Original title: (Trump's project WLFI makes a big purchase of 45 million USD tokens, who are the key decision-makers behind it?)
Original author: Weilin, PANews
Trump's DeFi project World Liberty Financial (WLFI) made significant purchases of crypto assets in December, totaling nearly 45 million USD, including ETH, cbBTC, LINK, AAVE, ENA, and the latest ONDO.
Since its launch in September, the project claims to be a decentralized finance (DeFi) platform. On December 13, the World Liberty Financial community approved the first proposal to deploy an Aave v3 instance. Although the project has made initial progress, the current leadership team consists mostly of newcomers, and the project's practicality and innovation still hold some uncertainty.
Significant purchases of crypto assets in December, total expenditure close to 45 million USD
According to blockchain data platform Lookonchain, World Liberty Financial has acquired a large amount of crypto assets since November 30 through a single wallet, including Ethereum (ETH) worth 30 million USD and Coinbase Wrapped BTC (cbBTC) worth 10 million USD. Other acquired assets include LINK, AAVE, ENA, and the latest purchase of Ondo tokens worth 250,000 USD. The specific data for these purchases is as follows:
Purchased 8,105 ETH with 30 million USDC, unit price 3,701 USD;
Purchased 103 cbBTC with 10 million USDC, unit price 97,181 USD;
Purchased 78,387 LINK with 2 million USDC, unit price 25.5 USD;
Purchased 6,137 AAVE with 2 million USDC, unit price 326 USD;
Purchased 509,955 ENA with 500,000 USDC, unit price 0.98 USD;
Purchased 134,216 ONDO with 250,000 USDC, unit price 1.86 USD.
Moreover, although COW is not listed among World Liberty Financial's assets, recent on-chain token purchases have used Cowswap, which is one of the DEXs most commonly used by Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin.
World Liberty Financial launched in September, claiming to be a decentralized finance (DeFi) platform for cryptocurrency trading, with elected president Trump listed as the 'chief crypto advocate', while his sons Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, and Barron Trump serve as 'ambassadors'. Companies associated with the family are entitled to 75% of the net income.
The project has performed poorly in selling its namesake token World Liberty Financial (WLFI). According to the roadmap, 1.5 billion USD is the fully diluted valuation of the project, with the 'initial sale' plan for WLFI aiming to raise 300 million USD by selling 20% of the token supply. However, as of December 17, 4.99 billion WLFI tokens have been sold, totaling 74.85 million USD at a unit price of 0.015 USD, which is less than a quarter of the 300 million USD target. Notably, Sun Yuchen disclosed an investment of 30 million USD in WLFI, becoming the largest investor in the project. So far, no other institutions have publicly announced investments in this project.
The WLFI community voted to approve the first proposal to deploy a lending instance based on Aave v3
Meanwhile, the good news is that on December 13, the governance page of World Liberty Financial showed that the WLFI community voted to approve the first proposal to deploy a lending instance based on Aave v3 on the Ethereum mainnet.
As of December 16, Aave DAO has a treasury worth 347 million USD. Initially, when World Liberty Financial announced it would build on the Aave protocol, the Aave community was skeptical. However, in October, after World Liberty Financial proposed to allocate 7% of its WLFI tokens and 20% of future fees generated by WLF to the crypto collective Aave DAO managing the Aave protocol, the situation changed.
The proposal suggests deploying an Aave v3 instance based on World Liberty Financial (WLF), focusing on:
· Providing stablecoin liquidity for ETH and WBTC.
· Expand the user base of the Aave protocol.
The proposal needs to be approved by the governance of AaveDAO and the WLF community. If approved, users will be able to deposit USDC and USDT stablecoins, as well as ETH and wBTC on the protocol. These assets can be used as collateral for borrowing other assets on Aave.
The proposal mentions that the benefits for Aave include bringing in a large number of new users and liquidity, building brand loyalty and recognition among new DeFi users, and solidifying Aave's leading position in the digital asset lending market.
Next, the proposal has several steps: 1. If the temperature check (TEMP CHECK) reaches consensus, it will be submitted to the Snapshot phase. 2. If the Snapshot vote passes, it will enter the ARFC phase. 3. Release a standard ARFC and collect feedback from the community and service providers. 4. If the ARFC Snapshot passes, release an AIP vote for final confirmation and execution.
What is the background of the WLFI leadership team, which is not familiar?
Trump's DeFi project has many newcomers not well known in the crypto circle. Besides Trump and his family members, the five co-founders of this project are Chase Herro, Zak Folkman, Steven Witkoff, Zach Witkoff, and Alex Witkoff.
Among them, Chase Herro's background is particularly unique; he has reportedly been involved in several businesses that seem unrelated to the crypto industry, including marijuana sales and weight loss products, and flaunted luxury cars and private jet travels on social media, but he has little reputation in the crypto circle. The only crypto project he publicly participated in, Dough Finance, attracted only a few million USD and suffered serious hacking attacks. A token he promoted on influencer Logan Paul's podcast plummeted by 96% after the promotion. In a speech in 2018, he called himself a 'loser on the internet' and stated that regulators should 'kick people like me out'.
Additionally, another co-founder, Chase Herro's business partner Zak Folkman, previously ran a service called Date Hotter Girls, where he taught seminars on how to approach women, which has a controversial background.
As for Steven Witkoff, he is a friend familiar to Trump, a real estate developer who donated 2 million USD to Trump's campaign. After Trump's victory, he was appointed as a special envoy to the Middle East. Witkoff's sons Alex and Zach are listed as co-founders of World Liberty Financial.
In addition to these co-founders who are relatively distant from the crypto market, the backgrounds of those responsible for other specific business sectors appear to be more professional and closely aligned with the crypto industry.
Rich Teo, responsible for stablecoins and payments, is also an OG in the crypto field and co-founded the exchange itBit in 2012, later co-founding the stablecoin company Paxos, where he currently serves as CEO for Asia. Additionally, Rich is an advisor to the AI-driven SocialFi project RepubliK and has retweeted several tweets about the project on Twitter.
Corey Caplan serves as the head of technology strategy; Corey Caplan is a co-founder of Dolomite. Dolomite is a DeFi platform launched in October 2022 on Arbitrum One, later expanding to other blockchain ecosystems, including Polygon's zkEVM, Mantle, and X Layer, offering various services including margin trading, lending, and portfolio management.
Bogdan Purnavel serves as the chief developer; he was also a developer at Dough Finance, and his online nickname is 0xboga. The blockchain lead for World Liberty Financial is Octavian Lojnita. According to his online resume, he is from Romania and is a full-stack developer. Octavian Lojnita also previously worked at Dough Finance.
Alex Golubitsky serves as legal counsel. Alex Golubitsky is an international tax attorney with a career covering areas such as tax law, securities law, entity formation, contract drafting, and litigation. He is a partner at MetaLeX Pro, LLP and serves as general counsel at Brisa Max Holdings VI, LLC.
In addition, World Liberty Financial has an advisory team composed of venture capitalists, lawyers, and blockchain engineers. Sandy Peng, co-founder of the Ethereum Layer 2 blockchain Scroll, and Luke Pearson, general partner at Polychain Capital, are both advisors to this project.
Currently, World Liberty Financial's significant token purchases have sparked mixed evaluations from the public.
Nansen research analyst Nicolai Søndergaard told Bloomberg that World Liberty Financial's token purchases might be 'to gain more trust or to promote its own project by drawing attention to these assets, as if these assets perform well, World Liberty Financial might also benefit.'
Although World Liberty Financial's plans may sound innovative to those unfamiliar with cryptocurrencies, startups like this are quite common, and few succeed. Many such companies are established merely to sell tokens and make profits, as previously stated by Tarun Chitra, a general partner at Robot Ventures.
Overall, the DeFi project World Liberty Financial, associated with the Trump family, demonstrates its ambitions in the crypto space through significant token purchases and collaboration with Aave. Their investment targets have also become a focal point of interest for investors. However, the leadership team is relatively unknown, and the project's practicality and innovation remain uncertain. Nevertheless, as a project initiated by the family of America's 'crypto president', it will still attract widespread market attention, and future developments are worth monitoring.
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