- World Liberty Financial, backed by Donald Trump and his sons, raised US$7.5M by selling 500M tokens at 1.5 cents each on day one.
- The sale, aimed at accredited investors, targets a US$1.5B valuation.
- However, despite whitelisting over 100,000 accredited US investors, the sale fell short of the target and faced technical issues.
- WLF’s website crashed and experienced numerous outages.
World Liberty Financial (WLF), the crypto project backed by Republican candidate Donald Trump, fell short of its target of US$300M (AU$449M).
The project only managed to raise… get ready for it —around US$9M (AU$13M). This represents approximately 1.7% of the 20 billion tokens allocated to the public sale.
Related: Standard Chartered Predicts SOL 5X if Trump Wins Election, BTC $200K Regardless
Scams, Outages, and Technical Issues
WLF launched its Ethereum-based token to accredited investors on its website. To participate, the criteria for US investors included having a net worth of over US$1M (AU$1.5M). The project claimed to have over 100,000 accredited US investors ready to invest, but the level of participation was underwhelming.
Shortly after the token’s debut at 12:40 UTC, the website faced technical issues, including outages that lasted around one hour, which hurt sales. The project managed to sell over 340 million tokens in the subsequent hours to more than 3,000 unique wallets.
The website came back up at around 17:30 UTC. One hour later, an Ethereum wallet linked to the token sale had over US$7M (AU$10.4M) in multiple assets, according to data from Etherscan.
Scammers didn’t take long to impersonate the project on social media, using phishing schemes and posting fake presale deposit addresses on X (formerly Twitter), leading to confusion and X suspending accounts left and right.
Yes and No
According to the project, Trump is the “chief crypto advocate” while his three sons, Eric, Barron, and Doland Jr. are listed as the “web3 ambassadors”. However a disclaimer in the white paper claims the project is not owned or managed by the Trump family —though they may receive a sweet compensation.
They sure love to promote on social media, however.
This token sale has been in the works for several weeks. It comes as US presidential elections are just around the corner, and Trump is appealing to crypto voters through his association with this and other crypto-related projects.
The polls on Polymarket show Trump has secured a 7.5% lead over Democratic candidate Kamala Harris.
Related: Trump Leads Harris on Polymarket as Elon Musk Calls Platform ‘More Accurate Than Polls’
Trump’s bump on the chart comes as Elon Musk showed his support for the Republican candidate. He even campaigned with Trump at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.
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