Original article | Odaily Odaily( @OdailyChina )
Author｜Azuma ( @azuma_eth )
On the evening of April 15th, World Liberty Financial (WLFI), the Trump family's crypto project recently embroiled in controversy, officially released a community proposal regarding the "unlocking of WLFI shares for early supporters, founders, team members, and partners." Unsurprisingly, this once again put WLFI in the spotlight.
- Odaily Note: For details regarding the recent controversy surrounding WLFI, please refer to " Sun Ge's 'Rights Protection' Stands Hard Against the Trump Family, WLFI is the Real Crypto Harvester ".
Public offering history and early unlocking status
There's no need to go into the basics of WLFI; here's a brief recap of the project's public offering history and early unlocking.
The total supply of WLFI is 100 billion, and it has previously been offered to the public in two rounds of pre-sales.
- The first pre-sale began in October 2024, priced at $0.015 per token, with a total supply of 20 billion tokens (20% of the total supply). WLFI's first pre-sale progressed slowly due to a plethora of FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Debt) voices in the market at the time. However, after Trump's token announcement, WLFI's popularity gradually increased, and it successfully sold all 20 billion WLFI tokens on January 20, 2025, raising $300 million.
- Following the conclusion of the first pre-sale, WLFI immediately launched a second pre-sale, priced at $0.05 per token, with a total supply of 5 billion tokens (5% of the total supply). The second pre-sale sold out on March 14, 2025, raising $250 million.
- In addition to the two rounds of sales to the public, according to WLFI's official token economic model, the project also pre-sold a total of 8.893 billion tokens (8.893% of the supply) to strategic investors and institutional participants at a price of $0.1 per token.
In summary, WLFI sold a total of 33.893 billion tokens through pre-sales (representing 33.893% of the total supply).
On September 1, 2025, WLFI officially launched, and pre-sale participants began their first unlocking of tokens. Users who participated in both rounds of public pre-sales could unlock 20% of their tokens after signing the token unlocking agreement and completing the activation process. The remaining 80% unlocking would depend on subsequent governance developments. Institutional investors' shares have not yet been unlocked.
After its launch, WLFI was once hyped by the market, with its on-chain price once exceeding $0.45. The price on some second- and third-tier exchanges even briefly surged to above $1. In the following months, the price of WLFI gradually fell from above $0.20, and as of the time of writing, it is temporarily reported at around $0.08.
For users who participated in the first round of WLFI presale (cost price $0.015), even if only 20% of the tokens were unlocked, they have basically recovered their principal or even made a profit as long as they have sold them in the past few months; however, for users of the second round of presale (cost price $0.05), most users have not yet recovered their principal, unless they sold at the high price at the beginning of the opening.
Most users weren't too worried about this at first—as long as the remaining 80% was unlocked, they could make a profit, right? But as the price of WLFI continued to drop, pre-order users became increasingly eager for the subsequent unlocks.
But no one expected that WLFI would pull some tricks with the unlocking rules.
WLFI's unlock proposal, oh wait, I mean unlock notification
According to the proposal released by WLFI on the forum, the rules for unlocking the remaining WLFI shares held by early supporters (pre-sale users), founders, team members, advisors, and partners are as follows.
- For pre-sale users (currently involving 17,043,666,558 WLFI, the number may change as some pre-sale users have not yet claimed their tokens), all locked tokens will undergo a two-year lock-up period, followed by a two-year linear unlocking period – meaning it will take four years to unlock them all .
- For the founders, team, advisors, and partners (involving 45,238,585,647 WLFI), 10% of all locked tokens (i.e., 4,523,858,565 WLFI) will be permanently burned and removed from the total supply. The remaining 90% (40,714,727,082 WLFI) will undergo a two-year lock-up period, followed by a three-year linear unlocking period—meaning it will take five years to fully unlock .
Okay, here comes the problem. Most users who initially considered investing in WLFI were drawn by the Trump family's name. But now you're making them wait another four years to receive their tokens? By then, Trump's current presidential term will have long ended. Not only will Trump not remember his sons running this project, but his very state of mind is also a question mark…
Another point worth mentioning, perhaps to demonstrate WLFI's decentralized spirit, is that WLFI "humanely" stated in its proposal that if the proposal committee approves, tokens held by holders who have not explicitly accepted the attribution plan will continue to be locked indefinitely—in other words: "You can disagree, but if you disagree, your tokens will be locked forever!"
Perhaps anticipating strong backlash from the community, WLFI even attempted to control comments on the official governance forum. As shown in the image below, a quick browse reveals numerous replies with highly uniform formatting, resembling spam (all starting with "YES").
It was rare to find a reply from a living person, who said: "Damn it, I'm going to send these bastards to jail!"
Speculation on the motivations of the WLFI team
Finally, let's speculate on the WLFI team's motives. Some friends have asked why the WLFI founders and team would voluntarily burn 10% of the tokens. I personally think there are two possibilities.
One possibility is that the WLFI team has a deep sense of compassion and is willing to sacrifice for the community. Another is that burning 10% of the tokens is merely a ruse to appease the community ("I've already sacrificed so much, it's not easy!"). After all, the value of 10%, which won't be fully unlocked for several years, is questionable. The WLFI team's real goal is to lock them all up, because the current token distribution best serves their interests. Although they can't obtain the tokens that are openly theirs, there will always be some hidden allocations under various names—this is the true meaning of the token economic model.
The above is purely personal speculation. If you ask me which I believe more, it would definitely be the first one.
