Perpetuals.com has halted talks to acquire the Trump family cryptocurrency firm’s payments company.
“Perpetuals has decided not to further pursue the acquisition of AI Financial Corporation’s subsidiary Alt5 Sigma Canada, Inc. and the earlier letter of intent has been terminated,” the company’s chief strategy officer Matthew Nicoletti said in a brief news release Tuesday (July 14).
The announcement comes one week after Perpetuals said it had signed a non-binding term sheet to explore the sale. One day later, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported that AI Financial was in discussions to sell its core business to Perpetuals, a blockchain technology company.
The price being discussed was for up to $15 million. President Donald Trump’s family’s crypto company last year purchased control of AI Financial, then known as Alt5 Sigma, for $750 million, the report said.
The WSJ characterized the planned sale as a reversal for a company that the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial had touted as key to its plans to become a serious industry player, using dollar-based stablecoins to establish an international payments business.
Instead, the report said, AI Financial has generated more than half a billion dollars for the Trumps, while investors have lost out.
World Liberty bought a majority stake in AI Financial last August with its own cryptocurrency. The payments company then raised another $750 million from investors to purchase more of World Liberty’s WLFI digital tokens.
However, the value of tokens has dipped by 70% since then, with investors seeing their shares in AI Financial plummet more than 90%, placing the company’s market value at $80 million,
Selling the company’s payments subsidiary would deprive AI Financial of its only revenue-generating business, which earned $25 million last year, the WSJ said.
In other digital assets news, PYMNTS wrote Tuesday about new legislation that bars the Federal Reserve from issuing or creating a central bank digital currency until the end of 2030.
The ban has been touted chiefly as a defense against government surveillance. That concern, the report said, is explicit in the legislation’s unusual exception for a dollar-denominated currency that is “open, permissionless, and private” and upholds the privacy protections of physical cash.
“But the more immediate economic effect may have less to do with Americans buying groceries and more to do with what happens when digital euros, digital yuan, tokenized central-bank reserves and privately issued dollar stablecoins begin encountering one another inside global payment systems,” PYMNTS wrote.