United States (US) Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump took to X (formerly known as Twitter) to promote World Liberty Financial, a new crypto venture backed by his family, following underwhelming initial sales of the platform's WLFI tokens.
His endorsement came late Tuesday, hours after the tokens went live.
Despite being touted as a governance token for DeFi activities such as borrowing, lending, and liquidity pooling, the sale raised only $9 million—falling far short of its $300 million target.
Approximately 3% of the total tokens were allocated for public sale.
The website experienced multiple outages, and no significant uptick in sales followed Trump's post, with over 540 million tokens already sold before his involvement.
World Liberty launched its WLFI token with an X Spaces broadcast, notably without Trump's presence.
Sales reportedly hit $5 million in the first hour, but the website soon crashed, stalling further transactions.
The site remained offline for several hours during peak interest, leaving potential buyers without updates.
Neither World Liberty Financial nor the Trump family issued any statements initially, contributing to uncertainty about the sale's status.
Trump eventually addressed the issue on X later in the day to promote WLFI.
Sandy Peng, WLFI advisor and co-founder of Scroll blockchain, attributed the outages to overwhelming demand, stating that the site saw 72 million unique visits in the first hour:
"The team wasn't expecting this level of interest."
The platform has since intermittently returned online after migrating to a new hosting service.
The WLFI token, currently on sale, will serve as the governance token for an upcoming Ethereum-based decentralised protocol but will not be tradable yet.
Throughout September, whitelist registration was open exclusively to accredited US investors and international participants.
Despite over 100,000 people being allow listed, only around 6,700 token holders have been recorded on Etherscan so far—a slow climb attributed to the website crashes.
With 100 billion WLFI tokens created on Ethereum, 35 billion were made available for this initial sale, marking one of the year’s most anticipated launches.
Trump's initial absence and technical challenges have raised concerns about the project's viability.
Many in the community remain sceptical, questioning the unclear technical objectives and the timing of the token launch so close to the election.
Manuel Ferrari, Co-Founder of Money On Chain, noted:
“The vast majority of people who will buy into Trump's DeFi project would be better served simply buying Bitcoin and holding.”
World Liberty initially claimed that only accredited investors—those with a net worth exceeding $1 million or an annual income of at least $200,000—would participate in the first round of sales.
Yet, the platform has struggled to smoothly handle transactions for this exclusive group.
With website crashes and underwhelming $WLFI sales, could Trump's last-minute endorsement be a futile effort to salvage the project?
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