Net Worth: Unknown.
- Since 2020, John Wu has served as president of the crypto company Ava Labs. On April 2, 2025, Ava Labs donated $1 million to MAGA Inc, President Trump’s Super PAC. According to the New York Times, the donation got Wu a spot at a fundraising event just two days later—a “candlelight dinner” featuring Trump as a guest speaker.
- In 2019, Ava Labs received seed money from Andreessen Horowitz, a venture capital firm co-founded by Marc Andreessen. The company’s most recent financing round was in 2022, when it raised $350 million at a valuation of $5.25 billion.
- To learn more about Andreessen Horowitz’s controversial crypto investments, see our project mapping them here. In the map, we highlight Avalanche, the cryptocurrency of Ava Labs, for the following controversy:
- In 2022, an up-and-coming crypto lawyer—Kyle Roche, then a partner at Roche Freedman—was caught on a hidden camera saying that Ava Labs had secretly given him stock in the company and a tranche of their AVAX tokens, worth “hundreds of millions” at the time. In multiple videos, in some of which he appeared to be drunk, Roche appeared to say that Ava Labs had given him the assets in exchange for him pursuing class action lawsuits against the company’s competitors. The stated reason? In part, at least, Roche’s lawsuits were meant to get regulators to focus on the competitors instead of Ava Labs. Roche at one point referred to the class action plaintiffs—his clients, who had lost money through crypto investments—as “100,000 idiots.”
- Wu regularly appears on business TV programs and in the business press to talk about the interests of the crypto industry.
- Talking about then-candidate Trump on Fox Business in July 2024, Wu said that he had “shown real leadership” and praised his “consistency” on blockchain regulation.
- In March 2021, on the Bloomberg Intelligence podcast, Wu predicted a bright future for Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) after a piece of art by the artist Beeple sold for $69 million at auction. Days after Wu’s podcast appearance, Beeple himself said of NFT art prices, “I absolutely think it’s a bubble.”
- NFT trading peaked within a year and then fell precipitously, contrary to Wu’s prediction.
- In the first half of 2025, Ava Labs has already spent $656,000 lobbying the federal government, which is roughly $150,000 more than it spent in all of 2024 — previously its highest ever annual lobbying expenditures. The company lobbied on two stablecoin regulation bills, the STABLE Act and the GENIUS Act, in addition to lobbying federal agencies including the Securities and Exchange Commission, Department of Veterans Affairs, and the White House itself.
- Americans for Financial Reform released a fact sheet detailing the GENIUS Act’s many “flaws and failures.” Their concerns include the conflicts of interest the bill poses with the Trump family’s holdings in crypto platform World Liberty Financial, how crypto titans who back the bill are also cheering on Trump and Musk’s dismantling of consumer watchdog agencies, and how the bill “strictly limits federal regulators’ ability to prevent stablecoin collapses from spreading.” Read more here.
- Ava Labs has recently entered into multiple partnerships with state and local governments.
- In California, it is putting all of the state’s vehicle registrations on the blockchain. Announcing the partnership in 2024, Wu said, “Blockchains are the most advanced tool any organization can leverage to maximize efficiency, maintain compliance and protect consumer data – vital components for a government serving its constituents.”
- In May 2025, Ava Labs announced a partnership with Bergen County, New Jersey to “digitize and tokenize the property records of over 370,000 parcels” of land. According to the company, the project covers “approximately $240 billion in real estate value,” and it is “the largest blockchain deed tokenization project in U.S. history.”
For more information, see the Revolving Door Project’s Billionaires in Trump World tracker.