An Abu Dhabi royal group and the Trump family hold 87% of USD1's chartered custodian

Add the two disclosed stakes and you get 87%, which means the residual in WLTC Holdings is 13% or less, and that residual is where the shareholder associated with World Liberty co-founders Zak Folkman and Chase Herro sits, alongside whoever else the published record does not name ^[17][7]. Concentration at the holdco is the story, because the holdco is the sponsor of a de novo Florida trust company that would carry no FDIC insurance and would exist to issue, redeem and custody one token ^[5][4].

The figure 49 is doing double duty here. It appears at the bank holding company ^[1], and it appeared a level up in January 2025, when a Tahnoon-backed vehicle bought 49% of World Liberty Financial itself for about $500 million through Aryam Investment 1, signed by Eric Trump, four days before the inauguration ^[10][11]. Divide $500 million by 0.49 and the implied value of the whole token business at that moment was roughly $1.02 billion ^[18]. Trump later said he had no knowledge of that deal and that his sons handled the business ^[11].

What the OCC actually did about all this was paper: three shareholders, StringZ among them, signed commitments limiting their ability to influence management or control the bank, according to the Journal ^[7]. StringZ's commitment was signed by Hamad Khlfan Ali Matar Alshamsi, previously a director at G42 ^[8], the Abu Dhabi AI company chaired by Sheikh Tahnoon, who is also the UAE's national security adviser and brother of the UAE president ^[12], and to which Washington authorized exports of advanced AI chips in November 2025 ^[13]. Democratic senators had already asked for hearings on whether the earlier $500 million purchase influenced US policy toward the UAE ^[14]. Cointelegraph asked the Trump Organization for comment and got none ^[16].

Here is the gap in the record: neither report gives the price StringZ paid for its 49% of the holdco, nor a figure for USD1 outstanding, nor who books the income on reserves that the application says would sit in dollars at financial institutions, government money market funds and cash equivalents ^[20][6]. The OCC's own August 14 decision lists StringZ as an investor and stops there, identifying neither Tahnoon nor the size of the stake, which the Journal supplied 13 days later ^[9][19].

This is probably wrong, but the thing being assembled functions as a federal charter with resale value as much as a stablecoin: institutional custody and conversion services were in the January application ^[21], and a chartered non-FDIC custodian sells to clients regardless of what USD1 does. The counter-thesis is that nothing here operates yet, since final authorization is still pending and pre-opening conditions remain to be met ^[3], however confidently former OCC officials told NOTUS in June that approval was expected ^[15]. Until those conditions clear, the value of that 49% stake in a Florida trust company with no operations remains undisclosed, since no purchase price has been made public ^[20].