A token sale for the Donald Trump-backed World Liberty Financial has faltered, so far only reaching 3.4% of its goal to sell $300 million worth of Crypto Token Sale.
The debut token sale for the Trump family’s crypto project World Liberty Financial has so far fallen flat, with the number of tokens sold reaching just over 3.4% of its $300 million goal after its website crashed.
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The sale for WLFI, the platform’s token, went live on Oct. 15 with 20 billion tokens priced at 1.5 cents apiece up for grabs to the public — but 14 hours later, only 687 million, around $10.3 million worth, had been sold.
Etherscan data shows just 6,832 unique wallet addresses hold WLFI, far below the over 100,000 signups the project’s team touted they’d seen a day before the token’s launch.
World Liberty Financial’s website also crashed soon after the tokens went on sale and was unavailable for several hours, apparently due to excessive traffic, with some observers met with a “website under maintenance” notice when trying to access the site.
According to the project’s white paper released Oct. 15 — which it calls a “gold paper” — WLFI’s total supply will be 100 billion tokens, 35% of which will be distributed in token sales to eligible participants.
Donald Trump’s sons, Eric, Barron, and Donald Trump Jr. are listed as the platform’s “Web3 Ambassadors.”
Trump, the Republican presidential hopeful — named the platform’s “Chief Crypto Advocate” in the white paper — took to X on Oct. 15 to spruik the token sale.
“Crypto is the future, let’s embrace this incredible technology and lead the world in the digital economy,” he said in a video.
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
In the United States, the tokens and platform are only available to accredited investors — those with Securities and Exchange Commission approval to invest in unregistered securities who typically earn over $200,000 a year and have over $1 million in assets.
A new crypto project promoted by U.S. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and his family got off to a bumpy start on Tuesday, as the website crashed and sales of a new digital token fell far short of the $300 million fundraising target during the first few hours.
The public token sale for the crypto project, World Liberty Financial, appeared to go live around 12:40 UTC (8:40 a.m. ET), and almost 2,900 investors bought the token despite the site suffering numerous outages during its first hour.
The WLFI tokens not be tradable but will serve as a governance token for the soon-to-be-launched Ethereum-based decentralized finance (DeFi) platform.
World Liberty Financial plans to run as an instance of the popular DeFi protocol Aave, according to a governance proposal it submitted to the protocol earlier this month.
Of the remaining WLFI tokens not set aside for the public, 32.5% will be allocated to community growth and incentives, 30% will be for “initial supporter allocation,” and 2.5% will be allocated to the team and advisers.
In an X Spaces event on Oct. 14, the platform’s head of operations, Zak Folkman, reiterated information about the project, confirming that the platform will allow users to borrow and lend crypto, create and interact with liquidity pools, and transact with stablecoins.
Sandy Peng, a WLFI advisor and co-founder of the Scroll blockchain network, attributed the website outages to excessive traffic. “The team wasn’t expecting this level of interest,” said Peng, whose Scroll network is set to host World Liberty Financial’s blockchain application.
According to Peng, the World Liberty Financial website—which serves as the official portal to the WLFI token sale—received 72 million unique visits in its first hour. The site fell offline due to the excessive traffic but has come back online intermittently, apparently having switched to a new web hosting service.
WLFI token sales appeared to ramp up around 17:30 UTC, when the website came back online for about an hour. By 18:10 UTC, an Ethereum blockchain wallet connected to the token sale held nearly $5.7 million worth of ether (ETH), $1.6 million of tether (USDT) and around $300,000 USD Coin (USDC) tokens.
