According to The New York Times on August 9, a businessman named Guren "Bobby" Zhou is one of the largest buyers of WLFI, the governance token of Trump-affiliated company World Liberty Financial, with a total investment of $100 million. Guren "Bobby" Zhou is the CEO of Aqua 1, an entity under market maker Web3Port. A court record from last November accused Zhou of participating in money laundering activities with five others starting in 2019. He was arrested in the UK in 2021 on suspicion of money laundering but was not prosecuted. British officials said at the end of last month that the investigation is still ongoing. It is reported that Zhou led crypto market maker Web3Port after moving to the United Arab Emirates. Shortly after Trump took office in January 2025, Web3Port announced a $10 million investment in World Liberty Financial. The Web3Port entity registered in the British Virgin Islands was later renamed Aqua 1 GP Limited. Two weeks after the renaming, Aqua 1 announced the purchase of $100 million worth of World Liberty Financial's WLFI tokens. Blockchain analytics firm Arkham Intelligence previously tracked and found that a wallet controlled by Web3Port purchased $20 million worth of World Liberty Financial tokens in January 2025, and another wallet possibly controlled by Aqua 1 purchased an additional $80 million worth of World Liberty Financial tokens in June 2025. Previous reports also showed that to combat market manipulation, in March 2025 Binance froze accounts of multiple market makers including Web3Port and its subsidiary Whisper, confiscated approximately $38 million in illegal profits, and permanently banned them from market-making activities. The incident involved abnormal plunges in tokens of multiple projects such as GoPlus, MyShell, Movement, and Aethir.
All Comments