A Deep Look into the Trump Family-supported WLF: Who is the Manipulator Behind the Suspected OEM?

Written by: 0xjs@黄金财经

Since former US President Trump turned to encryption, Trump's remarks in support of encryption have become commonplace among industry insiders.

However, since September 2024, Trump has personally supported the DeFi project World Liberty Financial, and even posted promotional articles on his official account with nearly 100 million fans from time to time, which still amazed industry insiders.

Not only that, well-known institutions and projects in the crypto industry are also constantly involved, such as Luke Pearson of Polychain Capital, Sandy Peng of Scroll, Ryan Fang of Tomo Wallet, and Rich Teo of Paxos have all become consultants or team members of World Liberty Financial.

On the evening of October 15, 2024, World Liberty Financial officially started public sale, and the veil of World Liberty Financial finally surfaced.

Golden Finance summarizes everything you need to know about World Liberty Financial.

What is World Liberty Financial?

According to World Liberty Financial's official information, World Liberty Financial describes its mission as follows: Promote the large-scale adoption of stablecoins and DeFi, especially US dollar stablecoins, thereby ensuring the dominance of the US dollar. A key part of World Liberty Financial is to use the global influence and popularity of the Trump brand to bring as many Web2 users as possible into the Web3 world.

Therefore, World Liberty Financial will be a DeFi platform where users can borrow and lend cryptocurrencies, create liquidity pools, and trade with stablecoins.

According to World Liberty Financial's proposal in the Aave Governance Forum, World Liberty Financial requires a temperature check on the motion to deploy an Aave V3 instance, which will allow four cryptocurrencies, USDC, USDT, ETH, and WBTC, to be used as collateral assets for lending. World Liberty Financial will provide 7% of its token supply to Aave DAO (worth $105 million) for governance and liquidity, and will also provide 20% of the fees that its platform generates on an ongoing basis.

According to public information, the first phase of World Liberty Financial is to launch a version of Aave on the Ethereum Layer 2 network Scroll, allowing users to lend and borrow tokens.

World Liberty Financial is deeply tied to the Trump family

When the outside world talks about World Liberty Financial, it generally adds a prefix, that is, "World Liberty Financial supported by the Trump family."

This is because World Liberty Financial is deeply tied to the Trump family.

Trump has repeatedly promoted World Liberty Financial on social media and called himself the "Chief Crypto Advocate" of the World Liberty Financial project.

Trump's two eldest sons, Donald Jr. and Eric, serve as "Web 3 Ambassadors" of World Liberty Financial, and his 18-year-old youngest son, Barron Trump, is the "DeFi visionary" of World Liberty Financial.

Although World Liberty Financial is deeply bound to the Trump family,From all indications, World Liberty Financial is more like an OEM product of the Trump family. The Trump family creates brands and earns profits, and unknown traders use the reputation of the Trump family to launch products.

This seems to be a very common business operation for the Trump family. For example, many Trump hotels or buildings named after Trump around the world are in cooperation with Trump in the form of licensing and OEM. In addition to real estate, Trump continues to authorize Trump's naming rights to other fields such as perfume, steak and mineral water. Trump's daughter Ivanka is also a frequent OEM customer.

World Liberty Financial, a suspected OEM

According to the World Liberty Financial white paper, DT Marks DEFI LLC agrees to make reasonable efforts to require the owners and principals of DT Marks DEFI LLC, including Donald Trump, to occasionally promote WLF and World Liberty Financial agreements, and grant World Liberty Financial and its related entities the right and license to use the name and likeness of the owners and principals of DT Marks DEFI LLC for publicity.

And this is indeed the case. Trump's photo appears on 11 of the 13-page white paper of World Liberty Financial, and World Liberty Financial is also endorsed by the Trump family.

World Liberty Financial White Paper Cover

In return, World Liberty Financial agreed that DT Marks DEFI LLC will receive 22.5 billion WLFI tokens and is entitled to receive 75% of the net income of the agreement, which is determined after deducting the agreed operating expenses and initial treasury reserves. The Service Agreement may be terminated by DT Marks DEFI LLC for “good cause” under certain conditions, or for non-renewal at the expiration of the initial 5-year term.

DT Marks DEFI LLC is a Delaware limited liability company (of which Trump is one of the owners), and its affiliated entities have received or may receive compensation for services provided to World Liberty Financial and its affiliates. These services are provided pursuant to a service agreement with Axiom Management Group, LLC (“AMG”), a Puerto Rico limited liability company wholly owned by Chase Herro and Zachary Folkman, at the direction of the principals of AMG, under which World Liberty Financial was formed. AMG is entitled to receive 7.5 billion WLFI tokens and 25% of the net proceeds of the agreement, but has agreed to allocate 50% of the proceeds to WC Digital Fi LLC, an affiliate of Steve Witkoff and certain of his family members.

Take a look at the World Liberty Financial team members.

World Liberty Financial co-founders Chase Herro and Zak Folkman own AMG and can obtain half of the 7.5 billion WLFI tokens and 25% of the net income of the World Liberty Financial protocol. The other half of the tokens and protocol income will go to the family of another co-founder Steven Witkoff (co-founders Steven Witkoff, Zach Witkoff, Alex Witkoff).

The operator behind World Liberty Financial

Chase Herro and Zak Folkman, co-founders of World Liberty Financial, have worked in the crypto industry, but are not well-known in the crypto world.

According to CoinDesk, Chase Herro and Zak Folkman previously developed the DeFi product Dough Finance, but failed to gain attention and was hacked in the summer of 2024, losing $2 million. Chase Herro and Zak Folkman also co-founded the creator platform Subify, which claims to be an uncensored competitor to Patreon and OnlyFans, two well-known creator platforms in the industry. Folkman earlier registered a company called Date Hotter Girls LLC and posted content on YouTube on how to pick up women.

The head of blockchain at World Liberty Financial is Octavian Lojnita. According to Octavian Lojnita's online resume, he is from Romania and is a full-stack developer. Octavian Lojnita previously worked at Dough Finance. Boga, an anonymous front-end developer at World Liberty Financial, is listed as an author in Dough Finance's source code (under 0xboga). Coindesk also reported that World Liberty Financial had published a code base on GitHub that was later deleted. A review of its code base showed that World Liberty Financial (at least in the early stages) seemed to have copied the code directly from Dough Finance. But World Liberty Financial posted on X on September 4, 2024, saying that World Liberty Financial did not want to take any risks and that its code "has been thoroughly reviewed by auditing companies such as BlockSec, Fuzzland, PeckShield, and Zokyo." Although World Liberty Financial has begun selling governance tokens WLFI to the public on its official website, the World Liberty Financial protocol and application have not yet been launched. It is not yet confirmed whether the subsequent versions of World Liberty Financial will contain the early code or vulnerabilities of Dough Finance.

The other three co-founders of World Liberty Financial are Steven Witkoff and his family. According to public information, Steven Witkoff is a well-known real estate developer and an old friend of Trump.

WLFI Token Information

WLFI Token Price: 0.015 USD

Total Public Sale: 20 billion (equivalent to 300 million USD)

Sold:As of press time, only 723 million (about 10 million USD) have been sold, and 19.2 billion are still available for sale

Total Tokens: 100 billion

FDV: 1.5 billion US dollars

Contract Address: 0xda5e1988097297dcdc1f90d4dfe7909e847cbef6

WLFI Token Distribution:

• 35% Token Sales: A significant proportion of WLFI tokens will be allocated to eligible participants through token sales, prompting them to participate extensively in the decision-making and growth of the WLF protocol.

• 32.5% Community Growth and Incentives: This portion will be reserved for expanding the governance participation of the WLF community and supporting the construction of the WLF protocol.

• 30% Initial Supporter Allocation: This portion of tokens is allocated to initial supporters (22.5 billion + 7.5 billion, which has been allocated to Trump and the World Liberty Financial trading team).

• 2.5% Team and Advisors: This portion of the tokens will be used to reward the core team, advisors, service providers, and those who contribute to the development of the WLF protocol

The World Liberty Financial token WLFI has another special feature: the token status is non-transferable and locked in the wallet or smart contract indefinitely. Users should treat the purchase of WLFI tokens as other non-refundable purchases of goods and services.

World Liberty Financial claims that if it wishes to unlock the transferability of WLFI through the protocol governance process in the future, such unlocking will only be allowed if it is determined that it does not violate applicable laws, and it must be more than 12 months after the completion of the token sale. WLFI holders should assume that the tokens are indefinitely non-transferable. World Liberty Financial also does not plan to create a secondary market for WLFI tokens.

The reason why WLFI tokens are not transferable may be to circumvent regulation. The move is intended to make WLFI look less like a security in the eyes of regulators, because it makes the asset difficult to buy and sell like other crypto tokens.

In addition to the non-transferability of tokens, World Liberty Financial's traders are very skilled and have taken many actions in advance to circumvent the supervision of US law enforcement agencies in advance.

How WLFI tokens circumvent US regulation

The first is the requirements of investors. Given Trump's huge influence in the United States, World Liberty Financial first targeted Americans. World Liberty Financial requires that Americans who participate in the investment are "qualified investors" as defined by Regulation D and undergo KYC procedures. KYC is also required for overseas investors and tokens are offered and sold in a manner that complies with the safe harbor conditions of Section 506(c) of the Securities Act.

Secondly, in terms of token utility. According to the official website of World Liberty Financial, World Liberty Financial has made special treatment for the utility of its WLFI tokens, requiring WLFI tokens:

to be used only for governance. The only purpose of holding WLFI is governance, not any investment. As a token holder, you will only have the right to propose and vote on proposals that will help shape the future of the World Liberty Financial protocol, including decisions on marketing plans, future features, etc.

No economic rights. Tokens do not confer any rights, express or implied, other than the right to use the tokens as a means of participating in the governance of the WLF Protocol through the WLF Governance Platform. WLF tokens do not represent or confer any ownership or shares, shares or security or equivalent rights, or any right to obtain any distributions, revenue sharing, additional tokens, intellectual property or any other form of participation in or related to the WLF Protocol and/or the Company and its corporate affiliates.

Non-transferable. All WLFI are non-transferable and locked in a wallet or smart contract indefinitely. Users should treat the purchase of WLFI tokens as other non-refundable purchases of goods and services and accept the risk. If it is desired in the future to unlock the transferability of WLFI through the protocol governance process, such unlocking will only be permitted if it is determined that it does not violate applicable law, which must be more than 12 months after the completion of the token sale. WLFI holders should assume that the tokens are indefinitely non-transferable. As the tokens are non-transferable, the World Liberty Financial protocol has not taken any action and does not plan to create a secondary market for the tokens.

World Liberty Financial also strictly distinguishes between the WLFI token, the WLF governance platform, and the WLF protocol.The WLFI token does not provide any economic or other rights related to the WLF protocol or otherwise. Therefore, there is no right to any fees generated by the WLF protocol or earned by the company.

World Liberty Financial specifically states that the WLFI token is not intended to be a digital currency, security, derivative, transferable crypto asset, or any other type of financial instrument. The token cannot be transferred or sold in exchange for money or other assets (including crypto assets), nor can it be used to purchase goods or services from any party.

Conclusion

All signs indicate that World Liberty Financial is like a DeFi product under the Trump family OEM.

The real trading team behind World Liberty Financial also had a "black" history, and the WLFI tokens were completely locked, with no secondary market and no liquidity, which caused the public sale of WLFI tokens to progress slowly, with only $10 million sold. It is far from matching Trump's momentum.

But this does not negate the possibility of World Liberty Financial's future success. After all, the US will hold a general election in three weeks, and Trump is likely to enter the White House again.

Based on Trump's attitude towards encryption, his interests in WLF, and his appeal to Americans and people all over the world, the world's crypto population is likely to jump to 1 billion on the current basis in the next four years.

With this huge traffic and Trump's endorsement, OEM may also succeed. Just like Trump sells naming rights to other OEM products.