Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump announced Thursday afternoon the official launch date for World Liberty Financial, a cryptocurrency project his family has been hinting at for the past two months.
“On September 16th at 8 p.m. live on Twitter Spaces, we will be launching World Liberty Financial,” Trump said in a video posted by his official X account. “We are embracing the future with cryptocurrency and leaving behind the slow, outdated big banks.”
Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump teased upcoming announcements related to the world of cryptocurrencies and DeFi on August 7. On September 3, CoinDesk reported on the project’s decentralized finance platform, Aave, and its white paper, which said the project would be built on the Ethereum blockchain and revolve around a “credit account system.”
Trump, who is seeking reelection this year, has embraced the cryptocurrency community after previously taking a negative stance. He spoke at the Bitcoin 2024 conference earlier this summer, saying he would fire SEC Chairman Gary Gensler if he were re-elected. He also announced that the U.S. would stop selling 213,000 bitcoins.
Earlier this month, Dolomite co-founder Corey Caplan was appointed as an advisor to World Liberty Financial. Shortly after, The project said it aims to promote stablecoin adoption with security as its top priority.
“We don’t take risks. We work with the world’s leading security experts, including Zokyo, Fuzzland, PeckShield, and BlockSecTeam,” the project posted on its Telegram channel. “Our code has been thoroughly reviewed by these industry leaders. We leverage best practices and make user security our primary concern.”
This happened just two days later. Lara and Tiffany Trump’s X account was hacked and content about tokens believed to be related to World Liberty Financial was posted.
Rep. Maxine Waters, the ranking Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, criticized Trump-backed cryptocurrency projects earlier this week.
“Decentralized finance, or DeFi, aims to create greater efficiency and transparency, but it can also bring with it increased risks of hacks, fraud, misinformation, and conflicts of interest that can harm consumers and investors,” Waters said. “We’ve seen this play out with a new DeFi venture called World Liberty Financial, which Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. plan to launch.”
Additional details were updated at 4:23 p.m. ET.
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