Written by: Wenser, Odaily Planet Daily
With Trump's successful election as Time Magazine's Person of the Year and his appearance on the cover on the 12th of this month, the Trump effect in the cryptocurrency market continues. Recently, the Trump family's crypto project WLFI (World Liberty) has brought a new wave of attention to the various tokens on the market. After purchasing a series of mainstream coins, infrastructure project tokens and RWA tokens, the project officially announced its cooperation with Ethena Labs at around 2 am on the 19th. The two parties plan to integrate Ethena's revenue token sUSDe into the WLFI lending platform.
Odaily Planet Daily will summarize WLFI's recent operations and their ripple effects for readers' reference.
WLFI has been very active recently: buying ENA, ONDO, etc.
Around 4 AM yesterday, according to Onchain Lens monitoring, Trump's family crypto project WLFI (World Liberty) once again spent 250,000 USDC to purchase 231,726 ENA, increasing its ENA holdings to 741,687 pieces, with a total cost of 750,000 USD. In addition, it also converted 103 cbBTC worth 10.36 million USD into WBTC.
On December 16, WLFI spent 250,000 USDC to buy 134,216 ONDO.
On December 15, WLFI spent 500,013 USDC to buy 509,955 ENA, with an average price of 0.981 USD.
On December 13, WLFI spent 1 million USDC to buy 37,052 LINK and spent 151,985 USDC to buy 422 AAVE; within 48 hours, the project cumulatively spent 10 million USDC to buy 2,631 ETH; spent 1,246,722 USDC to buy 4,043 AAVE; spent 2 million USDC to buy 78,387 LINK.
On December 12, according to Arkham monitoring, the WLFI multi-signature address held 14,573 ETH (approximately 57.03 million USD), 102.9 cbBTC (approximately 10.38 million USD), 3.108 million USDT, 1.515 million USDC, 41,335 LINK (approximately 1.17 million USD), 3,357 AAVE (approximately 1.16 million USD), and other cryptocurrencies. Notably, on that day, the project had just exchanged a large amount of stablecoins from token sale proceeds for ETH, at which point its ETH holdings were valued at over 50 million USD.
As previously mentioned by on-chain analyst Ai Yi, the non-stablecoin assets purchased by WLFI include LINK / AAVE / ENA / ONDO, half belonging to top DeFi applications and half to RWA assets. Interestingly, although COW is not in World Liberty's portfolio, due to the recent token purchases using Cowswap, its price has skyrocketed nearly 93% in the past seven days; this ripple effect is also evident in the other tokens purchased.
On December 14, after buying LINK and AAVE, WLFI's holdings in the former had an unrealized profit of 299,000 USD; the latter had an unrealized profit of 338,000 USD.
On December 16, following the spread of news about WLFI's purchases, ONDO broke through 2.1 USDT, reaching an all-time high, with a 24H increase of 16.33%.
On December 16, fueled by news of WLFI buying various tokens, COW broke through 1 USD, reaching an all-time high; the price of ENA once rose to 1.33 USD, just less than 0.2 USD shy of its previous all-time high.
If the previous BTC price was influenced by the 'Trump Effect' and rose from 70,000 USD to break through the 100,000 USD mark, it is undoubtedly the case that the WLFI held tokens have also been influenced by this effect.
After all, in the eyes of cryptocurrency traders in the U.S. and around the world, WLFI is 'Trump's flagship project.'
Current WLFI holding statistics: AAVE, COW
From the end of November to December 19, after achieving a token sale target of 30 million USD, WLFI's previous token buying operations included -
30 million USD USDC to purchase 8,105 ETH;
10 million USD USDC to purchase 103 cbBTC (converted to WBTC);
2 million USD USDC to purchase 78,387 LINK;
1.91 million USD USDC to purchase 6,137 AAVE;
750,000 USD USDC to purchase 741,687 ENA;
250,000 USD USDC to purchase 134,216 ONDO.
According to on-chain data website Arkham, the current holding situation of the WLFI project is as follows:
14,800 ETH, worth 54.89 million USD;
103 WBTC, worth 10.45 million USD;
6137 pieces of AAVE, worth 2.12 million USD;
74,100 LINK, worth 1.95 million USD;
74,100 ENA, worth 860,000 USD;
134,000 ONDO, worth 256,000 USD.
Stablecoins (USDT+USDC) holdings are about 10 million USD.
Currently, the total value of assets in this wallet address is approximately 80.56 million USD.
WLFI token holding information (as of December 19, 5 PM)
The difficult growth path of WLFI: from a goal of 300 million to barely gathering 30 million
Looking back at WLFI's growth path, it is also difficult to say it has been smooth sailing.
At the end of August, Eric Trump, Trump's second son and current executive vice president of the Trump Organization, announced the official launch of the crypto project WLFI (@WorldLibertyFi), aimed at creating a new financial era. Notably, after Trump won the presidential election in early November, insiders revealed that the project was established to address the funding shortfall during Trump's presidential campaign.
After inviting numerous notable figures, including the CEO of Paxos, the founder of Tomo Wallet, the CEO of Mixie Studios & Mixie Media, and co-founders of Glue, and after experiencing a series of market doubts and challenges, on October 15, the WLFI project token presale finally commenced as scheduled.
Despite achieving the impressive result of 'raising 5 million USD within one hour of the presale,' the market reaction was not ideal due to issues such as KYC certification, website downtime, and previous token distribution ratios. According to media reports, the roadmap shows that WLFI's initial sale will seek to raise 300 million USD and sell 20% of the token supply at a FDV of 1.5 billion USD.
Until October 17, according to Lookonchain monitoring, WLFI sold 83,373 million tokens, with sales exceeding 12.5 million USD; more than 10,000 users participated in the token sale, among which address 0x2d24 spent 351.3 ETH (903,000 USD) to purchase 60.43 million WLFI, becoming the largest buyer.
Subsequently, according to a 13-page document titled 'World Liberty Gold Paper' from the project, the Trump family will receive 75% of the project's net income, with no liabilities.
The news caused an uproar.
Yat Siu, co-founder and executive chairman of Animoca Brands, Jehan Chu, co-founder and managing partner of Kenetic Capital, and Kain Warwick, founder of Synthetix, each raised questions, evaluations, and suggestions from their perspectives.
At the beginning of November, WLFI reduced its financing target by 90%, planning to only sell WLFI tokens worth 30 million USD instead of the initially planned 300 million USD.
On November 20, WLFI sold approximately 1.35 billion tokens, with sales reaching 20,283,014 USD, accounting for about 68% of its adjusted financing target.
Just when many thought the project had entered a dead end and it would be hard to gather the 30 million USD target, someone stepped in.
On November 26, Sun Yuchen announced a 30 million USD investment in Trump's crypto project WLFI, becoming its largest investor. He also stated that the U.S. is becoming a hub for blockchain, thanks to Trump's support for Bitcoin. He later joined WLFI as an advisor.
It is my personal guess that this is also the reason why WLFI recently converted cbBTC to WBTC.
As for the purchases of AAVE and LINK tokens, they are also related to previous collaborations -
On November 14, WLFI officially announced that it would adopt the Chainlink standard for on-chain data and cross-chain connections, as a secure way to bring DeFi into the next stage of widespread adoption.
On December 13, the first community proposal initiated by the WLFI community to 'deploy an Aave v3 instance for the WLFI protocol' was ultimately passed. It is understood that this instance will be managed by an external risk manager and will be built on the existing Aave v3 infrastructure, ultimately launching on the Ethereum mainnet.
Thus, WLFI has transformed, not only successfully 'staying at the table' but is now expected to become the 'crypto weather vane' of the U.S.
Conclusion: WLFI will continue to be active in the U.S. crypto market, becoming a 'crypto banner.'
According to a previous analysis, WLFI's prior conversion of stablecoins to ETH indicates that the project is seeking to engage in a deeper level of the crypto economy. This may also suggest that the team believes ETH is a better reserve asset than the USD. The first to note this transaction was the well-known Ethereum investor and advisor Eric Conner.
As mentioned earlier, 75% of the net proceeds from the WLFI project's presale will be obtained by the Trump family, with no liabilities. The document also emphasizes that Trump and his family members are not directors, employees, managers, or operators of WLFI or its affiliates and states that the project and tokens 'are not related to any political activity.' The remaining 25% of net agreement income will belong to the Puerto Rican company Axiom Management Group (AMG), wholly owned by project co-founders Chase Herro and Zachary Folkman. AMG has agreed to allocate half of its revenue rights to Trump's close friend and political donor Steve Witkoff and some of his family members' affiliated company WC Digital Fi.
From this perspective, WLFI may become the 'crypto banner' for Trump’s faction, collaborating deeply with more crypto projects through trading operations to promote the development of the U.S. crypto economy; on the other hand, the project will also provide certain financial support to Trump and his faction for personal and political actions during their future governance.
Around WLFI, a core group that may promote the development of the U.S. crypto economy is expected to emerge, and the project is likely to become Trump's 'crypto Huangpu Military Academy.'
