Andrei Grachev, an early booster of a Trump crypto offering, has cycled through several alleged investment scams and was convicted on fraud charges in Russia.
World Liberty Financial’s website touts WLF1, its Trump-sanctioned “governance token.”
(Gabby Jones / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Last year, President Donald Trump and his sons teamed with the crypto investment firm World Liberty Financial (WLF) to promote a Trump-approved token. The sale started with a trickle, but after prominent crypto figures like Tron founder Justin Sun poured in $75 million, a stampede ensued among crypto backers keen to exploit even a passing connection to the American president, via his crypto brand. Under WLF’s guidance, the Trumps have taken in hundreds of millions of dollars—perhaps much more—from token purchases, fees, and supposed investments, some of it from unknown sources overseas. With WLF counting Trump diplomatic envoy Steve Witkoff and two of Witkoff’s sons as cofounders, the company has the potential to be the chief business arm—or the bribery vehicle—of the second Trump administration.
One of the participants in this speculative gold rush was Andrei Grachev, the Uzbek-born, United Arab Emirate– and Switzerland-based, 37-year-old managing partner of DWF Labs. Grachev’s company is a prominent crypto market–making and investment firm with a murky history, and Grachev directed the company to buy $25 million worth of $WLFI, WLF’s prized “governance token.” The token is supposed to allow holders to vote on changes to the WLF platform, but they cannot sell or move their tokens elsewhere. It’s essentially a donation, and Grachev seemed proud to make it, touting his association with the crypto company where President Trump is listed as “chief crypto advocate.”
On April 16, 2025, the Abu Dhabi–based DWF Labs announced that it would be opening an office in New York City, and that it had acquired $25 million in $WLFI tokens. (Twelve days earlier, an eagle-eyed blockchain sleuth saw that DWF had transferred $25 million worth of USDC stablecoin tokens to World Liberty Financial, indicating that the transaction had already taken place.) DWF also said that it would be providing liquidity for USD1, Trump’s new stablecoin project, which has already been tied to a $2 billion deal involving a UAE investment fund and the world’s largest crypto exchange, Binance, whose former CEO Changpeng Zhao is currently seeking a pardon after spending four months in federal prison for violating US money-laundering laws.
“With World Liberty Financial, it has different noises around, different rumors around, but look, it’s still the only coin that has President Trump’s family behind it,” Grachev told the influencer Mario Nawfal in an interview. “It cannot be a scam, right? And we have to invest.”
DFW first appeared on the scene in 2022, amid the collapse of multibillion-dollar frauds like Terraform Labs, Celsius, and FTX. That timing struck some industry watchers as sketchy—and Grachev’s own finance background invited additional scrutiny. Nevertheless, the company launched with a bang, announcing that it was trading hundreds of pairs of tokens across dozens of exchanges, with offices in Singapore, Switzerland, Dubai, Hong Kong, and China. The source of the money powering all this trading activity was unclear.
Grachev, for his part, was already a controversial presence on the Russian crypto scene. In 2018, he was made the CEO of the Russian branch of the Huobi crypto exchange. Before that, he had been accused of being involved in assorted crypto and investment scams. As CEO of Huobi, he said he was working to list OneCoin, a $4 billion international Ponzi scheme that collapsed and sent one of its creators to US federal prison for 20 years.
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Grachev’s temperament seemingly hadn’t evolved since he took the helm of DWF Labs. As The Wall Street Journal reported last year, investigators at Binance found that DWF was less a market-maker—buying and selling tokens to provide liquidity for traders—than a potential market manipulator, artificially inflating the volume of some tokens in order to drive up their price. Instead of cracking down on DWF, Binance fired some of its in-house investigative team. The Block, a crypto trade publication, similarly reported that DWF Labs offered token issuers “price management” services, including “artificial volume.”
It turns out that Grachev’s criminal history is more extensive than previously known, according to a review of public records, leaked Russian government documents, and Russian and English-language social media postings. Grachev also has some notable ties to Russian state banks—and one of his colleagues may have accumulated a collection of luxury assets on Grachev’s behalf. Well before he was investing millions in the U.S. president’s crypto ventures, Andrei Grachev was a confessed fraudster turned crypto hustler.
In April 2015, a Moscow criminal court charged Grachev and an accomplice with fraud. He and a colleague were accused of creating a fake logistics and shipping firm, recruiting unwitting drivers, and using them to steal cargo, including a multimillion-ruble shipment of canned food. The pair admitted their guilt. Grachev received a suspended three-year prison sentence, five years of probation, and a fine of 450,000 rubles. “Taking into account the social danger of the crime committed, the court considers it necessary to establish a long probationary period for the defendants, during which they must prove to society their rehabilitation,” wrote the judge, according to a machine-translated sentencing document.
While on probation, Grachev was accused of participating in three crypto scams, including two in which he allegedly absconded with investors’ funds.
By 2017, Grachev was trading cryptocurrencies and started a company called Crypsis Blockchain Holding, whose majority shareholder was a Russian woman named Olga Dementieva. A pitch deck found on a Russian business website promised fantastical returns of 2,000 percent.
In what became a pattern, Grachev developed crypto businesses, solicited investors, made sensationalist social media posts, and promised ICOs, or Initial Coin Offerings—only for almost nothing to happen. They had names like Shoptimizer, B2B United Trade, and Export.Online and left behind a trail of dead websites, cheated investors, and failed-to-launch crypto tokens.
In 2019 a Russian-language crypto media outlet reported that members of a St. Petersburg–based investment club had accused Grachev of stealing 10 million rubles that were supposed to go toward Export.Online’s ICO. In addition, the members of the club lost 8 million rubles in another investment initiative that Grachev had promised would generate an annual 120 to 400 percent return. According to a member of the investment club, Grachev took their money, “went into hiding and did not answer the phone.”
Another Russian crypto executive said that Grachev borrowed $10,000 from him and never repaid it. He publicly denounced Grachev on Facebook, writing, “I hope that maybe this post will save someone from trusting you.”
Despite the trail of controversy, Grachev rose higher in Russia’s crypto industry. In May 2018, he became vice president of trading at RACIB, a nonprofit crypto industry group created by German Klimenko, a tech entrepreneur who at the time was an adviser to Russian President Vladimir Putin. RACIB supported government crypto initiatives, and its board included executives from state companies.
In September 2018, Grachev was named CEO of the Russian branch of Huobi, a Singapore-based crypto exchange that would later be renamed HTX—and whose global adviser is Justin Sun, a top investor in Trump’s crypto projects whose SEC fraud case was paused earlier this year. Under Grachev, Huobi Russia formed a partnership with VEB bank, a state-connected firm that employed Vladimir Demin, who also sat on the board of RACIB. While at Huobi, Grachev connected with a Swiss high-frequency trading trading firm called Digital Wave Finance. The Swiss company began trading tens of millions of dollars worth of crypto on Huobi Russia each day, providing some much-needed liquidity for the exchange. Grachev would eventually leave Huobi to trade on behalf of Digital Wave Finance under the “artificial brand” of VRM Trade, as he described it. Grachev founded VRM Trade with Demin and enlisted Ilya Rynenkov, who worked for VTB, a state-owned Russian bank.
Digital Wave Finance spawned a number of companies in various jurisdictions, including the UAE-based DWF Labs, where Grachev became managing partner. In other words, when DWF Labs seemed to burst out of nowhere onto the crypto scene in fall 2022, it was actually the latest project from veteran crypto boosters—in this case, traders Marco and Remo Schweizer and Michael Rendchen. The Schweizer brothers each owned 27 percent of DWF Labs, as did Grachev. With an emphasis on tapping less-regulated Asian markets, DWF Labs poured money into hundreds of crypto projects, both major and obscure. When Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX collapsed in November 2022, Digital Wave Finance was listed among the company’s creditors, having purchased some shares in a 2021 offering.
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As DWF Labs grew, it attracted rumors on social media and criticism from peers. Grachev “had absolutely no business to be on that panel,” wrote Cristian Gil, the chairman of crypto firm GSR, after Grachev, in his DFW affiliation, appeared at a conference alongside other prominent market makers. “It’s very sad that in late 2023 bad actors like @DWFLabs can still get so much airtime.” (Gil and GSR didn’t respond to requests for comment.)
Such skepticism didn’t stop DWF Labs’ rise. In 2023, the company formed a partnership with Justin Sun’s TRON, a prelude to the companies later collaborating on Trump’s stablecoin. Appearing at conferences with Sun and other crypto bigwigs, posting photos of himself in Dubai with Eric Trump, Grachev shows every sign of joining crypto’s ruling inner circle. In March, DWF Labs announced a $250 million investment fund “aimed at accelerating the adoption and expansion of mid and large-cap crypto projects.” Three weeks later, it made its $25 million $WLFI purchase.
Based on his public appearances and social media postings, Grachev seems to spend a lot of time in Switzerland and the UAE, but he also has some prominent links to his old life in Russia. His former associate Olga Dementieva, the majority owner of Grachev’s Crypsis venture, has acquired five luxury cars and an apartment in a Moscow high-rise building—all in the last four years, according to Russian vehicle and real estate records. Grachev, who is heavily tattooed with a scraggly beard, has posted photos of DWF-branded sports cars. He has also posted references to the Marvel superhero movie Deadpool—such as photos of Deadpool-themed boxing gloves and a picture of Deadpool forming his hands into a heart around the DWF Labs logo. According to a database of photos of Russian vehicles, Dementieva’s 2021 Porsche Panamera GTS features a full-body Deadpool vinyl wrap, including the character’s face and two guns on the hood.
Some Democratic members of Congress and watchdog groups have taken notice of Trump’s crypto dealings. In April, the group Accountable.US, citing a report in Rolling Stone, sent a letter to members of Congress asking for an investigation into the $25 million deal between World Liberty Financial and DWF Labs. The next month, Connecticut Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal sent a letter to WLF cofounder Zach Witkoff regarding a “preliminary inquiry into potential conflicts of interest and violations of the law from President Trump’s cryptocurrency ventures.” Blumenthal cited concerns about WLF’s dealings with foreign companies including DWF Labs. “DWF Lab’s management previously managed Russian firms accused of enabling Russian banks to bypass sanctions, in addition to having other ties to Russian banks,” wrote Blumenthal. (A member of Blumenthal’s comms staff didn’t respond to a request for comment.)
Andrei Grachev did not respond to requests for comment sent through X and LinkedIn.
Asked about what Democrats are doing to investigate Trump’s dealings with DWF Labs and other firms, Illinois Representative Sean Casten, who sits on the House Financial Services Committee, said in a statement: “President Trump’s cryptocurrency business ventures are incredibly alarming and raise countless legal questions.… A DOJ that isn’t blindly loyal to the president would immediately launch an investigation into the president’s crypto dealings. I’m profoundly disappointed that the DOJ has refused to respond to my demand, alongside 36 members of Congress, that they do so. It should not be partisan to believe that the president should not accept millions upon millions of dollars from foreign actors whose true identities largely remain anonymous.”
Outraged demands from elected Democrats will have minimal impact on the new regulatory playing field for the crypto industry. Trump and the GOP-led Congress have dismantled the prior restraints on crypto-related offenses—and the investigative teams charged with enforcing them—to say nothing of presidential malfeasance and broader issues of crypto-enabled corruption. If any crime has been committed in connection with the DFW and WLF deal, it may not matter.
According to a recent court filing, Trump intended to sell some portion of DT Marks DEFI LLC, the vehicle that held his ownership share of World Liberty Financial. It’s not clear if Trump actually made that deal—and if so, who the buyer was.
For Grachev and DWF Labs, however, there can be no doubt that the $25 million they handed over to the president’s crypto firm for noncirculating $WLFI tokens was money well spent. “I do believe it was a great investment deal we made,” Grachev told Nawfal, “while others are waiting.”
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