Trump’s project WLFI bought up $45 million in tokens. Who are the core decision-makers behind it?

Author: Weilin, PANews

Trump’s DeFi project World Liberty Financial (WLFI) purchased crypto assets on a large scale in December, with a cumulative expenditure of nearly $45 million, including ETH, cbBTC, LINK, AAVE, ENA and the latest ONDO.

Since its launch in September, the project describes itself as a decentralized finance (DeFi) platform. On December 13, the World Liberty Financial community passed its first proposal to deploy Aave v3 instances. Although the project has made initial progress, judging from the current situation, the leadership team is mostly new faces, and there is still a certain degree of uncertainty about the practicality and innovation of the project.

Big purchases of crypto assets in December, with total expenditure close

to $45 million

According to blockchain data platform Lookonchain, World Liberty Financial has purchased a large number of crypto assets through a single wallet since November 30, including $30 million worth of Ethereum (ETH) and $10 million of Coinbase Wrapped BTC (cbBTC). . Other purchased assets include LINK, AAVE, ENA, and the latest purchase of Ondo tokens worth $250,000. Specific data on these purchases are as follows:

Use USD 30 million USDC to purchase 8,105 ETH at a unit price of USD 3,701;

Use USD 10 million USDC to purchase 103 cbBTC, with a unit price of USD 97,181;

Use USD 2 million USDC to purchase 78,387 LINK at a unit price of USD 25.5;

Use USD 2 million USDC to purchase 6,137 AAVE at a unit price of USD 326;

Use USD 500,000 USDC to purchase 509,955 ENA at a unit price of USD 0.98;

Use USD 250,000 USDC to purchase 134,216 ONDO at a unit price of USD 1.86.

In addition, although COW is not in World Liberty Financial’s asset list, Cowswap has been used in recent on-chain purchases of tokens, and it is also one of the most commonly used DEXs by Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin.

Launched in September, World Liberty Financial describes itself as a decentralized finance (DeFi) platform for cryptocurrency trading and lists President-elect Trump, his son Donald Trump Jr., as the “chief crypto advocate.” ., Eric Trump and Barron Trump serve as "ambassadors." Companies associated with the family are entitled to 75% of net income.

The project has had a dismal performance selling its namesake token, World Liberty Financial (WLFI). According to the roadmap, $1.5 billion is the fully diluted valuation of the project, and WLFI’s “initial sale” plans to raise $300 million and sell 20% of the token supply. However, as of December 17, 4.99 billion WLFI have been sold. Based on a unit price of US$0.015, the total is US$74.85 million, which is less than a quarter of the US$300 million target. It is worth mentioning that Justin Sun disclosed that he invested US$30 million in WLFI, becoming the largest investor in the project. In addition, no institution has announced investment in this project.

The WLFI community voted to pass the first proposal to deploy lending

instances based on Aave v3

At the same time, the good news is that on December 13, the World Liberty Financial governance page showed that the WLFI community voted to pass the first proposal to deploy an Aave v3-based lending instance on the Ethereum mainnet.

As of December 16, Aave DAO had a treasury worth $347 million. Initially, when World Liberty Financial announced that it would be built on the Aave protocol, the Aave community was skeptical. However, that changed in October after World Liberty Financial proposed to allocate 7% of its WLFI tokens and 20% of future fees generated by WLF to the Aave DAO, the crypto collective that governs the Aave protocol.

The proposal recommends deploying an Aave v3 instance based on World Liberty Financial (WLF). Highlights include:

• Provides stablecoin liquidity for ETH and WBTC.
• Expand the user base of the Aave protocol.

Proposals need to be approved by AaveDAO and WLF community governance. If the proposal is approved, users will be able to deposit USDC and USDT stablecoins on the protocol, as well as ETH and wBTC. These assets can be used as collateral to borrow other assets on Aave.

The proposal mentioned that the benefits to Aave are to bring a large number of new users and liquidity to Aave, build brand loyalty and awareness among new DeFi users, and consolidate Aave’s leading position in the digital asset lending market.

Next, the proposal has several steps: 1. If the temperature check (TEMP CHECK) reaches a consensus, it will be submitted to the Snapshot stage. 2. If the Snapshot vote passes, it will enter the ARFC stage. 3. Publish the standard ARFC and collect feedback from the community and service providers. 4. If the ARFC Snapshot passes, the AIP vote will be released for final confirmation and execution.

There are no familiar faces in the WLFI leadership team. What are their

origins?

There are many new faces behind Trump’s DeFi project who are not familiar with the encryption circle. In addition to Trump and his family members, the five co-founders of this project are Chase Herro, Zak Folkman, Steven Witkoff, Zach Witkoff and Alex Witkoff.

Among them, Chase Herro has a rather special background. According to reports, he has been engaged in a number of businesses that seem to have nothing to do with the encryption industry, including cannabis sales and weight loss products, and has shown off luxury cars and private jet travel on social media, but in But it has little reputation in crypto circles. The only crypto project he was publicly involved with, Dough Finance, only attracted a few million dollars and suffered serious hacks. A token he promoted on influencer Logan Paul’s podcast plunged 96% after the promotion. In a 2018 speech, he called himself the "scum of the internet" and said regulators should "kick people like me out."

In addition, another co-founder, Chase Herro’s business partner Zak Folkman, once ran a service called Date Hotter Girls, where he taught lectures on how to pick up women, with a more controversial background.

As for Steven Witkoff, he is a familiar friend of Trump, a real estate developer, and has donated $2 million to Trump’s campaign. After Trump won the election, he appointed him as the special envoy to the Middle East. Witkoff's sons Alex and Zach are listed as co-founders of World Liberty Financial.

Except for these co-founders who are far away from the encryption market, the backgrounds of other heads of specific business sectors appear to be more professional and close to the encryption industry.

For example, Rich Teo, who is the head of stablecoin and payment, is also an OG in the encryption field. He co-founded the exchange itBit in 2012, and then co-founded the stablecoin company Paxos. He currently serves as the CEO of Paxos Asia. In addition, Rich is also a consultant for the AI-driven SocialFi project RepubliK and has retweeted many tweets about the project on Twitter.

Corey Caplan, co-founder of Dolomite, serves as head of technology strategy. Dolomite is a DeFi platform that launched on Arbitrum One in October 2022 and has since expanded to other blockchain ecosystems, including Polygon’s zkEVM, Mantle, and X Layer, and offers a variety of services including margin trading, lending, and investing Portfolio management.

Bogdan Purnavel serves as the lead developer. He was also a developer of Dough Finance and his online nickname is 0xboga. The head of blockchain at World Liberty Financial is Octavian Lojnita. According to his online bio, he is from Romania and works as a full-stack developer. Octavian Lojnita also previously worked at Dough Finance.

Alex Golubitsky served as legal counsel. Alex Golubitsky is an international tax lawyer whose career covers tax law, securities law, entity formation, contract drafting and litigation. He serves as a partner at MetaLeX Pro, LLP and as general counsel at Brisa Max Holdings VI, LLC.

In addition, World Liberty Financial also has an advisory team composed of venture capitalists, lawyers and blockchain engineers. Sandy Peng, co-founder of Ethereum’s second-layer blockchain Scroll, and Luke Pearson, general partner of Polychain Capital, are among the project’s advisors.

At present, World Liberty Financial’s large-scale token purchases have triggered different evaluations from the outside world.

Nansen research analyst Nicolai Søndergaard told Bloomberg that World Liberty Financial’s token purchases may be “to gain more trust or to promote the development of its own projects by drawing attention to these assets, because if these assets perform well, World Liberty Financial may also benefit.”

While World Liberty Financial’s plan may sound innovative to those unfamiliar with cryptocurrencies, startups like this are actually common and few are successful. Many such companies are established just to sell tokens and make profits, Tarun Chitra, general partner of Robot Ventures, previously told the outside world.

In general, the Trump family's DeFi project World Liberty Financial has demonstrated its ambitions in the encryption field through large-scale currency purchases and cooperation with Aave. Their investment target screening has also become a weather vane that investors pay attention to. However, its leadership team is relatively unfamiliar, and there is still uncertainty about the practicality and innovation of the project. Despite this, as a project initiated by the family of the "crypto president" of the United States, it will still attract widespread attention from the market, and the follow-up situation deserves further attention.