Trump-backed DeFi project celebrates milestone by trying to raise another $250m

The Donald Trump-backed DeFi project World Liberty Financial has met its goal of selling 20 billion WLFI tokens, hours before the former President’s inauguration.

“We’ve completed our mission and sold 20% of our token supply!” a Monday post from World Liberty Financial’s X account said. “Due to massive demand and overwhelming interest, we’ve decided to open up an additional block of 5% of token supply.”

The new 5% block, sold at a price of $0.05 per token, would raise another $250 million if it sells out, a portion of which goes into the president’s pocket.

The WLFI token frenzy comes after an official Trump memecoin, launched January 18, ignited a firestorm in the industry as it soared to a $15 billion market value. It’s now down to just under $11 billion.

That makes TRUMP more valuable than the tokens of DeFi stalwarts like Uniswap, Aave and Ethena.

Currently, only 20% of the TRUMP token’s total supply trades on the open market.

CIC Digital LLC, an affiliate of The Trump Organisation, and Fight Fight Fight LLC collectively owns the remaining 80%, worth approximately $43 billion.

The new Trump memecoin’s skyrocketing value has made other crypto tokens affiliated with Trump — namely WLFI — hot property.

World Liberty Financial is a planned DeFi protocol built on top smart-contract network Ethereum. It hasn’t launched, but documentation for the project says it will let users lend and borrow crypto assets like Ether, and that it will issue its own stablecoin.

The project’s documentation says it originally planned to sell 35% of its 100 billion token supply before reducing the amount to 20%.

The WLFI token sale

World Liberty Financial’s quest to market hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of tokens hasn’t been easy.

In the days following the sale’s launch on October 15, investors only bought 766 million tokens, raising just $11 million of the project’s lofty $450 million target.

Sales remained slow until Tron founder Justin Sun bought $30 million worth of WLFI on November 25.

“We are thrilled to invest $30 million in World Liberty Financial @worldlibertyfi as its largest investor,” Sun said on X, confirming the purchase.

The purchase pushed World Liberty Financial’s profits over the $30 million mark, at which point the proceeds from token sales started going to Trump and other collaborators instead of being kept by the project.

On January 20, Sun bought another $45 million worth of WLFI, bringing his total purchase to $75 million.

It’s not clear exactly how much World Liberty Financial has made so far from sales of the WLFI token. Crypto wallets associated with the project hold assets valued at $314 million, per crypto data platform Arkham Intelligence.

Untradable

DeFi projects often come with governance tokens that are also usually tradable on the market. World Liberty Financial’s token, however, isn’t tradable.

“You should think of your purchase of Tokens like other non-refundable purchases of goods and services,” World Liberty Financial’s Token Sale Terms and Conditions page says. “Once you’ve paid the purchase price, your interest in the Token may decline and you have no expectation of resale of the Token.”

Many have speculated that the project chose to keep the WLFI token untradable to avoid scrutiny from the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The SEC previously said it considers similar token sales, known in the industry as initial coin offerings, to be securities offerings.

But many buyers are betting that as President, Trump will push through legislation to remove legal impediments to making the token tradable.

Even more sales?

Even if the additional 5% of the WLFI token available sells out, it may not be the end.

The project still has another 10% of its token supply — 10 billion tokens — unallocated.

All subsequent profits from WLFI sales will be paid to companies owned and controlled by Trump, his family, and the project’s founders, among others, per the project’s documentation.

Tim Craig is DL News’ Edinburgh-based DeFi Correspondent. Reach out with tips at tim@dlnews.com.