More than two hours after former Republican President Donald Trump’s World Liberty Financial project was launched Monday night, the team behind the Trump family’s new crypto project has finally revealed key details: who can buy the upcoming tokens it plans to issue, and how the project’s shares will be allocated.
For more than a month, the former president and his family members have been promoting this endeavor in vague terms, promising that he will do many things at once.
The lofty goals laid out by project participants at the X space program on Monday night suggest that World Liberty Financial will serve as a crypto banking platform, where the general public will be encouraged to borrow, lend and invest in cryptocurrencies.
There will also be a companion token called WLFI, the founders said on Monday.
The equity structure for these tokens will be to allocate 20% of the project’s tokens to the founding team, which includes the Trump family, 17% of the tokens will be allocated to user rewards, and the remaining 63% of the coins will be available for purchase by the public, according to founder Zach Volkman.
There will be no pre-sales or early buys, Volkman added.
A previously leaked draft of the project's internal blueprint suggested the founders would own 70% of the company, raising concerns that the venture 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 requirement that makes it possible for a company to raise capital without first registering its securities with the commission as long as certain conditions are met.
These were the topics Trump addressed in conversational form early in the more than two-hour event, where he spoke about the perceived hostility of the Securities and Exchange Commission toward the cryptocurrency industry.
Many industry figures take issue with SEC Chairman Gary Gensler, claiming that he regulates the industry through enforcement actions, not rules.
Over the course of a 40-minute chat with Trump at the start of the more than two-hour livestream, he talked about how he was “not overly interested” in cryptocurrencies at first.
But that changed, he said, when sales of his collections of Trump-branded NFTs were paid for in cryptocurrency. “I think my kids opened my eyes more than anything else,” he said.
“Cryptocurrency is one of the things 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 comes at an unprecedented moment for Trump's presidential campaign.
On Sunday afternoon at the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida, Trump and his longtime friend and political donor Steve Witkoff were between the fifth and sixth holes of the course when shots were fired. The FBI described the incident as an apparent assassination attempt on the former president.
Witkoff is a longtime friend of Trump's, and is also a member of the small group of founders of World Liberty Financial.
Witkoff was sitting to Trump's right during the live broadcast Monday night, and described how he brought together the Trump family with two cryptocurrency entrepreneurs to start the project.
“My son introduced me to two partners, Chase Herro and Zach Volkman, who are exceptionally smart people… These guys are as smart as any crypto traders I’ve ever met. They started talking to me about decentralized finance, which is frictionless finance, and why that made sense for people. And about the forgotten people, who can’t get credit there,” Witkoff said.
“And when I started to understand that, I said to myself, ‘Who understands this better than the Trump family?’ And we had a meeting first with Eric, Donald Jr., the president and his counsel. And we said, ‘Let’s get on with it.’ We worked on it for about nine months,” Witkoff said.
As Witkoff points out, the similarities between World Liberty Financial and Trump's other recent venture, Trump Media and Technology GroupIt was inevitable.
In the case of Trump Media, two former actors on Trump’s hit NBC TV 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 boosted Trump’s net worth by billions of dollars, and Truth Social has become his favorite social media platform.
In addition to Trump and Witkoff, World Liberty Financial's founders 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, obtained by CoinDesk listed Barron as “Chief DeFi Visionary,” Eric and Donald Jr. as “Web3 Ambassadors,” and Trump Sr. as “Chief Crypto Advocate.”
While the Trump family will receive compensation from the project, the platform itself is “not owned, managed, operated or sold” by members of the Trump family.
According to a person familiar with the project, Witkoff, a real estate investor, and Eric Trump, executive vice president of the Trump Organization, are the two people running World Liberty Financial. Both are new to the cryptocurrency industry.
Until Monday, much of what the public knew about World Liberty was based on interviews the Trump sons gave to the press over the past month, a leaked white paper that served as a kind of manifesto for the crypto project, and conversations with insiders.
Anyone who wanted to obtain substantive details about the platform, including the white paper, was required to sign a non-disclosure agreement, according to a person familiar with the project.
World Liberty Financial represents the latest step in the evolution of Donald Trump’s political and personal relationship with the cryptocurrency industry.
Several prominent crypto figures have cozyed up to Trump during the 2024 election cycle, offering their money and endorsements to the Republican presidential candidate.
Meanwhile, Trump has increasingly embraced positive talking points about cryptocurrencies during his campaign, culminating in a keynote speech in July at the largest bitcoin event of the year in Nashville, Tennessee.
However, some of those supporters also said they were concerned that Trump's foray into crypto could jeopardize his relationship with the sector more broadly, especially if the launch doesn't go as planned.
The founders offered few details on Monday about any future timelines for the project, saying only that new information would be shared on official social media channels, and warned fans not to fall prey to scams.
