Last month, former US President and Republican candidate Trump announced the launch of the Trump family's DeFi project World Liberty Financial. With the US presidential election about three weeks away, Trump publicly announced on Tuesday that WLFI will be open for public sale. The price of a WLFI token is US$0.015 and can be purchased using ETH, USDT, USDC or WETH.
However, according to Coindesk, the public sale of WLFI tokens had a very unsuccessful start. The public sale started at 8:40 a.m. Eastern Time on the 15th (approximately 21:40 Taiwan Time on the 15th). Within the first hour of going online, the official website of the public sale crashed several times, but nearly 2,900 investors still purchased the token.
On-chain data shows that in the first hour of the public sale, approximately 344 million WLFI tokens were sold to approximately 3,000 independent wallets. However, to date, only 730 million WLFI tokens have been sold, equivalent to US$11 million, accounting for less than 4% of the 20 billion tokens allocated for the public sale, far below the fundraising target of US$300 million.
Sandy Peng, an advisor to WLFI and co-founder of the Scroll blockchain network, which will host World Liberty Financial’s blockchain application, attributed the website crash to high traffic, saying the team had not anticipated such a large interest.
According to Sandy Peng, World Liberty Financial's official website received 72 million unique visits within the first hour of its launch. The website was offline due to excessive traffic, but later came back online intermittently, apparently having switched to a new website hosting service.
What is the use of WLFI tokens?
World Liberty Finance officially stated that the WLFI token will be used to govern the World Liberty Finance platform, which is designed to allow users to participate in lending and other DeFi activities. The WLFI token is temporarily non-transferable (there will be a 12-month lock-up period), and holders can vote on matters such as protocol upgrades, technical changes, promotion partnerships, and security risk supervision.
The total supply of WLFI tokens is 100 billion, and holders can propose changes to the platform in the future. Since all WLFI are non-transferable, it means that they will be locked in wallets or smart contracts indefinitely and cannot be traded unless the rules are modified in the future. The WLFI team stated that all governance decisions will comply with US regulations to ensure that any changes are legal.
The WLFI token sale is limited to non-Americans and qualified U.S. investors. World Liberty Financial officially announced that the project has whitelisted more than 100,000 qualified U.S. investors before the token launch. The restrictions on U.S. investors are intended to protect WLF from violating U.S. securities regulations.
In the United States, accredited investors are authorized by the SEC to invest in unregistered securities, such as stocks prior to an initial public offering (IPO), and they must meet certain income and net worth criteria, such as an annual income of $200,000 and total assets exceeding $1 million.