Behind the Trump Crypto Project Is a Self-Described ‘Dirtbag of the Internet’

reader · September 13

No way you can make this stuff up.

From Bloomberg / MSN

Bloomberg) -- Chase Herro has sold a lot of things in his career. Weed. Weight-loss “colon cleanses.” A $149-a-month get-rich-quick class. Now he’s adding another line to his resume: the Trump family’s crypto guru.

Herro is the dealmaker behind World Liberty Financial, the crypto project that Donald Trump and his two older sons have been promoting on social media in recent weeks, according to two people involved with the project. Herro's long-time business partner Zachary Folkman is also playing a key role. While few details about World Liberty have been released, Eric Trump said that the startup will promote “financial independence” and Donald Trump Jr. said it will “make finance great again.” Former President Trump himself posted a video saying he'd announce the details on Sept. 16. “We’re embracing the future with crypto and leaving the slow and outdated big banks behind,” Trump said.

Yet Herro, a fast-talking 39-year-old who shows off his fancy cars and private-jet rides on social media, is an unknown in the crypto world. More than a dozen prominent digital-asset investors said in interviews they had never heard of him. The only crypto project with which he was publicly affiliated attracted only a few million dollars and suffered a devastating hack. A token he promoted on influencer Logan Paul’s podcast dropped 96% afterward. In one speech in 2018, he called himself “the dirtbag of the internet” and said that regulators should “kick s---heads like me out.”

“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,” Herro said about crypto in a 2018 YouTube video recorded as he drove in a Rolls-Royce. “I'm not going to question the right and wrong of all that.”

Bloomberg News sent detailed questions to a World Liberty email address. “We all see the picture you're trying to paint here and consider it at best grossly inaccurate,” a man named Jim Redner replied. “We're confident that our results will speak for themselves.” Redner said he was not a spokesperson for the company and was "just answering emails.” Herro, Folkman and the Trump presidential campaign didn’t respond to messages seeking comment.

Herro was introduced to the Trumps by Steve Witkoff, a real-estate developer and longtime supporter of the former president, after first meeting one of Witkoff’s sons, according to one of the people involved with the project.

When they met, Trump was reconsidering his stance on crypto. He’d once called Bitcoin a “scam against the dollar,” but in late 2022 he licensed his image for a series of nonfungible tokens – essentially, digital trading cards – featuring cartoon images of a muscular Trump. Then in July, after Bitcoin advocates raised what they said was $25 million for his campaign, Trump flew to Nashville to speak at a Bitcoin conference, where he promised to loosen regulations on the industry and create a strategic national stockpile of the cryptocurrency.

“The United States will be the crypto capital of the planet,” Trump said in the speech.

At the same time, Trump’s sons were getting curious about the industry. At the Nashville conference, Donald Trump Jr. appeared at an event sponsored by a little-known token called “Make America Great Again, Again,” though he said he had no affiliation with the project. And in June, Martin Shkreli, the former hedge-fund manager who served years in prison for securities fraud, said that he’d been talking with Barron Trump about starting another Trump cryptocurrency. Shkreli declined to comment.

Herro is described in the white paper as the person responsible for “data & strategies.” His friend Folkman is listed as “operations lead.” Folkman used to run a service called Date Hotter Girls where he taught seminars about how to pick up women. “OK, how many guys came here to learn how to take girls home and bang them?” Folkman said in a speech in 2014. The trademark for World Liberty is registered to a company using the same address in Puerto Rico as another company run by Herro and Folkman.

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