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Trump Touts New Crypto Token After Initial Sales Are a Dud

A token sale for World Liberty Financial was active earlier on Tuesday and raised about $9 million amid multiple website crashes, well below the $300 million fundraising target.

By Shaurya Malwa|Edited by Bradley Keoun

Updated Oct 15, 2024, 11:36 p.m. Published Oct 15, 2024, 11:29 p.m.

Donald Trump at an NFT event at Mar-a-Lago on May 8, 2024. (Danny Nelson/CoinDesk)

U.S. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump took to the social-media platform X to tout World Liberty Financial, a new crypto project promoted by his family, after initial sales of the platform's new WLFI tokens fell well short of the target.

Trump's post came late in the U.S. day on Tuesday, several hours after the tokens were initially made available. Some $9 million of the tokens were sold as of press time, some 3% of the total tokens allocated to the public sale.

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"Today's the day!" Trump said in an X announcement.

Today’s the day! @WorldLibertyFi token sale is live. Get your $WLFI tokens now. Purchase $WLFI here: https://t.co/jg1tOaHHBy pic.twitter.com/j8ewxa13wp
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 15, 2024

WLFI serves as a governance token for the platform, enabling users to participate in DeFi activities like borrowing, lending, and creating liquidity pools.

The token sale website went live earlier Tuesday and suffered numerous outages.

As such, trackers for the WLFI token on its website did not show an immediate spike in purchase volume after Trump's X post - with over 540 million tokens already purchased by users before his endorsement.

Trump

Shaurya Malwa

Shaurya is the Co-Leader of the CoinDesk tokens and data team in Asia with a focus on crypto derivatives, DeFi, market microstructure, and protocol analysis. Shaurya holds over $1,000 in BTC, ETH, SOL, AVAX, SUSHI, CRV, NEAR, YFI, YFII, SHIB, DOGE, USDT, USDC, BNB, MANA, MLN, LINK, XMR, ALGO, VET, CAKE, AAVE, COMP, ROOK, TRX, SNX, RUNE, FTM, ZIL, KSM, ENJ, CKB, JOE, GHST, PERP, BTRFLY, OHM, BANANA, ROME, BURGER, SPIRIT, and ORCA. He provides over $1,000 to liquidity pools on Compound, Curve, SushiSwap, PancakeSwap, BurgerSwap, Orca, AnySwap, SpiritSwap, Rook Protocol, Yearn Finance, Synthetix, Harvest, Redacted Cartel, OlympusDAO, Rome, Trader Joe, and SUN.