Trump’s Crypto Gambit: What We Know About Today’s Launch of World Liberty Financial
With little over a month and a half to go till the U.S. presidential election, Donald Trump’s schedule is packed – rallies, debates, stump speeches, crisscrossing the country to campaign in battleground states. Over the weekend, at his golf club in West Palm Beach, Florida, he became the target of what the FBI described as an attempted assassination.
Despite all that, the former president and Republican nominee has carved out some time later on Monday to unveil a new crypto company: World Liberty Financial.
At 8 p.m. on X (formerly Twitter), Trump is scheduled to livestream specifics of the blockchain app that he and his sons have been teasing for months in the leadup to November’s presidential election.
The project has already sparked controversy. Hackers recently compromised X accounts belonging to members of the Trump family, promoting fake links to the crypto company. While the real app has yet to be officially launched, leaked details of the project’s leadership team – and its ties to another recently hacked crypto app – have sparked concern among some of the former president’s supporters in the crypto world.
Earlier this month, CoinDesk obtained a confidential draft for the project outlining plans for an app meant to make decentralized finance (DeFi) accessible to the masses. Decentralized finance refers to blockchain-based tools that allow users to directly trade, borrow, lend and invest assets without traditional middlemen.
After deriding bitcoin as “based on thin air” in 2019, Trump has explicitly embraced the technology and amped up his pro-crypto rhetoric in recent months, especially with the blockchain industry emerging as one of the election cycle’s biggest corporate fundraisers. His speech at the Bitcoin Nashville conference in July outlining favorable crypto policies was met with repeated standing ovations and cheers from the thousands of attendees.
The white paper obtained by CoinDesk advertises World Liberty Financial as a way of “putting the power of finance back in the hands of the people,” as an answer to the “rigged” financial system.
Who is involved
World Liberty Financial’s team includes a mix of Trump family members (18-year-old Barron is listed as chief “DeFi Visionary”), traditional financial figures and blockchain industry leaders. The elder Trump’s title with the project would be “chief crypto advocate,” according to the white paper.
The pair spearheading the project – Zak Folkman and Chase Herro – are not well-known in the crypto world.
CoinDesk previously reported that the duo was responsible for Dough Finance, a DeFi product that failed to gain traction and was hacked for $2 million over the summer.
The pitch outlined in World Liberty Financial’s white paper closely resembles that of Dough. Both platforms are modeled as user-friendly interfaces for accessing Aave, a popular Ethereum-based lending market, and some of the early code for the Trump-backed crypto app appears to have been lifted directly from Herro and Folkman’s older project.
Outside of crypto, Folkman and Herro are the founders of Subify, a censorship-free subscription platform similar to OnlyFans that is best known for its association with the influencer Logan Paul.
Folkman, who registered the LLC for World Liberty Financial, used to deliver seminars advising men on how to pick up women. According to a Bloomberg report published last week, Herro has promoted himself as the “dirtbag of the internet” and has promoted failed cryptocurrencies, colon cleanses and get-rich-quick classes.
A Trump crypto token
Crypto projects frequently release governance tokens to “decentralize” their products and sidestep arduous securities regulations. World Liberty has not officially unveiled its plans for a cryptocurrency, but the white paper reviewed by CoinDesk suggested that the project will eventually sell a governance token called WLFI.
According to the document, the Ethereum-based WLFI token will be non-transferable, meaning it won’t be possible to trade on the blockchain, but holders will be able to use it to vote on changes to World Liberty’s development roadmap.
An unusually large 70% of WLFI tokens have apparently been reserved for World Liberty’s team and developers. The rest will be sold to the public, with the proceeds from that sale also reserved for World Liberty insiders.
While crypto projects generally reserve a portion of tokens to compensate founders, investors and developers, these groups rarely receive more than 20% or 30% of the total supply. WLFI’s allocation to insiders is much larger than peer projects, and token presales are relatively uncommon altogether in today’s crypto industry because they tend to face legal and practical hurdles.
The transfer restrictions may be designed to make WLFI look less like a stock in the eyes of regulators since they will make the asset difficult to buy and sell like other speculative cryptocurrencies. However, traders frequently sell IOUs for blockchain assets via legal agreements and handshake deals, and WLFI holders could ostensibly vote to make the asset directly transferable on blockchains in the future.
Community response
Trump has fashioned himself as cryptocurrency’s sole champion in this year’spresidential race, and his crypto venture uses anti-establishment rhetoric that could resonate with single-issue crypto voters and MAGA populists alike. (Neither Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, nor his Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, mentioned crypto at last week’s televised debate.)
While it is unclear how closely World Liberty Financial will ultimately resemble its white paper, some of Trump’s backers within the crypto industry are worried that the whole plan could backfire.
“Is there something that we, as crypto twitter, can collectively do to stop the launch of world liberty coin,” Nic Carter, a prominent crypto industry figure and Trump supporter, asked on X (formerly Twitter) after CoinDesk published its initial report on World Liberty Financial’s white paper.
Though the Trump family appears deeply involved in World Liberty Financial and Donald Trump will be officially unveiling it on Monday evening, the project’s white paper claims that the platform has no political affiliation, stating: “World Liberty Financial is not owned, managed, operated, or sold by Donald J. Trump, the Trump Organization, or any of their respective family members, affiliates, or principals.”
It adds: “However, they may own $WLFI and receive compensation from World Liberty Financial and its developers. World Liberty Financial and $WLFI are not political and have no affiliation with any political campaign.”
