A shareholder of Circle, the fintech company behind the USDC stablecoin, has sued U.S. President Donald Trump, alleging that he unconstitutionally profited from cryptocurrency deals with the United Arab Emirates. The lawsuit was filed on Thursday by J. Benjamin Greenberg, a Circle shareholder and former employee.
The suit alleges that a member of the UAE ruling family agreed to pay half a billion dollars into the Trump-backed World Liberty Financial business, a decentralized finance project co-founded by the president and his sons. It also claims that an investment fund created by the Abu Dhabi government gave the president $2 billion through World Liberty Financial’s USD1 stablecoin product.
“The corruption at issue is not subtle, and it is not hidden,” the lawsuit states. “Since returning to office, President Donald J. Trump and his family have built a cryptocurrency business and invited foreign states to route money to him by paying into it. Foreign money has answered.”
The lawsuit further alleges that the president gave the Emirati leadership access to advanced artificial intelligence chips and pardoned a convicted felon in exchange for the crypto investment. It references a February Wall Street Journal article that reported the deal.
“Although the President has dressed his corrupt arrangements in the language of new technology — tokens and stablecoins, holding companies and reserve yields — that vocabulary must not obscure what this is: the oldest form of public corruption, a public official taking money from a foreign power,” the lawsuit adds.
President Trump, World Liberty, and U.S. Middle East Special Envoy Steve Witkoff are named as defendants. Trump stopped being involved in World Liberty Financial after taking office in 2025.
The lawsuit comes as U.S. regulators push ahead with pro-crypto rules despite lawmakers last month blocking landmark digital asset legislation, the Clarity Act, which President Trump backed. Some lawmakers did not support the draft legislation because they said the Trump family had illicitly cashed in on crypto ventures.
Trump and the White House have consistently denied any conflicts of interest. In August, ahead of the Clarity Act vote, the president said that Democrats criticizing his family’s crypto ventures had made money from stock trading.
