Other executives involved in the DeFi project also revealed details about its governance token on Monday evening.
Trump has positioned himself as the champion of the American crypto industry.
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Posted on September 16, 2024 at 11:50 p.m. EST.
The U.S. cryptocurrency industry is under attack by a “very hostile” SEC and the Biden-Harris administration as a whole, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said in a speech Monday night at X Space to promote his DeFi project World Liberty Financial (WLF). Trump was speaking live from Mar-A-Lago, Florida, just a day after a second assassination attempt.
Democrats are blocking the United States from becoming the crypto capital of the world, Trump claimed, arguing that if the country did not change course, China would take over the industry.
Trump acknowledged that the cryptocurrency industry needs a legal framework, noting that it “should also have some safeguards… it can’t be totally free.” But he claimed without providing evidence that after he announced his plans for a DeFi project, the SEC “treated people a lot better” and that several SEC investigations were dropped. Crypto players who were under investigation “will live in hell” if Democratic nominee Kamala Harris wins in November, he warned.
Learn more: Trump Promises to Embrace Cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin in Economic Policy Speech
Trump also said that his sons, and particularly his youngest son Barron, opened his eyes to cryptocurrency “more than anything else.” However, he noted that the rapid sale of his various NFTs, despite being “late” in the “very cold industry (of NFTs),” also spurred his interest.
The WLF platform
The X Space was billed on X as an opportunity for Trump to reveal the details of WLF, though the more than two-hour conversation, in which he spoke for only 40 minutes, was light on technical details. Trump’s sons Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. were followed by his longtime friend and real estate developer Steve Witkoff. WLF’s chief data strategist Chase Herro and chief operating officer Zachary Folkman then weighed in.
Herro and Folkman noted that the project would be a kind of app to make loans and credit on Aave more “accessible to everyday people,” while Witkoff said the project has been in development for nearly nine months.
World Liberty Financial, previously called “The Defiant Ones,” was first announced by Donald Trump in a statement in August. job on Truth Social. Previous announcements of the project have also been light on technical details, and have mostly been limited to announcing various “advisors” without specifying the degree of involvement of each.
Read more: Congress holds its first hearing on DeFi. What does the White House think?
An X thread and the follow-up announcement on Telegram on September 4, however, gave some clues as to what the participants were building. That thread indicated that the project was a non-hostile fork of Aave and was intended to drive stablecoin and DeFi adoption. The release of US-pegged stablecoins would “ensure the continued dominance of the US dollar,” the thread said, fitting WLF neatly into Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” platform, which largely depends on defending the US economy against that of foreign governments, both allied and adversary. The discussion on X on Monday night was similarly vague but reconfirmed those same basic details.
CoinDesk reported On Sept. 3, details from a white paper about the project showed that WLF’s protocol was largely built on the codebase of Dough Finance, a small DeFi project aimed at automating lending on Aave that suffered a $2 million hack in July. Herro, a little-known crypto investor and get-rich-quick seminar seller, and Folkman, the YouTube flirty video creator, were co-founders of Dough Finance, according to CoinDesk’s report.
On the X Space, Folkman’s description of WLF sounds a lot like Dough Finance. “If we really want to see mass adoption — widespread adoption and an influx of liquidity into this market — we need to create products that the everyday user who is used to interacting with apps on their phone, who is used to using certain financial sites and tools, can instantly relate to and take ownership of,” Folkman said..
Token distribution
According to Folkman, 63% of the project’s governance token, WLFI, will be sold to the public, while 17% will be used to reward WLF users and 20% will go to WLF’s management team and advisors. It will not be a security and will only be offered to accredited investors under an exemption from the SEC’s Regulation D, due to what Folkman called “regulatory uncertainty” around crypto tokens in the United States.
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CoinDesk previously reported The founding team would receive 70% of World Liberty Financial’s governance tokens, citing the white paper it obtained. Folkman, however, confirmed CoinDesk’s report that the token will not be transferable.
The promotion of the project by people with little experience in DeFi has made many players in the sector skeptical of the project’s security. A major hack could damage not only the industry’s perception, but also the president’s reputation as a cryptocurrency advocate, skeptical sources told Unchained.
Apparently in response to the criticism, WLF announced on September 4 that it was working with what it identified as “top security experts” – Zokyo, Fuzzland, Peckshield, BlockSec Team, and later, anonymous crypto sleuth Ogle.
“Whether you buy our token or not, don’t fall for scams,” Folkman said at the end of Monday night’s stream.
