On June 26, the Trump family's crypto project WLFI posted a statement saying, "The team has heard the community's voice and is actively working on advancing the WLFI token's transferability feature. The relevant work is currently happening behind the scenes, and a major announcement is forthcoming." On July 10, the WLFI official team officially launched a community voting activity, and seven days later, the proposal was approved, with WLFI officially confirmed to be tradable today.

The WLFI token, which in the whitepaper originally stated it "may never be tradable," is also about to be "unlocked." From the first round's $0.015 issuance price to the second round's $0.05, participants took on the risk of "going to zero," and this risk is about to see rewards. With the dual endorsement of the "Genius Bill" and "U.S. Presidential Certification," the current off-exchange price of WLFI is around $0.1.

Currently, with WLFI about to go live, the market eagerly awaits the moment when the token unlocks to complete the transition from a political narrative to asset realization.

The Designer Behind WLFI

World Liberty Financial (WLFI) was founded on September 16 last year, guided by real estate tycoon Steve Witkoff and his son Zach. Co-founders also include crypto KOL Chase Herro and Zak Folkman.

The Trump family also holds a significant position, with Trump being named the "Chief Cryptocurrency Advocate," and his sons Eric, Donald Jr., and Barron serving as "Web3 Ambassadors."

Additionally, WLFI has three technical leads,

1. Rich Teo: Head of Stablecoins and Payments, previously founded the exchange itBit and stablecoin company Paxos, currently serving as CEO of Paxos Asia. Rich also advises the SocialFi project RepubliK.

2. Corey Caplan: Head of Technical Strategy, co-founder of DeFi platform Dolomite, responsible for integrating lending and trading functionalities.

3. Bogdan Purnavel: Chief Developer, former developer at Dough Finance.

One of World Liberty Financial's first initiatives was to sell its own token. The ICO started on October 15, 2024, selling 20 billion $WLFI at a price of $0.015, earning the company approximately $300 million.

On January 20, 2025, the day of Trump's inauguration, WLFI announced its second token sale, citing "enormous demand and strong interest." It issued 5 billion tokens at a price of $0.05, a 230% increase from the initial sale. The second sale was completed on March 14, nearly two months later, reaching its full target of $250 million.

According to WLFI's "Golden Paper," WLFI tokens will grant holders voting rights on significant protocol matters, such as upgrades. The expected token distribution includes 35% through token sales, 32.5% allocated for incentives and community development, 30% for "initial supporters," and 2.5% for the "core team and advisors."

The project's whitepaper also states, "Issuing $WLFI tokens to raise funds, purchasing mainstream project tokens with growth potential, and allowing $WLFI token holders to share the gains from asset portfolio appreciation." The whitepaper clearly indicates that the $WLFI purchased by users is solely a governance token, with $550 million already belonging to the project team.

However, the Trump family's multiple cryptocurrency investments seem to "foreshadow" that WLFI will not merely serve as a "non-transferable verification" token.

What is the Valuation of the WLFI Token?

Pre-market data shows that the $WLFI price traded sideways for several days in the range of $0.90 to $1.10 following the official announcement of "hearing the community's voice, possibly unlocking token transfers." The daily average trading volume exceeded $5 million, and today it remains around $0.8, demonstrating strong funding interest even in its pre-circulation state.

From a community perspective, suppressing the price around $1 pre-market is seen as a measure to avoid the risk of withdrawal runs caused by a price surge post-listing for WLFI—after all, if the price soars to above $5 post-listing, exchanges may need to buy back the token at a high price, posing significant financial pressure on the platform.

In a horizontal comparison, the market generally views WLFI as a heavyweight project compared to the TRUMP token. The latter surged to an $800 billion market cap early on, while WLFI's current initial market cap forecast has already exceeded $300 billion, fully capable of further amplifying expectations to a trillion-dollar market cap.

If we use the first-round funding valuation of $15 billion (corresponding to $0.015 per token) and the second-round valuation of $50 billion ($0.05 per token) as a basis, the current over-the-counter price has reached $1, implying that WLFI's valuation has grown by over 65 times in the past 8 months.

Following the Stablecoin Craze

The Trump family not only ventured into launching a cryptocurrency project but also got involved in the stablecoin business through this project.

USD1 is a fiat-collateralized stablecoin issued by World Liberty Financial, with each USD1 being pegged 1:1 to the US dollar. The reserve assets include US dollar cash and US short-term Treasury bonds, custodied by BitGo. The relationship between WLFI and USD1 is a typical DeFi product portfolio design: users holding WLFI can participate in governance and receive USD1 airdrop incentives, while USD1 provides liquidity infrastructure and actual payment functionality for the platform ecosystem.

From on-chain data, it is evident that currently USD1's main stronghold is on Binance and primarily on the BSC. There is 97.83% of on-chain issuance on the BSC, and USD1's trading volume...

In addition to the May BSC standout meme coin BUILDon (B), which brought together the highlights of WLFI's public purchase support, the largest USD1 trading pair on-chain, rapid listing on Binance Alpha and Binance contract, and many other "hot topic" halos on one platform, its market cap once reached $450 million. In a relatively "depleted" liquidity on-chain market, it truly attracted a wave of attention.

A month later, USD1's development on the BSC chain progressed rapidly, with several "WLFI" narrative tokens achieving impressive results, and memes paired with USD1 slowly occupying the forefront of BSC chain trading volume.

The top 10 trading volume ranking has gradually shifted from WBNB to USD1

Further reading: "USD1 makes a big move, and the price increase tells you who is the hottest 'Trump concept' target?"

In addition, USD1 has also been used in the fundraising of other projects. On June 18, World Liberty Financial officials stated that Sahara AI successfully completed an $8.5 million initial token offering (IDO) of the SAHARA token on the token issuance platform Buidlpad. The event received total subscription commitments exceeding $74 million, surpassing the subscription target by 777%. USD1 contributed 79% of the total subscription amount ($59 million), while BNB contributed 21% ($16 million).

While BSC has been making waves in the Memecoin and fundraising channels, it has also started to focus on DeFi. KOL 0xYond shared on Twitter about the USD1 on a DeFi platform being "politically correct," leading to significant arbitrage opportunities. He mentioned, "Excluding Binance's hot wallet address, the on-chain liquidity of USD1 is actually less than 100m. Subsidizing USD1 appears to be a task that serves asset growth on the surface but is, in fact, politically correct."

The strong performance of Circle's stock price demonstrates the market's favor towards the stablecoin business. If World Liberty Financial's valuation is similar to Circle's, then the value of Trump's stablecoin project USD1 could now be as high as $1.7 billion.

Did Trump WLFI Take Profits?

On June 19, according to Forbes, based on an analysis of the World Liberty official website's details, a company under Trump's ownership has reduced its stake in the crypto project World Liberty Financial from 60% to 40% in the past 11 days.

This change, without any public announcement, is another sign indicating that Trump himself or individuals acting on his behalf are still secretly engaging in behind-the-scenes transactions during his tenure.

Public information shows that WLFI's token sale revenue amounted to a whopping $57.355 million, marking the largest cryptocurrency-related income.

On June 26, WLFI's co-founder Zak Folkman stated at the "Permissionless" crypto industry conference that the platform is drawing strong interest from several public companies that wish to use the WLFI token as corporate reserves. Folkman also announced the launch of a new World Liberty Financial application.

Folkman said, "We have a very close relationship with Michael Saylor, and we greatly appreciate everything he has done strategically and how he promoted the concept of holding a company's reserves in cryptocurrency form. Several public companies have shown strong interest in using the WLFI token as their corporate reserves."

Which Whales Have Bought In?

According to a joint disclosure by Accountable.US and Bloomberg, among the top 50 WLFI addresses, at least 14 users hold coins via U.S.-restricted trading platforms, collectively owning over 6.7 billion WLFI tokens (approximately $335 million in market value). The most prominent holder is undoubtedly Justin Sun.

In November 2024, TRON DAO, led by Justin Sun, became the largest independent investor in World Liberty Financial (WLFI), subscribing to up to 3 billion WLFI tokens for $30 million. According to sources familiar with the matter, the transaction price was much lower than the market's expected $0.015 issuance price at the time, with the actual price being $0.01, meaning Sun Yuchen entered with a significant discount of about 40%. This price not only earned him early investment dividends but also solidified his core position in the WLFI project.

Subsequently, on November 27, 2024, WLFI officially announced that Justin Sun had joined the project as an Advisor, although Justin's introduction was not found on the WLFI website.

Aqua1 Fund

However, recently, a fund has pushed Sun Brother out of the top position. On June 26, the Web3-native fund Aqua 1 announced a strategic purchase of $100 million of the Trump family's crypto project World Liberty Financial governance token WLFI, aiming to participate in the decentralized finance platform's governance and accelerate the development of the blockchain finance ecosystem. According to on-chain information, Aqua1 Fund holds 800,000,000 WLFI tokens.

Furthermore, Aqua 1 also plans to establish an Aqua Fund in the Middle East and collaborate with WLFI to jointly incubate the RWA tokenization platform BlockRock.

DWF Labs

In April 2025, the Abu Dhabi-based crypto investment and market-making institution DWF Labs announced that it had invested $25 million to purchase tokens issued by the Trump family-controlled crypto project World Liberty Financial (WLFI).

Mike Dudas

6th Man Ventures co-founder and The Block founder Mike Dudas purchased over $145,000 worth of WLFI tokens on January 20, 2025, on the eve of Trump's inauguration, acquiring approximately 970,000 WLFI tokens.

Troy Murray

BarnBridge DAO member Troy Murray purchased approximately 666,000 WLFI tokens.

Sigil Fund (alias Fiskantes)

This Gibraltar-based fund, whose Chief Investment Officer goes by the alias "Fiskantes," spent 40 ETH (approximately $130,000) to acquire WLFI tokens, amounting to around 400,000 WLFI tokens based on the WLFI issuance price.

WLFI stands as one of the most "notorious" experiments in the fusion of American political capital with Web3 financial structures. From a "non-tradable" governance token to soon-to-be-unlocked assets. From "Presidential Ambassador" to on-chain holdings, from stablecoin collateralization tools to international investment onboarding platforms, the significance behind WLFI may not just be a token but rather a symbol, a set of pathways representing a microcosm of political and capital forces entering cryptocurrency.

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