PALM BEACH, Fla. — Attending the World Liberty Financial forum at Mar-a-Lago felt less like a high-level summit and more like an intimate gathering, if the guest list included people who control trillions in assets and the future of finance.
Hidden beneath chandeliers and gold-painted moldings, the guest list read like a who’s who of the industry’s old guard and rising disruptors. No name tags needed. Everyone seemed to know everyone, or at least know someone who knew everyone.
Conversations floated from the future of finance to how they could fix what has been broken in the past: ambitious visions of tokenized assets, regulatory overhauls and reinvented capital markets. But just as easily, the conversation turned to the upcoming FIFA World Cup and pressed nails, courtesy of some unexpected names that probably had no business being there and yet somehow made it all seem even more surreal.
The event was not aimed at an exclusively American audience; Attendees came from various countries. Several attendees flew from Consensus Hong Kong last week directly to Palm Beach to attend the World Freedom Forum. One attendee said he had flown in Wednesday morning from ETHDenver, and several others said they would fly to the Colorado conference after the forum.
‘Punitive finances’
In any other context, the event would appear to be a typical crypto conference; Speakers with traditional financial backgrounds explain how they use blockchain or why they are discussing cryptocurrencies in a dimly lit room.
However, the backdrop emerged: this was a conference organized by World Liberty Financial, the cryptocurrency 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 Trump’s pardon, was seen 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 of a high standard; World Liberty Financial co-founder Alex Witkoff asked U.S. Senator Ashley Moody to explain her background to the audience, or Eric Trump and Donald Trump, Jr. reiterating their past grievances with banks.
“It was forced and maybe opportunistic, but we lived a life that opened our eyes to how corrupt the system… the banks were. [canceled our accounts] “We realized how outdated finance was, how punitive finance was,” Eric Trump said.
In the middle of these sessions, some speakers presented their arguments in favor of the digital asset sector. Franklin Templeton CEO Jenny Johnson explained the reason the U.S. dollar remains the global reserve currency, saying the European Union was too uncoordinated for the euro to take the dollar’s place and other currencies simply weren’t up to the task.
“About 50% of current trade is carried out in dollars, another 30% in euros, [but] There is no single European debt market. “They can’t even coordinate around the euro… so that won’t be the next reservation,” he said.
China’s renminbi and India’s rupee are contenders, but neither floats freely, so it’s unlikely either of those currencies could take on that role, he said.
“As long as people continue to look for their stablecoin to be backed by the most risk-free currency, it will be the dollar,” he said.
However, many of the panels only focused in passing on 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 present, and that’s when tokenization (putting assets on the blockchain) became a topic. Hotel billionaire Barry Sternlicht, whose Starwood Capital manages more than $125 million in assets under management, said the company was prepared to tokenize real-world assets such as real estate but remains unable to do so given uncertainty over regularity.
Similarly, Kevin O’Leary told listeners that sovereign wealth funds, with whom he speaks regularly, won’t touch cryptocurrencies because they fear the regulatory risk it brings in the US.
Glamor and celebrities
From O’Leary to Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon to FIFA president Gianni Infantino, if the day’s lineup were ranked by celebrity status, organizers would surely save the best for last, and probably the least relevant.
Nicki Minaj closed out the event as the final panelist, but the former had half the room pull out their phones to take a photo. Her presence may not make sense in the context of finance or cryptocurrencies specifically (when moderator Alex Bruesewitz informed her that people had gathered to talk about a new innovation in finance, she said “you might like it”), but given her recently developed close relationship with President Donald Trump, it wasn’t entirely surprising to see her supporting the family event.
The World Freedom Forum wasn’t just a conference, it was the kind of room where fortunes are made, not thrown, and where the side talks were as revealing as the main agenda.
