Trumps crypto project claims 100K signups ahead of token sale
2024-10-15

The Donald Trump-backed crypto project World Liberty Financial claims it has seen over 100,000 signups before its public token launch on Tuesday, Oct. 15. 
In a meandering over 90-minute-long Oct. 14 X space that offered little new information, the platform’s head of operations, Zak Folkman, said the WLFI token would be an Ethereum-based ERC -20 token and reiterated that it would function as the governance asset of the decentralized finance (DeFi) platform.
Folkman, along with fellow World Liberty Financial team members Chase Herro and Zach Witkoff, rehashed information shared days earlier in an Oct. 11 blog post, saying the platform will allow users to borrow and lend crypto, create and interact with liquidity pools and transact with stablecoins.
In the United States, the platform is only open to accredited investors — those approved by the Securities and Exchange Commission to invest in unregistered securities and who typically need to earn over $200,000 a year and have over $1 million in assets.
Herro also announced that Paxos co-founder Rich Teo would join the team as the project’s stablecoin and payments lead.
In an X space last month to launch the project, Folkman explained that a 63% allocation of WLFI tokens would be sold to whitelisted members of the public on Oct. 15, while 17% would go toward user rewards and 20% would be paid to the team. 
According to a leaked white paper, the WLFI token will be nontransferable for 12 months from distribution however it can be used immediately by holders to participate in governance votes. 
The white paper also showed the project plans to raise $300 million from the token sales, which would put it at a valuation of around $1.5 billion. 
The space also saw a brief appearance from Aave CEO and founder Stani Kulechov, who said he was “super excited and happy” that World Liberty Financial was using Aave for its borrowing and lending functionality. 
Speaking briefly on the space, Donald Trump Jr. — listed as the project’s “Web3 Ambassador” — praised World Liberty Financial as introducing a more equitable financial system for regular citizens and slammed the US banking system as a “big Ponzi scheme.”
The World Liberty Financial platform will start off as a DeFi lending platform, with an Oct. 9 proposal confirming that it will launch as an Aave instance on the Ethereum network, with plans to expand further to Ethereum layer-2 network Scroll. 
The WLFI token sale will begin exactly three weeks out from the US elections on Nov. 5.
Trump, the Republican presidential candidate, has vowed to establish the US as the “crypto capital” of the world if he clinches victory in November. 
Trump leads rival Kamala Harris by 9% on the decentralized betting platform Polymarket, while Harris leads Trump by 2.4% in the national polls, per 538 polling data. 
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