- Donald Trump’s new memecoin has sparked interest in another DeFi project.
- World Liberty Financial achieved its sales target.
- But now she plans to sell even more.
Donald Trump-backed DeFi project World Liberty Financial reached its goal of selling 20 billion WLFI tokens, hours before the former president’s inauguration.
“We have completed our mission and sold 20% of our token stock! » said an article from World Liberty Financial’s X account on Monday. “Due to massive demand and considerable interest, we have decided to open an additional 5% block of the token supply.”
The new 5% block, priced at $0.05 per token, would raise an additional $250 million if sold, part of which would go into the president’s pocket.
The WLFI token frenzy comes after an official Trump memecoin, launched on January 18, ignited an industry firestorm as it reached a market value of $15 billion. It’s now just under $11 billion.
This makes TRUMP more valuable than tokens from DeFi mainstays like Uniswap, Aave, and Ethena.
Currently, only 20% of the total supply of the TRUMP token is traded on the open market.
CIC Digital LLC, a subsidiary of The Trump Organization, and Fight Fight Fight LLC collectively own the remaining 80%, worth approximately $43 billion.
The rising value of the new Trump memecoin has made other Trump-affiliated crypto tokens – namely WLFI – hot property.
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World Liberty Financial is a planned DeFi protocol built on top of the top smart contract network Ethereum. It hasn’t launched, but project documentation says it will allow users to lend and borrow crypto assets like Ether, and will issue its own stablecoin.
Project documentation indicates that it initially planned to sell 35% of its 100 billion token supply before reducing that amount to 20%.
The WLFI token sale
World Liberty Financial’s quest to bring tokens worth hundreds of millions of dollars to market has not been easy.
In the days since the sale launched on October 15, investors purchased just 766 million tokens, raising just $11 million of the project’s ambitious $450 million goal.
Sales remained slow until Tron founder Justin Sun purchased $30 million worth of WLFI on November 25.
“We are excited 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 above the $30 million mark, at which point proceeds from token sales began going to Trump and other aides instead of being kept by the project.
On January 20, Sun purchased WLFI for an additional $45 million, bringing its total purchase to $75 million.
It is unclear how much World Liberty Financial has earned 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.
Untradeable
DeFi projects often come with governance tokens that are also typically tradable on the market. However, the World Liberty Financial token is not tradable.
“You should treat your purchase of tokens as other non-refundable purchases of goods and services,” World Liberty Financial’s token sales terms and conditions page states. “Once you have paid the purchase price, your interest in the token may wane and you have no expectation of reselling the token.”
Many have speculated that the project chose to keep the WLFI token non-tradable to avoid scrutiny from the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The SEC has previously said it considers sales of similar tokens, known in the industry as initial coin offerings, to be securities offerings.
But many buyers are betting that as president, Trump will pass legislation to remove legal hurdles preventing the token from being tradable.
Even more sales?
Even if the additional 5% of available WLFI token runs 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, in accordance with project documentation.
Tim Craig is DL News’ DeFi correspondent based in Edinburgh. Contact us with advice at tim@dlnews.com.
