Original title: "Trump Project WLFI bought up $45 million in tokens. Who are the core decision-makers behind it?" 》

Original author: Weilin, PANews

Trump’s DeFi project World Liberty Financial (WLFI) purchased crypto assets aggressively in December, with cumulative expenditures approaching $45 million, including ETH, cbBTC, LINK, AAVE, ENA and the latest ONDO.

Since its launch in September, the project describes itself as a decentralized finance (DeFi) platform. On December 13, the World Liberty Financial community passed the first proposal to deploy Aave v3 instances. Although the project has made initial progress, judging from the current situation, the leadership team is mostly new faces, and there is still a certain degree of uncertainty about the practicality and innovation of the project.

In December, it purchased crypto assets on a large scale, with total expenditures approaching $45 million

According to blockchain data platform Lookonchain, World Liberty Financial has One wallet purchased a large amount of crypto assets, including $30 million worth of Ethereum (ETH) and $10 million of Coinbase Wrapped BTC (cbBTC). Other assets purchased include LINK, AAVE, ENA, and the latest purchase of Ondo tokens worth $250,000. The specific data of these purchases are as follows:

Using 30 million US dollars USDC to purchase 8,105 ETH, with a unit price of 3,701 US dollars;

: left;">Use 10 million USDC to purchase 103 cbBTC, unit price is 97181 USD;

Use 200 Use USD 10,000 USDC to purchase 78,387 LINK, unit price is USD 25.5;

Use USD 2 million USDC to purchase 6,137 AAVE, unit priceUS$326;

Use US$500,000 USDC to purchase 509,955 ENAs at a unit price of US$0.98;

Use USD 250,000 USDC to purchase 134,216 ONDO at a unit price of USD 1.86.

In addition, although COW is not in World Liberty Financial’s asset list, Cowswap has been used to purchase tokens on the chain in recent times, which is also the case with Ethereum. One of the most commonly used DEXs by founder Vitalik Buterin.

World Liberty Financial launched in September, claiming to be a decentralized finance (DeFi) platform for cryptocurrency trading, and will elect President Trump Listed as "chief encryption advocate," Trump's sons Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, and Barron Trump serve as "ambassadors." Companies associated with the family are entitled to 75% of net income.

The project has had a dismal performance selling its namesake token, World Liberty Financial (WLFI). According to the roadmap, $1.5 billion is the fully diluted valuation of the project, and WLFI’s “initial sale” plans to raise $300 million and sell 20% of the token supply. But as of December 17, 4.99 billion WLFI have been sold, for a total of $74.85 million based on a unit price of $0.015, which is less than a quarter of the $300 million target. It is worth mentioning that Justin Sun disclosed that he invested US$30 million in WLFI, becoming the largest investor in the project. In addition, no institution has announced investment in this project.

The WLFI community voted to adopt the first proposal to deploy lending instances based on Aave v3

At the same time, the good news is that on December 13, the World Liberty Financial governance page showed , the WLFI community voted to pass the first proposal to deploy a lending instance based on Aave v3 on the Ethereum main network.

As of December 16, Aave DAO has a value of US$347 millionYuan's treasury. Initially, when World Liberty Financial announced that it would be built on top of the Aave protocol, the Aave community was skeptical. That changed in October, though, after World Liberty Financial proposed allocating 7% of its WLFI tokens and 20% of future fees generated by WLF to the Aave DAO, the crypto collective that governs the Aave protocol.

The proposal recommends deploying an Aave v3 instance based on World Liberty Financial (WLF). Key points include:

· Provide stablecoin liquidity for ETH and WBTC.

· Expand the user base of the Aave protocol.

Proposals need to be approved by AaveDAO and WLF community governance. If the proposal is approved, users will be able to deposit USDC and USDT stablecoins on the protocol, as well as ETH and wBTC. These assets can be used as collateral to borrow against other assets on Aave.

The proposal mentioned that the benefit to Aave is to bring a large number of new users to Aave and liquidity, build brand loyalty and awareness among new DeFi users, and solidify Aave’s leading position in the digital asset lending market.

Next, the proposal has several steps: 1. If the temperature check (TEMP CHECK) reaches a consensus, it will be submitted to the Snapshot stage. 2. If the Snapshot vote is passed, it enters the ARFC stage. 3. Publish the standard ARFC and collect feedback from the community and service providers. 4. If the ARFC Snapshot passes, the AIP vote will be released for final confirmation and execution.

WLFI’s leadership team is not a familiar face, what’s the origin?

There are many new faces behind Trump’s DeFi project who are not familiar with the encryption circle. In addition to Trump and his family members, the five co-founders of this project are Chase Herro, Zak Folkman, Steven Witkoff, Zach Witkoff, and Alex Witkoff.

Among them, Chase Herro has a special background. It is reported that he has been engaged in many He has businesses seemingly unrelated to the crypto industry, including cannabis sales and weight-loss products, and has flaunted luxury cars and private jet travel on social media, but has little reputation in crypto circles. The only crypto project he was publicly involved with, Dough Finance, only attracted a few million dollars and suffered a serious hack. A token he promoted on influencer Logan Paul’s podcast plunged 96% after the promotion. In a 2018 speech, he called himself the "scum of the internet" and said regulators should "kick people like me out."

In addition, another co-founder, Chase Herro's business partner Zak Folkman, once ran a service called Date Hotter Girls, in which he The lecture on how to pick up women has a more controversial background.

As for Steven Witkoff, he is a familiar friend of Trump, a real estate businessman, and has donated $2 million to Trump's campaign. After Trump won the election, he appointed him as the special envoy to the Middle East. And Witkoff’s sons Alex and Zach are listed as co-founders of World Liberty Financial.

Except for these co-founders who are far away from the encryption market, the backgrounds of other heads of specific business sectors appear to be more professional and close to the encryption industry.

For example, Rich Teo, who serves as the head of stablecoins and payments and is also an OG in the crypto field, co-founded the exchange itBit in 2012 and later co-founded The stablecoin company Paxos currently serves as the CEO of Paxos Asia. In addition, Rich is also an advisor to the AI-powered SocialFi project RepubliK and has retweeted many of the project’s tweets on Twitter.

Corey Caplan, co-founder of Dolomite, serves as head of technology strategy. Dolomite is a DeFi platform that launched on Arbitrum One in October 2022 and has since expanded to other blockchain ecosystems, including Polygon’s zkEVM, Mantle, and X Layer, and offers a variety of services including margin trading, lending, and investing Portfolio management.

Bogdan Purnavel serves as the lead developer. He was also a developer of Dough Finance and his online nickname is 0xboga. The head of blockchain at World Liberty Financial is Octavian Lojnita. According to his online bio, he is originally from Romania and works as a full-stack developer. Octavian Lojnita also previously worked at Dough Finance.

Alex Golubitsky served as legal counsel. Alex Golubitsky is an international tax attorney whose career spans tax law, securities law, entity formation, contract drafting and litigation. He serves as a partner at MetaLeX Pro, LLP and as general counsel at Brisa Max Holdings VI, LLC.

In addition, World Liberty Financial also has an advisory team composed of venture capitalists, lawyers and blockchain engineers. Sandy Peng, co-founder of Ethereum second-layer blockchain Scroll, and Luke Pearson, general partner of Polychain Capital, are among the project’s advisors.

At present, World Liberty Financial’s large-scale token purchases have caused differences in the outside world evaluate.

Nansen research analyst Nicolai Søndergaard told Bloomberg that World Liberty Financial's token purchases may be "to gain more trust, or by causing interest in these assets." attention to promote the development of its own projects, because if these assets perform well, World Liberty Financial may also benefit. ”

While World Liberty Financial’s plan may sound innovative to those unfamiliar with cryptocurrencies, startups like this are actually common and few are successful. Many of these companies are set up just to sell tokens and make a profit, Tarun Chitra, general partner at Robot Ventures, previously told Outsiders.

In general, the Trump family’s DeFi project World Liberty Financial has demonstrated its ambitions in the encryption field through large-scale currency purchases and cooperation with Aave. , the screening of their investment targets has also become a weather vane that investors pay attention to. However, its leadership team is relatively unfamiliar, and there is still uncertainty about the practicality and innovation of the project. Despite this, as a project initiated by the family of the "crypto president" of the United States, it will still attract widespread attention from the market, and the follow-up situation deserves further attention.