Trump-Backed WLFI Token Sale Raises Just $12M In 24 Hours

World Liberty Financial’s highly anticipated token sale is falling short of expectations.

On Oct. 15, the Trump-backed DeFi project began selling WLFI tokens to U.S-based accredited investors and non-U.S. persons at a price of $0.015 each.

While World Liberty Financial aims to raise $300 million at a fully diluted valuation (FDV) of $1.5 billion, just $11.9 million worth of tokens have been so far, with 96% of the allocated tokens still up for grabs.

According to data from Dune, the token sale has drawn participation from 10,885 unique wallets, despite claiming 100,000 users signed up for whitelisting ahead of the sale.

The token sale has also been marred by technical issues. Shortly after going live, the project’s website crashed due to high traffic, rendering it inaccessible throughout multiple outages.

Mark Cuban, the billionaire celebrity investor, told The Defiant that the WLFI sale will be “fun to watch.”.

WLFI token

Of WLFI’s 100 billion token supply, 35% are allocated to public sales. The project also earmarked 32.5% for community growth and incentives, with 30% will go to “initial supporters,” and 2.5% to its team and advisors.

WLFI governance tokens are non-transferable for 12 months, according to the project’s whitepaper. Individual wallets cannot mobilize more than 5% of the token's supply each for governance voting.

The whitepaper also highlights the involvement of the Trump family, with Donald J. Trump serving as the “Chief Crypto Advocate,” and his sons Barron, Eric, and Donald Trump Jr. performing the role of “Web3 Ambassadors."

Despite issuing a governance token, World Liberty Financial is not structured as a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO). Instead, it operates as a Delaware non-stock corporation with a board of directors.

Aave iteration

World Liberty Financial plans to launch a deployment of Aave v3, the largest DeFi lending protocol.

On Oct.10, the project submitted a governance proposal to Aave requesting to launch an instance of Aave v3 on Ethereum. The deployment would support deposits and loans in stablecoins such as USDC and USDT, as well as Ether and Wrapped Bitcoin. World Liberty Financial said it may onboard other digital assets in the future as well.

If approved, the project would distribute 20% of fees generated by the protocol and 7% of WLFI’s token supply to AaveDAO. The proposal has garnered positive feedback from the Aave community so far.

“Can’t wait to see what level of overcollateralization they require for loans,” Cuban commented.