Source: Vernacular 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 projects related to the Trump team are also taking off.

Recently, World Liberty Financial (hereinafter referred to as WLFI), which has close ties with the Trump family, has frequently purchased ETH, LINK, AAVE, ENA, etc., triggering a wave of follow-up in the market and becoming a player that cannot be ignored in the crypto investment market. wind vane.

So, what is WLFI, and what actions may it take to affect the market in the future?

WLFI is a DeFi project supported by Trump and his family (including eldest son Donald Trump Jr., third son Eric Trump, and youngest son Barron Trump) and was launched in 2023 The Aave V3 platform was officially launched on the Ethereum mainnet in September.

WLFI is essentially a DeFi platform that allows users to borrow, lend, and invest in cryptocurrencies. The founders’ vision is to build it as a tool to achieve financial independence, allowing users to conduct private peer-to-peer transactions without relying on traditional financial intermediaries, thus driving the development of decentralized finance globally, especially for those with traditional banking services Not enough people, the Trump family once called it “the future of crypto DeFi.”

WLFI is the governance token of World Liberty Financial. Each token grants its holder one vote in community proposals on the governance platform. However, its initial distribution plan has been adjusted, from half of the previous The above is used to transfer sales changes to community and creator rewards, reflecting changes in community incentives and shares of initial supporters.

Unlike other governance tokens such as UNI and MKR, WLFI does not provide economic rights, that is, it is not transferable after redemption, which means that users cannot trade/exchange/sell WLFI after holding the token. While this may change through governance proposals in the future, for now it appears that the token will not be tradable for an extended period of time.

Perhaps due to its non-transferability and inability to provide short-term profit opportunities for cryptocurrency investors, WLFI has had low liquidity since its launch on October 15.

It is also worth noting that WLFI is only available to users outside the United States and is not registered with any financial regulatory agency. This means that U.S. residents cannot participate in trading these tokens, which may be considered to avoid the supervision of U.S. law enforcement agencies.

Considering its promotion method, to put it more bluntly, WLFI is under the influence of Trump to seek to promote the use of US dollar stable coins and DeFi applications, aiming to strengthen the US dollar in the DeFi field one of statusprojects. Therefore, we have to explore how the Trump family supports this project.

1) Team members

According to WLFI official information, there is a paragraph describing itself: Inspired by Trump, it promotes the large-scale adoption of stablecoins and DeFi, especially the U.S. dollar. stablecoin, thus ensuring the dominance of the US dollar.

Donald Trump himself serves as the project’s “chief cryptocurrency advocate,” while his sons Eric Trump, Donald Trump Jr., and Barron Trump He serves as a Web3 ambassador, helping to promote the platform and attract mainstream users.

In this context, and according to the content of the white paper, DT Marks DEFI LLC (a Trump-owned company) agreed to promote WLFI and granted it a license to use the names and likenesses of Trump family members for promotional purposes right. In return, WLFI pays Tokens to DT Marks DEFI LLC and shares a portion of the protocol’s net revenue (approximately 75%).

But the Trump family has legally bypassed all ties with WLFI. Although WLFI claims to be "the only DeFi platform inspired by Trump," the positions of advocate and ambassador of the Trump family are not any real positions involved in management, and there is a small text at the bottom of the official website:

Neither Donald J. Trump, nor any member of his family, nor any director, officer or employee of the Trump Organization, DT Marks DEFI LLC, or their respective affiliates, is a shareholder of WLFI or their Officers, directors, founders or employees of affiliated companies. …World Liberty Financial and its WLFI Token are not part of, nor are they part of, any campaign.

Therefore, some critics believe that WLFI is deeply tied to the Trump family and is an OEM product of the Trump family. Unknown traders use the reputation of the Trump family to launch products, especially The Trump family sells brands and makes profits. Because this kind of business operation is commonplace for the Trump family. For example, many of the Trump hotels or buildings named after Trump around the world are cooperation with Trump in the form of licensing and OEM.

In general, although various propaganda says that WLFI and the Trump family are inextricably linked, there is actually no legal connection. This may be one of the reasons why everyone is not very convinced of WLFI.

In addition to the strong support of the Trump family, the WLFI team is composed of experienced encryption practitioners.

The official website shows that WLFI has a total of five founders, among whom Chase Herro and Zak Folkman’s industry resumes are not very impressive. According to CoinDesk reported that they had launched a tepid DeFi product, Dough Finance, and the project was hacked in the summer of 2024 and lost $2 million. In addition, WLFI’s blockchain leader Octavian Lojnita and an anonymous developer are also from the former company Dough Finance. Coindesk’s report also showed that a review showed that in the early stages, the code base posted on WLFI directly copied Dough Finance’s code, which was later deleted. However, WLFI stated that they have had their code reviewed by multiple auditing companies (such as BlockSec, Fuzzland, PeckShield, Zokyo, etc.) to ensure security.

In addition to Chase Herro and Zak Folkman, the other three co-founders of WLFI are Steven Witkoff and his family (founders Steven Witkoff, Zach Witkoff, Alex Witkoff). Steven Witkoff is a well-known real estate developer in the United States. , is also a friend of Trump.

In addition, WLFI also has an advisory team composed of venture capitalists, lawyers and blockchain engineers. Among these people are Sandy Peng, co-founder of Ethereum’s second-layer blockchain Scroll, and Luke Pearson, general partner of Polychain Capital. It can be seen that these advisors have specific technical expertise and market experience, which can help WLFI achieve its long-term goals, especially in promoting USD stablecoins and expanding DeFi applications.

2) Recent development

Although the entire altcoin market has begun to recover driven by Bitcoin, WLFI’s sales are still not optimistic, with only four cents sold since its launch. About one. However, there are two things worth noting. First, at the end of November, Tron founder Justin Sun spent $30 million to allocate WLFI Token to express his support for the project, becoming the largest public investor in the project at present. Then in November On the 26th, Justin Sun was appointed as a consultant to WLFI

Following the announcement of Justin Sun as a consultant ambassador, on December 18, WLFI announced a partnership with Ethena Labs After reaching a cooperation, the two parties are seeking long-term cooperation. The starting plan is to start with Ethena's income token sUSDe. In addition, what attracts the most attention is the various altcoins exchanged by WLFI. Every time it is sold, it can directly trigger a wave of trading boom.

According to Spot On Chain monitoring, WLFISince November 2024, a variety of mainstream and emerging crypto assets have been stored through one main wallet address, especially in December, with cumulative spends approaching $45 million, including ETH, cbBTC, LINK, AAVE, ENA, and the latest ONDO Wait, the total position value has exceeded 84.8 million US dollars.

Source: https://intel.arkm.com/explorer/entity/worldlibertyfi

According to incomplete statistics, its reserve encryption Assets include:

1) ETH

As the world's second largest cryptocurrency platform, Ethereum's status and influence in the industry go without saying.

WLFI has purchased ETH many times and spent the most on ETH. It was previously reported that it spent US$30 million to reserve 8,105 ETH, with a unit price of approximately US$3,700. The most recent operation was in December On the 20th, 722.213 ETH were acquired through Cow Protocol for US$2.5 million. After this transaction, WLFI’s 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 blockchains such as Ethereum network. WLFI spent US$10 million to exchange approximately 103 cbBTC, with an average operating price of US$97,181 per coin; subsequently, WLFI exchanged all cbBTC for WBTC holdings. The move came on the same day Coinbase announced it was delisting WBTC for failing to comply with CEX standards. Coinbase delisted WBTC, and WLFI’s move was seen as support for WBTC. WLFI's choice to exchange cbBTC for WBTC may be due to WBTC's maturity and infrastructure advantages in the market, or the addition of Justin Sun as a consultant may have influenced this decision.

Because BiT Global, Sun’s custody company, and BitGo, the company behind WBTC, announced their cooperation in August this year. In this cooperation, the WBTC business was transferred from the original company to BiT Global and Sun Chen.

3) AAVE

AAVE is a decentralized borrowing protocol based on Ethereum, which allows users to earn interest on deposits or borrow crypto assets, which is the protocol launched by WLFI.

WLFI is also very active in investing in AAVE Token and has made allocations many times. wLFIAn AAVE with a unit price of US$360 was exchanged for US$246,000; an AAVE with a unit price of US$308.4 was exchanged for US$1.25 million; and an AAVE with a unit price of US$297.8 was exchanged for US$1 million. Currently, WLFI holds a total of 6.137 million AAVE.

4) LINK

The project behind LINK is Chainlink, a decentralized oracle network designed to provide reliable off-chain for smart contracts on the blockchain data. Simply put, Chainlink helps blockchains obtain and use external data.

WLFI has also invested frequently in LINK, having allocated LINK at prices of US$34.2, US$25.5, US$27, etc., spending a total of approximately US$8 million. Currently, the total amount of LINK held by WLFI is 78,300.

It is reported 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. As a DeFi platform, WLFI may need to use Chainlink's oracle services to ensure the accuracy and security of its financial products. Therefore, purchasing LINK may be to obtain and use Chainlink’s services and 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 staking, trading, and governance. The platform provides efficient trading, 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 ENA, with an average operating price of 1.011 US dollars per coin; in addition, at a price of US$500,000, with an average of 0.98 USDT per coin, 509,954 ENAs are currently held in reserve. 741,000 ENA.

However, a spokesman for WLFI stated that the purchase of ENA Token is not directly related to the cooperation with Ethena Labs, but only shows WLFI’s confidence in the long-term viability and success of the Ethena network.

6) ONDO

The project behind Ondo is Ondo Finance, a DeFi protocol based on Ethereum that aims to transform traditional liquidity services into the 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 Futures, including U.S. Monetary Fund OMMF, Blackrock Short-Term U.S. Treasury Bond ETF OUSG, Tokenized Notes USDY, and Flux Finance supporting tokenized security collateral. For Ondo, WLFI only had one configuration operation, and spent a total of US$250,000 to configure 134,000 ONDOs. The average price during the operation was US$1.86 per coin.

It can be seen that the WLFI project has recently made many on-chain operations, and its configured Tokens include stablecoins (USDT), mortgage lending, RWA, oracles, and encapsulated Bitcoin projects, which basically cover All categories of DeFi on the chain. In addition to our obvious DeFi asset reserves, we can also see the following points from the project’s on-chain activities: 1) The use of Safe multi-signature wallet Safe multi-signature wallet is an asset management tool based on smart contracts. The signature mechanism (requires multiple accounts to sign together) improves the security of digital assets. It supports flexible setting of signing rules. In the Safe multi-signature wallet, it can be set to single signature (such as 1/1), where one person can authorize transactions, or configured to multi-signature (such as 2/3 or 3/5). The preset number of signatories needs to be met 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 favored by Web3 users for its high security and transparency.

The Safe multi-signature wallet operated by WLFI on the chain has a total of 7 signers, one of which is an active DeFi user.

2) Token exchange through the built-in Cowswap of the Safe wallet

On-chain data shows that WLFI has conducted more than 150 transactions through the decentralized exchange CowSwap in less than two months. transaction. CoW Swap is the front-end of CoW Protocol. As a DEX aggregation protocol that integrates functions such as Batch Auctions, Trade Intents and MEV protection, it is deployed on Ethereum and Gnosis and is one of the currently popular DEXs.

Due to the large number of exchanges conducted by WLFI through its wallet, the price of CoW Protocol’s native token COW once surged by more than 30% in 24 hours, and by more than 80% in 7 days.

3) Measurement behind Token selection

Diversified investment portfolio: By allocating Tokens in different fields, WLFI can not only reduce the volatility risk of a single asset, but also capture more market growth opportunities, and at the same time take advantage of market heat to enhance the effect of capital operation.

Enhancing the DeFi ecological influence: these TokMost of en are DeFi core assets. Allocating these Tokens will help WLFI expand its layout and influence in the DeFi ecosystem.

Strategic cooperation opportunities: Certain allocated assets (such as ENA and ONDO) may be considered based on cooperation with these projects, thereby enhancing their own brand value and market voice.

In general, this is in line with the development goals of the WLIF project, which is to continuously improve its influence through various methods to build a comprehensive on-chain borrowing and trading platform.

If the price of BTC has climbed from US$70,000 to more than US$100,000 due to the "Trump effect", then the Token held by WLFI has also been driven by this effect. For example, on December 14, after WLFI configured LINK and AAVE, the LINK position had a floating profit of US$299,000, and the AAVE position had a floating profit of US$338,000. On December 16, as news of the WLFI operation spread, the price of ONDO exceeded 2.1 USDT, setting a record high, with a 24-hour increase of 16.33%.

Therefore, there are rumors in the market that WLFI’s assets may become the benchmark for established DeFi, and there are many speculations about what crypto assets WLFI will reserve next?

Some people think that the team behind the investment consultant deserves attention, some think that the leaders of each track, such as projects with large asset value and high brand value, may become new targets, and some think that high-quality projects in the top 100 in market value No DeFi asset can be ignored.

But we will wait and see what actions WLFI will take next.