Amid these sessions, some speakers went through their arguments for the digital assets sector. Franklin Templeton chief executive Jenny Johnson laid out the rationale for the US dollar to remain the global reserve currency, saying the EU was too uncoordinated for the euro to take the dollar’s place and that other currencies just didn’t meet the moment.
“About 50% of trade today is in dollars, another 30% is in euros, [but] there is no European debt market. They can’t even coordinate around the euro … so it’s not going to be the next reserve,” she said.
China’s renminbi and India’s rupee are competitors, but neither is free-floating, so that makes it unlikely that 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 will be the dollar,” she said.
Many of the panels nevertheless only had a passing focus on the digital assets themselves. The crowd reflected this, with crowds mingling outside the actual venue to chat during several panels.
It wouldn’t have been a Trump rally without the biggest real estate moguls in the room—and that’s when tokenization (putting assets on the blockchain) became a topic. Hotel billionaire Barry Sternlicht, whose Starwood Capital manages more than $125 million in assets under management, said the firm was ready to tokenize real-world assets such as real estate but remains unable to do so because of the uncertainty of regularity.
Similarly, Kevin O’Leary told listeners that sovereign wealth funds that he speaks to regularly won’t touch crypto because they are afraid of the regulatory risk that comes with it in the US.
Glamor and celebrities
From O’Leary to Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon to FIFA President Gianni Infantino, whose lineup today was ranked by celebrity status, organizers certainly saved the best for last — and probably the least relevant.
Nicki Minaj closed out the event as the last panelist, but the first, prompting half the room to pull out their phones to snap a photo. Her presence might not make sense in the context of finance or crypto specifically — when moderator Alex Bruesewitz informed her that people were gathered to talk about a new innovation in finance, she said she “likes it” — but given her recently developed close relationship with President Donald Trump, it wasn’t entirely surprising to see her support the family event.
The World Liberty Forum was not just a conference, it was the kind of space where fortunes are managed, not broken up, and where the side talk was as telling as the main agenda.
