After blessing a pair of classy gold sneakers and an American Bible, Donald Trump’s cryptocurrency, World Liberty Financial (WLFI), immediately appeared to me like another way to squeeze more money out of his fan base. But when YouTuber Coffeezilla analyzed the project in more detail, it turned out to be even more ridiculous than I expected.
First of all (not surprisingly), WLFI is fully pre-mined. 20 billion coins, equivalent to 35% of the total supply, are being sold for $0.015 each. The remaining 65% of coins are allocated to protocol development and insiders.
This means that they value the WLFI project at around $900 million, immediately putting it into the same arena as Bitcoin SV (which is probably appropriate). But in reality, less than 1 billion coins have been sold so far, bringing the coin closer to a $14 million market cap. This is more similar to projects like Pikaboss or Boba Oppa. I’ve never heard of it either.
It’s equally surprising that WLFI doesn’t achieve anything new or interesting (lending and borrowing on top of the existing Aave protocol), isn’t decentralized in a meaningful way, or that one of the project’s co-founders already has a questionable history in this area. This is not it.
But what even I didn’t expect is that WLFI is non-transferable indefinitely. you’re right. You won’t be able to send these coins to anyone, at least for the time being. You could just buy it and sell it later, right? maybe? This sounds more like the infamous scam OneCoin, a cryptocurrency in name only, than any serious altcoin I’ve ever heard of.
While Nikolaus and Calli believe the former president has truly embraced Bitcoin, they don’t think he’s actually changed his mind about the cryptocurrency much since three years ago. I think he just wants to engage in fraud.
Watch the full Coffeezilla episode here:
This article take. The opinions expressed are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.