US President Donald Trump looks at a debit card that will be used to distribute Covid-19 relief funds to the public during a Cabinet meeting in the East Room of the White House in Washington, DC, US, on Tuesday, May 19, 2020.
Kevin Deitch | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Donald Trump's new cryptocurrency project has gotten off to a rocky start.
World Liberty Financial, which aspires to be a kind of cryptocurrency bank, launched its token sale on Tuesday, a day after project co-founder Zachary Volkman said “more than 100,000 people” were on the investment whitelist.
But the WLF website suffered regular and prolonged outages for most of the morning and afternoon, which contributed to a limited number of sales. Only about 4,300 unique gated addresses held the token as of Tuesday afternoon, according to blockchain data tracked by Etherscan, representing about 4% of the total number of people registered.
The platform says it has sold more than 532 million tokens at 15 cents each. This is less than 3% of the 20 billion tokens available for public sale.
Throughout the day, the site repeatedly showed a page saying: “We are under maintenance.”
WLF did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The false launch represents a potential setback for the Republican presidential candidate just three weeks before the election. Trump and his family have been promoting the project since August, calling it “The DeFiant Ones,” a play on DeFi, short for decentralized finance.
Source: World Liberty Financial
In the roadmap provided to potential investors and first seen by The Block, the WLF proposal says the coin is looking to raise $300 million at a valuation of $1.5 billion in its initial sale. Volkmann, who previously had a company called Date Hotter Girls and reportedly helped develop the cryptocurrency project Dough Finance, said 20% of WLF tokens will be allocated to the founding team, which includes the Trump family.
The WLFI token will be a Regulation D token offering, following a provision that makes it possible to raise capital without first registering the security with the SEC. Certain conditions must be met, such as limiting the size of the sale and limiting it to accredited investors, which is defined in part as having a net worth of more than $1 million.
Although few details have been announced about the project's aspirations, people involved with WLF said that customers will be encouraged to borrow, lend and invest in cryptocurrencies. No official white paper or formal business plan has been released to the public, and all that has been revealed is that investing in the project will give users voting rights on the yet-to-be-launched WLF platform.
Last week, WLF began the process of getting its cryptocurrency bank approved by the DeFi ecosystem known as Aave.
Aave is open source software, and in DeFi, it is one of the oldest and most trusted cryptocurrency lending platforms.
Cryptocurrencies weren't the only dark spot for Trump-related investing on Tuesday.
Shares of Trump Media & Technology Group, the parent company of social media platform Truth Social, fell nearly 10% at the close after trading was briefly halted when the stock suddenly fell.
CNBC's Can Oguz and Jordan Smith contributed to this report.
Watch: Trump token launch misses early targets
