Trump is hawking tokens for a crypto project he still hasn’t explained

After a disclaimer that nothing we’d hear tonight is financial or legal advice, followed by a 40-minute interview with former President Donald Trump — which touched on the apparent attempt on his life at a Florida golf course, the border, the “evil forces” conspiring against him, and his granddaughter’s foreign language skills — and subsequent conversations with Trump’s sons and associates, the X Space dedicated to announcing Trump’s “crypto platform” more or less got to the point.

The goal of World Liberty Financial, Trump’s new decentralized finance project, is to drive “the mass adoption of stablecoins and decentralized finance,” according to a statement posted on its X account earlier this month. But over the course of the lengthy “announcement” on Monday night, neither Trump nor any of his business partners explained how exactly that would work.

Finally, more than two hours into the stream, Corey Caplan — the co-founder of the decentralized lending platform Dolomite, who is working as an adviser for Trump’s project — said World Liberty Financial would “sell and otherwise distribute governance tokens called WLFI.” The token sales will be limited to “certain persons who would be eligible to participate in transactions that are exempt from registration under US federal securities law,” meaning only accredited investors under Regulation D and Regulation S can buy the token. Three people with knowledge of the project told the New York Times that World Liberty Financial has been pitched as a borrowing and lending platform.

Earlier in the stream, a bevy of Trump relatives and associates described World Liberty Financial as a way of helping the “huge, approachable class of people who have either been debanked ... or they just don’t have a bank that they can go to, and they don’t have a bank that will listen to them.”

The details started to emerge a little over an hour and a half into the announcement, when two of Trump’s other business partners — Chase Herro and Zak Folkman — revealed some details of the “crypto platform” Trump and his sons have been teasing for over a month. World Liberty Financial will “onboard as many people through simple products where they can actually start to earn yield on their assets,” said Folkman, the co-founder of Dough Finance, a crypto platform that was hacked earlier this year.

Trump first announced the project in August. “For too long, the average American has been squeezed by the big banks and financial elites. It’s time we take a stand—together. #BeDefiant,” he posted on Truth Social. Aside from a link to a Telegram channel, the post included no other details about the platform or what it entailed. The uncertainty around the announcement has let opportunists — and hackers — take advantage of Trump’s fans. Earlier this month, hackers breached the X accounts of Tiffany Trump and Lara Trump, on which they posted links to a fake World Liberty Financial website announcing that the venture had launched.

Donald Trump Jr. and real estate developer and landlord Steve Witkoff, both of whom are also involved in World Liberty Financial, framed the project as a way of helping underserved and unbanked communities.

“If you want to borrow money today, you have to be almost anointed. You have to be a member of the privileged class,” said Witkoff, who in 2017 purchased the Fontainebleau Resort Las Vegas for $600 million.

Don Jr., who described himself as “still a neophyte” in the crypto space, said decentralized finance can help people who have been excluded from traditional financial markets. The announcement played up a popular fear among the crypto crowd: being debanked, potentially as punishment for political dissent.

“There was a time period where the Trumps, we could’ve picked up the phone and called and CEO of any bank,” Don Jr. said. “We went from being people who would have been the elite in that world to just being, like, totally canceled.” It’s possible that cancellation has more to do with Trump’s history of lying about his wealth or running a scammy for-profit college than it does with his political views.

Despite claims that World Liberty Financial will put “the power of finance back in the hands of the people,” initial reports suggested that its founding token would mostly be distributed to people involved in the project. A white paper obtained by CoinDesk said 70 percent of WLFI would be held by the founding members, team, and service providers.

During the stream, however, Caplan chastised the “fake news media” reports of how the token would be distributed and said approximately 63 percent of the tokens will be sold to the public, while 20 percent would be “reserved for team compensation.”

World Liberty Financial appears to be part of a broader Trump outreach campaign to the crypto community. Trump headlined this year’s Bitcoin Conference in Nashville, Tennessee, where he said he’d never sell the US’s Bitcoin holdings but stopped short of promising to create a strategic Bitcoin reserve. He’s also released four NFT collections, which netted him at least $7.2 million, according to August financial disclosure forms.

It’s evident that Trump, who disappeared from the stream after the first 40 minutes, is the face of a product he knows almost nothing about. He had little to say about cryptocurrency aside from some vague comments about the “very hostile environment” the Securities and Exchange Commission has created for the crypto community — and an admission that politicians know that embracing crypto could help them win voters.

“You’re going to be happy, and you’re going to love your crypto, and as long as you have crypto, you’re happy,” Trump said early in the stream. “I think crypto is one of those things we have to do whether we like it or not.”