Donald Trump has made a lot of money this year, but no one really knows how much. It’s a mystery not because the president has a private business. Nor because he won’t share his tax returns. Nor even because gains in cryptocurrency can be difficult to track. The main reason no one knows what Trump is making is because of a single, secretive agreement that appeared around the time of the inauguration.

At some point, apparently the start of the year, Trump owned 70% of a company named DT Marks Defi LLC, which in turn owned 75% of the crypto project World Liberty Financial. The president’s financial disclosure report listed unnamed family members (presumably World Liberty cofounders Don Jr., Eric and Barron) as the owner of the remaining 30%. But a monitor overseeing the Trump Organization disclosed in a letter to a New York judge that her team learned in January that the first family was selling a stake in an unspecified company that seems all but certain to be DT Marks Defi. That deal presumably changed the ownership structure of DT Marks Defi—though exactly how remains unclear.

The agreement came with no public announcement. World Liberty’s website acknowledges that DT Marks Defi holds a stake in the project, but it doesn’t answer the key question—who exactly owns DT Marks Defi. Trump submitted his financial disclosure report in June, but it appears to offer a snapshot of his holdings as of January 1, omitting later developments. The Trump Organization shows no interest in revealing anything about the January agreement—what percentage the first family sold, who bought the stake, how much money was involved, even whether the deal closed.

One thing is clear: DT Marks Defi LLC is raking in money—more than almost any company in Trump’s empire. A smattering of investors—crypto newbies and kingpins among them—purchased an estimated $440 million of World Liberty tokens from January to March, and 75% of that haul, or roughly $330 million, went to DT Marks Defi. That was just the beginning.

In April, a firm named DWF Labs purchased another $25 million of tokens, routing an estimated $19 million to DT Marks Defi. A couple of weeks later, Eric Trump traveled with Zach Witkoff, the son of Trump’s ambassador-at-large Steve Witkoff, to a crypto conference in Dubai. On stage, the younger Witkoff revealed that World Liberty’s stablecoin, USD1, was set to receive a boost from an investment firm created by the president of the United Arab Emirates, which was going to use USD1 to make a $2 billion investment in a crypto exchange. That move essentially promised World Liberty a couple-billion-dollar deposit, which it could use to generate tens of millions in interest annually. Great news for the owners of DT Marks Defi LLC, whoever they are.

Forbes first unearthed the agreement to sell a stake in DT Marks Defi in June. A couple of weeks later, another UAE firm announced it had purchased $100 million of World Liberty coins, sending an estimated $75 million to DT Marks Defi. On June 30, Trump went after the Forbes reporter who broke the story. “Forbes doesn’t even try to get things right,” the president posted on Truth Social. “I haven’t spoken to these SleazeBags in years, they don’t want the facts, and they’re so inaccurate (purposely!) about everything. I would have thought Forbes would be DEAD by now, but it continues to hang around like a bad disease.”

Then, in August, the Trump family unveiled its largest token sale yet. They helped take over a small biotech company, which sold off a pile of shares, then used the proceeds to purchase more than $700 million of World Liberty tokens, with an estimated 75% of the funds flowing to DT Marks Defi. By that point, the company had taken in about $1 billion in 2025.

Reviewing the smattering of deals, Forbes and other outlets have estimated the size of the windfalls for members of the first family. But those calculations assume that the ownership breakdown of DT Marks Defi has remained constant since the start of the year, with the spree of dealmaking resulting in around $1 billion for the president and about $150 million for Don Jr., Eric and even 19-year-old Barron. The precise size of first family’s gains, however, depends on the details of the January agreement.

The unknowns surrounding the deal start with the most fundamental: How much did the Trumps sell, and at what price? The questions get more complicated from there: How did the parties involved in the deal calculate the value of a holding company that could collect hundreds of millions from a combination of self-dealing and presidential profiteering? Did an unknown buyer bet that he could invest low, at the start of Trump’s term, figuring that not even the president could fully grasp how much money he was about to make? Or did Trump expect the windfalls to come all along—and therefore demand a massive payout to offload part of his stake at the outset of his term?

Answers may not come until May 2026, when the president will file a new financial disclosure report. Even then, don’t expect full transparency—Trump has long boasted openly about his wealth while working to keep the details out of public view.