Donald Trump dodged bullets again this weekend when a second assassination attempt against him was thwarted at his golf course in West Palm Beach. Trump clearly showed his resilience on Monday when he appeared at Elon Musk’s X Spaces to discuss his upcoming cryptocurrency project.
This summer, Trump and his sons announced a new crypto business, details of which have slowly trickled out. The project, called World Liberty Financial, is a DeFi trading platform that will soon release its native governance token WLFI. Monday’s conversation was ostensibly about revealing new details about the emerging business, although Trump himself has shared little explicitly on the subject, preferring to do his usual shtick.
For much of the 40-plus minutes Monday, Trump focused on several familiar campaign themes, including evil leftists, “Comrade Kamala,” the “destruction” of illegal immigration to America and what if he Without a win in November, the United States will become “Venezuela on steroids.” Trump also spoke of a recent near miss that disrupted his golf game, quipping: “I really wish that last putt sank.” Regarding the multiple murder attempts against him, he added: “Something It’s happening. I mean, maybe God wanted me to be president to save this country. He also seemed to reveal information that had not been made public before, noting that it was a civilian woman who initially spotted the potential shooter and reported him.
After some prodding from the host, Trump eventually turned to the topic of the cryptocurrency industry, expressing vague excitement about it and blaming the Biden-Harris administration for any regulatory hostility currently facing cryptocurrency companies. He left shortly after praising NFTs and slamming the SEC.
The conversation didn’t end with the former president’s exit, however. Instead, Trump’s descendants and business associates continued to talk in a vague, aimless manner for about two hours. Towards the end of the conversation, the speaker finally revealed some details about the project. The most relevant details shared concern the division of project assets. Founder Zak Folkman said that 20% of the project’s tokens will be reserved for the founding team, while 17% of the tokens will be used for “user rewards.” The remaining 63% of the assets will be available for purchase by the certified public. Folkman said there will be no pre-sale (the practice of selling tokens to early investors before an initial coin offering). It’s unclear when WLFI’s first sales will actually occur.
World Liberty Financial has previously faced criticism over a Coindesk report claiming that the project involved an unusually unequal ratio of public to private tokens. Generally speaking, crypto projects will release the majority of their minted tokens to the public through sales, while retaining a small portion of the assets for insiders and investors (e.g. Ethereum retains ~16% of the initial ETH tokens for itself) . By contrast, World Liberty Financial may initially plan to reserve 70% of the project’s “governance” crypto tokens for “founders, teams and service providers,” according to a leaked white paper cited by Coindesk. At the same time, only 30% of the tokens will be sold through a public sale.
Beyond the tiny details provided, the rest of Monday night was filled with sibling banter and back-slapping, with plenty of web3 PR talk being traded and circulated. Don Jr. is able to construct more coherently than his father raison d’être The family’s new business. With typical Kendall-Roy Coke energy, Trump’s descendants describe DeFi as a safe space for financial “freedom” amid a morass of bureaucratic corruption and red tape. He claimed that the banking industry has “become politicized” and that cryptocurrencies and DeFi “take the political component out of it.”
According to the Trump family, the cryptocurrency world is not, as some onlookers often describe it, a predatory environment where wealthy scammers exploit (and monetize) the hopes and dreams of financially illiterate lower-middle-class investors. Rather, it’s a bold technology space that can democratize finance and render traditional gatekeepers irrelevant.
However, some details revealed on Monday appeared to undercut the purported democratic nature of the project. Fortune notes that “the project only offers tokens to accredited investors (those with a net worth of over $1 million)” and appears to be failing in its “apparent mission of helping underserved people obtain loans.” However, this approach could allow the platform to “qualify for a key SEC exemption that allows companies to issue unregistered securities,” the outlet wrote. After two hours of listening, we still honestly have no idea what the purpose of this project is, or how investors are supposed to make money from it.
Over the weekend, Bloomberg published a story about one of the scheme’s most controversial figures, a former get-rich-quick class instructor named Chase Herro. Before joining WLF, Hero was said to have been involved in a number of bizarre businesses (including a “colon cleanse” weight loss product) and had previously called himself “the trash bag of the internet.” Herro seems to have been lifted straight out of the core casting of Trump World, though he does one thing that makes him truly compelling. Bloomberg cited a YouTube video posted by Herro in 2018, in which he said of cryptocurrencies: “If the story is true, you could sell it in a can, wrapped in urine, covered in people, for $1 billion. Skin the shit because people will buy it.
When it comes to laudable accomplishments, Herro may rise above any other member of the World Liberty team purely because he came up with this particular metaphor. As far as we know, this is one of the most honest and appropriate descriptions of cryptocurrencies in existence.
