World Liberty Financial, the DeFi project closely connected with GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump and his family, began its initial token sale early Tuesday ET, raising more than $8 million despite the protocol’s main website intermittently crashing for hours.
The second-largest holder of WLFI, which was initially allocated 20 billion tokens, or 20% of the total 100 billion supply, has been facilitating the token sale, distributing about 550 million WLFI to nearly 4,500 holders. As a result, the wallet address conducting the token sale has received over $8 million in stablecoins and ETH as of Tuesday afternoon ET, onchain data from Etherscan shows. The top 10 addresses holding WLFI currently control 97% of the total token supply.
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According to The Block, which said it saw a copy of a roadmap that was shared with prospective investors, World Liberty Financial is looking to raise $300 million by selling 20% of its token supply, resulting in a fully-diluted valuation of $1.5 billion for WLFI. While the token sale only began this morning, the amount raised so far is substantially less than the project’s goals, according to the roadmap seen by The Block.
World Liberty Financial did not immediately respond to requests for comment for this story.
One executive behind World Liberty Financial, Zachary Folkman, conducted a X live space on Monday, in which he revealed that the protocol had whitelisted over 100,000 accredited U.S. investors prior to the token sale. In order to qualify as an accredited investor, an individual in the U.S. must have a net worth of over $1 million, excluding the value of their primary residence, as well as at least $200,000 in annual income for the past two years.
WLFI, which is non-transferable, is intended to be a governance token that enables holders to dictate the protocol’s parameters and vote on other matters. The Trump-associated protocol aims to be a platform where users can conduct financial services such as borrowing and lending.
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The token sale comes nearly a week after the team behind World Liberty Financial proposed deploying on Aave as a means to provide liquidity for stablecoins, ETH, and WBTC, as well as grow Aave’s user base. By signaling an intention to deploy on the largest DeFi lending platform, World Liberty Financial is signaling its willingness to integrate itself into the wider DeFi ecosystem.
The launch of WLFI sale also comes less than a month before the U.S. presidential election, scheduled for Nov. 5, where voters will decide between former U.S. president Trump and current vice-president Kamala Harris. At presstime, bettors on predictions platform Polymarket were assigning Trump a 58.3% likelihood of winning the presidential election, compared to 41.4% for Harris.
According to veteran crypto hack negotiator Ogle, who also serves an advisor for World Liberty Financial, Trump’s involvement with the protocol is no different from his other business ventures. “[World Liberty Financial] doesn’t, to me, seem any different than him doing Trump steaks,” Ogle told Unchained “He’s a business person, who does business-person things and that involves taking on debt [and] in some cases, it involves doing raises.”
All three of Trump’s sons are involved in the operations of World Liberty Financial.
