Here's your Forbes Daily Briefing for Thursday, January 23rd.

Today on Forbes, Trump's crypto assets are nonsense.

The cash they throw off is very real.

Donald Trump released a digital meme on the Friday before his Monday inauguration,

sparking a trading frenzy that led to reports that he had instantly

added tens of billions of dollars to his fortune. Unfortunately, that is nonsense.

Those numbers are based on theoretical prices for crypto assets that Trump cannot sell right now,

which is why Forbes values them at zero, in keeping with our methodology of generally

excluding unsellable assets from net worth tallies.

The crypto that Trump has already offloaded, however, did bolster his fortune, adding

hundreds of millions of dollars in liquid assets to his balance sheet.

So how did that happen? Consider World Liberty

Financial, a crypto venture that, over the last few days, as of Wednesday, boosted the incoming

president's cash pile by an estimated $290 million. World Liberty Financial generates revenue by selling

tokens. Its so-called, quote, gold paper,

a Trumpified version of a white paper, explains that these tokens cannot currently be resold

and promise no share of future profits, offering little to people who like to make money on their

investments. The document indicates that the first $30 million of proceeds stay in the

project, which aims to speed up finance and bring crypto to the masses. After setting aside that

initial pile of cash, however, 75% apparently goes to Trump's company, and 25% gets split

between other insiders, including the family of Steve Whitkoff,

Trump's incoming special envoy to the Middle East.

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