Other executives involved in the DeFi project also revealed details about its governance token on Monday evening.
Trump has positioned himself as the champion of the U.S. crypto industry.
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Posted September 16, 2024 at 11:50 pm EST.
The U.S. crypto industry is under assault from a “very hostile” SEC and Biden-Harris administration overall, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said in a meandering Monday evening X Space promoting his DeFi project World Liberty Financial (WLF). Trump was speaking live from Mar-A-Lago, Florida just one day after a second attempt on his life.
Democrats are keeping the U.S. from being the world capital of crypto, Trump claimed, arguing that if the country didn’t shift course, China would take over leadership of the industry.
Trump acknowledged that the crypto industry did need a legal framework, noting that it “should have certain safeguards, too…it can’t be totally freewheeling.” But he claimed without offering evidence that after he announced his plans for a DeFi project, the SEC has “treated people much better” and that several SEC investigations have been dropped. Those in crypto who were under investigation will be “living in hell” if Democratic candidate Kamala Harris wins in November, he warned.
Read more: Trump Promises to ‘Embrace’ Crypto and Bitcoin in Economic Policy Speech
Trump also said that his sons, and particularly his youngest son Barron, opened his eyes to crypto “more than anything else.” However, he noted that the rapid sale of his various NFTs, despite his being “late” to the “very cold [NFT] industry,” also boosted his interest.
The WLF Platform
The X Space was advertised on X as an opportunity for Trump to reveal the details of WLF, though the over two-hour conversation, during which he only spoke for 40 minutes, was light on technical details. Trump’s sons Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. were followed by his longtime friend and real estate developer Steve Witkoff. WLF data strategies lead Chase Herro and head of operations Zachary Folkman then chimed in.
Herro and Folkman noted that the project would be some sort of app to make lending and credit on Aave more “accessible [to] everyday people,” while Witkoff said the project had been in development for nearly nine months.
World Liberty Financial, previously named “The Defiant Ones,” was first announced by Donald Trump in August in a post on Truth Social. The project’s previous announcements have also been light on technical details, and have been made up mostly of announcing various “advisors” without specifying the degree of involvement each have.
Read more: Congress Is Having Its First Hearing on DeFi. What Does the White House Think of It?
An X thread and companion Telegram announcement on Sept. 4, however, gave some hints at what the participants were building. That thread said that the project was a non-hostile fork of Aave and was intended to drive stablecoin and DeFi adoption. Spreading US-pegged stablecoins would “ensure that the U.S. Dollar’s dominance continues,” the thread said, fitting WLF neatly into Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” platform, which is largely dependent on championing the US economy over those of foreign governments, allied and adversarial. The discussion on X on Monday night was similarly vague but re-confirmed those same basic details.
CoinDesk reported on Sept. 3 the details of a white paper for the project which showed WLF’s protocol was largely built on the code base of Dough Finance, a small DeFi project aimed at automating lending on Aave that suffered a $2 million hack in July. According to CoinDesk’s report, Herro, a little-known crypto investor and peddler of get-rich-quick seminars, and Folkman, the creator of pick-up artist videos on YouTube, were the co-founders of Dough Finance.
On the X Space, Folkman’s description of WLF sounded very similar to that of Dough Finance. “If we really want to see a massive amount of adoption — mainstream adoption and liquidity flood into this market — we need to build products that the everyday user who is used to interacting with apps on their phone, who is used to using certain financial sites and tools, can relate to and instantly pick up,” Folkman said.
Token Distribution
According to Folkman, 63% of the project’s governance token, WLFI, will be sold to the public, while 17% will be used to reward WLF users and 20% will go to the WLF executive team and its advisors. It will not be a security and will only be offered only to accredited investors under an SEC Regulation D exemption, owing to what Folkman referred to as “regulatory uncertainty” around crypto tokens in the U.S.
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CoinDesk previously reported that the founding team would receive a whopping 70% of World Liberty Financial’s governance tokens, referencing the white paper it obtained. Folkman, however, did confirm CoinDesk’s reporting that the token will be non-transferable.
The project’s promotion by people with little experience in DeFi has made many in the industry skeptical of the project’s security. A major hack could harm not only perceptions of the industry but also the president’s standing as a crypto advocate, skeptical sources told Unchained.
Seemingly in response to the criticism, WLF announced on Sept. 4 that it was working with what it identified as “top security experts” — Zokyo, Fuzzland, Peckshield, BlockSec Team, and, later, anonymous crypto sleuth Ogle.
“Whether you buy our token or not, please don’t fall for scams,” said Folkman at the end of the Monday night stream.
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