PALM BEACH, Fla. — Attending World Liberty Financial’s forum at Mar-a-Lago felt less like a high-profile summit and more like an intimate gathering — if the guest list included people who control billions in assets and the future of finance.
Nestled under chandeliers and gold-painted trim, the guest list reads like a who’s who of the old guard and emerging industry disruptors. No name tag was necessary. Everyone seemed to know everyone, or at least know someone who knew them.
Conversations focused on the future of finance and how it might fix what was broken in the past: ambitious visions of tokenized assets, regulatory overhauls, and reinvented capital markets. But just as easily, the discussion turned to the upcoming FIFA World Cup and the snap nails, courtesy of a few unexpected names that probably didn’t have to be there, and yet somehow made the whole thing even more surreal.
The event was not intended for an exclusively American audience; participants came from several countries. Several attendees flew last week from Consensus Hong Kong directly to Palm Beach to attend the World Liberty Forum. One attendee said he arrived Wednesday morning from ETHDenver, and several others said they would fly to the Colorado conference after the forum.
“Punitive financing”
In any other context, the event would appear to be a typical crypto conference; speakers from traditional financial backgrounds explaining how they use blockchain or why they discuss crypto in a dimly lit room.
However, the backdrop loomed: It was a conference hosted by World Liberty Financial, the crypto company launched and partly owned by US President Donald Trump’s family, held at his Mar-a-Lago golf club, with several attendees linked to his business interests. Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, in his first appearance in the United States since receiving a pardon from Trump, was spotted at the event. David Solomon of Goldman Sachs joked on stage that he was there because his client had requested his presence.
Many of the panels themselves were high-profile; World Liberty Financial co-founder Alex Witkoff asked U.S. Senator Ashley Moody to tell the public about her journey, or Eric Trump and Donald Trump, Jr. to reiterate their past grievances with banks.
“It was forced and perhaps opportunistic, but we lived a life that opened our eyes to the corruption of the system…the banks. [canceled our accounts] for no reason other than my dad wore a hat that said ‘Make America Great Again,'” Eric Trump said. “We realized how antiquated finance was, how punitive finance was.”
During these sessions, some speakers presented their arguments in favor of the digital asset sector. Jenny Johnson, CEO of Franklin Templeton, explained why the US dollar remains the world’s reserve currency, saying the European Union was too uncoordinated for the euro to take the dollar’s place and that other currencies were simply not adapting in a timely manner.
“Today, around 50% of trade is done in dollars, a further 30% in euros. [but] there is no single European debt market. They can’t even coordinate around the euro… so it won’t be the next reserve,” she said.
China’s renminbi and the Indian rupee are competitors, but neither is free-floating, making it unlikely that either currency could take on that role, she said.
“As long as people are looking for their stablecoin to be backed by the most risk-free currency, it will be the dollar,” she said.
However, many panels have only had a passing interest in digital assets themselves. The audience reflected this, with crowds mingling outside the room 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 has more than $125 million in assets under management, said the company was ready to tokenize real-world assets such as real estate, but remained unable to do so due to regularity uncertainty.
Similarly, Kevin O’Leary told his listeners that sovereign wealth funds, with whom he speaks regularly, would not touch crypto because they are afraid of the regulatory risk that comes with it in the United States.
Glamor and celebrities
From O’Leary to Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon to FIFA President Gianni Infantino, if the day’s lineup was ordered by celebrity status, organizers surely saved the best for last – and probably the least relevant.
Nicki Minaj closed the event as the final panelist, but the first one caused half the room to take out their phones to take a photo. Her presence may not make sense in the context of finance or crypto specifically — when moderator Alex Bruesewitz informed her that people had gathered to talk about a new innovation in finance, she said she “might like 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 wasn’t just a conference, it was the kind of room where fortunes are directed, not cast, and where side chatter was just as revealing as the main agenda.
