World Liberty Financial, a DeFi protocol launched with the support of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, launched a public token sale Tuesday morning.
As of 7:25 PM ET, approximately 610 million WLFI tokens have been sold and 19.4 billion tokens remain. Converted to $0.015 per unit, this corresponds to sales of approximately $9.15 million. The project’s website experienced intermittent downtime as sales began Tuesday morning between 8 and 9 a.m. ET. It is said to have raised $5 million within an hour of launch.
According to the roadmap shared with potential investors, WLFI’s initial sale will raise $300 million and sell 20% of the token supply at a fully diluted valuation of $1.5 billion.
WLFI will be the governance token used to vote on decisions regarding the future development of the platform according to the roadmap and the tokens will be non-transferable for the first year. On Monday morning, co-founder Zak Folkman said “well over 100,000 people” had signed up for the whitelist since it went live on September 30.
World Liberty Financial was co-founded by Steve and Zach Witkoff, Folkman and Chase Herro. Most notably, it introduced former President Donald Trump as a “top supporter of cryptocurrencies” and his three sons, Donald Jr., Eric, and Barron, as Web3 ambassadors.
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“Big news! The World Liberty Financial token sale is now live,” Trump said in a post on X Tuesday night. “Cryptocurrency is the future. Let’s embrace this amazing technology and lead the world in the digital economy.”
Initial reactions to World Liberty Financial were divided: Cryptocurrency critics and advocates say the project is doing more harm than good to the industry.
According to analysts at Bernstein, the price of Bitcoin rose about 15% in October as Trump’s chances of winning against Vice President and Democratic candidate Kamala Harris increased.
“We believe Bitcoin’s recent strength is being driven by the reemergence of the correlation between Bitcoin and Trump’s odds of winning,” analysts wrote in a note to clients early Tuesday. “Despite both sides showing support for digital assets, the market bid for cryptocurrencies grew stronger due to Trump’s potential improvement in election prediction markets.”
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