Former US President and Republican candidate Trump announced the launch of the Trump family's DeFi project World Liberty Financial last month, just about 3 weeks before the US presidential election. On Tuesday, Trump publicly tweeted, officially announcing the WLFI token sale, with one WLFI token priced at $0.015, purchasable using ETH, USDT, USDC or WETH.
It's time
https://t.co/l0xkttUY86
— WLFI (@worldlibertyfi) October 16, 2024
However, according to CoinDesk's report, the WLFI token sale had a rather rocky start. The sale began at 8:40 AM ET on the 15th (around 9:40 PM Taiwan time on the 15th), and within the first hour, the sale website crashed multiple times, but still had nearly 2,900 investors purchase the token.
On-chain data shows that within the first hour of the sale, about 344 million WLFI tokens were sold to around 3,000 unique wallets, but so far, only 730 million WLFI tokens have been sold, equivalent to $11 million, less than 4% of the 20 billion tokens allocated for the public sale, far below the $300 million fundraising target.
WLFI advisor and Scroll blockchain network co-founder Sandy Peng attributed the website crashes to high traffic, saying the team did not anticipate such strong interest, and Scroll's network will host World Liberty Financial's blockchain applications.
According to Sandy Peng, the World Liberty Financial website received 72 million unique visits in the first hour after launch, causing the site to go offline due to the high traffic, but it later intermittently came back online, apparently switching to a new web hosting service.
What is the use of WLFI tokens?
World Liberty Finance officially stated that WLFI tokens will be used for governance of the World Liberty Finance platform, which aims to allow users to participate in lending and other DeFi activities. WLFI tokens are currently non-transferable (with a 12-month lock-up period), and holders can vote on matters such as protocol upgrades, technical changes, promotion partner relationships, and security risk oversight.
The total supply of WLFI tokens is 100 billion, and token holders can propose changes to the platform's future. Since all WLFI tokens are non-transferable, they will be locked indefinitely in wallets or smart contracts, unless the rules are changed in the future to allow trading. The WLFI team stated that all governance decisions will comply with US regulations to ensure any changes are legal.
WLFI token sales are limited to non-US persons and qualified US investors. World Liberty Financial claims that the project has pre-whitelisted over 100,000 qualified US investors before the token launch, and the restriction on US investors is to protect WLF from violating US securities laws.
In the US, qualified investors authorized by the SEC can invest in unregistered securities, such as stocks before an initial public offering (IPO). They must meet specific income and net worth standards, such as an annual income of $200,000 and total assets exceeding $1 million.
