Trump's New Crypto Project Is a Type Linked to Organized Crime and Terrorism
Maggie Harrison Dupré
Sat, September 14, 2024
The crypto lobby has been pouring boatloads of cash into the latest presidential campaign of former president Donald Trump, who has entirely abandoned his once-hardline stance against digital currencies as the campaign money has rolled in.
Now, on the back of recent promises to make America the "crypto capital of the world," Trump is prepping to publicly roll out a wildly dubious and ethically fraught new crypto project started by none other than his sons Eric and Donald Trump, Jr.
The project is called World Liberty Financial (WLFI), and it centers on "stablecoins," or coins that creators claim are pegged to stable commodities or government currencies. In an X-formerly-Twitter thread posted last week, the WLFI team claimed their stablecoin would be pegged to the US dollar.
"For too long, the average American has been squeezed by the big banks and financial elites," Trump, a financial elite whose penthouse is caked in gold, said in a Thursday X-formerly-Twitter video promoting the forthcoming crypto venture. "It's time we take a stand — together."
But while stablecoins sound like they should be stable, they've historically been disastrous for investors and economies.
The collapse of the so-called stablecoin Terra-Luna was central to the 2022 crypto crash that wiped nearly $2 trillion from the market, resulting not only in the catastrophic fall of billion-dollar crypto ventures like FTX but in people's entire life savings vanishing into thin air.
What's more, as The Wall Street Journal reported last year, stablecoins are also a favorite financing tool of organized crime and terror groups, who use the sleazy digital currencies to launder cash, traffic drugs, and even buy and sell humans.
And on top of all that, there are too many conflicts of interest to count.
If elected, Trump has already promised to slash crypto regulations and bring digital currency into the mainstream American economic fold. WLFI would capitalize on those pro-crypto regulatory shifts, thus putting a sitting president in the position of supporting a possibly lucrative family business through the powers of the federal government. And like Trump's Truth Social meme stock, WLFI would also offer obvious new inroads to currying Trump family favor, as wealthy operators looking to suck up could simply pour investments into the Trump sons' stablecoins.
Some of the non-Trump family characters reportedly involved in the project are too seedy to even make up. As Bloomberg News reports, a key WLFI "dealmaker" is a person named Chase Herro, a former colon cleanse salesman who stated in a 2018 YouTube video — while driving around in a Rolls-Royce — that "you can literally sell shit in a can, wrapped in piss, covered in human skin, for a billion dollars if the story's right, because people will buy it."
"I'm not going to question the right and wrong of all that," Herro added. Clearly the kind of guy you'd want to be entangled in the American economy.
WLF defended its stablecoin effort in an X post this month as a means of ensuring the "dominance" of the US dollar and maintaining America's financial leadership on the international stage. In the same thread, the company claimed without evidence that the US dollar is actively under attack by unnamed "foreign-nation states." But economic experts overwhelmingly agree that fearmongering claims around the allegedly imminent downfall of the American dollar are exaggerated and that knocking the US dollar out of its top spot would likely take decades.
Through one lens, Trump's very public backing for WLFI is just the latest example of the former president using his campaign to promote a personal or family business. In addition to standard campaign merch, he's selling less-conventional golden sneakers for nearly $500, as well as a $299 pair of "Trump Crypto President" low-tops in the shade "Bitcoin Orange"; $99 NFTs of himself; a $59.99 "patriotic" take on the Bible; and a recently-published coffee table book in which he threatens to jail Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, which is available for $99 (though you can get a signed version for $499.)
But the implications of WLFI are far more serious than expensive Bibles and random junk.
In addition to being used to fund illicit activities around the world, stablecoins have proven to be anything but stable. Coupled with the clear risk of corruption that the Trump family's involvement in the crypto world would pose should the former president retake the Oval Office, and everything about WLFI's scheme is as dangerous as it is bankrupt.
More on Trump and crypto: After Calling Crypto a "Scam," Donald Trump Now Owns Millions in Crypto
Trump to unveil crypto project amid scams and fears of ‘huge embarrassment’
Anthony Cuthbertson
Fri, September 13, 2024
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump makes remarks at the Fraternal Order Of Police’s National Board Of Trustees meeting. on 6 September, 2024 in Charlotte, North Carolina (Getty Images)
Former US President Donald Trump plans to unveil a brand new crypto project next week that has already been plagued by scams and targeted by cyber criminals.
The Republican candidate will reveal the World Liberty Financial project from his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida on Monday, claiming it will revolutionise finance and “leave the slow and outdated big banks behind”.
The project is being led by his two sons, Donald Jr. and Eric Trump, though little is known about what the venture will entail.
In a recent interview with the New York Post, Eric Trump described it as “digital real estate” – referring to either the creation of virtual property within the metaverse, or the digital tokenisation of real-world assets in the form of non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
“It’s equitable. It’s collateral anyone can get access to and do so instantly,” he said. “I don’t know if people realise what a shake up that is for the world of banking and finance. I hope we can help change that.”
Earlier this month, tens of thousands of Donald Trump’s followers were tricked into joining a fake group on the messaging app Telegram that was claiming to offer free cryptocurrency giveaways from the Trump-backed platform.
The group has since been removed, though ads promoting the scam giveaways still continue to appear for its 150,000 members. Telegram did not respond to a request for comment from The Independent.
The X accounts of Mr Trump’s daughter Tiffany and daughter-in-law Lara were also targeted by cyber criminals, who hijacked their profiles in order to share fake links for the project.
Nic Carter, a Trump supporter and noted figure within the crypto industry, advised the former president to stop the launch of World Liberty Financial, writing on X: “At best it’s an unnecessary distraction, at worst it’s a huge embarrassment and source of (additional) legal trouble.”
The project’s official Telegram channel revealed that the launch event for World Liberty Financial will be live streamed on X at 8pm ET on Monday (1am BST on Tuesday).
“Get ready as we unveil our plan to Make Finance Great Again,” the Telegram post stated. “This is a landmark event you won’t want to miss! Let’s make history together.”
Mr Trump has pitched himself as the pro-crypto candidate in the upcoming presidential elections, recently appearing at a bitcoin conference to outline his plans for the industry if elected.
Having previously dismissed the world’s leading cryptocurrency as a “scam”, Mr Trump told the crowd at the Bitcoin 2024 conference in Nashville that he would create a “national bitcoin stockpile” from seized criminal funds, as well as “immediately appoint a bitcoin and crypto presidential advisory council”.
Behind the Trump Crypto Project Is a Self-Described ‘Dirtbag of the Internet’
Zeke Faux and Muyao Shen
BLOOMBERG
Fri, September 13, 2024
Behind the Trump Crypto Project Is a Self-Described ‘Dirtbag of the Internet’
(Bloomberg) -- Chase Herro has sold a lot of things in his career. Weed. Weight-loss “colon cleanses.” A $149-a-month get-rich-quick class. Now he’s adding another line to his resume: the Trump family’s crypto guru.
Herro is the dealmaker behind World Liberty Financial, the crypto project that Donald Trump and his two older sons have been promoting on social media in recent weeks, according to two people involved with the project. Herro's long-time business partner Zachary Folkman is also playing a key role. While few details about World Liberty have been released, Eric Trump said that the startup will promote “financial independence” and Donald Trump Jr. said it will “make finance great again.” Former President Trump himself posted a video saying he'd announce the details on Sept. 16. “We’re embracing the future with crypto and leaving the slow and outdated big banks behind,” Trump said.
Yet Herro, a fast-talking 39-year-old who shows off his fancy cars and private-jet rides on social media, is an unknown in the crypto world. More than a dozen prominent digital-asset investors said in interviews they had never heard of him. The only crypto project with which he was publicly affiliated attracted only a few million dollars and suffered a devastating hack. A token he promoted on influencer Logan Paul’s podcast dropped 96% afterward. In one speech in 2018, he called himself “the dirtbag of the internet” and said that regulators should “kick s---heads like me out.”
“You can literally sell s--- in a can, wrapped in piss, covered in human skin, for a billion dollars if the story's right, because people will buy it,” Herro said about crypto in a 2018 YouTube video recorded as he drove in a Rolls-Royce. “I'm not going to question the right and wrong of all that.”
Bloomberg News sent detailed questions to a World Liberty email address. “We all see the picture you're trying to paint here and consider it at best grossly inaccurate,” a man named Jim Redner replied. “We're confident that our results will speak for themselves.” Redner said he was not a spokesperson for the company and was "just answering emails.” Herro, Folkman and the Trump presidential campaign didn’t respond to messages seeking comment.
Herro was introduced to the Trumps by Steve Witkoff, a real-estate developer and longtime supporter of the former president, after first meeting one of Witkoff’s sons, according to one of the people involved with the project.
When they met, Trump was reconsidering his stance on crypto. He’d once called Bitcoin a “scam against the dollar,” but in late 2022 he licensed his image for a series of nonfungible tokens – essentially, digital trading cards – featuring cartoon images of a muscular Trump. Then in July, after Bitcoin advocates raised what they said was $25 million for his campaign, Trump flew to Nashville to speak at a Bitcoin conference, where he promised to loosen regulations on the industry and create a strategic national stockpile of the cryptocurrency.
“The United States will be the crypto capital of the planet,” Trump said in the speech.
At the same time, Trump’s sons were getting curious about the industry. At the Nashville conference, Donald Trump Jr. appeared at an event sponsored by a little-known token called “Make America Great Again, Again,” though he said he had no affiliation with the project. And in June, Martin Shkreli, the former hedge-fund manager who served years in prison for securities fraud, said that he’d been talking with Barron Trump about starting another Trump cryptocurrency. Shkreli declined to comment.
Herro, who usually spells his name as “Chase Hero” with one “r” online, seemed like a better partner. He was affiliated with Dough Finance, a so-called decentralized-finance protocol which promised to allow users to borrow and lend crypto without intermediaries.
The two people involved with World Liberty insisted that Herro is a billionaire with a track record of crypto success. But Dough Finance only attracted $3.2 million in total activity, a tiny amount for the crypto industry, according to data provider DefiLlama. In July, it was hacked for about $2 million and it appears to be inactive now. An email to Dough Finance seeking comment was not returned.
Like Dough, World Liberty is being pitched as a platform for borrowing and lending crypto. It will have its own token, called WLFI, which it says will allow users to vote on how the project is run, according to a white paper reviewed by Bloomberg News. About 70% of those tokens will be reserved for insiders, with the rest sold to the public to raise cash. That amount of tokens going to insiders is “quite high" for a project that in theory is supposed to be decentralized, said Leo Mizuhara, founder of crypto asset manager Hashnote. Usually no entity or group of investors owns more than 20% of a project's total token supply, he added.
While the World Liberty plan might sound innovative to someone unfamiliar with crypto, startups like this are common, and few succeed. Many of them are only created in order to sell tokens and make money, said Tarun Chitra, general partner at Robot Ventures, which in August raised a $75 million fund to invest in new crypto projects.
“This just feels like a fly-by-night, trying to make a quick buck, kind of thing,” Chitra said of World Liberty. “It really doesn’t seem earnest to me.”
Herro’s involvement isn’t the only red flag when it comes to World Liberty. The white paper lists 18-year-old Barron Trump – a college freshman with no known crypto expertise — as “chief DeFi visionary.” A JPMorgan Chase banker listed as an adviser to the project, Brian Baker, refused to say whether that description was accurate.
Herro is described in the white paper as the person responsible for “data & strategies.” His friend Folkman is listed as “operations lead.” Folkman used to run a service called Date Hotter Girls where he taught seminars about how to pick up women. “OK, how many guys came here to learn how to take girls home and bang them?” Folkman said in a speech in 2014. The trademark for World Liberty is registered to a company using the same address in Puerto Rico as another company run by Herro and Folkman.
Herro likes to tell the story of how he spent time in prison for dealing marijuana when he was a young man before getting rich through internet marketing in the early days of social media. He was involved in what’s known as “affiliate marketing,” in which middlemen buy ad space on social networks and use it to sell products for other companies, which pay a bounty.
“You could just make millions,” Herro said in a video. “It was the easiest thing in the world.”
Herro’s marketing business left only a few traces online. But in a lawsuit he filed in 2014, he said that he marketed a “colon cleanser” called Regula RX on Facebook and wasn’t paid for the sales he generated. Carl Ruderman, owner of Regula RX, didn’t immediately respond to a letter sent to him at a federal prison in Miami, where he’s serving a five-year sentence for an unrelated Ponzi scheme.
Herro said in another video that he had at times employed a tactic called “cloaking,” which means hiding ads’ contents to evade social networks’ rules. In another lawsuit he filed in 2014, he sought a refund from a middleman who had sold him 20 Facebook accounts from Singapore for $100,000. Both tactics were the types of strategies used by advertisers who tried to place deceptive ads against social-media networks’ rules, according to Rob Leathern, a former Facebook executive who had responsibility for enforcing rules around advertising. “There’s no legitimate use case for cloaking,” said Leathern. (Leathern said he'd never heard of Herro.)
Herro said in his videos that the online advertising business became more challenging once competition emerged. In recent years, he and Folkman have pivoted to crypto, running a membership group called the Watchers that claimed to teach people the secrets of crypto trading and making money online. The group had more than 250 members who paid at least $149 a month, according to two people formerly involved with the group. Some paid tens of thousands of dollars for personalized coaching. Herro also appeared at other paid seminars with Jordan Belfort, whose penny-stock scams inspired the movie The Wolf of Wall Street.
“If you do this right, who f---ing cares if it goes to zero?” Herro said in a YouTube video promoting the Watchers. “You'll make so much money trading these f---ing coins in and out.”
In 2021, Herro appeared on influencer Logan Paul’s podcast, Impaulsive. (Trump went on the same podcast in June.) During the podcast, Paul acted like he was surprised when Herro said he liked a cryptocurrency called OMI, which Paul said he liked too. A co-host asked if the two had planned the promotion before the show, and Herro denied it, swearing “on my kids.” The price of OMI has since declined 96%. And a leaked video released by the scam-busting YouTuber Coffeezilla shows Herro and Paul talking with someone about getting more OMI tokens ahead of the show. A lawyer for Paul didn’t respond to a message seeking comment.
The white paper for World Liberty lists Donald Trump as “chief crypto advocate” and his sons Eric and Donald Jr. each as “Web3 Ambassador.” A disclaimer says that World Liberty is “not owned, managed, operated or sold” by the Trumps. It does note, however, that they may receive compensation. CoinDesk first reported on the white paper last week.
Promoting a private business like this while running for president is not illegal, though it’s a clear conflict of interest that may lead Trump to push crypto policies that favor his company, according to Danielle Brian, president of the Project On Government Oversight.
“The biggest harm is public policy is skewed away from what benefits the country to what benefits the individual and their family,” Brian said.
Whether or not the World Liberty project achieves its goals, its token might still be valuable. Trump’s fans have shown they’ll make investments in his companies even if they aren’t successful. In 2021, two former cast members from his reality show The Apprentice pitched Trump on starting his own social network, according to Reuters. The company that grew from that pitch, Trump Media & Technology Group Corp., which operates Truth Social, is worth about $3 billion, despite quarterly revenue of less than $1 million. Trump owns the majority of its stock.
When Trump considers an endorsement deal, his main consideration is not whether the product is useful, but whether he’ll receive cash up front, according to Michael Cohen, who served as the former president’s personal lawyer for years before testifying against him at his fraud trial.
“Is there upfront money attached?” Cohen said in an interview. “If the economics of the deal are to his benefit, with zero risk, he’s all in.”
--With assistance from Max Abelson.
©2024 Bloomberg L.P.
World Liberty, Crypto Project Helmed by Donald Trump's Family, Will Release on Sept. 16
Fri, September 13, 2024
Behind the Trump Crypto Project Is a Self-Described ‘Dirtbag of the Internet’
(Bloomberg) -- Chase Herro has sold a lot of things in his career. Weed. Weight-loss “colon cleanses.” A $149-a-month get-rich-quick class. Now he’s adding another line to his resume: the Trump family’s crypto guru.
Herro is the dealmaker behind World Liberty Financial, the crypto project that Donald Trump and his two older sons have been promoting on social media in recent weeks, according to two people involved with the project. Herro's long-time business partner Zachary Folkman is also playing a key role. While few details about World Liberty have been released, Eric Trump said that the startup will promote “financial independence” and Donald Trump Jr. said it will “make finance great again.” Former President Trump himself posted a video saying he'd announce the details on Sept. 16. “We’re embracing the future with crypto and leaving the slow and outdated big banks behind,” Trump said.
Yet Herro, a fast-talking 39-year-old who shows off his fancy cars and private-jet rides on social media, is an unknown in the crypto world. More than a dozen prominent digital-asset investors said in interviews they had never heard of him. The only crypto project with which he was publicly affiliated attracted only a few million dollars and suffered a devastating hack. A token he promoted on influencer Logan Paul’s podcast dropped 96% afterward. In one speech in 2018, he called himself “the dirtbag of the internet” and said that regulators should “kick s---heads like me out.”
“You can literally sell s--- in a can, wrapped in piss, covered in human skin, for a billion dollars if the story's right, because people will buy it,” Herro said about crypto in a 2018 YouTube video recorded as he drove in a Rolls-Royce. “I'm not going to question the right and wrong of all that.”
Bloomberg News sent detailed questions to a World Liberty email address. “We all see the picture you're trying to paint here and consider it at best grossly inaccurate,” a man named Jim Redner replied. “We're confident that our results will speak for themselves.” Redner said he was not a spokesperson for the company and was "just answering emails.” Herro, Folkman and the Trump presidential campaign didn’t respond to messages seeking comment.
Herro was introduced to the Trumps by Steve Witkoff, a real-estate developer and longtime supporter of the former president, after first meeting one of Witkoff’s sons, according to one of the people involved with the project.
When they met, Trump was reconsidering his stance on crypto. He’d once called Bitcoin a “scam against the dollar,” but in late 2022 he licensed his image for a series of nonfungible tokens – essentially, digital trading cards – featuring cartoon images of a muscular Trump. Then in July, after Bitcoin advocates raised what they said was $25 million for his campaign, Trump flew to Nashville to speak at a Bitcoin conference, where he promised to loosen regulations on the industry and create a strategic national stockpile of the cryptocurrency.
“The United States will be the crypto capital of the planet,” Trump said in the speech.
At the same time, Trump’s sons were getting curious about the industry. At the Nashville conference, Donald Trump Jr. appeared at an event sponsored by a little-known token called “Make America Great Again, Again,” though he said he had no affiliation with the project. And in June, Martin Shkreli, the former hedge-fund manager who served years in prison for securities fraud, said that he’d been talking with Barron Trump about starting another Trump cryptocurrency. Shkreli declined to comment.
Herro, who usually spells his name as “Chase Hero” with one “r” online, seemed like a better partner. He was affiliated with Dough Finance, a so-called decentralized-finance protocol which promised to allow users to borrow and lend crypto without intermediaries.
The two people involved with World Liberty insisted that Herro is a billionaire with a track record of crypto success. But Dough Finance only attracted $3.2 million in total activity, a tiny amount for the crypto industry, according to data provider DefiLlama. In July, it was hacked for about $2 million and it appears to be inactive now. An email to Dough Finance seeking comment was not returned.
Like Dough, World Liberty is being pitched as a platform for borrowing and lending crypto. It will have its own token, called WLFI, which it says will allow users to vote on how the project is run, according to a white paper reviewed by Bloomberg News. About 70% of those tokens will be reserved for insiders, with the rest sold to the public to raise cash. That amount of tokens going to insiders is “quite high" for a project that in theory is supposed to be decentralized, said Leo Mizuhara, founder of crypto asset manager Hashnote. Usually no entity or group of investors owns more than 20% of a project's total token supply, he added.
While the World Liberty plan might sound innovative to someone unfamiliar with crypto, startups like this are common, and few succeed. Many of them are only created in order to sell tokens and make money, said Tarun Chitra, general partner at Robot Ventures, which in August raised a $75 million fund to invest in new crypto projects.
“This just feels like a fly-by-night, trying to make a quick buck, kind of thing,” Chitra said of World Liberty. “It really doesn’t seem earnest to me.”
Herro’s involvement isn’t the only red flag when it comes to World Liberty. The white paper lists 18-year-old Barron Trump – a college freshman with no known crypto expertise — as “chief DeFi visionary.” A JPMorgan Chase banker listed as an adviser to the project, Brian Baker, refused to say whether that description was accurate.
Herro is described in the white paper as the person responsible for “data & strategies.” His friend Folkman is listed as “operations lead.” Folkman used to run a service called Date Hotter Girls where he taught seminars about how to pick up women. “OK, how many guys came here to learn how to take girls home and bang them?” Folkman said in a speech in 2014. The trademark for World Liberty is registered to a company using the same address in Puerto Rico as another company run by Herro and Folkman.
Herro likes to tell the story of how he spent time in prison for dealing marijuana when he was a young man before getting rich through internet marketing in the early days of social media. He was involved in what’s known as “affiliate marketing,” in which middlemen buy ad space on social networks and use it to sell products for other companies, which pay a bounty.
“You could just make millions,” Herro said in a video. “It was the easiest thing in the world.”
Herro’s marketing business left only a few traces online. But in a lawsuit he filed in 2014, he said that he marketed a “colon cleanser” called Regula RX on Facebook and wasn’t paid for the sales he generated. Carl Ruderman, owner of Regula RX, didn’t immediately respond to a letter sent to him at a federal prison in Miami, where he’s serving a five-year sentence for an unrelated Ponzi scheme.
Herro said in another video that he had at times employed a tactic called “cloaking,” which means hiding ads’ contents to evade social networks’ rules. In another lawsuit he filed in 2014, he sought a refund from a middleman who had sold him 20 Facebook accounts from Singapore for $100,000. Both tactics were the types of strategies used by advertisers who tried to place deceptive ads against social-media networks’ rules, according to Rob Leathern, a former Facebook executive who had responsibility for enforcing rules around advertising. “There’s no legitimate use case for cloaking,” said Leathern. (Leathern said he'd never heard of Herro.)
Herro said in his videos that the online advertising business became more challenging once competition emerged. In recent years, he and Folkman have pivoted to crypto, running a membership group called the Watchers that claimed to teach people the secrets of crypto trading and making money online. The group had more than 250 members who paid at least $149 a month, according to two people formerly involved with the group. Some paid tens of thousands of dollars for personalized coaching. Herro also appeared at other paid seminars with Jordan Belfort, whose penny-stock scams inspired the movie The Wolf of Wall Street.
“If you do this right, who f---ing cares if it goes to zero?” Herro said in a YouTube video promoting the Watchers. “You'll make so much money trading these f---ing coins in and out.”
In 2021, Herro appeared on influencer Logan Paul’s podcast, Impaulsive. (Trump went on the same podcast in June.) During the podcast, Paul acted like he was surprised when Herro said he liked a cryptocurrency called OMI, which Paul said he liked too. A co-host asked if the two had planned the promotion before the show, and Herro denied it, swearing “on my kids.” The price of OMI has since declined 96%. And a leaked video released by the scam-busting YouTuber Coffeezilla shows Herro and Paul talking with someone about getting more OMI tokens ahead of the show. A lawyer for Paul didn’t respond to a message seeking comment.
The white paper for World Liberty lists Donald Trump as “chief crypto advocate” and his sons Eric and Donald Jr. each as “Web3 Ambassador.” A disclaimer says that World Liberty is “not owned, managed, operated or sold” by the Trumps. It does note, however, that they may receive compensation. CoinDesk first reported on the white paper last week.
Promoting a private business like this while running for president is not illegal, though it’s a clear conflict of interest that may lead Trump to push crypto policies that favor his company, according to Danielle Brian, president of the Project On Government Oversight.
“The biggest harm is public policy is skewed away from what benefits the country to what benefits the individual and their family,” Brian said.
Whether or not the World Liberty project achieves its goals, its token might still be valuable. Trump’s fans have shown they’ll make investments in his companies even if they aren’t successful. In 2021, two former cast members from his reality show The Apprentice pitched Trump on starting his own social network, according to Reuters. The company that grew from that pitch, Trump Media & Technology Group Corp., which operates Truth Social, is worth about $3 billion, despite quarterly revenue of less than $1 million. Trump owns the majority of its stock.
When Trump considers an endorsement deal, his main consideration is not whether the product is useful, but whether he’ll receive cash up front, according to Michael Cohen, who served as the former president’s personal lawyer for years before testifying against him at his fraud trial.
“Is there upfront money attached?” Cohen said in an interview. “If the economics of the deal are to his benefit, with zero risk, he’s all in.”
--With assistance from Max Abelson.
©2024 Bloomberg L.P.
World Liberty, Crypto Project Helmed by Donald Trump's Family, Will Release on Sept. 16
Shaurya Malwa
Thu, September 12, 2024 at 11:58 p.m. MDT·1 min read
Donald Trump announced that his family's cryptocurrency project, World Liberty Financial, will launch on September 16.
The project aims to move away from traditional banking by embracing cryptocurrencies.
Republican candidate Donald Trump said on a podcast Thursday that his family-helmed decentralized finance (DeFi) project World Liberty Financial will be released on September 16.
“Embracing the future with crypto and leaving slow and outdated big banks behind,” Trump said in a video posted on his X account. “Join me live at 8 P.M.”
World Liberty Finance is helmed by Trump’s sons, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr, and the 18-year-old Barron Trump is the project's "DeFi visionary.”
A draft of the World Liberty Financial whitepaper received by CoinDesk shows the project will include a "credit account system" built on DeFi platform Aave and the Ethereum blockchain – to facilitate decentralized borrowing and lending.
Broadcast messages on the World Liberty Finance Telegram channel show plans for stablecoins pegged to the U.S. dollar - stating the project wants to “spread U.S.-pegged stablecoins around the world” to “ensure that the U.S. dollar’s dominance continues.”
Polymarket Bettors See 84% Chance of Donald Trump Starting His Own Token
Shaurya Malwa
Fri, September 13, 2024
Betting odds on Polymarket for Donald Trump launching a cryptocurrency token before the November election surged to over 84% after he announced a launch date for the World Liberty Financial crypto project, but later reversed.
The market, which has seen over $1.7 million in bets, will only resolve to "Yes" if Trump personally issues a verifiable token on a blockchain by November 4, 2024, despite plans for a governance token named "WLFI" in the project's white paper.
Betting odds on Republican candidate Donald Trump issuing a token before the November presidential elections jumped to over 84% on Polymarket early Friday, before reversing, as he confirmed a launch date for the Trump family-helmed World Liberty Financial crypto project.
The odds of a “yes” in the “Will Trump launch a coin before the election?” market were just 40% on Thursday and 16% a month ago. That seemingly changed in the past 12 hours as Trump said the World Liberty Financial project will released on Monday.
(Polymarket)
The market has attracted over $1.7 million in bets by Polymarket users as of Friday. It will resolve to "Yes" if conclusive evidence emerges that Trump is involved in “deploying a new token” by November 4, 2024, 11:59 PM ET.
That means mere plans or confirmation for the token will not resolve the market to “Yes:” it will have to be an actual token issued on a blockchain in a way that can be verified by all.
A copy of the World Liberty white paper seen by CoinDesk states plans for the project to issue a non-transferable governance token called “WLFI.” However, it remains unknown what specific part Trump plays in the project and his role in issuing the proposed token.
Still, some Polymarket users are taking their chances.
“The development team already launched multiple test tokens on Ethereum,” user “Car,” who holds over 4,400 yes shares, wrote. “Funnily enough, that's enough to resolve this market to YES.”
“Non-fungible tokens are indeed Tokens,” another user, “563defi,” who holds 6,600 yes shares, said, referring to Trump’s lineup of NFT projects.
Those on the other side of the bet remain skeptical: “Even if a token launches, it will be his son's,” user “Tenebrus7,” who holds 2,000 “No” shares, wrote. “After the scam - trump will not want to be associated with it anytime soon.”
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