WLFI ผู้สนับสนุนรายใหญ่ที่สุดกลับเป็น "ลูกหนี้หนีหนี้" จริงหรือ?

Original author: Nicky, Foresight News

According to Caixin's report on August 26, Aqua 1 Foundation, an UAE investment institution, previously spent $100 million to purchase WLFI tokens issued by Trump family's crypto project World Liberty Financial, surpassing Justin Sun's cumulative investment of $75 million to become the project's largest buyer.

For a considerable period of time, the identity of Aqua 1's actual controller remained a mystery, but recently the person behind it has gradually come to light: a Chinese national born in Shanghai in 1984, whose real name is Zhou Guren, is the biggest financier behind this transaction.

Caixin's report also noted that Zhou Guren has been listed as a dishonest person subject to enforcement on China's information disclosure platform for court judgments, involving six cases with total debts of approximately 25 million yuan. Additionally, a recent indictment provided by the UK's Crown Prosecution Service shows that he is also implicated in a money laundering case that occurred in the UK. Furthermore, according to multiple sources including Caixin and The New York Times, he has connections with the controversial crypto institution Web3Port.

Zhou Guren met with Welsh officials including Economy Minister Ken Skates in Shanghai in 2017. Source: Welsh Government.

According to an investigative report published by The New York Times on August 9, Zhou Guren studied in the UK in his early years and built his career by expanding his family's wooden flooring business to Europe. He founded Flooring Republic, a flooring retail chain with over 20 stores, which ended in liquidation in 2018. He subsequently moved into the cryptocurrency sector, founding the Caduceus Protocol project, and in 2022 publicly claimed to have received support from China Merchants Securities (UK) and Bin Zayed Group — both institutions later clarified that these statements were unauthorized and false. Around the summer of 2024, Zhou Guren moved from London to Abu Dhabi, after which his affiliated entities began to appear frequently in WLFI's transaction chain.

Regarding the financial flows between Zhou Guren and WLFI, according to The New York Times' investigation, blockchain analytics firm Arkham Intelligence tracked two wallet addresses: one wallet controlled by Web3Port purchased $20 million worth of WLFI in January 2025, and another wallet labeled "aqua1" purchased $80 million in June of the same year. This on-chain trail aligns with the timeline mentioned in Caixin's report: on January 27, 2025, just one week after Trump returned to the White House, Web3Port immediately purchased the first batch of WLFI worth $20 million; about a month later, a British Virgin Islands company associated with Web3Port initiated a name change, replacing "Web3Port" with "Aqua 1".

Aqua 1 issued a statement in July 2025 denying any equity, financial, or operational connections with any unrelated entities.

According to information previously disclosed by crypto blogger "CLabs Founder Da Piao Liang," Reuters reporters verified Aqua 1's registration information with Abu Dhabi Global Market, the Dubai International Financial Centre, Dubai's crypto regulator VARA, and the UAE Securities and Commodities Authority, and received responses that no such institution or relevant personnel could be found. The blogger also claimed that Aqua 1's official website shares the same AWS server as web3port.foundation and web3port.us.

Public records show that Web3Port's predecessor was ICPort, registered in the British Virgin Islands, positioning itself externally as a Web3 accelerator and investment platform. It completed approximately $1 million in seed funding around 2022, with investors including SNZ Holding, HashKey Capital, FBG Capital, and KuCoin Ventures. Its business scope covers project packaging, tokenomics design, fundraising facilitation, exchange listing negotiations, and "recommended market makers."

According to materials obtained by The New York Times, Web3Port-related entities underwent name changes around the time of market-making investigations, and the new Aqua 1 GP Limited subsequently became the main entity for WLFI investment. This temporal overlap makes it difficult to dispel external doubts about whether there is a substantive continuity between Web3Port and Aqua 1.

Prior to this, another public chapter in Zhou Guren's crypto career was Caduceus, a modular protocol positioned as metaverse and AI infrastructure. In March 2022, Caduceus announced the completion of a $4 million Series A funding round, with investments from institutions including Susquehanna International Group, BlockFills, Qredo, and TokenInsight.

According to CoinMarketCap data, its official CAD token began trading on the secondary market in July 2024, briefly reaching approximately $0.6 that month. The price has since continued to decline and currently stands at $0.00032, with a market capitalization of only about $32,000 and a 24-hour trading volume of approximately $1,720, with only limited trading on Gate exchange.

The failure of Caduceus and its relationship with Web3Port form two intertwined threads in Zhou Guren's crypto career. Together, they point to one unresolved core question: how did a person with tens of millions of yuan in unpaid debts in China and under a money laundering investigation in the UK become WLFI's largest single investor?

For WLFI, the compliance of these funds has always been a focal point of external scrutiny. According to The New York Times, citing Patrick Prinz, COO of Swiss digital asset crime investigation firm Recoveris, Zhou Guren's history of business failures, sudden appearance of substantial wealth, transaction scale, and ongoing money laundering investigation should collectively trigger source-of-funds review requirements under anti-money laundering regulations. A WLFI spokesperson responded that the company complies with all applicable laws and regulations but declined to say whether it was aware of the specific source of these funds.

Private interactions between Zhou Guren and the WLFI team have also left public traces. According to The New York Times, in July 2026, Zhou Guren was photographed alongside World Liberty co-founder Zach Witkoff in a private box at the World Cup final in New Jersey, USA — approximately one year after Aqua 1 announced its $100 million investment.