Thankfully, Trump Is Still Alive. Unfortunately, So Is His Misguided Crypto Project

Donald Trump dodged another bullet this weekend when a second assassination attempt against him was foiled at his golf course in West Palm Beach. In an apparent show of resilience on Monday, Trump appeared on Elon Musk’s X Spaces to discuss his upcoming crypto project.

This summer, Trump and his sons announced a new crypto business, the details of which have been slowly trickling out. Dubbed World Liberty Financial, the project is a DeFi platform for trading that will soon release a native governance token, WLFI. Monday’s conversation was ostensibly meant to reveal new details about the nascent business, although Trump, himself, shared little in the way of clarity on the subject, preferring to do his usual schtick.

For the majority of the 40-ish minutes in which he was present Monday, Trump fixated on several familiar campaign subjects, including evil leftists, “Comrade Kamala,” the “destruction” of the United States via illegal immigration, and the premise that if he didn’t win in November, America would become “Venezuela on steroids.” Trump also spoke about the recent almost-shooting that disrupted his golf game, quipping: “I would’ve liked to have sunk that last putt.” On the subject of the repeated murder attempts against him, he added: “There’s something going on. I mean, perhaps it’s God wanting me to be President to save this country.” He also seemed to reveal information that hadn’t previously been released, noting that it was a civilian woman who initially spotted the would-be shooter and reported him.

With some prodding from the moderator, Trump finally pivoted to the topic of the crypto industry, expressing vague excitement for it and blaming the Biden-Harris administration for whatever regulatory hostility crypto companies are currently facing. Not long after praising NFTs and slamming the SEC, he left.

The conversation did not end with the former President’s exit, however. Instead, Trump’s offspring and business partners continued to perpetuate the chat in a vague and rambling fashion for a period of some two hours. Near the end of this dialogue, the speakers did, finally, reveal some details about the project. The most pertinent details shared involved the partitioning of the project’s assets. 20 percent of the project’s tokens will be reserved for the founding team, said founder Zak Folkman, while 17 percent of the tokens will be put aside for “user rewards.” The remaining 63 percent of the assets will be made available for accredited members of the public to purchase. There will be no pre-sales (the practice whereby tokens are sold to early investors before an initial coin offering), said Folkman. It’s still somewhat unclear when the initial sale of WLFI will actually happen.

World Liberty Financial was previously criticized after a Coindesk report claimed the project would involve an unusually unequal ratio of public to private tokens. In general, crypto projects will release a majority of their minted tokens to the public via a sale, while retaining a small percentage of the assets for insiders and investors (Ethereum, for example, kept about 16 percent of its initial ETH tokens for itself). By comparison, World Liberty Financial may have originally planned to retain 70 percent of the project’s “governance” crypto tokens for “the founders, team, and service providers,” according to a leaked white paper cited by Coindesk. Meanwhile, a mere 30 percent of said tokens were going to be sold off via a public sale.

Outside of the slim details provided, the rest of Monday night was a cacophony of bro-banter and backslapping, with a significant aggregate of web3 PR-speak traded and circulated. Much more than his father, Don Jr. managed to coherently frame the raison d’être of the family’s new enterprise. With his typical Kendall-Roy-on-coke energy, the Trump spawn characterized DeFi as a safe space for financial “freedom” amidst a morass of bureaucratic corruption and red tape. Banking has “become politicized,” he claimed, and crypto and DeFi takes “that political component out of it.”

According to the Trumps, the world of crypto isn’t—as some onlookers have frequently characterized it—a predatory milieu in which wealthy con artists take advantage of (and monetize) the hopes and dreams of financially illiterate lower- and middle-class investors, but rather a bold technological space that can democratize finance and make traditional gatekeepers irrelevant.

However, some details revealed Monday would appear to undercut the purportedly democratic nature of the project. Fortune notes that by “only making the token available to accredited investors (those with a net worth over $1 million), the project” would seem to fail its own “apparent mission of helping the underserved obtain loans.” However, this practice will likely allow the platform to “qualify for a key SEC exemption that allows companies to issue unregistered securities,” the outlet writes. After two hours of listening, it’s honestly still not clear what the purpose of this project is or how investors are supposed to make money from it.

Over the weekend, Bloomberg published a story on one of the project’s more controversial figures, a former get-rich-quick class instructor named Chase Herro. Before coming on board with World Liberty Financial, Herro is said to have dabbled in a number of odd businesses (including a “colon cleanse” weight loss product), and had previously referred to himself as a “dirtbag of the internet.” Herro seems straight out of Trumpworld central casting, though he has done one thing that makes him really notable. Bloomberg quotes a YouTube video published by Herro in 2018, in which he said, of crypto: “You can literally sell shit in a can, wrapped in piss, covered in human skin, for a billion dollars if the story’s right, because people will buy it.”

When it comes to laudable achievements, Herro may outshine any other member of the World Liberty team purely by virtue of the fact that he hatched this particular metaphor. As far as can be discerned, it is one of the most honest and apt descriptions of the cryptocurrency in existence.