World Liberty Financial (WLFI), the digital asset venture co-founded by the Trump family, has added to a growing list of partnerships to promote its USD1 stablecoin, tying up with financial services firm Apex Group to explore using the token for payment rails and a potential listing of WLFI-tokenized assets on the London Stock Exchange’s Digital Market Infrastructure platform.
The collaboration will explore integrating WLFI’s USD1 stablecoin, which was launched in February 2025, across Bermuda-based Apex’s ecosystem for subscriptions, distributions and redemptions of tokenized assets, according to a statement dated 18 Feb. WLFI co-founders Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump hosted a high-profile inaugural World Liberty Forum on the same day at the Trump Organization’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida.
Integrating digital assets
Apex is a fund administrator servicing over $3.5tn in assets. Peter Hughes, Founder and CEO of Apex, said that the agreement "lets us examine how USD1 and stablecoin infrastructure can modernize our platform and services, while providing the edge to support our clients as digital asset integration becomes standard practice."
The integration of regulated stablecoin infrastructure into traditional fund administration services could potentially streamline settlement and improve operational efficiency for Apex’s institutional client base, which include asset managers, private markets, pensions and sovereign wealth funds.
DeFi merges with asset management
Zach Witkoff, CEO and Co-Founder of WLFI, said the collaboration "accelerates our mission to make WLFI assets accessible at the most established financial services platforms globally."
For WLFI, the latest partnership with Apex allows it to integrate decentralized finance with traditional asset management and is an expansion of a theme the company has been pursuing of merging with mainstream finance.
Last week at Consensus Hong Kong, Witkoff teased a new foreign exchange trading platform called World Swap, that would be backed by the dollar-pegged USD1 stablecoin. World Liberty, like a number of crypto peers, has applied for a national trust bank charter, which has raised questions about potential conflicts of interest.
Tokenization of Maldives hotel loan revenues
WLFI made another announcement on 18 Feb that it plans to tokenize loan revenue interests for the Trump International Hotel & Resort in the Maldives, in partnership with Securitize and property developer DarGlobal.
The initial offering of the Maldives tokenized real-world asset (RWA) aims to provide eligible accredited investors with a fixed yield and loan revenue streams from the luxury hotel, which is slated for completion in 2030. Investors gain exposure to the underlying asset’s performance through the loan interest payments, including potential income distributions and the potential for certain profits upon any future sale, the statement said.
Tokenization before completion
Real estate tokenization is a growing trend, but the Maldives project is being billed as the world's first to tokenize a hotel during its development phase, allowing investors to participate from the construction stage rather than waiting for completion.
WLFI’s token was up 0.92% to $0.118 over the past 24 hours, below its initial price of $0.31 following its February 2025 launch, according to CoinMarketCap data.
