More than two hours after Republican former President Donald Trump’s World Liberty Financial launch event at X Monday night, the team behind the Trump family’s new crypto project finally revealed an important detail: Who can buy the upcoming tokens they’re planning to release, and how shares of the project will be allocated.
For more than a month, the former president and his family have been pumping up the effort with vague descriptions and promises that it will do many things at once.
Lofty goals set by those involved in the project on Monday night’s X-space suggest that World Liberty Financial will be a crypto-banking platform of sorts, where the general public will be encouraged to borrow, lend and invest in crypto to invest.
There will also be an accompanying token called WLFI, founders said Monday.
The equity structure for these tokens will be that 20% of the project’s tokens will be allocated to the founding team, which includes the Trumps, 17% of tokens will be set aside for user rewards, and the remaining 63% of the coins will be made available. for the public to buy, founder Zak Folkman said.
There will be no pre-sales or early bird purchases, Folkman added.
An earlier leaked draft of an internal project review had the founders’ stake at 70%, raising concerns that the project would be little more than a get-rich-quick scheme.
The token will be a Reg D token offering, which follows the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Regulation D – a provision that allows a company to raise capital without first registering their securities with the commission as long as certain conditions are met.
These were themes Trump addressed early in the more than two-hour event in a conversational format, as he talked about the perceived hostility of the Securities and Exchange Commission to the digital currency industry.
Several high-profile figures in the industry are challenging SEC Chairman Gary Gensler, claiming that he regulates the industry through enforcement actions, rather than rules.
During Trump’s 40-minute fireside chat at the top of the more than two-hour live stream, he talked about how he initially “wasn’t too interested” in crypto.
But that changed, he said, when sales of his Trump-branded non-fungible token collections were paid for with crypto. “I think my kids opened my eyes more than anything else.”
“Crypto is one of those things that we have to do,” Trump said at the end of his remarks. “Whether we like it or not, we have to do it.”
Monday’s event came at an unprecedented moment for 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, were on the course between the fifth and sixth holes when gunshots were fired. The FBI described the incident as an apparent assassination attack on the former president.
Witkoff is a longtime friend of Trump. He is also part of the small group of World Liberty Financial founders.
Sitting to Trump’s right during Monday night’s live stream, Witkoff described how he brought the Trump family together with two crypto-entrepreneurs to get the project off the ground.
“My son introduced me to two partners, Chase Herro and Zak Folkman, who are exceptionally smart people… These guys are as smart as any currency traders I’ve ever met. And they started talking to me about decentralized finance, what frictionless finance means, and why it made sense for people and about the forgotten, who can’t get credit out there,” said Witkoff.
“When I started to understand it, I said, ‘Who would understand it better than the Trump family? And we initially had a meeting with Eric, Don Jr., and the president and his counsel. And we said, ‘Let’s check it out.’ We’ve been at it for almost nine months,” Witkoff said.
As Witkoff spoke, the parallels between World Liberty Financial and Trump’s other recent venture, Trump Media and Technology Groupwas inescapable.
In Trump Media’s case, two former cast members of Trump’s NBC reality show “The Apprentice” approached Trump in 2021 with an idea for a new, conservative social media platform.
Three and a half years later, Trump Media’s publicly traded stock has increased Trump’s net worth by billions of dollars, and Truth Social is his social 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 an early internal report, known as a white paper and obtained by CoinDesk, listed Barron as “Chief DeFi Visionary,” Eric and Donald Jr. as “Web3 Ambassadors,” and Trump Sr. as “Chief Crypto Advocate.”
But while the Trumps 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 approaching World Liberty Financial, according to a person familiar with the project. Both are new to the crypto 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 white paper that served as a sort of crypto project manifesto, and conversations with insiders.
Anyone who wanted material details of the platform, including the white paper, was asked to sign a non-disclosure agreement, according to a person familiar with the project.
World Liberty Financial represents the latest step in Donald Trump’s evolving political and personal relationship with the crypto industry.
Some visible figures in crypto have been cozying up to Trump during the 2024 election cycle, lending their cash and endorsements to the Republican nominee for president.
At the same time, Trump has adopted increasingly bullish talking points about crypto on the campaign trail. This culminated in his delivering a keynote speech in July at the biggest bitcoin event of the year in Nashville, Tennessee.
However, some of these supporters have also said they worry that Trump’s foray into crypto itself could jeopardize his relationship with the sector more broadly, especially if the launch doesn’t go as planned.
Founders provided few details Monday about any future timelines for the project, saying only that new information will be shared on official social media channels, and warning fans not to fall for scams.
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