UAE’s Aqua 1 Invests $100M in Trump-Backed WLFI to Reshape Global Finance

Aqua 1, a Web3-native investment fund headquartered in the UAE, has announced a $100 million acquisition of governance tokens from World Liberty Financial (WLFI). The investment is intended not just as a financial stake, but as a governance commitment aimed at building a new era of blockchain-driven financial ecosystems.

WLFI, a decentralized finance protocol backed by U.S. President Donald Trump and his family, is focused on launching its fully backed stablecoin USD1, while exploring broader DeFi initiatives. Aqua 1’s $100 million investment marks a major institutional commitment, with both parties aiming to integrate traditional financial systems with blockchain-based infrastructure.

“Aligning with Aqua 1 validates our blueprint for global financial innovation,” said Zak Folkman, Co-Founder of WLFI. “We have a joint mission to bring digital assets to the masses and strengthen our nation’s standing as a leader of cryptocurrency and blockchain technology.”

The partnership between Aqua 1 and WLFI is framed as a defining moment in the migration of traditional financial frameworks to decentralized networks. The collaboration centers on expanding the adoption of tokenized real-world assets and building a compliant, scalable, and secure platform that offers institutional-grade access to these markets.

At the heart of WLFI’s offering is USD1, a U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoin designed for commercial and institutional use. Fully backed by short-term U.S. Treasuries, U.S. dollar deposits, and cash equivalents, USD1 is issued by World Liberty Financial and custodied by BitGo, a South Dakota-chartered trust company and federally registered money services business. Aqua 1’s $100 million investment in WLFI underscores institutional confidence in the platform, potentially aiding in the broader adoption of USD1.

“WLFI’s USD1 ecosystem and RWA pipeline embody the trillion-dollar structural pivot opportunity we seek to catalyze,” said Dave Lee, Founding Partner of Aqua 1. “Where architects merge traditional capital markets with decentralized primitives to redefine global financial infrastructure.”

Although WLFI is U.S.-anchored in regulatory and political terms, the partnership’s ambitions are unmistakably global. Aqua 1 will deploy its investment and compliance teams across key regions, including South America, Europe, Asia, and other emerging markets to accelerate WLFI’s footprint and ecosystem adoption.

This will include supporting the launch of the Aqua Fund, a UAE-domiciled vehicle that aims to lead digital economic transformation in the Middle East. Developed in collaboration with local stakeholders, the Aqua Fund will channel investments into blockchain infrastructure, artificial intelligence, and foundational Web3 services. The fund also plans to list on a secondary trading platform within the Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM), giving investors access to regulated, secondary market liquidity.

The partnership signals not just capital injection, but cross-border cooperation between financial innovation hubs, with the UAE emerging as a key strategic base for future-facing digital asset ventures.

A notable element of the joint roadmap is the creation of BlockRock, a next-generation platform designed for institutional RWA tokenization. The platform is being incubated to enable premium traditional assets, such as real estate, commodities, and government bonds, to be digitized, fractionalized, and made tradable on-chain.

BlockRock is expected to leverage the technological and compliance frameworks of both Aqua 1 and WLFI to meet the growing demand for regulated, high-liquidity tokenized products. The goal is to democratize access to financial instruments that have historically been restricted to large institutions or high-net-worth investors.

The initiative supports a broader vision: building a decentralized yet institutionally trusted infrastructure for global finance, one where capital, data, and ownership can move seamlessly across jurisdictions and platforms.

Based in the UAE, Aqua 1 is a Web3-focused fund that balances primary market investments with active secondary asset management. It seeks early-stage blockchain projects with strong infrastructure and protocol use cases, while also offering stable returns to its investors through strategic token and equity positions. Beyond financial backing, Aqua 1 describes itself as an “ecosystem co-builder,” working closely with project founders to scale innovation and adoption.

This $100 million alignment may represent more than just a financial deal. It could be a marker of a new paradigm in which institutions, regardless of geography or political legacy, recognize the potential of DeFi to reshape how financial systems operate.

By tying together U.S.-based token compliance, UAE-based capital innovation, and a stablecoin backed by sovereign debt, Aqua 1 and WLFI are laying the groundwork for what could become one of the first truly global DeFi ecosystems, one that doesn’t just parallel traditional finance, but increasingly intersects with it.