What secrets do the Trump family’s encryption projects and their allocated assets reveal?

Source: Vernacular Blockchain

Trump's victory in the US presidential election pushed Bitcoin to break through the $100,000 mark, accelerating the process of this round of bull market. Not only Bitcoin, but also projects related to the Trump team are taking off.

Recently, World Liberty Financial (hereinafter referred to as WLFI), which has close ties with the Trump family, has frequently purchased ETH, LINK, AAVE, ENA, etc., triggering a follow-up craze in the market and becoming an indispensable indicator in the crypto investment market.

So, what is WLFI, and what actions may affect the market in the future?

01 What is WLFI?

WLFI is a DeFi project supported by Trump and his family (including his eldest son Donald Trump Jr., his third son Eric Trump, and his youngest son Barron Trump), which was officially launched on the Aave V3 platform on the Ethereum mainnet in September 2023.

WLFI is essentially a DeFi platform that supports users to borrow, lend and invest in cryptocurrencies. The founder's vision is to build it into a tool for financial independence, allowing users to conduct private peer-to-peer transactions without relying on traditional financial intermediaries, thereby promoting the development of decentralized finance around the world, especially for those who are underserved by traditional banks. The Trump family once called it "the future of crypto DeFi."

WLFI is the governance token of World Liberty Financial. Each token grants its holder one vote in community proposals on the governance platform.However, its initial distribution plan has been adjusted from more than half of the previous sales to community and creator rewards, reflecting the changes in community incentives and the share of initial supporters.

Unlike other governance tokens such as UNI and MKR, WLFI does not provide economic rights, that is, it is not transferable after redemption, which means that users cannot trade/exchange/sell WLFI after holding the token. While this may be changed in the future through governance proposals, it seems that the tokens will not be tradable for a long time.

Perhaps due to its non-transferability and inability to provide short-term profit opportunities for cryptocurrency investors, WLFI has had low liquidity since its launch on October 15.

It is also worth noting that WLFI is only available to users outside the United States and is not registered with any financial regulator. This means that US residents cannot participate in trading these tokens, which may be considered to circumvent the supervision of US law enforcement agencies.

Combined with its promotion method, to put it more bluntly, WLFI is a project under the influence of Trump to seek to promote the use of US dollar stablecoins and DeFi applications, aiming to strengthen the position of the US dollar in the DeFi field.
Therefore, it is necessary to explore how the Trump family supports this project.

1) Team Members

According to the official information of WLFI, there is a paragraph describing itself as follows: Inspired by Trump, promote the large-scale adoption of stablecoins and DeFi, especially US dollar stablecoins, to ensure the dominance of the US dollar.

Donald Trump himself serves as the "chief cryptocurrency advocate" of the project, while his sons Eric Trump, Donald Trump Jr. and Barron Trump serve as Web3 ambassadors to help promote the platform and attract mainstream users.

Against this background, according to the contents of the white paper, DT Marks DEFI LLC (a Trump-owned company) agreed to promote WLFI and grant it the right to use the names and portraits of Trump family members for publicity. In return, WLFI pays Token to DT Marks DEFI LLC and shares part of the net income of the protocol (about 75%).

But the Trump family legally circumvented all ties with WLFI. Although WLFI claims to be "the only DeFi platform inspired by Trump", the positions of advocate and ambassador of the Trump family are not real positions involved in management, and there is a small text at the bottom of the official website: Donald J. Trump, any of his family members, or any director, officer or employee of the Trump Group, DT Marks DEFI LLC or their respective affiliates are not officers, directors, founders or employees of WLFI or its affiliates. ... World Liberty Financial and its WLFI Token are not political in nature and are not part of any political campaign. Therefore, some critics believe that WLFI is deeply tied to the Trump family and is a branded product of the Trump family. Unknown traders use the reputation of the Trump family to launch products, and the Trump family creates brands and obtains profits. Because this kind of business operation is commonplace for the Trump family. For example, many Trump hotels or buildings named after Trump around the world are cooperating with Trump in the form of licensing and OEM.

In general, although various propaganda claims that WLFI and the Trump family are inextricably linked, there is actually no legal connection. This may be one of the reasons why people are not very convinced by WLFI.

In addition to the strong support of the Trump family, the WLFI team is composed of experienced crypto practitioners.

According to the official website, WLFI has a total of five founders, of which Chase Herro and Zak Folkman's industry resumes are not very impressive. According to CoinDesk, they once launched a tepid DeFi product Dough Finance, which was hacked in the summer of 2024 and lost $2 million. In addition, Octavian Lojnita, the head of blockchain at WLFI, and an anonymous developer also came from the former company Dough Finance. Coindesk's report also showed that the review showed that in the early stages, the code base published on WLFI directly copied the code of Dough Finance, and later this code base was deleted.
However, WLFI stated that they have been reviewed by multiple auditing companies (such as BlockSec, Fuzzland, PeckShield, Zokyo, etc.) to prove their security.

In addition to Chase Herro and Zak Folkman, the other three co-founders of WLFI are Steven Witkoff and his family (founders Steven Witkoff, Zach Witkoff, Alex Witkoff). Steven Witkoff is a well-known real estate developer in the United States and a friend of Trump.

In addition, WLFI also has a team of consultants consisting of venture capitalists, lawyers and blockchain engineers. Among these people are Sandy Peng, co-founder of Ethereum's second-layer blockchain Scroll, and Luke Pearson, general partner of Polychain Capital.
It can be seen that these consultants have specific technical expertise and market experience, which will help WLFI achieve its long-term goals, especially in promoting US dollar stablecoins and expanding DeFi applications.

2) Recent Developments

Although the entire altcoin market has begun to recover driven by Bitcoin, WLFI's sales are still not optimistic. Only about a quarter of it has been sold since its launch.
However, there are two things worth noting. First, at the end of November, Justin Sun, the founder of TRON, spent 30 million US dollars to configure WLFI Token to show his support for the project, becoming the largest public investor in the project. Then on November 26, Justin Sun was appointed as an advisor to WLFI

Following the announcement of Justin Sun as an advisory ambassador, on December 18, WLFI announced a partnership with Ethena Labs. The two parties are seeking long-term cooperation, and the initial plan is to start with Ethena's revenue Token sUSDe.
In addition, the most concerned are the various altcoins exchanged by WLFI. Every time it is sold, it can directly drive a wave of trading booms.

02 On-chain activities of the WLFI project

According to Spot On Chain monitoring, WLFI has reserved a variety of mainstream and emerging crypto assets through a main wallet address since November 2024, especially in December, with cumulative expenditures approaching US$45 million, including ETH, cbBTC, LINK, AAVE, ENA and the latest ONDO, etc. The total holding value has exceeded US$84.8 million.

Source: https://intel.arkm.com/explorer/entity/worldlibertyfi

According to incomplete statistics, its reserve crypto assets include:

1) ETH

As the world's second largest cryptocurrency platform, Ethereum's status and influence in the industry are naturally self-evident.

WLFI has purchased ETH many times and spent the most on ETH. It was previously reported that it spent $30 million to reserve 8,105 ETH, with a unit price of about $3,700. The most recent operation was to purchase 722.213 ETH through Cow Protocol for $2.5 million on December 20. After this transaction, WLFI's total ETH holdings reached 16,400 ETH.

2) cbBTC

cbBTC (Coinbase Wrapped Bitcoin) is an ERC-20 Token launched by Coinbase, which aims to introduce the value of Bitcoin (BTC) into blockchain networks such as Ethereum. WLFI spent $10 million to exchange about 103 cbBTC, with an average operation price of $97,181 per coin; subsequently, WLFI exchanged all cbBTC for WBTC holdings.
This move took place on the same day that Coinbase announced that it would delist WBTC for failing to meet CEX standards. Coinbase delisted WBTC, and WLFI's move was seen as support for WBTC.
WLFI's choice to exchange cbBTC for WBTC may be due to WBTC's maturity in the market and infrastructure advantages, or it may be that Sun Yuchen's joining as an advisor had an impact on this decision.

Because Sun Yuchen's custody company BiT Global and BitGo, the company behind WBTC, announced a partnership in August this year, in which the WBTC business was transferred from the original company to BiT Global and Sun Chen.

3) AAVE

AAVE is a decentralized lending protocol based on Ethereum that allows users to deposit and earn interest or borrow crypto assets, which is the protocol that WLFI launched with the help of.

WLFI is also very active in investing in AAVE Token and has made multiple configurations. WLFI once exchanged AAVE at a price of $360 per unit for $246,000; it exchanged AAVE at a price of $308.4 per unit for $1.25 million; and it also exchanged AAVE at a price of $297.8 per unit for $1 million. Currently, WLFI holds a total of 6.137 million AAVE.

4) LINK

The project behind LINK is Chainlink, a decentralized oracle network designed to provide reliable off-chain data for smart contracts on the blockchain. Simply put, Chainlink helps blockchains obtain and use external data.

WLFI has also invested frequently in LINK, and has configured LINK at prices such as $34.2, $25.5, and $27, spending a total of about $8 million. At present, the total amount of LINK held by WLFI is 78,300.

It is reported that WLFI will integrate with Chainlink Oracle to accelerate the promotion and adoption of DeFi. Chainlink is the leading data oracle solution on the market. As a DeFi platform, WLFI may need to use Chainlink's oracle service to ensure the accuracy and security of its financial products. Therefore, the purchase of LINK may be to obtain and use Chainlink's services to enhance the functionality and credibility of the platform.

5) ENA

Ethena (ENA) is a decentralized financial platform that ensures the stability of assets through an algorithmic stablecoin mechanism. ENA can be used for mortgage, trading and governance. The platform provides efficient transactions, liquidity mining and DeFi integration, aiming to provide stable and transparent financial services for crypto assets.

WLFI spent a total of $750,000 to reserve 741,687 ENA, with an average operation price of $1.011 per coin; in addition, at a price of $500,000, an average of 0.98 USDT per coin, 509,954 ENA were reserved, and a total of 741,000 ENA are currently held.

However, a spokesperson for WLFI said that the purchase of ENA Token has no direct relationship with the cooperation with Ethena Labs, and only shows WLFI's confidence in the long-term feasibility and success of the Ethena network.

6) ONDO

The project behind Ondo is Ondo Finance, an Ethereum-based DeFi protocol that aims to transform traditional liquidity services into tokenized real-world assets, connecting crypto assets and the real economy. Its flagship product is the bond RWA. Currently, Ondo has launched four products on Binance Futures, including the US money fund OMMF, Blackrock short-term US Treasury ETF OUSG, tokenized notes USDY, and Flux Finance that supports tokenized securities collateral.
For Ondo, WLFI only had one configuration operation, spending a total of $250,000 to configure 134,000 ONDOs, with an average price of $1.86 per coin at the time of the operation.

 03 What other information was revealed?

It can be seen that the WLFI project has made a lot of on-chain operations recently. The tokens it configures include stablecoins (USDT), mortgage lending, RWA, oracles, and wrapped Bitcoin projects, which basically cover all categories of on-chain DeFi. In addition to the obvious DeFi asset reserves, the following points can also be seen from the on-chain activities of the project:
1) Adopting Safe multi-signature wallet
Safe multi-signature wallet is an asset management tool based on smart contracts. It improves the security of digital assets through a multi-signature mechanism (multiple accounts need to sign together). It supports flexible setting of signing rules. In the Safe multi-signature wallet, it can be set to single signature (such as 1/1), one person can authorize the transaction, or configured as multi-signature (such as 2/3 or 3/5), and the preset number of signatories must be met to complete the operation. It is also compatible with a variety of blockchains and token types, and is widely used in team fund management, DAO financial operations, personal asset protection and custody services. It is favored by Web3 users for its high security and transparency.

WLFI's Safe multi-signature wallet for on-chain operations has a total of 7 signatories, one of which is an active DeFi user.

2) Token exchange through Cowswap built into the Safe wallet

On-chain data shows that WLFI has conducted more than 150 transactions through the decentralized exchange CowSwap in less than two months. CoW Swap is the front end of CoW Protocol. As a DEX aggregation protocol that integrates batch auctions, trade intentions, and MEV protection, it is deployed on Ethereum and Gnosis and is one of the popular DEXs.

Due to the large number of exchanges conducted by WLFI through its wallet, the price of CoW Protocol's native Token COW soared by more than 30% in 24 hours, and more than 80% in 7 days.

3) The measurement behind the selection of tokens

Diversified investment portfolio:By configuring tokens in different fields, WLFI can not only reduce the volatility risk of a single asset and capture more market growth opportunities, but also use market heat to enhance the capital operation effect.

Enhance the influence of the DeFi ecosystem:Most of these tokens belong to the core assets of DeFi. Configuring these tokens will help WLFI expand its layout and influence in the DeFi ecosystem.

Strategic cooperation opportunities:Some of the configured specific assets (such as ENA and ONDO) may be based on cooperation considerations with these projects, thereby enhancing their own brand value and market voice.

In general, this is in line with the development goal of the WLIF project, that is, to continuously improve influence through various means to build a comprehensive on-chain borrowing and trading platform.

04 Summary

If the price of BTC has previously climbed from $70,000 to more than $100,000 due to the "Trump effect", then the tokens held by WLFI have also been driven by this effect.For example, on December 14, after WLFI configured LINK and AAVE, LINK's floating profit was $299,000 and AAVE's floating profit was $338,000. On December 16, as the news of WLFI's operation spread, the price of ONDO broke through 2.1 USDT, setting a record high, with a 24-hour increase of 16.33%.

Therefore, the market has heard that WLFI's assets may become the vane of the old DeFi, and people have speculated,What crypto assets will WLFI reserve next?

Some people think that the team behind the investment consultant is worth paying attention to, some think that the top projects in each track, such as projects with large asset value and high brand value, may become new targets, and some people think that the top 100 high-quality DeFi assets in market value should not be ignored.

However, we will wait and see what actions WLFI will take next.