World Liberty Financial, a crypto project backed by Donald Trump, claims to have garnered over 100,000 signups ahead of its public token launch yesterday.
The presale of World Liberty Financial's WLFI token went live yesterday, exactly three weeks before the presidential election where Donald Trump is the Republican candidate.
In a 90-minute X space on October 14, which provided little new information, Zak Folkman, the platform’s head of operations, confirmed that the WLFI token would be an Ethereum-based ERC-20 token. He reiterated that the token will serve as the governance asset for the decentralized finance (DeFi) platform.
The project aims to raise $300 million from the token sales at a valuation of $1.5 billion. WLFI will function as the protocol's governance token and users to vote on changes to the protocol and further strategies.
Folkman, along with team members Chase Herro and Zach Witkoff, reiterated details shared earlier in an October 11 blog post. They emphasized that the platform would offer borrowing and lending of crypto, liquidity pools, and stablecoin transactions.
In the U.S., World Liberty Financial is currently available only to accredited investors — individuals approved by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to invest in unregistered securities, typically those earning over $200,000 annually or with assets exceeding $1 million.
Chase Herro also announced the addition of Paxos co-founder Rich Teo to the team, who will lead the stablecoin and payments initiatives.
Last month, during an initial X space, Folkman outlined that 63% of WLFI tokens would be sold to whitelisted members of the public on October 15, with 17% allocated for user rewards and 20% for the team.
According to a leaked white paper, WLFI tokens will be non-transferable for 12 months following distribution, although holders will be able to participate in governance votes immediately. The white paper also revealed plans to raise $300 million from the token sale, giving the project a projected valuation of $1.5 billion.
WLF crash after WLFI token went on sale
Shortly after the release of its token, the website crashed. The public token sale for the crypto project, World liberty Financial, appeared to go live around 12:40 UTC, and almost 2,900 investors bought the token despite the site suffering numerous outages during its first hour.
Blockchain data shows that about 344 million of the platform's WLFI tokens were sold in the first hour to around 3,000 unique wallets.
But that amount still represents just 1.7% of the 20 billion tokens allocated to the public sales.
Sandy Peng, A WLFI advisor and co-funder of the Scroll blockchain network, attributed the website outages to excessive traffic. She added that she and her team were shocked by the number of people who showed interest in the token, which has far exceeded the team's expectations.
What do we know so far about the platform
The event featured a brief appearance by Aave CEO Stani Kulechov, who expressed excitement over World Liberty Financial’s use of Aave for its borrowing and lending functions.
Donald Trump Jr., who serves as the project’s “Web3 Ambassador,” also made a brief statement, praising the platform for creating a more accessible financial system for everyday users, while criticizing the U.S. banking system as a “Ponzi scheme.”
World Liberty Financial will launch as a DeFi lending platform, confirmed in an October 9 proposal to be built on Aave on the Ethereum network, with future plans to expand to the Ethereum layer-2 network, Scroll.
The WLFI token sale is set to begin three weeks before the U.S. elections on November 5. Donald Trump, the Republican presidential candidate, has pledged to make the U.S. the “crypto capital” of the world if elected.
Currently, Trump leads his rival Kamala Harris by 9% on the decentralized betting platform Polymarket, though Harris holds a 2.4% lead over Trump in national polls, according to 538 polling data.
Hui Xin
Brian
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