A "Herro" in Disguise - Trump Family's New Crypto Guru

Chase Herro has sold many things over his career, including "Colon cleanses" for weight reduction, the $149/month "get rich quick" course, and weed.

His résumé is expanding, and he is now the crypto expert for the Trump family.

Herro is the mastermind behind World Liberty Financial, the cryptocurrency venture that Donald Trump and his two eldest sons have been touting on social media for the past two weeks.

Another important player is Zachary Folkman, who has been Herro's business partner for a long time.

Although Eric Trump has stated that the business will encourage "financial independence" and Donald Trump Jr. has stated that it will "make finance great again," very little information about World Liberty has been made public.

In a video he broadcast on September 16, Trump announced, "We're embracing the future with crypto and leaving the slow and outdated big banks behind," referring to large banks.

However, people in the crypto world have yet to learn who the fast-talking 39-year-old Herro is, despite flaunting his private plane flights and expensive automobiles on social media.

Despite their interest in digital assets, over a dozen high-profile investors denied ever hearing of him in media interviews.

A severe hack crippled the one cryptocurrency project he was openly associated with, which only managed to attract a few million dollars.

His token's value plummeted 96 per cent following its promotion on a podcast by influencer Logan Paul. "Regulators should kick s---heads like me out," he stated in a 2018 speech in which he referred to himself as "the dirtbag of the internet."

In a 2018 YouTube video, Herro, while driving a Rolls-Royce, said, "You can literally sell s--- in a can, wrapped in piss, covered in human skin, for a billion dollars if the story's right, because people will buy it. I'm not going to question the right and wrong of all that."

Media reports show that real estate entrepreneur and long-time Trump supporter Steve Witkoff introduced Herro to the Trumps after Herro met one of Witkoff's kids.

Trump was rethinking his position on cryptocurrency when they met.

Despite his previous criticism of Bitcoin as a "scam against the dollar," Trump licensed his likeness for a deck of digital trading cards portraying a muscular Trump in late 2022.

Following the reported $25 million in donations to Trump's campaign from Bitcoin proponents in July, the president travelled to Nashville to deliver a speech at a Bitcoin conference.

During his speech, Trump pledged to reduce sector restrictions and establish a strategic national cryptocurrency stockpile, saying, "The United States will be the crypto capital of the planet."

Meanwhile, the Trump boys were starting to wonder about the business world.

"Make America Great Again, Again" was a relatively unknown symbol that Donald Trump Jr. attended at the Nashville conference; nevertheless, he said he was not associated with the initiative.

In June, ex-hedge fund manager and long-term prison inmate for securities fraud Martin Shkreli announced that he and Barron Trump had been discussing the possibility of launching a second Trump coin.

Shkreli chose not to voice his opinion.

Herro, whose online persona is "Chase Hero" with a single "r," looked like the more suitable collaborator.

He had ties to Dough Finance, a so-called decentralised finance technology that claimed to remove intermediaries from cryptocurrency lending and borrowing.

According to the two individuals associated with World Liberty, Herro is a crypto millionaire.

However, data source DefiLlama reports that Dough Finance only received $3.2 million in total activity, which is quite little compared to the crypto market.

It is dormant currently after being hacked for around $2 million in July.

Proponents of World Liberty argue that it can provide an alternative to Dough for lending and borrowing cryptocurrency.

According to Bloomberg News, the project's white paper states that users would be able to vote on the project's management using its own token, WLFI.

The remaining tokens will be sold to the general public to generate revenue, while around 70 per cent will be reserved for insiders.

Leo Mizuhara, creator of crypto asset management Hashnote, noted that the quantity of tokens flowing to insiders is "quite high" for a project that is intended to be decentralised in principle.

According to him, it is common practice for only some investors or organisation organisations to possess more than 20% of a project's entire token supply.

To the uninitiated, the World Liberty idea may sound novel, but in reality, there are many of these types of enterprises, and very few of them make it.

Robot Ventures, which collected $75 million in August to invest in new crypto ventures, was led by general partner Tarun Chitra, who stated that many of these initiatives have only been established to generate revenue through token sales.

Concerns about World Liberty extend beyond Herro's role.

The white paper names Barron Trump, an 18-year-old college student with no prior experience in the cryptocurrency industry, as the "chief DeFi visionary."

According to Herro's films, the advent of competition made the online advertising industry more difficult.

He and Folkman recently shifted their focus to cryptocurrency, where they ran a membership organisation called the Watchers. The organisation promised to reveal the ropes of online cryptocurrency trading and wealth creation.

Some people shelled out thousands of dollars for one-on-one instruction. Herro and Jordan Belfort, whose penny-stock frauds were the basis for the film The Wolf of Wall Street, also participated in other paid seminars together.

What is more interesting, though, is Trump's use of his campaign trail to promote his crypto business.

While it's not against the law to promote a private corporation like this while running for president, Project On Government Oversight president Danielle Brian argues that it creates a blatant conflict of interest and might cause Trump to advocate for policies that benefit his company.

The token's value may remain high regardless of the success or failure of the World Liberty initiative.

Elsewhere

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