Original | Odaily Planet Daily (@OdailyChina)
Author | Wenser (@wenser 2010)
With Trump's successful election on the 12th of this month (Time Magazine's Person of the Year) and appearing on the cover, 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 diverse tokens in the market. After purchasing a series of mainstream coins, infrastructure project tokens, and RWA tokens, the project officially announced its collaboration with Ethena Labs around 2 AM today, planning to integrate Ethena's revenue token sUSDe into the WLFI lending platform.
Odaily Planet Daily will summarize WLFI's recent operations and their impacts in this article for readers' reference.
WLFI has been very active recently: buying ENA, ONDO, etc.
Around 4 AM yesterday, according to Onchain Lens monitoring, the Trump family crypto project WLFI (World Liberty) again spent 250,000 USDC to buy 231,726 ENA, increasing its ENA holdings to 741,687 tokens, with a total cost of $750,000. Additionally, it converted 103 cbBTC worth $10.36 million 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 at an average price of $0.981.
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, WLFI's multi-signature address held 14,573 ETH (approximately $57.03 million), 102.9 cbBTC (approximately $10.38 million), 3.108 million USDT, 1.515 million USDC, 41,335 LINK (approximately $1.17 million), 3,357 AAVE (approximately $1.16 million), and other cryptocurrencies. Notably, on that day, the project had just converted a large amount of token sale proceeds into ETH, and at that time, its ETH holdings were worth over $50 million.
As previously shared 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, while COW is not part of World Liberty's portfolio, its price has surged nearly 93% over the past week due to the recent token purchases on Cowswap, and this driving effect is also reflected in the other tokens it has bought:
On December 14, after buying LINK and AAVE, WLFI's former holdings had unrealized gains of $299,000 for LINK and $338,000 for AAVE.
On December 16, after news of WLFI's purchases spread, ONDO broke $2.1 USDT, reaching an all-time high, with a 24H increase of 16.33%.
On December 16, boosted by news of WLFI buying various tokens, COW broke $1, reaching an all-time high; the price of ENA once rose to $1.33, just under $0.2 away from its previous all-time high.
If the previous BTC price was influenced by the 'Trump effect' and broke through the $100,000 mark from $70,000, then undoubtedly, WLFI's holding tokens have also been affected by this effect.
After all, in the eyes of cryptocurrency traders in the U.S. and around the world, WLFI is the 'Trump flagship project'.
Current WLFI holdings include: AAVE, COW.
From the end of November to December 19, after achieving the $30 million token sale target, WLFI's previous token purchase operations included—
- $30 million USDC to purchase 8,105 ETH;
- $10 million USDC to purchase 103 cbBTC (converted to WBTC);
- $2 million USDC to purchase 78,387 LINK;
- $1.91 million USDC to purchase 6,137 AAVE;
- $750,000 USDC to purchase 741,687 ENA;
- $250,000 USDC to purchase 134,216 ONDO.
According to on-chain data site Arkham, the current holdings of the WLFI project are as follows:
14,800 ETH, worth $54.89 million;
103 WBTC, worth $10.45 million;
6,137 AAVE, worth $2.12 million;
78,300 LINK, worth $1.95 million;
740,000 ENA, worth $860,000;
134,000 ONDO, worth $256,000.
Stablecoins (USDT + USDC) holdings are approximately $10 million.
Currently, the total value of assets in this multi-signature address is approximately $80.56 million.
WLFI token holding information (as of December 19 at 5 PM)
WLFI's difficult growth journey: from a target of $300 million to barely raising $30 million.
Looking back on WLFI's growth journey, it is hard to say it has been smooth sailing.
At the end of August, Eric Trump, the second son of Trump and current executive vice president of the Trump Organization, announced the official launch of the crypto project WLFI (@WorldLibertyFi), aiming to create a new era of finance. Notably, after Trump's victory in the presidential election in early November, insiders revealed that this project was established to address funding shortages during Trump's presidential campaign.
After inviting a number of well-known figures, including the CEO of Paxos, the founder of Tomo Wallet, the CEO of Mixie Studios & Mixie Media, and co-founders of Glue, and experiencing a series of market doubts and challenges, on October 15, the WLFI project token presale finally commenced as scheduled.
Despite achieving an impressive result of raising $5 million within the first hour of the presale, market feedback was not ideal due to issues such as KYC authentication, website downtime, and previous token distribution ratios. According to media reports, the roadmap indicates that WLFI's initial sale will seek to raise $300 million and sell 20% of the token supply at a $1.5 billion FDV.
Until October 17, according to Lookonchain monitoring, WLFI sold 83,373 million tokens, with sales exceeding $12.5 million; more than 10,000 users participated in the token sale, with address 0x2d24 spending 351.3 ETH ($903,000) to purchase 60.43 million WLFI, becoming the largest buyer.
Subsequently, according to a 13-page 'World Liberty Gold Paper' document from the project, the Trump family will receive 75% of the project's net profits while bearing no responsibilities.
The news caused a stir.
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, comments, and suggestions from their perspectives.
In early November, WLFI reduced its fundraising target by 90%, planning to sell only $30 million worth of WLFI tokens instead of the initially planned $300 million.
On November 20, WLFI sold about 1.35 billion tokens, generating sales of $20,283,014, accounting for about 68% of its revised fundraising target.
Just when many thought the project had hit a dead end and that even raising the $30 million target would be difficult, one person stepped in.
On November 26, Sun Yuchen announced a $30 million investment in the Trump family's crypto project WLFI, becoming its largest investor. He also stated that the U.S. is becoming a center for blockchain, thanks to Trump's support for Bitcoin. Subsequently, he joined WLFI as an advisor.
I personally speculate that this is also the reason why WLFI recently converted cbBTC to WBTC.
As for the purchase of AAVE and LINK tokens, it is also related to previous collaborations—
On November 14, WLFI's official announcement stated that it would adopt the Chainlink standard for on-chain data and cross-chain connectivity, serving as a secure way to bring DeFi into the next phase of large-scale 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 approved. It is understood that this instance will be managed by external risk managers and will be built on the existing Aave v3 infrastructure, ultimately launching on the Ethereum mainnet.
Thus, WLFI transformed itself, successfully 'staying at the table' and is now expected to become the 'crypto barometer' of the United States.
Conclusion: WLFI will continue to be active in the U.S. crypto market, becoming a 'crypto banner'.
According to a previous analysis, WLFI's action of converting stablecoins to ETH indicates that the project is seeking to engage in a deeper level of crypto economy. This may also suggest that the team believes ETH is a better reserve asset than the dollar. Notably, the first to notice this trading operation was renowned Ethereum investor and advisor Eric Conner.
As mentioned earlier, 75% of the net profits from WLFI's presale will go to the Trump family, with no responsibilities incurred. 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 activities.' The remaining 25% of the net protocol revenue 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 profit rights to Trump's close friend and political donor Steve Witkoff and some of his family members' affiliated company WC Digital Fi.
In this view, WLFI may become the 'crypto banner' of the Trump faction, leveraging trading operations and deeper cooperation with more crypto projects to promote the development of the U.S. crypto economy; on the other hand, the project will also provide some financial support for Trump and his faction, facilitating various personal and political actions during future governance.
Around WLFI, a core team may emerge to promote the development of the U.S. crypto economy, and the project is expected to become Trump's 'crypto Huangpu Military Academy.'
