World Liberty Financial (WLFI) Celebrates Donald Trump’s 47th Presidency With Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Altcoin Purchases

Key Takeaways

• The WLFI token sale achieved its $300 million target, selling 20 billion WLFI at $0.015 per token.
• To extend the sale, 5 billion WLFI tokens priced at $0.05 have been added, allowing the sale to draw an additional $250 million.
• WLFI has purchased $47 million in wBTC, $47 million in ETH, and $18.8 million in four other altcoins.

With Donald Trump officially back in the White House, the World Liberty Financial (WLF) project has just announced it has purchased $112.8 million worth of Wrapped Bitcoin (wBTC), Ethereum (ETH), Aave (AAVE), Chainlink (LINK), and TRON (TRX).

Though the returning President made no mention of Bitcoin or cryptocurrency during his inauguration speech, WLF appears to finally be sailing on bullish winds.

Strategic Crypto Purchase

The WLF project appears to be making strides as Donald Trump Jr. took to social media to inform followers that it has made a “strategic purchase” of several cryptocurrencies.

The news was also posted by the official WLFI X account . This marks the project’s first major acquisition, and comes just a week after the project moved crypto as part of treasury management efforts, pay expenses and fees, and “address working capital requirements.”

Now that the project has exceeded its original $300 million goal and sold 20 billion WLFI tokens, it has extended the sale and bumped up the price per token considerably.

Extended Goal

After finally offloading all 20 billion WLFI tokens and raking in $300 million through a sluggish token sale, the project has announced that it will increase the token supply for late buyers, which comes with a hefty price premium.

Having initially sold WLFI at $0.015 a piece, the “relaunch” of the sale has seen the token price more than triple to $0.05 per WLFI.

Now, having increased the token supply by 25%, an additional 5 billion tokens are available. If sold, this would generate an extra raise of $250 million for the project. So far, 1.43 billion of these extra tokens have been sold, yielding $71.5 million.

Donald Trump-themed memecoins are believed to be one of the main drivers behind the sudden rush to the WLFI project, which had struggled to sell even 10% of its original offering within a month of launching.

This follows the conclusion of a relatively recent WLFI governance proposal to deploy an “Aave v3 instance for the World Liberty Financial Protocol,” which passed almost unanimously.

This will supposedly bring stablecoin and decentralized finance (DeFi) functionality to the platform, which has yet to be built.

A collaboration with synthetic-dollar protocol Ethena was recently teased. Firms said they were observing a “long-term collaboration” that would begin with the integration of Ethena’s yield-bearing stablecoin token, Ethena Staked USDe (sUSDe).

The Justin Sun Pump

It would seem that the WLFI token sale has finally reached its 90% downsized goal of $30 million and, in fact, surpassed it, reaching $52.95 million after selling some 3.53 billion WLFI tokens.

However, that’s largely due to the Tron founder, Justin Sun, who was just brought on to the WLFI project as an advisor and decided to foot the bill and invest $30 million in it.

Sun’s investment is particularly interesting because it activates the project’s revenue sharing clause, as per the project’s “Gold paper.”

Now that the project has crossed the $30 million mark, Trump’s company, DT Marks DEFI LLC, can begin collecting 75% of the net revenue from it.

What’s in it for Sun? Who knows.

The crypto-tycoon is known for making flashy headline-grabbing moves, though this one seems a little more expensive than his usual PR spend.

Perhaps Sun is hoping the investment will bring him and his projects closer to the incoming Trump administration.

Whether or not WLFI becomes notable within the crypto space remains to be seen, but hopes aren’t particularly high at this point.

WLFI and Aave v3

As per a recent proposal from the WLFI team on its governance forum, the project is proposing to deploy a WLFI Aave v3 instance for the protocol and launch on the Ethereum mainnet.

As per the proposal:

“The WLFI Protocol will provide liquidity for Ethereum, Wrapped Bitcoin, certain stablecoins, and potentially other digital assets. WLFI will make the WLFI Protocol Aave instance available to WLFI Protocol users, and the WLFI Protocol Aave instance will be managed through Aave risk management.”

To begin with, the platform intends to offer lending and borrowing services with USDT, USDT, ETH, and WBTC. Additional assets will be considered through voting proposals.

“The revenue split will be set up using a trustless smart contract that directs the appropriate percentage of protocol fees to the AaveDAO treasury and WLFI treasury addresses.”

AaveDAO stands to receive 20% of the protocol’s fees and 7% of the WLFI token’s circulating supply for governance participation, liquidity mining, and maintaining WLFI platform decentralization.

WLFI Token Sale

It would seem that the Trump-backed/Trump-endorsed decentralized finance (DeFi) project is off to a disappointingly slow start for project backers.

The WLFI token sale continues to stagnate, selling just 1.08 billion tokens of the original 20 billion goal. This means the project has raised just $16.2 million, far from the lofty $300 million initially set.

Trump’s election victory has seemingly done little to persuade onlookers that this heavily endorsed project has anything to offer. The most recent X post from the project, dated Nov. 6, is devoid of any meaningful details.

Just days before the election, it was revealed that the project intends to shut down the WLFI token sale after $30 million in sales has been reached. This means that despite reducing their goal by 90%, the fundraising target is barely over the 50% mark.

The project, “inspired by Donald J. Trump”, appears to offer zero functionality beyond offering a token, and a website/forum for creating governance proposals. Though  several threads initially saw some activity from users, it appears that not a single user has posted to the forum in over a week.

Launch Day

According to the World Liberty Financial website, just 754.57 million tokens have been sold. At a price of $0.015 per WLFI, the project has raised roughly $11.33 million.

This leaves 19.44 billion of the allocated sale WLFI tokens to go. If the project hopes to hit its lofty $300 million goal, it must sell all 20 billion tokens allocated to this public sale.

Roughly 344 million WLFI tokens were sold in the first hour, followed by a brief website outage. A WLFI advisor reportedly attributed this to excessive traffic, claiming the site received 72 million unique visits in that first hour.

Furthermore, the team claimed before the launch that over 100,000 accredited investors were whitelisted for the sale. Contrary to this, Etherscan data shows just 8,454 WLFI holders at the time of writing.

This number will surely rise over the coming days, though this has been a considerably tepid token launch, considering the hype and figureheads surrounding the project.

Skepticism

Very little is known about the project. It has simply touted itself as a decentralized finance (DeFi) platform focused on stablecoin payments, borrowing and lending services, and liquidity pools.

What is known about the project is that it will leverage Aave V3 for additional token functionality and that the WLFI token will be untransferrable for its first year of trading.

WLFI is a governance token. Meaning that users can submit, review, and vote on future proposals. Presumably, this lockup period will serve as a formative time for WLF to receive and act upon community proposals.

If it plans to build out from there, this may impact the token’s sale potential.

Even with Trump backing the project, the distinct lack of information surrounding the project fails to inspire confidence in would-be investors or users.