Eric Trump will no longer serve as a director on the board of a cryptocurrency firm after the company held talks with stock market regulators despite an earlier announcement.
Fintech firm Alt5 Sigma touted that President Donald Trump’s son was joining its board of directors in an August 13 news release.
Trump rang the Nasdaq opening bell on the day of the announcement to mark a $1.5 billion crypto deal between Alt5 Sigma and World Liberty Financial, the company that is financially backed by the Trump family.
But according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing, Trump has since been demoted to a board observer, where he can still attend meetings but doesn’t have the power of a full board director, The Street first reported.
Zachary Witkoff, the son of the president’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, meanwhile, has been named chairman and board nominee of Alt5 Sigma.
The change to Trump’s position comes “after discussion with The Nasdaq Stock Market LLC” and was made “in order to comply with Nasdaq’s listing rules,” according to the commission’s filing dated August 25.
No further explanation was given in the filing and the company is yet to publicly comment. Trump, however, is still listed as a board director on Alt5 Sigma’s website.
The Independent has contacted Alt5 Sigma for comment.
The president and his family have amassed as much as $6 billion on paper after their crypto venture opened trading for a new digital currency earlier this month, The Wall Street Journal reported.
The Trump family launched a new cryptocurrency—WLFI— on September 1 in the crypto equivalent of an initial public offering. Before now, people who had bought the World Financial Liberty currency had not been able to trade the tokens.
The family holds about a quarter of all the tokens in existence. Eric Trump, along with Donald Trump Jr and Barron Trump, are co-founders of World Liberty, while the president is named as a “Co-Founder Emeritus.”
Trump and his sons launched World Liberty Financial last year when he was running for president, and said he would make “America Great Again, this time with crypto.”
Some fear that World Liberty creates an avenue to influence the Trump family and investors use it to seek help from the Trump administration.
But White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said “neither the president nor his family have ever engaged, or will ever engage, in conflicts of interest.”
Additional reporting from Eric Garcia.
