World Liberty Financial, the much-hyped DeFi protocol launched with the support of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, went live with its public token sale Tuesday morning.
About 610 million WLFI tokens had been sold as of 7:25 p.m. ET, with 19.4 billion tokens remaining. At $0.015 apiece, this translates to around $9.15 million worth of sales. The project's website faced intermittent downtimes Tuesday morning with the sale going live between 8-9 a.m. ET. It reportedly raised $5 million within the first hour.
The initial sale of WLFI will look to raise $300 million and sell 20% of the token supply at a $1.5 billion fully diluted valuation, according to a roadmap shared with prospective investors.
WLFI will be a governance token used to vote on decisions regarding the future development of the platform, according to the roadmap, and the tokens will be non-transferable for the first year. On Monday morning, co-founder Zak Folkman said "well over 100,000 people" signed up for the whitelist since it went live on Sept. 30.
World Liberty Financial is co-founded by Steve and Zach Witkoff, Folkman and Chase Herro. Most notably, it touts former President Donald Trump as "chief crypto advocate" and his three sons – Donald Jr., Eric and Barron – as web3 ambassadors.
"Big news! The World Liberty Financial token sale is now live," Trump said in a post on X Tuesday night. "Crypto is the future. Let's embrace this incredible technology and lead the world in digital economy."
Early reaction to World Liberty Financial has been split with crypto critics and advocates saying the project does more harm than good for the industry.
The price of bitcoin is up about 15% in October, driven in part by Trump’s rising election odds over Vice President and Democratic nominee Kamala Harris, according to analysts at Bernstein.
“We believe the recent bitcoin strength is being driven by the return of bitcoin’s correlation to Trump’s election odds,” the analysts wrote in a note to clients earlier Tuesday. "Despite both sides indicating support for digital assets, the crypto market bid is stronger on Trump’s odds improving on the election prediction markets."
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