Original | Odaily Planet Daily (@OdailyChina)
Author | Wenser (@wenser 2010)
With Trump's successful election as Time Magazine's Person of the Year on the 12th of this month and his appearance on the cover, the Trump effect is still continuing in the cryptocurrency market. The latest wave of attention in the market for a variety of tokens is the Trump family's cryptocurrency project WLFI (World Liberty). After previously purchasing a series of mainstream coins, infrastructure project tokens, and RWA tokens, the project officially announced a collaboration with Ethena Labs around 2 am this morning, with the two parties planning to integrate Ethena's yield token sUSDe into the WLFI lending platform.
Odaily Planet Daily will sort out WLFI's recent operations and transmission impact in this article for readers' reference.
WLFI's Recent Frequent Actions: Buying ENA, ONDO, etc.
Around 4 am yesterday, according to monitoring by Onchain Lens, the Trump family's cryptocurrency project WLFI (World Liberty) spent another $250,000 USDC to purchase 231,726 ENA, bringing its ENA holdings to 741,687 tokens, with a total cost of $750,000. In addition, it also exchanged 103 cbBTC worth $10.36 million for 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 $151,985 USDC to buy 422 AAVE; within 48 hours, the project cumulatively spent $10 million USDC to buy 2,631 ETH; $1,246,722 USDC to buy 4,043 AAVE; and $2 million USDC to buy 78,387 LINK.
On December 12, according to Arkham's monitoring, WLFI's multi-signature address held 14,573 ETH (about $57.03 million), 102.9 CBBTC (about $10.38 million), 3.108 million USDT, 1.515 million USDC, 41,335 LINK (about $1.17 million), 3,357 AAVE (about $1.16 million) and other cryptocurrencies. It is worth mentioning that on that day, the project had just exchanged a large amount of token sales proceeds in stablecoins for ETH, with its ETH holdings valued at over $50 million at the time.
As previously shared by on-chain analyst Ai Yí, the non-stablecoin assets purchased by WLFI include LINK/AAVE/ENA/ONDO, half of which are top DeFi applications and half are 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 on-chain token purchases using 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 holdings in the former had an unrealized profit of $299,000, and the latter had an unrealized profit of $338,000.
On December 16, after the news of WLFI's purchases spread, ONDO broke through $2.1 USDT, hitting a new high, with a 24-hour increase of 16.33%.
On December 16, driven by WLFI's purchase of various tokens, COW broke through $1, hitting a new high; ENA's price once rose to $1.33, just under $0.2 away from its previous all-time high.
If BTC price broke through the $70,000 to $100,000 barrier under the "Trump effect" previously, then undoubtedly, the tokens held by WLFI have also been driven by this effect.
After all, in the eyes of cryptocurrency traders in the US and around the world, WLFI is the "Trump-branded project".
WLFI's Current Holdings: AAVE, COW
From the end of November to December 19, after completing its $30 million token sales target, WLFI's previous token purchase operations include:
- $30 million USDC to buy 8,105 ETH;
- $10 million USDC to buy 103 cbBTC (already exchanged for WBTC);
- $2 million USDC to buy 78,387 LINK;
- $1.91 million USDC to buy 6,137 AAVE;
- $750,000 USDC to buy 741,687 ENA;
- $250,000 USDC to buy 134,216 ONDO.
According to the on-chain data website Arkham, WLFI's current holdings 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;
741,000 ENA, worth $860,000;
134,000 ONDO, worth $256,000.
Stablecoin (USDT+USDC) holdings of about $10 million.
Currently, the total value of assets in this multi-wallet address is about $80.56 million.
WLFI Token Holdings Information (as of 5 pm on December 19)
WLFI's Difficult Growth Path: From a $300 Million Target to Barely Raising $30 Million
Looking back at WLFI's growth path, it can hardly be called smooth sailing.
At the end of August, Eric Trump, the second son of Trump and the current Executive Vice President of the Trump Organization, announced the official launch of the cryptocurrency project WLFI (@WorldLibertyFi), committed to building a new era of finance. It is worth mentioning that after Trump's presidential election victory in early November, an informed source revealed that the project was established to raise funds for Trump's presidential campaign due to insufficient funding.
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 the co-founder of Glue, and going through a series of market doubts and questioning, on October 15, WLFI's token pre-sale was finally launched as scheduled.
Although it achieved the impressive feat of "raising $5 million in the first hour of the pre-sale", due to issues such as KYC verification, website downtime, and previous token distribution ratios, the market feedback was not ideal. According to media reports, the roadmap shows that WLFI's initial sales will seek to raise $300 million and sell 20% of the token supply at a $1.5 billion FDV.
Until October 17, according to monitoring by Lookonchain, WLFI had 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 ($90.3 thousand) 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, without any liability.
The news caused an uproar.
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, raised questions, comments and suggestions from their respective perspectives.
In early November, WLFI reduced its fundraising target by 90%, planning to sell only $30 million worth of WLFI tokens, instead of the initial $300 million.
On November 20, WLFI sold about 1.35 billion tokens, with sales reaching $20,283,014, accounting for about 68% of its revised fundraising target.
Just as many thought the project was at a dead end and it would be difficult to even raise the $30 million target, someone stepped in.
On November 26, Justin Sun announced a $30 million investment in the Trump family's cryptocurrency project WLFI, becoming its largest investor. He also stated that the United States is becoming the center of blockchain, and this is all thanks to Trump's support for Bitcoin. Subsequently, he also joined WLFI as an advisor.
The author personally speculates 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 the previous cooperation -
On November 14, the WLFI official announced that they will use the Chainlink standard for on-chain data and cross-chain connections, as a secure way to bring DeFi into the next stage of mass adoption.
On December 13, the first community proposal initiated by the WLFI community to deploy an Aave v3 instance for the WLFI protocol was finally passed. It is understood that this instance will be managed by an external risk manager and will be built on the existing Aave v3 infrastructure, and will be launched on the Ethereum mainnet.
Thus, WLFI has transformed, not only successfully "staying on the table", but is currently expected to become the "crypto bellwether of the United States" 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 previous 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 indicate that the team believes ETH is a better reserve asset than the US dollar. It is reported that the famous Ethereum investor and advisor Eric Conner was the first to notice this trading operation.
And as mentioned earlier, 75% of the net proceeds from the WLFI project pre-sale will be obtained by the Trump family, without any liability. 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 activity." The remaining 25% of the net protocol revenue will be owned by the project's co-founders Chase Herro and Zachary Folkman's Puerto Rico-based Axiom Management Group (AMG). AMG has agreed to allocate half of its revenue rights to WC Digital Fi, an affiliate of Trump's friend and political donor Steve Witkoff and some of his family members.
From this perspective, WLFI may become the "crypto flag" of the Trump faction in the future, on the one hand, deepening cooperation with more crypto projects through trading operations 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, facilitating the implementation of various personal and political activities during his future tenure.
Around WLFI, a group of "core cadres" who will promote the development of the US crypto economy may emerge, and the project is expected to become Trump's "crypto West Point".
