On Monday, former President Donald Trump solidified his months-long flirtation with the crypto industry.
In a two-hour livestream on X Spaces, Trump, his sons, and their business partner Chase Herro, who once described himself as the “shitbag of the internet,” launched a new crypto initiative called World Liberty Financial. Trump’s appearance was largely promotional. In his opening remarks, Trump didn’t talk about World Liberty Financial directly, but instead addressed Sunday’s foiled assassination attempt, gave a condensed version of his campaign speech, and outlined his hopes for the future of cryptocurrency in the United States.
“If we don’t do it, China will,” Trump said. “China is doing it anyway and if we don’t do it, we’re not going to be the greatest, and we need to be the biggest and the best.”
The Trumps themselves do not own or operate any part of World Liberty Financial, according to Bloomberg. The project appears to be run by Herro and Zachary Folkman, who were giving classes on how to pick up women. Herro and Folkman were introduced to Trump’s sons through real estate investor Steve Witkoff, he said during the livestream.
The two men also won praise from Donald Trump Jr., who touted their expertise in macroeconomics. “You could put them in a boardroom at Goldman Sachs and they’d get people drunk,” he said.
World Liberty Financial is a project in what’s known as DeFi, or decentralized finance, in which users on one platform can lend and borrow cryptocurrencies from another without an institution, like a bank, in between. During the livestream, Donald Trump Jr. spoke about the family’s own experience with debanking, a term that refers to the difficulty some individuals or businesses have accessing credit lines from established financial institutions.
“There was a time when the Trumps could have picked up the phone and called any CEO, any bank, and gotten a loan from anyone in the world for any project with a low loan-to-value ratio and things like that, and then we got into the political arena and that’s where it all stopped,” he said.
In a decentralized financial network, individuals can negotiate such transactions with each other directly through transactions recorded on smart contracts stored on the blockchain. Folkman and Herro had previously been involved in a DeFi platform called Dough Finance. Dough Finance had already been hacked, according to reports from CoinDeskwho also obtained a white paper relating to World Liberty Financial.
As part of this project, World Liberty Financial will launch a new cryptocurrency that will be a non-transferable token that will allow holders to vote on governance issues related to the platform. The token is somewhat similar to the idea of voting for shares of a publicly traded company.
World Liberty Financial did not respond to a request for comment sent via X.
Trump’s sons have been teasing the project for several weeks. An earlier version was called DeFiant Ones, a play on DeFi. In August, Eric Trump hinted at the platform in a post on X. “I’ve really fallen in love with Crypto/DeFi,” he wrote. “Stay tuned for a big announcement…”
I really fell in love with crypto/DeFi. Stay tuned for a big announcement…@Asset @realDonaldTrump @DonaldJTrumpJr
— Eric Trump (@EricTrump) August 6, 2024
In the final months of his campaign, Trump has taken a closer look at cryptocurrencies. At a major Bitcoin conference in Nashville, Trump said he wanted to make the United States the “cryptocurrency capital of the world.” He has dabbled in digital markets himself with several NFT collections, including one of his mugshot. In July, Trump’s campaign raised some $3 million from various donors with ties to the crypto world. This came just months after he became the first presidential candidate to accept campaign donations in cryptocurrencies.
This is in stark contrast to his past stance. In 2021, the former president called Bitcoin a “dollar scam.”
During Monday’s livestream, Donald Trump Jr. acknowledged that he, too, had been relatively slow to embrace cryptocurrencies and decentralized finance. But he said his family’s recent struggles to get lines of credit helped change his mind. “We went from being the elite of this world to being totally canceled, and it changed our perspective so much,” he said. “We understand what so many Americans are going through.”
