The world Liberty Financial crypto project has moved into the spotlight following Donald Trump’s election to become the next US president.
The project, which started its public token sale on October 14, has had a mild reception from crypto traders, who have only bought just 1.05 billion WLFI tokens. Each token goes for $0.015, meaning that the total purchased tokens are worth about $15 million.
According to the website, the developers hope to sell 18.9 billion tokens, which would value the WLFI tokens at over $284 million. This means that, despite being promoted by Trump, who has received over 72 million votes, the token sale is underperforming expectations.
Other smaller token sales have done much better this year. For example, Poodlana, a popular Solana meme coin, raised over $8 million within a month. Bitcoin Dogs, the first ICO on the Bitcoin network, raised $15 million in a token sale.
World Liberty Financial red flags
For starters, World Liberty Financial is a blockchain project started by Donald Trump who is its Chief Crypto Advocate. His sons, Eric, Donald, and Barron, serve as its ambassadors.
The hope is that World Liberty Financial will be a blockchain network that will let people borrow money in a decentralized manner. It hopes to be a better alternative to other popular lending platforms like AAVE, JustLend, Venus, and Compound.
According to its white paper, WLFI will be its native token and will be used for governance purposes. Holders will be able to submit and review proposals and vote on proposals.
There are three main reasons why the World Liberty Project is seeing lukewarm demand despite being owned by Trump.
First, there are concerns about whether the project will work out since the lending industry is highly saturated.
Second, unlike other decentralized autonomous organizations (DAO), WLFI holders are not guaranteed to receive a share of their revenue.
According to the white paper, Trump will be given 22.5 WLFI tokens and also receive 75% of the protocol revenue. AMG, the partner, will then receive 7.5 billion tokens and 25% of the remainder.
Third, the project is run by some shady people like Chase Herro, who describes himself as the “dirtbag of the internet”. Herro is known for Dough Finance, a DeFi protocol that lost millions of dollars. The same is true with Zak Folkman, who was involved in the project.
The WLFI token sale is failing because of the weak performance of most tokens that have run token sales. A closer look at most of those tokens shows that many of them have underperformed the market over time. A similar situation has happened with many airdrops, including Wormhole, Hamster Kombat, and Catizen, which have all plunged.
Read more: Catizen Price Has Formed a Bullish Pattern: Will CATI surge to $1?
Donald Trump and ethics
The other big issue with the WLFI token sale is that Trump will now become the next president, meaning that he should operate more ethically. In most cases, presidents are required to turn their assets to a blind trust to avoid any conflict of interest issues.
It is unclear whether he will push his stake in World Liberty Financial in a trust and what impact it will have on the token.
To be sure: the fact that Trump won the election could benefit WLFI token in terms of regulations. In this case, Trump may appoint an SEC chair who is open to look the other way for token sales. This is unlike Gary Gensler who has sued companies that raised cash through token sales like Ripple, Uniswap, and Immutable X.
So, is World Liberty Financial a good investment? Analysts believe that it is a high-risk investment because of its many red flags.
