More than two hours after former Republican President Donald TrumpAt the World Liberty Financial launch event this Monday evening, the team behind the Trump family’s new cryptocurrency project finally revealed an important detail: Who can buy the upcoming tokens the project plans to issue and how the project’s shares will be allocated.
For over a monthThe former president and his family have hyped the effort with vague descriptions, promising that it will accomplish many things at once.
The lofty goals set by project participants on Monday night at X space suggest that World Liberty Financial will be a form of crypto banking platform where the general public will be encouraged to borrow, lend, and invest in cryptocurrencies.
The founders said on Monday that there will be an accompanying token called WLFI.
The equity structure for these tokens is that 20% of the project’s tokens will be allocated to the founding team, including Trumps, 17% of the tokens are reserved for user rewards, and the remaining 63% of the coins will be made available to the public for purchase, said founder Zak Folkman.
Folkman added that there will be no pre-sale or early bird.
A previously leaked draft of the internal project outline showed the founders holding 70% of the shares, raising concerns that the project was nothing more than a get-rich-quick scheme.
The token will be a Regulation D offering, subject to the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Regulation D — a provision that allows a company to raise capital without having to register its securities with the commission first, as long as certain conditions are met.
These were topics Trump touched on in a conversation early in the two-hour-plus event, when he spoke about the Securities and Exchange Commission’s alleged hostility toward the cryptocurrency industry.
Some senior industry figures disagree with SEC Chairman Gary Gensler, arguing that he is regulating the industry through enforcement actions, rather than through rules.
During Trump’s 40-minute fireside chat at the beginning of the more than two-hour livestream, he talked about how he initially “wasn’t too interested” in cryptocurrencies.
But that changed, he said, when sales of his Trump-branded non-fungible token collection were paid for in cryptocurrency. “I think my kids opened my eyes more than anything else.”
“Cryptocurrency is one of those things that we have to do,” Trump said near the end of his speech. “Whether we like it or not, we have to do it.”
Monday’s event comes at an unprecedented moment in Trump’s presidential campaign.
On Sunday afternoon At Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida, Trump and his longtime friend and political donor, Steve Witkoff, between the fifth and sixth holes on the golf course when shots rang out. The FBI described the incident as an attempt to assassinate the former president.
Witkoff is a longtime friend of Trump’s. He was also part of the small group that founded World Liberty Financial.
Witkoff sat to Trump’s right during Monday night’s livestream and described how he brought together the Trump family and two cryptocurrency entrepreneurs to start the project.
“My son introduced me to two associates, Chase Herro and Zak Folkman, who are incredibly smart guys… These guys are as smart as any currency trader I’ve ever met. And they started talking to me about decentralized finance, which is frictionless finance, and why it makes sense for people. And about the forgotten people out there who can’t get credit,” Witkoff said.
“When I first started to understand that, I said to myself, ‘Who better to understand this than the Trump family?’ And we initially had a meeting with Eric, Don Jr., and the president and his advisers. And we said, ‘Let’s pursue it.’ We pursued it for almost nine months,” Witkoff said.
As Witkoff noted, the similarities between World Liberty Financial and Trump’s other recent project, Trump Media and Technology Groupis inevitable.
In the case of Trump Media, two former cast members of Trump’s hit reality show “The Apprentice” on NBC approached Trump in 2021 with the idea of a new, conservative social media platform.
Three and a half years later, Trump Media’s publicly traded stock has added billions of dollars to Trump’s net worth, and Truth Social is his social media platform of choice.
Along with Trump and Witkoff, the founders of World Liberty Financial include Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump and Barron Trump, as well as Witkoff’s son, Zach Witkoff.
A copy of the original internal report, known as the white paper and Collected by CoinDesklisted Barron as a “DeFi Visionary,” Eric and Donald Jr. as “Web3 Ambassadors,” and Trump Sr. as a “Crypto Advocate.”
But while the Trump family will receive compensation from the project, the platform itself is “not owned, managed, operated or sold” by members of the Trump family.
Witkoff, a real estate investor, and Eric Trump, Executive Vice President of the Trump Organization, are the two people who will run World Liberty Financial, according to a person familiar with the project. Both are new to the cryptocurrency industry.
Until Monday, much of what the public knew about World Liberty was based on interviews Trump’s sons gave to the press over the past month, as well as a leaked report that served as a sort of manifesto for the cryptocurrency project and conversations with insiders.
Anyone who wants to know details about the platform, including the white paper, is required to sign a non-disclosure agreement, according to a person with knowledge of the project.
World Liberty Financial represents the latest step in Donald Trump’s growing political and personal ties to the cryptocurrency industry.
Several prominent figures in the cryptocurrency space have appeared to cozy up to Trump during the 2024 election cycle, lending money and backing the Republican presidential candidate.
At the same time, Trump has Apply increasingly optimistic talking points about cryptocurrencies on the campaign trail. This culminated in Keynote in July at biggest bitcoin event of the year in Nashville, Tennessee.
However, some advocates also said they were concerned that Trump’s involvement in the cryptocurrency sector could jeopardize his relationship with the sector as a whole, especially if the launch does not go as planned.
The founders offered few details on Monday about the project’s future timeline, saying only that new information would be shared on official social media channels and warning fans not to be fooled.
