The Trump family appears to be consolidating control over World Liberty Financial, the DeFi platform announced before the sitting president took office that is still under development. Co-founders Zak Folkman and Chase Herro have reportedly been replaced as “controlling parties” of the platform, according to a Reuters article published on Monday.
The move comes about two weeks after World Liberty raised an additional $250 million in funding through a second WLFI token offering. World Liberty opened up an additional 5% of the total WLFI token supply on Jan. 19 after quickly selling its initial 20 billion WLFI token offering in the days leading up to Inauguration Day.
In total, the project has brought in $550 million by selling WLFI tokens to accredited investors in the U.S. and non-accredited investors around the world. In a document published at the time of launch, World Liberty said the Trump family could take home 75% of the net revenue from those sales.
According to Reuters, the Trump family took further control of World Liberty in January when launching a new parent company, WLF Holdco LLC, which is 60% owned by DT Marks DeFi LLC, to oversee protocol development. Although it’s unclear who owns the remaining 40%, this shift replaced Folkman and Herro as “sole directors and members” of World Liberty Financial Inc., according to the fine print on the World Liberty site.
“DT Marks DEFI LLC, an entity affiliated with Donald J. Trump and certain of his family members, own approximately 60% of the equity interests in WLF Holdco LLC, which holds the only membership interest in World Liberty Financial, Inc., a Delaware non-stock corporation and which is developing the WLF protocol and operates the WLF governance platform,” the website reads.
In other words, the Trump family, along with DT Marks DeFi, owns at least 22.5 billion WLFI token supply, which is capped at 100 billion.
When announced in October, Donald Trump was named World Liberty’s "chief crypto advocate” while his eldest sons Eric and Donald Jr. were called "web3 ambassadors" and younger son Barron was listed as "chief DeFi visionary."
Zach Witkoff, the son of Trump’s Middle East envoy Steven Witkoff, was also listed as a project co-founder along with Rich Teo, who co-founded the blockchain infrastructure firm Paxos. Eric Trump serves as one of the managers on the board of managers of WLF Holdco LLC, according to the World Liberty site.
In addition to the 75% of net revenues from WLFI token sales, Reuters reports the Trump family can claim 60% from the protocol’s operations once the core crypto lending and personal finance features are operational. This arrangement entitles them to approximately $400 million of the $550 million raised through token sales, and potentially more if additional WLFI tokens are sold.
After the co-founders take their cut, 5% of the funds will remain for platform development, according to Reuters. World Liberty's codebase reportedly draws from Aave's open-source lending facility. Two listed World Liberty developers, Octavian Lojnita and Bogdan Purnavel, worked on Herro and Folkman's previous DeFi project, Dough Finance, which lost steam following an exploit.
Approximately 85,000 people have participated in the two WLFI token sales to date. Of those, approximately 70% of the $550 million raised came from wallets spending at least $100,000, with over 50% from buys of $1 million or more, according to onchain data. Tron founder Justin Sun famously purchased $75 million worth of WLFI tokens, although he’s far from the only crypto leader who has forged ties with the project.
Movement, a relatively new scalable blockchain startup, and Ondo Finance, a tokenization firm founded by former Goldman Sachs employees, have both said they would collaborate with World Liberty. According to Arkham Intel data, World Liberty holds MOVE and ONDO tokens in its treasury.
Over the past several months, World Liberty has bought and sold dozens of different cryptocurrencies. At its height, the project’s treasury held over $360 million worth of tokens — primarily in ETH, WBTC and the USDT and USDC stablecoins — before it unexpectedly sold over 90% of its tokens. It has since begun repurchasing some coins, and currently holds over $80 million in total crypto assets.
Several commentators, including Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin, have raised concerns that politicians raising funds through a token offering or memecoin launch could be a way to curry favor or hide bribes.
World Liberty's “lend and borrow” market will reportedly be announced soon, with a personal finance app to follow. Last week, the team floated plans to launch USD1, a U.S. dollar stablecoin to be issued on the Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain blockchains.
The Block has reached out to World Liberty representatives.
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