World Liberty Financial, the nascent decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol supported by Donald Trump and his family, announced plans to start selling tokens on Tuesday – exactly three weeks before the presidential election for which Donald Trump is the Republican candidate.
"Public sale starts [on] October 15th, open to everyone who qualifies through the whitelist," the project's social media account posted on Friday.
Bettors on blockchain-based prediction market Polymarket see Donald Trump as the frontrunner in the presidential election taking place on Nov. 5.
🦅🇺🇸 Big news! @WorldLibertyFi public sale starts Oct. 15th, open to everyone who qualifies through the whitelist. Join us for a Twitter Spaces on Oct. 14th at 8 AM EST to learn more. Stay tuned for updates!
— WLFI (@worldlibertyfi) October 11, 2024
World Liberty Financial is spearheaded by Zachary Folkman and Chase Herro, who worked previously on DeFi platform Dough Finance, which saw $2 million of crypto assets drained through a July exploit.
Members of the Trump family, including Donald Trump, publicly championed the project on social media, with the former president being titled as "Chief Crypto Advocate" Two of his sons, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., are involved as "Web3 Ambassadors," while his other son Barron Trump is listed as "DeFi Visionary."
Read more: Inside the Trump Crypto Project Linked to a $2M DeFi Hack and Former Pick-Up Artist
The project aims to raise $300 million from the token sales at a valuation of $1.5 billion, according to its roadmap obtained and reported by The Block on Thursday. The upcoming token, called WLFI, serves as the protocol's governance token and would allow users to vote on initiatives about the the protocol's development, the report added.
The project proposed to launch on DeFi lending powerhouse Aave's v3 platform on Ethereum mainnet for "providing liquidity for ether {{ETH}}, wrapped bitcoin {{wBTC}}, stablecoins and potentially other digital assets," according to an Aave governance post on Wednesday.
