The Big Tech Collapse Draws Closer with a “Crypto Winter” Approaching
by Brian Shilhavy
Editor, Health Impact News
Donald Trump was swept into power in the November 2024 elections funded to a large extent by Silicon Valley billionaires.
In return for their support, Trump appointed JD Vance, who was handpicked by Silicon Valley as the Vice President. JD Vance is a disciple of Peter Thiel, who along with Elon Musk founded PayPal as part of the PayPal Mafia. See:
The Man Behind Trump’s VP Pick: It’s Worse Than You Think
Big Tech has been a huge part of Trump’s 2.0 Presidency, as we have seen here in 2025 with the push to make cryptocurrencies a larger part of the U.S. and worldwide financial system.
Before the end of the first quarter in March of 2025, the Trump family started their own cryptocurrency financial network to challenge traditional banking, called World Liberty Financial. I covered it back then. See:
Trump Takes on the Banking Industry by Developing his Own Cryptocurrency Financial Network
However, the most common way people use cryptocurrency today is through selling and buying it like an asset, which is why Blackrock and other giant Wall Street investors have created their own hedge funds around the price of cryptocurrencies.
To truly replace banks and become an entirely new financial system, crypto has to be used in financial transactions in places like the retail sector, where currently the credit card companies (Visa, Mastercard, etc.), backed by FDIC insured bank accounts, still dominate.
So in August this year, the Trump family-owned World Liberty Financial purchased a publicly traded Canadian company, Alt5 Sigma, giving World Liberty Financial a public stock listing in the U.S., and giving them an existing platform where cryptocurrencies were already being used for online payments in ecommerce stores and gaming sites.
Fast forward to today as we near the end of 2025, and things are not going well for Trump’s new crypto financial system, or its investors.
This was published this week on The Information:
Trump Family Crypto Deal Runs Aground
Crypto firm that did a complicated deal with the Trumps warns it may face lawsuits and regulatory probes.
By Michael Roddan
Excerpts:
Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. rang the bell at Nasdaq’s New York headquarters in August to celebrate the announcement of a deal that could have netted the family a windfall of hundreds of millions of dollars.
The president’s oldest sons were combining their crypto startup, World Liberty Financial, with a publicly traded Canadian company, Alt5 Sigma.
“We’re going to change finance forever,” Eric Trump said at the ceremony.
Alongside the Trump brothers were about two dozen people cheering the market open in front of a sign with the two companies’ logos.
Missing from the scene were any representatives of Alt5 Sigma, even the CEO. A World Liberty spokesperson said:
“other members of the Alt5 team were unable to attend.”
Troubles with the combined company quickly surfaced.
Weeks later, Alt5 suspended its CEO pending the outcome of an investigation by a new outside law firm, and the company warned staff it would likely face litigation and regulatory investigations, according to a letter from the firm distributed to employees.
Several other senior executives have quit or have been fired.
In the three months since, Alt5 Sigma’s shares have fallen 75% and the value of the Trumps’ crypto currency, $WLFI, has fallen by nearly half. The company also disclosed that it had been convicted of money laundering in Rwanda.
Alt5 told its staff on Sept. 4, without providing an explanation, about the suspension of its CEO. It didn’t publicly disclose the suspension until it posted a securities filing on Oct. 22.
Alt5 Sigma investors are furious.
“I feel betrayed,”
said Matt Chipman, a Los Angeles–based shareholder in the company. He said he had been stonewalled in his efforts to find out why the deal happened and what the company’s plans are.
The arrangement gave World Liberty Financial a public stock listing. The Trump family was aiming to profit from investor enthusiasm for digital asset treasury stocks—publicly traded companies whose sole purpose is to buy and hold crypto coins.
Founded by Canadian entrepreneurs in 2018, Alt5 Sigma built a trading platform and payment system that allowed customers to buy and sell crypto and to use digital coins to buy goods from e-commerce websites or gaming platforms.
It processed roughly $1 billion worth of transactions in 2023, according to company records and people familiar with the figures.
As part of the deal, World Liberty co-founder Zach Witkoff—the son of President Donald Trump’s Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff—was appointed Alt5’s chair.
He said the deal would boost Alt5 Sigma’s original business by allowing it to issue cryptocurrencies that customers could use to make purchases.
But Alt5’s bet on the Trump cryptocurrency turned out to be awful.
The company’s stock is now more closely tied to the cryptocurrency than to its original business. Stocks that hold cryptocurrencies peaked in the summer and have tumbled since, with many falling by half or more.
Alt5 Sigma’s market capitalization has sunk from around $700 million before the deal to below $200 million.
Joining the Trump Orbit
Alt5 Sigma got its stock market listing last year through its merger with a biotech company, JanOne. The combined company named Canadian entrepreneur Peter Tassiopoulos as CEO.
Earlier this year, the Trumps’ World Liberty Financial was searching for a partner to help it issue crypto-enabled credit and debit cards.
Alt5 owned a subsidiary that could do just that. The two firms began discussing a possible project, former Alt5 employees said.
Those discussions didn’t pan out, but Tassiopoulos and the World Liberty team soon eyed a more adventurous opportunity: having Alt5 Sigma buy up the Trump’s cryptocurrency to join the burgeoning ranks of stocks that hold crypto. That led to the announcement at the Nasdaq.
World Liberty’s website says the Trump family owns 22.5 billion $WLFI tokens and is entitled to receive 75% of the proceeds from sales of the cryptocurrency. That implies the first part of the deal should have netted the Trumps roughly $550 million.
The second part, Alt5 Sigma’s purchase of tokens on the open market, could have boosted the value of $WLFI. The cryptocurrency was priced at 20 cents per token on completion of the deal.
Since then, however, the price has dropped as low as 11 cents, likely reducing the Trump family’s gains.
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