The Trump family’s new crypto venture, World Liberty Financial, got off to a rocky start after website crashes limited investors’ ability to participate in an inaugural token sale event.
The crypto token, WLFI, went on sale around 9 a.m. ET on Tuesday. At the time of writing, the website continues to be plagued by reliability issues, pushing some visitors to an error page. “We are currently unable to contact the server for this app or website,” the notice said.
Data from analytics platform Etherscan shows that only 8,500 people have participated in the token presale so far, buying around 750 million tokens — 3.75 percent of the total available in the presale — between them. A World Liberty Financial representative previously told X that 100,000 accredited US investors have been pre-approved after registering interest in the token.
World Liberty Financial Advisor Sandy Peng told crypto media CoinDesk that the website was down due to a spike in traffic. More than 70 million unique visitors landed on the site within an hour of the token going on sale, she said. The organization did not immediately respond to a request for further comment.
Problems with the website make it difficult to accurately gauge investor appetite for the WLFI token. But the shaky launch will give pause to those worried about Trump’s project’s potential to set back the DeFi industry if it fails.
Since August, World Liberty Financial has been touted by the Trump family as a way to “revolutionize finance” and “make finance great again.” The website lists presidential candidate Donald Trump as a “chief crypto advocate” and his sons Eric, Donald Jr. and 18-year-old Barron as “Web3 ambassadors.”
The World Liberty Financial platform is set to provide peer-to-peer lending and lending, in the spirit of what is known in the crypto world as decentralized finance, or DeFi. But firm details on the project are not forthcoming. Despite making numerous announcements teasing the project on Telegram and X, and publishing a manifesto of sorts about the project’s purpose, the Trumps have provided little to no information about how the platform works or the range of services that will be available to customers.
This created an opportunity for bad actors. At the end of August, impersonators were using the project’s Telegram channel – billed as “the ONLY one”. [sic] place to get the official news”—to advertise a fake token giveaway. In early September, X accounts belonging to Lara Trump, wife of Eric, and Tiffany Trump, daughter of the former president, were allegedly compromised and used by the hackers to sell another crypto token, allegedly affiliated with World Liberty Financial.
