(Kitco News) – After months of hype and speculation, the Trump family’s decentralized finance (DeFi) platform World Liberty Financial (WLFI) launched its token sale on Tuesday, but thus far, demand has been lackluster.
“Shape a New Era of Finance. Be DeFiant,” the homepage for WLFI reads. “We're leading a financial revolution by dismantling the stranglehold of traditional financial institutions and putting the power back where it belongs: in your hands.”
Clicking through to the token sale page shows that each WLFI token is being sold for $0.015 and can be purchased using Ether (ETH), USDT, USDC, or Wrapped Ether (WETH).
The token sale went live at 12:40 UTC on Tuesday. Out of the target of 20 billion tokens, the token sale page shows that roughly 806.25 million WLFI have been purchased at the time of writing, less than 10% of the original goal.
Data provided by Etherscan shows 9352 unique wallet addresses are holding WLFI, a figure that is far below the more than 100,000 signups the project’s team said they’d seen a day before the token’s launch.
While there was a healthy level of demand when the token sale started, with nearly 2,900 investors purchasing 344 million tokens within the first hour, website outages and other difficulties have hampered other’s efforts.
Even Donald Trump's X announcement promoting the token launch failed to generate significant buzz. Just over 180 million additional token purchases immediately followed the announcement, but no spike in sales was seen.
“Crypto is the future. Let’s embrace this incredible technology and lead the world in the digital economy,” Trump, who is named the platform’s “Chief Crypto Advocate” in the WLFI white paper, said in the video.
The white paper, which, in typical Trump fashion, is called a “gold paper,” indicates that the total supply of WLFI will be 100 billion tokens, 35% of which are intended to be distributed in token sales to eligible participants. According to the document, Trump’s sons Barron, Eric, and Donald Trump Jr. are listed as the platform’s “Web3 Ambassadors.”
With a target of 20 billion tokens in the public sale, that means the initial goal was to raise $300 million. With only 806 million tokens sold at the time of writing, the project has raised just over $12 million, leading many to call the token sale a failure.
A survey of X users shows that most are unimpressed with the project, with many highlighting serious red flags, including numerous mistakes on the “gold paper” and the fact that WLFI tokens are non-transferrable for at least a year, won’t be listed on any exchanges, and will mainly be used for future governance.
“You should assume that the Tokens are non-transferable indefinitely,” the gold paper reads, as noted by X user Pledditor. “As the Tokens are non-transferable, the Company has not taken any action to, and has no plans to, create a secondary market for the Tokens.”
That means users can not speculate on the prices of WLFI or sell it at a higher value to investors in the future - dimming its prospects as an investment.
And the actual governance utility of the token remains in question.
The finer details in the white paper also show that Trump’s affiliation with the platform is only contracted for five years, and in exchange, “DT Marks DeFi, LLC and its affiliates, including Donald J. Trump, has or may receive approximately 22.5 billion tokens.”
“Since there are a total of 100 billion tokens issued, that means 22.5% of the supply will be given to this legal entity,” Pledditor said. “That must be where most of the ‘30% initial support allocation’ they don't elaborate about is going (just another way of saying ‘team allocation’ without saying ‘team allocation’).”
Angel investor Evan Luthra summed up the progress of the token sale succinctly in an X thread posted on Wednesday.
“World Liberty Financial’s token sale is a disaster,” he said. “They aimed to raise $300M—so far, they’ve got just $10M. Tokens sold are decreasing; Site crashed at launch; Trump’s backing hasn’t helped. This might be one of the biggest ICO failures.”
After listing the various stats covered above, Luthra said, “Considering the hype, those figures are low, especially for something with Trump's name on it.”
“WLFI was advertised as a governance token for the DeFi platform @worldlibertyfi, promising lending, borrowing, and liquidity functions,” he added. “But during the sale, the site crashed under high traffic. A ton of people couldn’t even get through to buy it. Somehow, the number of tokens sold went down an hour later. 655M tokens sold dropped to 612M. Seems like there were refunds or someone pulled out.”
“Trump even pushed it on X, but by that time, the initial momentum had already fizzled,” Luthra said. “540M WLFI tokens were bought, and that endorsement didn’t seem to matter much by then.”
After highlighting the red flags identified by many, Luthra reiterated that “People have been speculating if this might go down as one of the biggest fails in ICO history.”
“Right now, it's on track. $10M raised out of a $300M goal, technical issues, and a structure that doesn't inspire much confidence,” he said. “WLFI is struggling because folks are being more cautious, especially when the product looks like it's relying more on a name than substance.”
As for what comes next for WLFI, Luthra said it will probably face “a long uphill battle to regain any credibility.”
“They need to address the issues with their platform, explain what happened with the token numbers, and give a clear roadmap for liquidity and utility,” he concluded. “The WLFI sale showed us what not to do: over-promise, under-deliver, and hope a big name can cover the rest. I’m curious to see how this plays out. Let's see if they manage a comeback, but it's not looking good.”
