Trump's WLFI Project Spends $45 Million on Crypto, Who Are the Big Players Behind It?
Trump's DeFi project WLFI made a big move in December, spending nearly $45 million to buy a large amount of cryptocurrencies, such as ETH and cbBTC. This project was launched in September and claims to be a decentralized finance platform.
What did WLFI buy? According to blockchain data, they started purchasing more than 8,100 ETH and over 100 cbBTC at the end of November, along with others like LINK and AAVE, totaling around $45 million.
Although this project claims to be a DeFi platform, most of the leadership team are new faces, and their practicality and innovation are still uncertain. Moreover, their own token WLFI is not selling well; they initially planned to raise $300 million but have sold less than a quarter of that. However, Sun Yuchen invested $30 million, becoming the largest investor.
The good news is that the WLFI community recently voted to pass their first proposal to deploy a lending instance of Aave v3 on Ethereum, which could bring new users and liquidity to the project.
So who are the big players behind this project? In addition to Trump and his sons, there are five co-founders, but they are not well-known figures in the crypto space. For example, Chase Herro, who previously worked in cannabis sales and weight loss products, has only participated in one crypto project and faced a hacker attack. Another one, Zak Folkman, also has a rather controversial background.
However, there are also some professionals in the project, such as Rich Teo, who is responsible for stablecoins and payments; he is a veteran in the crypto field and has founded exchanges and stablecoin companies. The technical strategy head, Corey Caplan, is also a co-founder of Dolomite and has rich experience in DeFi platforms.
WLFI's recent actions have attracted outside attention; some believe they are trying to build trust or promote project development, while others feel that such startups are common, with few succeeding.
Overall, although the leadership team of Trump's family's DeFi project is not very familiar, their ambition and actions have still captured market attention. We will have to keep an eye on how things develop.
