The Trump family has finally revealed additional details about World Liberty Financial – their latest adventure within the crypto realm.

On Monday, former president Donald Trump and his sons took part in a livestream on the social media platform X to officially present the project to the public. The event lasted two hours and, while it addressed some questions about World Liberty Financial, it also left several uncertainties unanswered.

The role that members of the Trump family would have in the company was one of the details provided during the online gathering. According to the project’s whitepaper, Donald Trump will act as the “chief crypto advocate” for WLF while his sons, Donald Jr. and Eric, have been given the title of “web3 ambassadors.”

Meanwhile, Barron Trump, the former president’s youngest son, received the title of “DeFi visionary” – referring to the decentralized finance segment of the crypto space that offers financial services without intermediaries.

Three Non-Trump Members Appear as Key Figures of WLF

Two crypto entrepreneurs were also presented as key leaders of the project on the technical side – Chase Herro and Zachary Folkman. In addition, Steve Witkoff, a successful real estate investor and close friend of Donald Trump, is also directly involved with the project.

Herro and Folkman have put together businesses in the crypto space in the past, mostly in the US Virgin Islands where they received tax breaks. Herro is a former convict according to a report from the New York Times but he managed to turn his life around and made money along the way.

Meanwhile, Folkman participated in various crypto ventures including the Nexus Group – an online advertising company. They both live in Puerto Rico and are being counseled by Alex Golubitsky who is acting as the project’s legal advisor.

Trump (Sr.) said during the event that he was initially skeptical about the crypto space and was not “overly interested” in it. However, after the success of his collection of non-fungible tokens (NFTs), he started to gain more knowledge about the potential of this technology and market.

“I think my children opened my eyes more than anything else,” he claimed. “Crypto is one of those things we have to do. Whether we like it or not, I have to do it.”

Sources claim that Witkoff is highly involved with the project. He said during the event that he first knew about cryptocurrencies through his son, who later on introduced him to Herro and Folkman.

“These guys are as smart as any currency traders I’ve ever met. And they began talking to me about decentralized finance, which means frictionless finance, and why it made sense for people. And about the forgotten, who can’t get credit out there,” Witkoff commented.

“As I began to understand that, I said, ‘Who would understand this better than the Trump family?’ And we had a meeting initially with Eric, Don Jr., and the president and his counsel. And we said, ‘Let’s go pursue it.’ We’ve been on it for close to nine months.”

Insiders Will Only Get 20% of WLFI Tokens and Not 70% As Initially Rumored

Even though the operational details of World Liberty Financial are still scarce, the platform will reportedly allow users to borrow, lend, and invest in digital assets without intermediaries – which means that it is a DeFi protocol primarily.

The project will have its own native token named $WLFI and its claimed mission will be to make DeFi much more accessible and easier to understand for mainstream users.

Folkman also shared a few details about the tokenomics of $WLFI. According to the whitepaper, 63% of the tokens will be available for the public to buy while 20% will be set aside for the developing team – which includes the Trump family.

Moreover, the remaining 17% will be distributed to the community as rewards, possibly through future airdrops. It was initially rumored that up to 70% of the $WLFI tokens would go to insiders – an unusually high percentage that virtually eliminated the possibility of considering the project a decentralized solution.

For now, the token will only be available to accredited investors in the United States in compliance with Regulation D – a provision that allows companies to raise capital from investors without registering their securities with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

This should protect WLF from the usual riffs that crypto projects face with the SEC when they sell their tokens via initial coin offerings (ICOs) to retail investors.

Crypto Has Become Trump’s Nod to The Youngest Generation

WLF is being launched just weeks ahead of the U.S. presidential election where Donald Trump is one of the top contenders in the race for the country’s top political seat. This new business venture raises ethical questions and concerns about potential conflicts of interest.

crypto pacs spend millions on lobbying efforts

Experts have cited that the former president’s decision to associate himself directly with this project is quite unusual for a running candidate. But these kinds of entanglements are nothing new for Trump. He had countless conflicts of interests during and after his time as president, such as his major business dealings with Saudi Arabia-owned Liv Golf after being extraordinarily friendly to the country as president.

Trump may have understood that being associated with the crypto space is positive for his campaign as this is a technology that the youngest generation of voters understands better than most.

It helps him appeal to that demographic directly by presenting himself as the “crypto president” and someone who understands how the world works at the moment.

“There has been a concerted effort to present [crypto] as an election issue and convince politicians they need to take a stance on it, or lose out on voters,” commented the author of Citation Needed and head of Follow the Crypto – a political transparency initiative that keeps tabs on where money from the industry goes in terms of lobbying efforts and campaign financing.

Meanwhile, Danielle Brian from the Project on Government Oversight argued that Trump’s pro-crypto agenda and involvement in such an outwardly sector-supportive venture increases the odds that he will force regulators to take favorable stances on the industry if he wins the election.

The development of World Liberty Financial bears striking similarities to Trump’s involvement with Trump Media & Technology Group, the parent company of Truth Social – Trump’s very own version of Twitter that he founded back in 2021 right after his account was suspended over the January 6th riot.

Trump’s direct majority ownership of that company has already raised ethical concerns due to its impact on his personal wealth. These issues highlight the complex intersection of business and politics in the Trump era and raise questions about whether lawmakers should take steps to regulate how involved in the business world presidential candidates, and potentially presidents, can possibly be.

If you’re interested in the roots of these problems, the investigative journalism monolith The Lever is producing an incredible series on the successful master plan devised decades ago to effectively legalize bribery and corruption in the US.

Politics are Increasingly Making Crypto a “Republican Thing”

Brad Harrison, CEO of Venus Protocol, cautioned that although he supports any effort to make DeFi more mainstream, without proper expertise “a new platform risks being more of a branding exercise than a substantive and safe contribution to the space.”

Meanwhile, Jacob Silverman, noticed that crypto is becoming more and more a “right-wing Republican commodity” and claims that the industry has aligned significantly with the interests of the Republican party and has become their biggest donor during this election cycle.

“Maybe the raucous reception at the crypto conference in Nashville has given him [Trump] an impression this is the world he wants to be in, because they love him and he can make money,” Silverman added.

In the past few months, several meme coins depicting Donald Trump’s cartoons or political agendas have been launched. Many of them have been touted as the “official Trump coins” but most have crashed and burned. Along the way, thousands of investors have lost money on these tokens.

One of the most notable incidents involved a token named DJT that was promoted at the time as the “official” Trump token as his son Barron had allegedly helped launch it. A controversial character named Martin Shkreli, known in investment circles as “pharma bro” reportedly participated in this project and he was the one who linked Barron with DJT.

Just days before Donald Jr. and Eric first teased World Liberty Financial, this token melted down as it lost over 90% of its value overnight as one of the insiders who held a large percentage of the total supply dumped millions of tokens on unwary investors.

Although no evidence of Barron’s involvement has ever been presented, Shkreli’s claims raised eyebrows and so did the timing of DJT’s collapse. In any case, WLF seems to be the beginning of a new chapter in the history between the Trump family and the crypto space.

As more details come to the surface about what this new project has to offer, the political influence of Donald will play a key part in its success. Although this did not do much to lift previous ventures like Truth Social, it may do the trick in this nascent industry where projects are mostly promoted by anonymous characters.