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World Liberty Financial (WLFI) Acquires $2M in Movement (MOVE)Tokens

Last Updated
Eddie Mitchell
Last Updated
By Eddie Mitchell
Edited by Insha Zia
Key Takeaways
  • The WLFI token sale achieved its $300 million target, selling 20 billion WLFI at $0.015 per token.
  • To extend the sale, 5 billion WLFI tokens priced at $0.05 have been added, allowing the sale to draw an additional $250 million.
  • WLFI currently holds over $413 million in cryptocurrencies, primarily in BTC and ETH.

The World Liberty Financial (WLFI) decentralized finance (DeFi) project has invested in a sizeable stack of Movement (MOVE) tokens, marking yet another interesting altcoin purchase from the team.

As per Arkham, WLFI now commands over $413 million  in cryptocurrencies.

MOVE Purchase

Arkham Intelligence has revealed yet another crypto purchase from the Trump-backed WLFI DeFi platform, which has purchased $1.9 million worth of MOVE tokens, marking its tenth-largest position.

The larger allocations comprise just over 63,000 ETH worth $205.16 million, 646.715 Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC) worth $67.56 million, 19,412 Lido Staked ETH (STETH) totaling $63.1 million, and $36.44 million in USD Coin (USDC).

Its recent MOVE purchase follows a series of altcoin investments, with the ambiguously crafted project also holding millions in Tron (TRX), ChainLink (LNK), Aave (AAVE), and Ethena (ENA).

Stacking Tron (TRX)

As per the on-chain analytics platform Arkham Intelligence , the WLFI team made a sizeable investment in Tron (TRX), bagging an additional 10.8 million TRX, totaling $2.62 million.

Now, WLFI’s TRX holdings stand at roughly $7.5 million. It’s worth noting that Tron founder Justin Sun is one of the biggest WLFI investors.

In November 2024, Sun purchased 2 billion WLFI tokens for $30 million. On the day of Trump’s inauguration, Sun doubled down with an additional $45 million purchase, raising Sun’s WLFI investment to $75 million.

The WLFI token sale was extended by an additional 5 billion tokens at an increased price of $0.05 per token, as opposed to the original $0.015. So far, the project has sold off 2.52 billion, raising an additional $126 million.

Strategic Crypto Purchase

The WLFI project appears to be making strides as Donald Trump Jr. took to social media to inform followers that it has made a “strategic purchase” of several cryptocurrencies.

The news was also posted by the official WLFI X account . This marks the project’s first major acquisition and comes just a week after the project moved crypto as part of treasury management efforts, pay expenses and fees, and “address working capital requirements.”

Now that the project has exceeded its original $300 million goal and sold 20 billion WLFI tokens, it has extended the sale and bumped up the price per token considerably.

Extended Goal

After finally offloading all 20 billion WLFI tokens and raking in $300 million through a sluggish token sale, the project has announced that it will increase the token supply for late buyers, which comes with a hefty price premium.

Having initially sold WLFI at $0.015 a piece, the “relaunch” of the sale has seen the token price more than triple to $0.05 per WLFI.

Now, having increased the token supply by 25%, an additional 5 billion tokens are available. If sold, this would generate an extra raise of $250 million for the project. So far, 1.43 billion  of these extra tokens have been sold, yielding $71.5 million.

Donald Trump-themed memecoins are believed to be one of the main drivers behind the sudden rush to the WLFI project, which had struggled to sell even 10% of its original offering within a month of launching.

This follows the conclusion of a relatively recent WLFI governance proposal  to deploy an “Aave v3 instance for the World Liberty Financial Protocol,” which passed almost unanimously.

This will supposedly bring stablecoin and decentralized finance (DeFi) functionality to the platform, which has yet to be built.

A collaboration with synthetic-dollar protocol Ethena was recently teased. Firms said they were observing a “long-term collaboration” that would begin with the integration of Ethena’s yield-bearing stablecoin token, Ethena Staked USDe (sUSDe).

The Justin Sun Pump

It would seem that the WLFI token sale has finally reached its 90% downsized goal of $30 million and, in fact, surpassed it, reaching $52.95 million after selling some 3.53 billion WLFI tokens.

However, that’s largely due to the Tron founder, Justin Sun, who was just brought on to the WLFI project as an advisor and decided to foot the bill and invest $30 million in it.

Sun’s investment is particularly interesting because it activates the project’s revenue sharing clause, as per the project’s “Gold paper.”

Now that the project has crossed the $30 million mark, Trump’s company, DT Marks DEFI LLC, can begin collecting 75% of the net revenue from it.

What’s in it for Sun? Who knows.

The crypto-tycoon is known for making flashy headline-grabbing moves, though this one seems a little more expensive than his usual PR spend.

Perhaps Sun is hoping the investment will bring him and his projects closer to the incoming Trump administration.

Whether or not WLFI becomes notable within the crypto space remains to be seen, but hopes aren’t particularly high at this point.

WLFI and Aave v3

As per a recent proposal  from the WLFI team on its governance forum, the project is proposing to deploy a WLFI Aave v3 instance for the protocol and launch on the Ethereum mainnet.

As per the proposal:

“The WLFI Protocol will provide liquidity for Ethereum, Wrapped Bitcoin, certain stablecoins, and potentially other digital assets. WLFI will make the WLFI Protocol Aave instance available to WLFI Protocol users, and the WLFI Protocol Aave instance will be managed through Aave risk management.”

To begin with, the platform intends to offer lending and borrowing services with USDT, USDT, ETH, and WBTC. Additional assets will be considered through voting proposals.

“The revenue split will be set up using a trustless smart contract that directs the appropriate percentage of protocol fees to the AaveDAO treasury and WLFI treasury addresses.”

AaveDAO stands to receive 20% of the protocol’s fees and 7% of the WLFI token’s circulating supply for governance participation, liquidity mining, and maintaining WLFI platform decentralization.

WLFI Token Sale

It would seem that the Trump-backed/Trump-endorsed decentralized finance (DeFi) project is off to a disappointingly slow start for project backers.

The WLFI token sale continues to stagnate, selling just 1.08 billion tokens of the original 20 billion goal. This means the project has raised just $16.2 million, far from the lofty $300 million initially set.

Trump’s election victory has seemingly done little to persuade onlookers that this heavily endorsed project has anything to offer. The most recent X post from the project, dated Nov. 6, is devoid of any meaningful details.

Just days before the election, it was revealed that the project intends to shut down the WLFI token sale after $30 million in sales has been reached. This means that despite reducing their goal by 90%, the fundraising target is barely over the 50% mark.

The project, “inspired by Donald J. Trump”, appears to offer zero functionality beyond offering a token, and a website/forum for creating governance proposals. Though several threads  initially saw some activity from users, it appears that not a single user has posted to the forum in over a week.

Launch Day

According to the World Liberty Financial website, just 754.57 million tokens have been sold. At a price of $0.015 per WLFI, the project has raised roughly $11.33 million.

This leaves 19.44 billion of the allocated sale WLFI tokens to go. If the project hopes to hit its lofty $300 million goal, it must sell all 20 billion tokens allocated to this public sale.

Roughly 344 million WLFI tokens were sold in the first hour, followed by a brief website outage. A WLFI advisor reportedly attributed this to excessive traffic, claiming the site received 72 million unique visits in that first hour.

Furthermore, the team claimed before the launch that over 100,000 accredited investors were whitelisted for the sale. Contrary to this, Etherscan data  shows just 8,454 WLFI holders at the time of writing.

This number will surely rise over the coming days, though this has been a considerably tepid token launch, considering the hype and figureheads surrounding the project.

Skepticism

Very little is known about the project. It has simply touted itself as a decentralized finance (DeFi) platform focused on stablecoin payments, borrowing and lending services, and liquidity pools.

What is known about the project is that it will leverage Aave V3 for additional token functionality and that the WLFI token will be untransferrable for its first year of trading.

WLFI is a governance token. Meaning that users can submit, review, and vote on future proposals. Presumably, this lockup period will serve as a formative time for WLFI to receive and act upon community proposals.

If it plans to build out from there, this may impact the token’s sale potential.

Even with Trump backing the project, the distinct lack of information surrounding the project fails to inspire confidence in would-be investors or users.

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Eddie Mitchell

Eddie has been writing news and content primarily for crypto news and industry players over the past seven years. With an eye for the bigger picture, Eddie prefers to investigate the broader implications of a story, as well as explore the weird and wonderful world of crypto. He believes blockchain has already changed the world, but observes the space overall with a skeptical and adoring eye.
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