Trump family Alt5 Sigma crypto venture left investors with steep losses

Back in August, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. were all smiles. They showed up at the Nasdaq stock exchange in New York to celebrate a new business partnership with a little-known publicly traded company, then called Alt5 Sigma, to give investors easier access to a cryptocurrency backed by the Trump family.

Less than 10 months later, the company has warned investors it may not be able to stay in business much longer. Its share price has fallen more than 90%, and a rebranding hasn’t revived investor interest. If the company, now called AI Financial Corp., can’t sustainably raise its share price out of penny-stock levels in the next 15 trading days, it faces the prospect of being delisted by the Nasdaq.

One of the few parties who benefited from the Alt5 Sigma transaction is the Trump family. As part of the August deal, Alt5 acquired $1.5 billion worth of crypto tokens from World Liberty Financial, the crypto company co-founded by Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., among others, in 2024. The president and undisclosed members of his family were entitled to roughly $500 million in proceeds from the crypto sale, according to disclosures by World Liberty Financial.

Alt5 closed at $8.97 on Aug. 8, the last trading day before the World Liberty deal was announced. Since then, AI Financial‘s stock — originally trading under the ticker ALTS, now AIFC — fell to 66 cents a share at the June 8 close, a 93% loss, according to FactSet data.

Attorneys for Democracy Defenders Fund told the Securities and Exchange Commission in an April letter that the regulator needs to “commence an independent investigation into ALTS without delay.” The nonpartisan group has sharply criticized the Trump administration over allegations of ethics issues. They didn’t receive a response to their letter. “The question now is: What happened to all that money?” Virginia Canter, chief anti-corruption counsel for the group, said in an interview.

The SEC declined to comment on whether it has looked at AI Financial since its involvement with the Trumps.

AI Financial has become a cautionary tale for investors who saw a Trump-linked deal as a natural winner in a Trump presidency. The company is on its third CEO and third outside auditor since Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. celebrated the World Liberty partnership at the Nasdaq in August. In January, it turned to World Liberty for a loan, then used some of the proceeds to try to lift its own share price. The effort failed. What looked to some like a public-market entry point into the Trump family’s expanding business empire has instead left investors with steep losses.

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