Abu Dhabi Royal Takes 49% Stake in Trump Family’s Crypto Bank Venture

An Abu Dhabi royal’s investment group backs a 49% stake in the holding company behind World Liberty Financial’s conditionally approved US trust bank, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan’s group is behind an entity named StringZ Holding, which owns 49% of WLTC Holdings, while an entity affiliated with President Donald Trump’s family owns another 38%, one person told the Journal. The remaining holding is not disclosed in the report. The structure places a foreign national-security official and a sitting president’s family inside the same federally supervised banking venture before it has opened.

In practice, that means the UAE national security adviser would sit on the cap table of a US trust bank set to issue, redeem and custody World Liberty’s USD1 stablecoin, if the bank clears its remaining approvals. The stake sits at the holding-company level, above the chartered bank itself.

Tahnoon also chairs the Abu Dhabi artificial intelligence company G42. Washington authorized exports of advanced AI chips to G42 in November 2025, months after the two governments agreed a broader AI cooperation framework. Those approvals tied a UAE entity already cleared for sensitive US technology to a separate deal involving the president’s family.

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency granted World Liberty Trust Company preliminary conditional approval on Aug. 14, 2026. The regulator’s published decision confirms StringZ as a WLTC Holdings investor and records commitments that StringZ would not influence the bank. It does not name Tahnoon as the backer or disclose the size of his group’s holding.

That distinction matters. The conditional charter covers the bank’s fitness to operate; the ownership of its parent sits a layer above, in a structure the OCC described only as an investor bound by non-influence commitments. The trust bank cannot begin operating until it satisfies the OCC’s pre-opening requirements and receives final approval.

Tahnoon previously backed a $500 million purchase of 49% of World Liberty Financial, Cointelegraph reported. Democratic senators later called for hearings into that transaction and whether it shaped US policy toward the UAE.

The two investments now share a backer and a Trump-family counterparty. Neither the Trump Organization nor World Liberty Financial has publicly addressed the holding-company stake. Cointelegraph contacted the Trump Organization for comment and did not receive a response before publication.

The OCC’s conditional approval does not identify Tahnoon as StringZ’s backer. Whether the regulator reviews the foreign-capital structure before final approval, and whether the senators’ earlier probe extends to the bank venture, is not yet known.