With just over a month and a half to go until the US presidential election, Donald Trump’s schedule is packed: rallies, debates, campaign speeches, crisscrossing the country campaigning in key states. Over the weekend, at his golf club in West Palm Beach, Florida, he became the target of what the FBI described as a assassination attempt.
Despite all this, the former president and Republican candidate took the time on Monday to unveil a new cryptocurrency company: Liberty Global Financial.
At 8 p.m. on X (formerly Twitter), Trump is expected to livestream details of the blockchain application he and his sons have been teasing for months in the run-up to the November presidential election.
The project has already sparked controversy. Hackers recently compromised X accounts belonging to members of the Trump family, promoting fake links to the cryptocurrency company. While the real app has yet to officially launch, Project leadership team details leaked — and its ties to another recently hacked crypto app — have raised concerns among some of the former president’s supporters in the crypto world.
Earlier this month, CoinDesk obtained a confidential draft outlining plans for an app intended to bring decentralized finance (DeFi) to the masses. Decentralized Finance refers to blockchain-based tools that allow users to directly trade, borrow, lend, and invest assets without traditional intermediaries.
After make fun of bitcoin Although “built on hot air” in 2019, Trump has explicitly embraced the technology and ramped up his pro-crypto rhetoric in recent months, particularly with the emergence of the blockchain industry as one of the biggest corporate fundraisers of the election cycle. His speech at the Bitcoin Nashville conference in July describing favorable crypto policies was greeted with standing ovations and repeated cheers from the thousands of attendees.
The white paper obtained by CoinDesk presents World Liberty Financial as a way to “put the power of finance back in the hands of the people,” as a response to the “rigged” financial system.
Who is involved?
The World Liberty Financial team includes a mix of Trump family members (Barron, 18, is cited as the chief “DeFi visionary”), traditional financial figures, and blockchain industry leaders. Trump Sr.’s title with the project would be “leading advocate of cryptography,” according to the white paper.
The duo behind the project – Zak Folkman and Chase Herro – are not very well known in the crypto world.
CoinDesk It was previously reported that the duo were responsible for Dough Financea DeFi product that failed to gain traction and was hacked for $2 million over the summer.
The pitch outlined in World Liberty Financial’s white paper sounds a lot like Dough’s. Both platforms are designed as user-friendly interfaces to Aave, a popular Ethereum-based lending marketplace, and some of the Trump-backed crypto app’s initial code appears to have been lifted directly from Herro and Folkman’s old project.
Outside of crypto, Folkman and Herro are the founders of Subify, a censorship-free subscription platform similar to OnlyFans, best known for its association with influencer Logan Paul.
Folkman, who registered the LLC for World Liberty Financial, used to give seminars advising men on how to pick up women. Bloomberg Report Posted last week, Herro called himself the “shitbag of the internet” and promoted failed cryptocurrencies, colon cleanses and get-rich-quick courses.
Learn more: World Liberty Financial: Inside Trump’s crypto project tied to $2M DeFi hack and former flirt
A Trump crypto token
Cryptocurrency projects frequently issue governance tokens to “decentralize” their products and bypass onerous exchange regulations. World Liberty hasn’t officially unveiled its plans for a cryptocurrency, but the whitepaper reviewed by CoinDesk suggests the project will eventually sell a governance token called WLFI.
According to the document, the Ethereum-based WLFI token will not be transferable, meaning it will not be possible to trade it on the blockchain, but holders will be able to use it to vote on changes to the World Liberty development roadmap.
An unusually high 70% of WLFI tokens have apparently been reserved for the World Liberty team and developers. The remainder will be sold to the public, with the proceeds also reserved for World Liberty insiders.
While crypto projects typically set aside a portion of tokens to compensate founders, investors, and developers, these groups rarely receive more than 20% or 30% of the total supply. WLFI’s allocation to insiders is much larger than that of peer projects, and token presales are relatively rare in today’s crypto industry, as they tend to run into legal and practical hurdles.
The transfer restrictions may be designed to make WLFI look less like a stock to regulators, as they will make the asset difficult to buy and sell like other speculative cryptocurrencies. However, traders frequently sell IOUs for blockchain assets through legal agreements and trading arrangements, and WLFI holders could ostensibly vote to make the asset directly transferable on blockchains in the future.
Learn more: Insiders in Trump-Backed Cryptocurrency Project Set to Receive Unusually Large Token Payouts
Community Response
Trump has presented himself as the sole champion of cryptocurrency in this year’s presidential race, and his crypto venture is using anti-establishment rhetoric that could resonate with single-issue crypto voters and MAGA populists. (Neither Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, nor his Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, have mentioned crypto in this regard.) last week’s TV debate.)
While it’s unclear how closely World Liberty Financial will ultimately resemble its white paper, some of Trump’s supporters within the crypto industry fear the entire plan could backfire.
“Is there anything we as crypto Twitter can do collectively to stop the launch of the world’s freedom currency,” said Nic Carter, a prominent crypto industry figure and Trump supporter, asked on X (formerly Twitter) after CoinDesk published its initial report on World Liberty Financial’s white paper.
Is there anything we as crypto Twitter can do collectively to stop the launch of the global currency of freedom? I think it is truly damaging to Trump’s electoral prospects, especially if it gets hacked (it will be the juiciest DeFi target ever and it is derived from a protocol that itself…
— nic carter (@nic__carter) September 4, 2024
Although the Trump family appears to be deeply involved in World Liberty Financial and Donald Trump will officially unveil it Monday night, the project’s white paper claims the platform has no political affiliation, stating: “World Liberty Financial is not owned, managed, operated, or sold by Donald J. Trump, the Trump Organization, or any of their respective family members, affiliates, or executives.”
He adds: “However, they may own $WLFI and receive compensation from World Liberty Financial and its developers. World Liberty Financial and $WLFI are not political and have no affiliation with any political campaign.”
