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A US-listed crypto venture backed by the Trump family has an auditor whose licence to practise lapsed earlier this year, as it wrestles with a crisis after failing to produce financial results.
Alt5 Sigma, a Las Vegas-based recycling business-turned-biotech-turned blockchain company, in August signed a deal to buy crypto tokens issued by the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial, with Eric Trump joining as a board observer.
But the company’s financial position has become murky since the deal was announced after it failed to produce quarterly results on time and switched auditors this month to a firm that has been fined by accounting regulators and failed an inspection under the industry’s peer review process.
The licence of the newly appointed firm, Victor Mokuolu CPA PLLC, expired in August, according to filings in its home state of Texas. It is therefore currently barred from doing audit work until the licence is renewed, under state regulations.
Victor Mokuolu, the firm’s founder, renewed his personal certified public accountant’s licence on August 31 but his firm’s licence had not been renewed as of December 26, the board’s records show.
Alt5 Sigma said in a statement to the Financial Times that its auditor was “undergoing a peer review per Texas State Board of Accountancy regulations and will be completed by the end of January 2026, at which point the auditor expects the firm’s licence to be active”.
“No reviews or audits of Alt5’s financial statements will be issued by our auditor until the firm’s licence is active,” it added.
Messages seeking comment from Mokuolu were not returned.
Mokuolu was an accountant in the oil and gas industry before setting up his own firm in 2020, according to his LinkedIn profile. His firm listed 30 small-cap audit clients in a recent regulatory filing.
The firm has been working for more than two years to remediate deficiencies which resulted in it getting a failing grade under the accounting profession’s peer review process in 2023.
The failure to renew its licence this year comes after the Texas State Board of Public Accountancy and another US regulator earlier took action against the firm for repeatedly failing to file regulatory paperwork on time.
The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board in 2023 fined the firm $30,000 for failing to inform the regulator of six public companies’ audits it had conducted the previous year, as it is supposed to do within 35 days of the audit being completed. The Texas board issued an additional $15,000 penalty last year for the same violations.
Alt5 Sigma’s appointment of Victor Mokuolu CPA PLLC on December 8 came amid a period of turmoil for the company, which now calls itself “a fintech with a pioneering $WLFI digital asset treasury strategy”.
The August Trump deal committed the company to buying and holding large quantities of World Liberty Financial’s $WLFI token, and the Trump venture became an investor in Alt5 Sigma.
Jonathan Hugh, the chief financial officer brought in at the time of the Trump deal, left the company after just three months, and Alt5 also parted ways with chief executive Peter Tassiopoulos in October.
Board member David Danziger resigned last month, putting the company in violation of a requirement to have an audit committee of a certain size and with accounting experience.
The company is now under threat of delisting from Nasdaq after failing to file its quarterly results for the period to late September. It blamed the delay in part on the “timeliness and responsiveness” of its previous auditor, who formally quit in November.
Alt5 Sigma was incorporated in July 2024 by a biotech company called JanOne Inc, which had previously focused on developing “innovative solutions for ending the opioid epidemic”. JanOne merged with Alt5 Sigma and assumed the latter’s name during the same month.
JanOne had rebranded once before, in September 2019, prior to which it was called Appliance Recycling Centers of America.
Alt5 Sigma says it provides financial infrastructure that allows traditional financial institutions to integrate with the digital asset economy. It held roughly 7.3bn $WLFI tokens as of December 8, worth about $1.1bn.
Alt5 Sigma’s chair since the Trump deal in August has been Zack Witkoff, who is co-founder of World Liberty Financial and son of President Donald Trump’s special envoy for peace negotiations, Steve Witkoff.
In August, Alt5 disclosed to US regulators that its Canadian subsidiary and the group’s former principal was found criminally liable by a Rwandan court in May “for offences including illicit enrichment and money laundering”.
Alt5 Sigma Canada and Andre Beauchesne appealed the judgment to the High Court of Kigali, Rwanda, in June, and the matter remains under judicial review. Both Alt5 Sigma Canada and Beauchesne denied any wrongdoing and maintain that they were the victims of fraud.
Additional reporting by Joe Miller