- Tension: World Liberty Financial’s largest publicly disclosed investment arrived from a counterparty whose corporate existence cannot be independently verified.
- Noise: Framing this as dirty money reaching the president overstates what is known — no public evidence connects the funds used in the purchase to any alleged laundering, and the man in question has never been charged and denies wrongdoing.
- Direct Message: The reportable failure is not the source of the money but the vetting: a company whose disclosed terms route most of its revenue to an entity the president owns took nine figures from a buyer it will not say it screened.
To learn more about our editorial approach, explore The Direct Message methodology.
Aqua 1 Foundation registered its website on May 28, 2025. Four weeks later it announced a $100 million purchase of World Liberty Financial’s governance tokens, presenting itself as an Abu Dhabi-based fund. It has no traceable corporate registration in the United Arab Emirates. The only human being ever attached to it in public is a founding partner named “Dave Lee,” represented by an avatar.
Who the money is reported to have come from
The New York Times reported on August 9 that the purchase traces to Guren “Bobby” Zhou, a Chinese national who moved to Britain from Shanghai in 2005 and built a hardwood-flooring retail business there, serving as a director of roughly thirteen UK companies between 2008 and 2019. Most were dissolved. The business went into administration around 2018, his visa lapsed the same year, and he relocated to Abu Dhabi. An earlier crypto venture, Caduceus, collapsed after burning through about $7.6 million.
The link between Zhou and Aqua 1 runs through wallet analysis by Arkham Intelligence and a corporate paper trail: a British Virgin Islands entity connected to the crypto firm Web3Port filed a name change to Aqua 1 GP Limited. Aqua 1 had previously denied any connection to Web3Port. The $100 million arrived in two tranches — roughly $20 million in January 2025 through a Web3Port-linked wallet, five months before Aqua 1 existed publicly, and about $80 million in June.
What the British record actually says
This is the part that requires precision. Zhou was arrested by the National Crime Agency on March 24, 2021, on suspicion of money laundering said to span an eighteen-month period. On May 10, 2022, the NCA submitted a case file to a Senior Crown Prosecutor for a charging decision. These facts are on the record in a February 2024 Court of Appeal judgment arising from his family’s immigration case.
He has never been charged. He was released under investigation, and in those proceedings he denies involvement in any wrongdoing. British officials confirmed to the Times in late July that the investigation remains open. A later court record names him among six people alleged to have taken part in a laundering operation dating to 2019, an allegation untested in court. In September 2025, roughly ninety days after World Liberty announced the investment, two of Zhou’s longtime employees were charged in the London case; one has pleaded guilty and the other’s trial is listed for 2028.
No publicly available evidence ties the specific funds used to buy the tokens to any alleged laundering. That sentence is not a formality — it is the boundary of what the reporting establishes.
Where the money went under the company’s own terms
World Liberty Financial published its revenue-sharing arrangement itself. Under the terms set out in its gold paper, an entity called DT Marks DEFI LLC holds the right to 75 percent of net protocol revenues after the first roughly $30 million is reserved for expenses and obligations, along with 22.5 billion tokens. The remaining 25 percent goes to Axiom Management Group, run by co-founders Chase Herro and Zachary Folkman.
Forbes reporting establishes that Donald Trump personally owns about 70 percent of DT Marks DEFI LLC, with family members holding the rest, and that the entity in turn controls roughly 60 percent of World Liberty’s parent company. Donald Trump Jr. is described as a “web3 ambassador,” Eric Trump sits on the board of managers of the holding company, and Barron Trump carries the title “chief DeFi visionary.” Applying the disclosed formula to a $100 million purchase is how the Times arrives at as much as $75 million reaching a company the president and his sons control. Affiliates of co-founder Zach Witkoff, son of the Middle East envoy, also benefited. Trump’s own financial disclosure reported $57.4 million in income from World Liberty.
The compliance question the company will not answer
World Liberty’s spokesman, David Wachsman, said the company followed all applicable laws and regulations and maintains a compliance program that meets or exceeds industry standards. He disputed the Times’s characterisation of Zhou without identifying a specific inaccuracy, and declined to say whether the company knew the source of the funds. The White House said the president has no conflicts of interest and acts only in the public interest. Zhou did not respond to requests for comment.
Held against the disclosed facts, the compliance claim is where the story tightens. Anti-money-laundering screening is designed to flag exactly this profile in combination: a dissolved business portfolio, an administration in 2018, an open national-crime-agency investigation, sudden access to nine figures, an unregistered counterparty in a jurisdiction where it cannot be found, and an initial tranche routed through a firm the buyer’s vehicle later denied any link to. Each element on its own is explicable. Assembled, they are what a screening program exists to catch.
Structure as a shield
The gold paper does two things simultaneously. It routes three quarters of net revenue and 22.5 billion tokens to an entity the president majority-owns, and it states that Trump and his family are not officers, directors, founders, employees, managers, owners or operators of World Liberty Financial. The arrangement captures the upside while formally locating operational responsibility somewhere else — including responsibility for knowing who is on the other side of a $100 million transaction.
That design also explains why the open questions may stay open. The trial of Zhou’s former employee is listed for 2028, which puts the London case inside the remainder of the term. A charging decision on Zhou himself has been pending since May 2022. Meanwhile the entity that received the proceeds is not a party to any of it, was never presented as one, and under the terms World Liberty wrote and published for itself, was never required to ask.
