Donald Trump and his progeny have been touting a new crypto project that they claim will bring newfound economic power to “the people.” However, a new report claims that instead of doing that, it may—much like Trump’s economic plan for a second presidential term—actually do the opposite, and deliver a majority of the financial spoils to a small coterie of privileged insiders.
Trump’s project, dubbed World Liberty Financial, is a new crypto lending platform built on the Ethereum blockchain that backers claim will make finance more accessible to everyday people.
However, Coindesk recently got its hands on the project’s white paper and found that 70 percent of the project’s “governance” crypto tokens—known as WLT—would be “held by the founders, team, and service providers.” Meanwhile, a mere 30 percent of said tokens would be distributed to members of the public via a public sale. Coindesk notes that this is an “unusually high” ratio that is clearly weighted in favor of the project’s insiders (for comparison, Ethereum only kept 16 percent of its ETH tokens). Hilariously, the outlet notes that a chunk of the money that would be raised from the assets’ public sale would also be going to project insiders, while the rest of it would go to a treasury “to support World Liberty Financial’s operations.”
Coindesk also notes that World Liberty Financial hasn’t finalized its plans yet, so it’s possible they could back away from the 70-30 split. Gizmodo reached out to the organization for more information and will update this story if it responds.
Trump and his boys began teasing the crypto project earlier this year, only to unveil it as a vague DeFi project about a week ago. “For too long, the average American has been squeezed by the big banks and financial elites,” Trump recently posted about the project. “It’s time we take a stand—together.”
This project is very on-brand for Trump, who has always pretended to care about the financial interests of average Americans, despite the fact that he is a billionaire who spent most of his four years in office passing legislation aimed at helping only the richest Americans. Trump’s brand of fake populism melds well with crypto, which has also frequently marketed itself as a democratizing financial medium, despite the fact that it is an industry full of rich assholes and, according to some studies, most normal people who invest in it lose money. Given all this, it makes sense that these two forces (Trump and DeFi) would come together in this most un-holiest of unions.
