Article source: Odaily Planet Daily
Author: Wenser; Editor: Hao Fangzhou
Produced by | Odaily Planet Daily
As Trump successfully won the title of 'Time Magazine Person of the Year' on the 12th of this month and appeared on the cover, the Trump effect in the cryptocurrency market continues. The Trump family crypto project WLFI (World Liberty) has brought a new wave of attention to the various tokens in the market. After purchasing a series of mainstream coins, infrastructure project tokens, and RWA tokens, the project officially announced a partnership with Ethena Labs around 2 AM today, planning to integrate Ethena's yield token sUSDe into the WLFI lending platform.
Odaily Planet Daily will summarize WLFI's recent operations and transmission effects for readers' reference.
WLFI has been active recently: buying ENA, ONDO, etc.
At around 4 AM yesterday, according to Onchain Lens monitoring, the Trump family's crypto project WLFI (World Liberty) again spent 250,000 USDC to purchase 231,726 ENA, raising its ENA holdings to 741,687, with a total cost of $750,000. Additionally, it exchanged 103 cbBTC worth $10.36 million for WBTC.
On December 16, WLFI spent 250,000 USDC to purchase 134,216 ONDO.
On December 15, WLFI spent 500,013 USDC to purchase 509,955 ENA at an average price of $0.981.
On December 13, WLFI spent 1 million USDC to purchase 37,052 LINK and 151,985 USDC to purchase 422 AAVE; within 48 hours, the project spent a total of 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, that day the project had just exchanged a large amount of stablecoins obtained from token sales for ETH, at which point its ETH holdings were valued at over $50 million.
As previously shared by on-chain analyst Ai Yi, WLFI's non-stablecoin asset purchases include LINK / AAVE / ENA / ONDO, half of which belong to top DeFi applications and half belong to RWA assets. Interestingly, although COW is not in World Liberty's portfolio, its price has surged nearly 93% in the past seven days due to the recent token purchases made using Cowswap, and this driving effect is also reflected in its purchases of other tokens:
On December 14, after buying LINK and AAVE, WLFI's holdings in the former gained a floating profit of $299,000; the latter gained a floating profit of $338,000.
On December 16, after the news of WLFI's purchases spread, ONDO broke through $2.1 USDT, reaching a historic high with a 24-hour increase of 16.33%.
On December 16, boosted by news of WLFI's purchases of various tokens, COW broke through $1, reaching a historic high; ENA's price once rose to $1.33, just under 0.2 dollars away from its previous all-time high.
If the previous BTC price was influenced by the 'Trump effect' as it broke the $70,000 barrier to surpass $100,000, then undoubtedly, WLFI's holding tokens have also been influenced by this effect.
After all, in the eyes of cryptocurrency traders in the United States and around the world, WLFI is the 'Trump project'.
Current WLFI holdings statistics: AAVE, COW
From the end of November to December 19, after completing 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 (already exchanged for 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 of approximately $10 million.
Currently, the total asset value of this multi-signature address is approximately $80.56 million.
WLFI token holdings information (as of December 19, 5 PM)
The difficult growth path of WLFI: from a target of $300 million to barely gathering $30 million.
Looking back at the growth path of the WLFI project, it is hard 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), aiming to create a new financial era. Notably, after Trump's victory in the presidential election in early November, insiders revealed that this project was established to address the funding shortfall during Trump's campaign.
After inviting several well-known figures, including Paxos CEO, founder of Tomo Wallet, CEO of Mixie Studios & Mixie Media, co-founder of Glue, and experiencing a series of market doubts and challenges, on October 15, the WLFI project token presale finally commenced as scheduled.
Although it achieved a remarkable feat of raising $5 million within an hour of the presale, market feedback was not ideal due to issues such as KYC certification, website crashes, and previous token distribution ratios. According to media reports, the roadmap shows that WLFI's initial sales aim to raise $300 million, selling 20% of the token supply at a fully diluted valuation of $1.5 billion.
Until October 17, according to Lookonchain monitoring, WLFI sold 83,373 tokens, with sales exceeding $12.5 million; more than 10,000 users participated in the token sale, among which address 0x2d24 spent 351.3 ETH ($903,000) to purchase 60.43 million WLFI, making it 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 profits without bearing any 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, all 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 approximately 1.35 billion tokens, with sales reaching $20,283,014, accounting for about 68% of its adjusted fundraising target.
Just when many thought the project had hit a dead end and it would be difficult to reach the target of $30 million, someone stepped in.
On November 26, Sun Yuchen announced a $30 million investment in Trump's family crypto project WLFI, becoming its largest investor. He also stated that the U.S. is becoming the center of 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 exchanged cbBTC for WBTC.
As for the purchase of AAVE and LINK tokens, it is also related to previous collaborations -
On November 14, WLFI 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 phase of mass adoption.
On December 13, the first community proposal initiated by WLFI community for 'deploying an Aave v3 instance for the WLFI protocol' was finally passed. It is understood that this instance will be managed through external risk managers and constructed on the existing Aave v3 infrastructure, ultimately launching on the Ethereum mainnet.
In this way, WLFI transformed into a project that not only successfully 'stayed at the table' but is also expected to become the 'American crypto weather vane' in the future.
Conclusion: WLFI will continue to be active in the US crypto market, becoming the 'crypto flag'.
According to a previous analysis, WLFI's behavior of exchanging stablecoins for ETH indicates that the project is seeking to participate in a deeper level of the crypto economy. This may also suggest that the team believes ETH is a better reserve asset than the dollar. It is reported that the first to notice this transaction was the famous Ethereum investor and advisor Eric Conner.
As mentioned earlier, 75% of the net profits from the WLFI project's presale will be received by the Trump family without bearing any responsibility. 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 agreement revenue will belong to Axiom Management Group (AMG), a Puerto Rican company wholly owned by project co-founders Chase Herro and Zachary Folkman. AMG has agreed to distribute half of its profit rights to Trump's close friend and political donor Steve Witkoff and some family members' affiliated companies WC Digital Fi.
In this view, WLFI may become the subsequent 'crypto flag' of the Trump faction, leveraging trading operations and deepening cooperation with more crypto projects to promote the development of the US crypto economy; on the other hand, the project will also provide certain financial support for Trump and his faction members, facilitating various personal and political actions during future governance.
Around WLFI, a core team promoting the development of the US crypto economy may emerge, and this project is expected to become Trump's 'crypto Huangpu Military Academy'.
