The Trump family’s new crypto venture, World Liberty Financial, is off to an inauspicious start after website outages limited investors’ ability to participate in an inaugural token sale event.
The crypto token, WLFI, went on sale around 9 a.m. ET on Tuesday. As of this writing, the website remains plagued by reliability issues, leading some visitors to an error page. “We are unable to connect to the server of this application or website at this time,” the notice says.
Data from analytics platform Etherscan shows that only 8,500 people have participated in the token pre-sale so far, purchasing around 750 million tokens (3.75 percent of the total available in the pre-sale) between them. A World Liberty Financial representative had previously said in X that 100,000 US accredited investors had been pre-approved after registering interest in the token.
Sandy Peng, financial advisor at World Liberty he told crypto media outlet CoinDesk that the website went down due to an increase in traffic. More than 70 million unique visitors came to the site within an hour of the token going on sale, he said. The organization did not immediately respond to a request for further comment.
Website issues make it difficult to accurately assess appetite for the WLFI token among investors. But the difficult launch will give pause to those worried about the possibility of the Trump project setting back the DeFi industry, should it fail.
Since August, the Trump family has marketed World Liberty Financial as a way to “revolutionize finance” and “make finance great again.” The website lists presidential candidate Donald Trump as a “top cryptocurrency advocate” and his sons (Eric, Donald Jr. and Barron, 18) as “Web3 ambassadors.”
The World Liberty Financial platform is set to provide peer-to-peer lending and borrowing, in the spirit of what is known in cryptoland as decentralized finance or DeFi. But no concrete details about the project have been communicated. Despite making multiple announcements teasing the project on Telegram and type manifest Regarding the objective of the project, the Trumps have barely provided information about how the platform works or the range of services that will be available to customers.
This created an opportunity for bad actors. At the end of August, imitators used the project’s Telegram channel, presented as “the ONLY (sic) place to receive official news”: to announce an inauthentic token giveaway. In early September, the
In the manifesto released on October 11, which promised to illuminate the Trumps’ “vision for revolutionizing finance” but ultimately shed little light, World Liberty Financial explained that the WLFI token will give people the ability to vote on the future development of the platform. “WLFi is also launching the WLFi Governance Platform, a DeFi governance platform (sic) for $WLFI token holders to help shape the WLFi protocol through governance,” reads a particularly puzzling passage in the post.
The failed token launch, then, is the latest in a series of mishaps and problems that befell the World Liberty Financial project. Thanks to his affiliation with the Trump family, any mistakes also have the potential to attract greater attention from the press and regulatory bodies.
“A bigger concern is that investors and regulators may use any project failure to justify hostility toward the entire crypto ecosystem,” says crypto analyst Noelle Acheson, formerly of crypto brokerage Genesis. “Most developers are working on different types of projects and should not be discouraged,” he says. “But there will be more disdain towards cryptocurrencies.”