u/greenascanbe

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency has granted World Liberty Trust Co., a business 38% owned by “an entity affiliated with Donald J. Trump and certain of his family members,” conditional approval to establish a national bank charter, marking the first time in U.S. history that a sitting president’s family company has been granted bank status. The Friday approval allows the Trump family’s crypto venture to directly issue its own stablecoin, a dollar-pegged digital currency, cutting out the third-party provider BitGo that World Liberty Financial had previously relied on. Because stablecoins tied to the dollar or other stable assets avoid the volatility of currencies like Bitcoin, they’re more attractive to large institutional clients for payments, money transmission, and storing value, according to the SEC, meaning the new charter opens the door to bigger clients and higher profits flowing directly to the Trump family’s business.

The financial stakes are already substantial. World Liberty Financial secured roughly $5 billion in value in its first days after going public, based on token pricing at the time, and Trump himself reported earning more than $1.4 billion in business revenue from his family’s crypto ventures on his financial disclosures. Abu Dhabi’s state-backed investment firm MGX invested an additional $2 billion in the company in May 2025, pledging to use the family’s USD1 stablecoin in large transactions with crypto exchange Binance, a deal that drew scrutiny after the Trump administration subsequently agreed to supply the UAE with advanced American AI chips despite prior concerns from earlier administrations that such technology could reach China. World Liberty Financial co-founder Zach Witkoff, son of Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, called the MGX deal “only the beginning” at a Dubai crypto convention alongside Eric Trump.

Democratic lawmakers are raising alarms over the arrangement. Senate Banking Committee Ranking Member Elizabeth Warren wrote to the Comptroller in January urging a halt to approval of Trump-linked ventures, and after the preliminary approval, called it “the most brazen act of self-dealing our financial system has ever seen,” writing, “for the first time in history, the president of the United States would be in charge of overseeing his own financial company.” She announced plans to introduce legislation “to stop this kind of unprecedented corruption.” The White House disputes any conflict exists. Spokeswoman Anna Kelly said Trump’s assets are held in a trust “managed by his children,” calling it a blind trust and stating, “there are no conflicts of interest,” though a true blind trust typically requires an independent, non-family trustee. The OCC defended its process, stating, “the Comptroller and staff acted consistently with their statutory duties and ethical obligations with respect to the Application,” and noted the charter won’t be fully finalized until the company meets additional conditions, including raising more capital.

Flock Safety CEO Garrett Langley is in full damage-control mode after his mass surveillance company, which operates 120,000 license plate reading cameras across 49 states and partners with 6,000 law enforcement agencies and 1,000 private customers, became the target of a growing nationwide backlash. Langley told Bloomberg “we’re not Big Brother” and insisted the company is “focused on protecting people,” even as at least 54 U.S. cities have voted to cancel, non-renew, or reject Flock’s automatic license plate readers since the start of the year. The pushback comes amid mounting reports of the technology’s misuse, including false arrests, a case of a crooked cop stalking innocent women, and a recent 404 Media report that Flock had been planning to infiltrate Uber and Lyft drivers’ dash cams to scan nearby vehicles’ plates at massive scale. The backlash has grown intense enough that people are being celebrated online for physically cutting down Flock’s surveillance towers.

In response to the scrutiny, Flock announced platform changes including a new audit tool requiring law enforcement customers to flag abnormal behavior, and a reduction in footage retention from 30 days down to seven. Civil liberties groups remain unconvinced. The American Civil Liberties Union called the moves a “step in the right direction” but dismissed other changes as “merely retreads of previous inadequate safety measures,” while Institute for Justice senior attorney Robert Frommer told the Associated Press, “this is window dressing that doesn’t address the fundamental problem, which is that police officers are the ones deciding who and when to search, and that should be done by judges with real warrants.” Despite the crisis, Flock’s business is thriving, with annual revenue climbing from $300 million in January to $500 million by June, according to Langley’s comments to Bloomberg, and the company is now pushing to expand into drones, surveillance trailers, and gunshot-detecting hardware.

The technology’s core function also remains deeply flawed. A Roseville, California police department investigation found the cameras mistook one license plate for another 71% of the time between 2023 and 2024. That failure rate isn’t abstract: The Drive’s director of content Joel Feder was wrongly flagged over “stolen” plates after Flock’s camera network misregistered his license plate number, leading police to ambush and box in his vehicle, accusing him of being unable to afford the “six-figure luxury SUV” he was driving. Flock directly referenced Feder’s case in its own announcement this week, stating, “the central point is simple, an alert is a lead, not a conclusion, which should be confirmed by an officer.”