The decentralized finance (DeFi) project World Liberty Financial token WLFI under former US President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump was officially sold publicly on Tuesday (October 16), but only about 4% of the tokens were sold in the end, equivalent to $12.45 million. This means that the Trump family's goal of raising $300 million unexpectedly failed, and the financial revolution did not get off to a smooth start.
The US presidential election is about three weeks away, and Trump's choice to publicly sell WLFI tokens at this time has sparked heated discussions in the crypto community. Trump announced the news in a post on Tuesday, with a WLFI token priced at $0.015 and available through Ethereum (ETH), USDT, USDC or WETH.
But according to CoinDesk, the public sale of WLFI tokens faced challenges at the beginning. The public sale started at 8:40 a.m. Eastern Time on October 15. Within the first hour of going online, the official website of the public sale crashed several times, but nearly 2,900 investors still bought the token.
On-chain data shows that within the first hour of the public sale, approximately 344 million WLFI tokens were sold to approximately 3,000 independent wallets. However, to date, only 830 million WLFI tokens have been sold, equivalent to US$12.45 million, accounting for approximately 4% of the 20 billion tokens allocated for the public sale, far below the fundraising target of US$300 million.
Sandy Peng, a WLFI consultant and co-founder of the Scroll blockchain network, which will host World Liberty Financial’s blockchain application, attributed the website crash to excessive traffic and said the team did not expect such great interest.
According to 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.
According to the official team before the coin was issued, the WLFI token will be used to govern the World Liberty Financial platform, which aims to allow users to participate in lending and other DeFi activities. The WLFI token is temporarily non-transferable and will have a 12-month lock-up period. Holders can vote on matters such as protocol upgrades, technical changes, promotion of partnerships, and security risk supervision.
The non-transferability of WLFI tokens is expected to be a significant factor causing traders to hesitate.
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 WLFI from violating U.S. securities regulations.
In the United States, accredited investors are authorized by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to invest in unregistered securities, such as stocks before an initial public offering (IPO), and they must meet certain income and net worth standards, such as an annual income of $200,000 and total assets of more than $1 million.
