More than two hours at the launch event of World Liberty Financial former Republican President Donald Trump in X on Friday night, the team behind the new crypto project of the Trump family finally revealed the key details: Who can buy future tokens, plans for release, and how the shares of the project will be granted.
For more than a month, the former president and his family have pursued the effort in vague descriptions, promising to do many things at once.
The high goals set by those involved in the project in the Twitter space Monday night indicate that World Liberty Financial will be a crypto banking platform, where the general public will be encouraged to borrow, borrow and invest in crypto.
There is also a token called WLFI, the founders said Monday.
According to founder Zak Folkman, the equity structure for the token is that 20% of the project’s tokens are given to the founding team, which includes Trumps, 17% of the tokens are set aside for user rewards, and the remaining 63% of the coins will be available for the public to buy.
There will be no pre-sales or early purchases, Folkman said.
A previously leaked internal draft of the project had the founder’s stake at 70%, raising concerns that the project 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 provision that allows companies to raise capital without registering securities with the commission as long as certain conditions are met.
It was a theme that Trump applied to the conversational format at the beginning of the more than two-hour event, as he spoke about the perceived hostility of the Securities and Exchange Commission to the digital currency industry.
Some high-profile figures in the industry took issue with SEC Chairman Gary Gensler, claiming that he regulates the industry through enforcement actions, rather than through rules.
During Trump’s 40-minute conversation at the top of the more than two-hour livestream, he talked about how he was “not very interested” in crypto in the first place.
But that changed, he said, when sales of Trump’s trademark nonfungible token collection were paid for in crypto. “I think my kids opened my eyes more than anything else.”
“Crypto is one of those things that has to be done,” Trump said at the end of his remarks. “Whether we like it or not, I have to do it.”
Monday’s event comes at an unprecedented moment for Trump’s presidential campaign.
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 the shot was fired. The FBI is treating the incident as an assassination attempt on the former president.
Witkoff is a longtime friend of Trump. He was also part of a small group of founders of World Liberty Financial.
Witkoff sat to the right of Trump during Monday night’s panel, and explained how he brought the Trump family together with two crypto entrepreneurs to start the project.
“My son introduced me to two partners, Chase Herro and Zak Folkman, who are incredibly bright people … These guys are as smart as any currency trader I know. And they started talking about decentralized finance, which means frictionless finance, and why can it be applied to people who are forgotten, who can’t get credit there,” Witkoff said.
“When I started to understand, I said, ‘Who would understand this better than the Trump family?’ And we had our first meeting with Eric, Don Jr., and the president and his advisers and we said, ‘Let’s pursue it.’ We’re almost nine months in,” Witkoff said.
As Witkoff said, in parallel with other Trump efforts, Trump Media & Technology Groupthey are inevitable.
In that case, two former cast members from Trump’s NBC reality show “The Apprentice” approached Trump in 2021 with an idea for a new conservative social media project. Three and a half years later, Trump Media’s publicly traded shares have boosted Trump’s net worth by billions of dollars, and Truth Social is his social platform of choice.
In addition to Trump and Witkoff, the founders of World Liberty Financial include Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump and Barron Trump, as well as Witkoff’s son, Zach Witkoff.
A copy of the initial internal report, known as a white paper and obtained by CoinDesk, lists Barron as “Chief DeFi Visionary,” Eric and Donald Jr. as a “Web3 Ambassador,” and Trump Sr.
But while Trump will receive compensation from the project, the platform itself is “not owned, managed, operated or sold” by members of the Trump family.
Witkoff, a real estate investor, and Eric Trump, executive vice president of the Trump Organization, were the two callers at World Liberty Financial, according to people familiar with the project. Both are new to the crypto industry.
Until Monday, much of what the public knew about World Liberty was based on interviews that Trump’s sons gave to the press over the past month, as well as a leaked white paper that was a kind of manifesto for the crypto project, and conversations with people familiar with it. with the project.
Anyone wanting details of material from the platform, including the white paper, has been asked to sign a non-disclosure agreement, according to people familiar with the project.
Several members of the crypto industry appear to have joined Trump in the 2024 election cycle, offering cash and endorsements to the Republican presidential nominee.
At the same time, Trump has implemented an increasing number of talking points about crypto on the campaign trail, culminating in the delivery of a keynote speech in July at the biggest bitcoin event of the year in Nashville, Tennessee.
Some of its supporters, however, say they are concerned that Trump’s involvement in crypto could jeopardize relations with the sector more broadly, especially if the launch does not go as planned.
The founder gave little details on Monday about the timeline for the project, saying only that new information will be shared on his official social media channels and warning fans not to fall for scams.
