jakiro
Source: Plain Language Blockchain
Trump’s victory in the US presidential election pushed Bitcoin to break through the $100,000 mark, accelerating the process of this bull market.Not only Bitcoin, but also projects related to the Trump team are taking off.
Recently, World Liberty Financial (hereinafter referred to as WLFI), which has a close relationship with the Trump family, has frequently purchased ETH, LINK, AAVE, ENA, etc., triggering a market follow-up craze and becoming a weather vane that cannot be ignored in the crypto investment market.
So, what is WLFI and what actions may affect the market in the future?
01What is WLFI?
WLFI is a DeFi project supported by Trump and his family, including eldest son Donald Trump Jr., third son Eric Trump, and younger son Barron Trump, in September 2023.The Aave V3 platform on the Ethereum main network has been officially launched.
WLFI is essentially a DeFi platform that enables users to borrow, lend and invest in cryptocurrencies.The founder’s vision is to build it as a tool for financial independence, allowing users to conduct private peer-to-peer transactions without relying on traditional financial intermediaries, thereby promoting the development of global decentralized finance, especially for traditional banking services.The Trump family once called it the “future of encrypted DeFi.”
WLFI is a governance token of World Liberty Financial, each token grants its holders one vote on community proposals on the governance platform.However, its initial allocation plan has undergone adjustments, from more than half of the previous sales change to community and creator rewards, reflecting the changes in community incentives and initial supporters’ share.
Unlike other governance tokens such as UNI and MKR, WLFI does not provide economic rights, i.e. it is not transferable after redemption, which means that users cannot trade/exchange/sell WLFI after holding the token.Although this may be changed through governance proposals in the future, it seems that Tokens will not be able to trade for a long time.
Perhaps due to its non-transferable nature, it cannot provide short-term profit opportunities for cryptocurrency investors, WLFI has been less liquid since its launch on October 15.
It is also worth noting that WLFI is only for users outside the United States and is not registered with any financial regulator.This means that U.S. residents are unable to participate in trading these tokens, which may be considered to circumvent U.S. law enforcement supervision.
Taking into account its promotion method, it is more bluntly to say that WLFI is a project under Trump’s influence to seek to promote the use of US dollar stablecoins and DeFi applications, aiming to strengthen the US dollar’s position in the DeFi field.
Therefore, this requires exploring how the Trump family supports this project.
1) Team members situation
According to official WLFI data, there is a passage that describes itself as follows: inspired by Trump to promote the large-scale adoption of stablecoins and DeFi, especially the dollar stablecoins, thereby ensuring the dominance of the dollar.
Donald Trump himself serves as the project’s “principal cryptocurrency advocate”, while his sons Eric Trump, Donald Trump Jr. and Barron Trump serve as Web3 ambassadors to help promoteThe platform also attracts mainstream users.
Against this backdrop, DT Marks DEFI LLC, a company owned by Trump, agreed to promote WLFI and grant it the right to use the names and portraits of members of the Trump family to promote it.In return, WLFI pays Token to DT Marks DEFI LLC and shares a portion of the agreement’s net income (approximately 75%).
But the Trump family legally bypassed all connections with WLFI.Although WLFI claims to be “the only DeFi platform inspired by Trump”, these positions are not real positions that are involved in management, and there is a small text at the bottom of the official website:
Donald J. Trump, any member of his family, or any directors, officers or employees of the Trump Group, DT Marks DEFI LLC or its respective affiliates, are not managers or directors of WLFI or its affiliates., founder or employee.…World Liberty Financial and its WLFI Token are not political in nature and are not part of any political campaign.
Therefore, some critics believe that WLFI is deeply bound to the Trump family and is an OEM product of the Trump family. An unknown trader borrows the reputation of the Trump family to launch products, and the Trump family produces brands and obtains profits.Because this kind of business operation is common to the Trump family.For example, many of Trump hotels or buildings named after Trump around the world are cooperation with Trump in the form of licenses and private labels.
In general, although various publicity says that WLFI and the Trump family are closely linked, there is actually no legal connection.This may be one of the reasons why everyone is not very interested in WLFI.
In addition to the strong support of the Trump family, the WLFI team is composed of experienced crypto practitioners.
The official website shows that WLFI has a total of five founders.Among them, Chase Herro and Zak Folkman’s industry resumes are not very good.According to CoinDesk, they launched a tepid DeFi product, Dough Finance, a project that suffered $2 million in damages in the summer of 2024.In addition, WLFI’s blockchain leader Octavian Lojnita and an anonymous developer also come from the former company Dough Finance.Coindesk’s report also shows that the review shows that in the early stages, the code base published on WLFI directly copied Dough Finance’s code, which was later deleted.
However, WLFI said they have reviewed their code by multiple audit companies (such as BlockSec, Fuzzland, PeckShield, Zokyo, etc.) to prove safe.
In addition to Chase Herro and Zak Folkman, the other three co-founders of WLFI are Steven Witkoff (founders Steven Witkoff, Zach Witkoff, Alex Witkoff). Steven Witkoff is a famous American real estate developer and a friend of Trump..
In addition, WLFI also has a consulting team of venture capitalists, lawyers and blockchain engineers.Among these people are Sandy Peng, co-founder of Ethereum’s second-tier blockchain Scroll, and Luke Pearson, general partner of Polychain Capital.
It can be seen that these consultants have specific technical expertise and market experience, which helps help WLFI achieve its long-term goals, especially in promoting US dollar stablecoins and expanding DeFi applications.
2) Recent development status
Although the entire altcoin market has begun to recover under the influence of Bitcoin, WLFI’s sales are still not optimistic, and it has only sold about a quarter of it since its release.
However, there are two things worth noting. First, at the end of November, Tron founder Justin Sun spent $30 million to configure WLFI Token to show support for the project, becoming the largest public investor of the project, and then in November.On the 26th,Justin Sun was appointed as WLFI consultant
After announcing Justin Sun as the advisory ambassador,On December 18, WLFI announced a cooperation with Ethena Labs.The two sides are seeking long-term cooperation, and the starting plan will start with Ethena’s revenue Token sUSDe.
In addition, the most popular ones are the various altcoins exchanged by WLFI. Every move can directly drive a wave of trading craze.
02On-chain activities for WLFI projects
According to Spot On Chain monitoring,WLFI has reserved a variety of mainstream and emerging crypto assets through a main wallet address since November 2024.Especially in December, the cumulative expenditure was close to US$45 million, including ETH, cbBTC, LINK, AAVE, ENA and the latest ONDO, and the total holding value has exceeded US$84.8 million.
Source: https://intel.arkm.com/explorer/entity/worldlibertyfi
According to incomplete statistics, its reserved crypto assets include:
1) ETH
As the world’s second largest cryptocurrency platform, Ethereum’s position and influence in the industry are naturally needless to say.
WLFI has acquired ETH many times and spent the most on ETH., it was previously reported that it spent $30 million to reserve 8,105 ETH, with a unit price of about $3,700, and the most recent operation was to acquire 722.213 ETH through Cow Protocol for $2.5 million on December 20. After this transaction, WLFIThe total ETH holdings reached 16,400 ETH.
2) cbBTC
cbBTC (Coinbase Wrapped Bitcoin) is an ERC-20 Token launched by Coinbase, aiming to introduce the value of Bitcoin (BTC) to blockchain networks such as Ethereum.WLFI spent $10 million to exchange about 103 cbBTC, with an average operating price of US$97,181 per coin; then WLFI replaced all cbBTCs with WBTC holdings.
The move came the same day that Coinbase announced that it had removed WBTC due to failure to comply with CEX standards.Coinbase removes WBTC and WLFI’s move is seen as support for WBTC.
WLFI’s choice to exchange cbBTC for WBTC may be due to the maturity of WBTC in the market and infrastructure advantages, or it may be that Justin Sun’s joining as an advisor had an impact on this decision.
Because Justin Sun’s hosting company BiT Global and BitGo, the company behind WBTC, announced a cooperation in August this year. In this cooperation, WBTC business was transferred from the original company to BiT Global and Sun Chen.
3) AAVE
AAVE is a decentralized loan agency based on Ethereum, allowing users to deposit and earn interest or borrow crypto assets, which is the protocol launched by WLFI.
WLFI has also invested in AAVE Tokens very actively and has made allocations many times.WLFI once exchanged AAVE at $246,000 for US$360; and also exchanged AAVE at $308.4 for US$1.25 million; and also exchanged AAVE at $297.8 for US$1 million.Currently, WLFI holds a total of 6.137 million AAVEs.
4) LINK
The project behind LINK is Chainlink, a decentralized oracle network designed to provide reliable off-chain data for smart contracts on the blockchain.In short, Chainlink helps blockchain acquire and use external data.
WLFI also invests frequently in LINK, and has allocated LINK for prices of US$34.2, US$25.5, US$27, etc., which costs a total of about US$8 million.Currently, WLFI holds a total of 78,300 LINKs.
There are reports that WLFI will be integrated with Chainlink oracles to accelerate the promotion and adoption of DeFi.Chainlink is currently the leading data oracle solution on the market, and WLFI, as a DeFi platform, may need to use Chainlink’s oracle services to ensure the accuracy and security of its financial products.Therefore, buying LINK may be to acquire and use Chainlink’s services, enhance the functionality and credibility of the platform.
5)ENA
Ethena (ENA) is a decentralized financial platform that ensures the stability of assets through an algorithmic stablecoin mechanism.ENA can be used for collateral, transactions and governance.The platform provides efficient transactions, liquidity mining and DeFi integration, aiming to provide stable and transparent financial services for crypto assets
WLFI spent a total of US$750,000 to reserve 741,687 ENAs, with an average operating price of US$1.011 per piece; in addition, at a price of US$500,000, an average of US$0.98 USDT, a reserve of 509,954 ENAs, and currently holds a total of 741,000 ENAs..
However, a WLFI spokesperson said that the purchase of ENA Token has no direct relationship with Ethena Labs, which only shows WLFI’s confidence in the long-term feasibility and success of the Ethena network.
6) ONDO
The project behind Ondo is Ondo Finance, an Ethereum-based DeFi protocol designed to convert traditional liquidity services into tokenization of real-world assets, connecting crypto assets and the real economy.Its main product is bond RWA. Currently, Ondo has launched four products on Binance Contract, including US money fund OMMF, Blackrock short-term US Treasury ETF OUSG, Tokenized Notes USDY and Flux Finance, which supports Tokenized securities collateral.
For Ondo, WLFI has only one configuration operation, and a total of US$250,000 was used to configure 134,000 ONDOs, with an average price of US$1.86 per unit during operation.
03What other information has been revealed?
It can be seen that the WLFI project has recently made many on-chain operations.The tokens it configures include stablecoins (USDT), collateral borrowing, RWA, oracle, and encapsulated Bitcoin and other projects, basically covering all categories of DeFi on the chain.But in addition to our obvious DeFi asset reserves, we can also see the following points from the on-chain activities of this project:
1) Use Safe multi-sign wallet
Safe Multi-Sign Wallet is an asset management tool based on smart contracts, which improves the security of digital assets through a multi-sign mechanism (which requires multiple accounts to sign together).It supports flexible setting of signing rules. In the Safe multi-signment wallet, it can be set as a single sign (such as 1/1), and one person can authorize transactions, or configured as a multi-signment (such as 2/3 or 3/5).The preset number of signers is required to complete the operation.It is also compatible with a variety of blockchain and token types, and is widely used in team fund management, DAO financial operations, personal asset protection and custody services. It is popular among Web3 users for its high security and transparency.
The Safe multi-signature wallet that WLFI performs on-chain operations has a total of 7 signers, one of which is an active DeFi user.
2) Token redemption through the built-in Cowswap of Safe wallet
On-chain data shows that WLFI has made more than 150 transactions through decentralized exchange CowSwap in less than two months.CoW Swap is the front-end of CoW Protocol. As a DEX aggregation protocol that integrates functions such as batch trading (Batch Auctions), Trade Intents and MEV protection, it is deployed on Ethereum and Gnosis. It is one of the popular DEXs at present.
Due to the massive redemption by WLFI through its wallet, the price of CoW Protocol’s native Token COW has soared by more than 30% in 24 hours, and has risen by more than 80% in 7 days.
3) The measurement behind the token selection
Diversified portfolio:By configuring tokens in different fields, not only can WLFI reduce the volatility risk of a single asset and capture more market growth opportunities, but also use market heat to enhance the capital operation effect.
Enhance DeFi ecological influence:Most of these tokens are DeFi core assets. Allocating these tokens will help WLFI expand its layout and influence in the DeFi ecosystem.
Strategic cooperation opportunities:Certain allocated specific assets (such as ENA and ONDO) may be based on cooperation with these projects, thereby enhancing their brand value and market voice.
In general, this is in line with the development goals of the WLIF project, which is to continuously increase its influence through various means to build a comprehensive on-chain borrowing and trading platform.
04summary
If the previous BTC price has climbed from $70,000 to more than $100,000 due to the “Trump effect”, then the Token held by WLFI is also driven by this effect.For example, on December 14, after WLFI configured LINK and AAVE, LINK’s floating profit was US$299,000 and AAVE’s floating profit was US$338,000.On December 16, as WLFI operation news spread, ONDO price broke through 2.1 USDT, a record high, with a 24-hour increase of 16.33%.
Therefore, it is reported that WLFI’s assets may become the weather vane of old DeFi, and there are many speculations.What crypto assets will WLFI reserve next?
Some believe that the teams supported by investment consultants are worth paying attention to, some believe that the top leaders of each track, such as projects with high asset value and high brand value, may become new goals, and some believe that high-quality DeFi assets with the top 100 market value cannot be ignored.
However, we will wait and see what actions WLFI will do next.
