Today Donald Trump intends to launch sales of the WLFI cryptocurrency associated with his World Liberty Financial project. The businessman and politician announced this on his page on the social network X, describing the project as “the future of the financial system.”
Image source: worldlibertyfinancial.com
People associated with the project describe it as a kind of cryptocurrency bank, whose clients will be able to issue and take out loans, as well as invest in cryptocurrency. No charter or regulations have been published, but it is known that participants who invested in the project will receive voting rights on the WLF platform. At the initial stage, the cryptocurrency, according to the plan, will raise $300 million at a valuation of $1.5 billion. World Liberty Financial is a separate company from Trump Media & Technology Group and has no relation to Trump’s Truth Social social network.
The WLFI digital coin falls under the financial regulation Regulation D, which, according to American law, allows you to raise capital without prior registration with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). To do this, special conditions must be met: sales volumes are limited, and buyers can be accredited investors with assets of $1 million or more. 20% of WLF tokens are allocated to the founding team, which includes the Trump family. Less than a day before the launch of the project, the WLF team broadcast on the X Spaces site, to which 12,000 users connected.
WLFI is a governance token that allows holders to make decisions related to the operation of the protocol, including initiatives such as advertising partnerships, said project co-founder Zachary Folkman, but ownership of the token “is not capital” and does not “embody an economic rights.” The sale of tokens will be carried out exclusively on the project’s website, and only those who have gone through the registration and verification process, and have also been whitelisted—there are “more than 100,000 people”—will be able to participate in this process. With the launch of the project, its “road map” will be published.
Last week, WLF began the process of approving a crypto bank in the decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem called Aave, one of the oldest and most reliable crypto lending platforms. On the Aave forum, the WLF team presented a brief description of the project’s goals, which included promoting “DeFi to a wider audience” and creating “a new class of users for issuing and receiving over-collateralized loans.” For now, the token sale is a lot like an IOU transaction—those who buy them now will be entitled to the tokens once the platform launches.