UFC fighters at the White House got paid with Trump family stablecoins—but an ethics expert says a gap in the law allows this

Trump’s Ultimate Fighting Championship Freedom 250 spectacle on the White House South Lawn resulted in record bonuses for the winners. The fighters, though, didn’t get paid in U.S. dollars, which would seem to be the obvious currency for such an event. Instead, the prize money came in the form of USD1, a type of synthetic dollar known as a stablecoin, that is run by the Trump family’s cryptocurrency business, World Liberty Financial.

This arrangement created an ethics scenario that would otherwise be illegal for most federal officials and could be treated as a crime, said Richard Painter, a former chief White House ethics lawyer in the George W. Bush administration.

“If a Treasury secretary had a financial interest in World Liberty........

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