After these classy gold sneakers and his God Bless the USA Bible, Donald Trump’s cryptocurrency World Liberty Financial (WLFI) immediately appeared to me like yet another way to squeeze some more money out of his fanbase. But when YouTuber Coffeezilla analyzed the project in more detail, what he found was even more ridiculous than what I was expecting.
For starters (though unsurprisingly), WLFI is completely pre-mined. 20 billion coins, which represent 35% of the total supply, are being sold for $0.015 each. The other 65% of coins is allocated to protocol development and insiders.This means they value the WLFI project around $900 million, immediately bringing it into the same ballpark as something like Bitcoin SV (perhaps fittingly). In reality, however, less than 1 billion coins have been sold so far, making it closer to a $14 million market cap coin, more similar to projects like Pikaboss or Boba Oppa— I’d never heard of them either.
It’s equally unsurprising that WLFI doesn’t accomplish anything new or interesting (lending and borrowing on the existing Aave protocol), or that it’s not decentralized in any meaningful way, or that one of the project’s cofounders has a dodgy history in this space already.
But what even I didn’t expect, is that WLFI is indefinitely non-transferable. That’s right, for the time being, at least, you can’t send these coins to anyone. You can just buy them, and, I guess, sell them back later? Maybe? This sounds more like OneCoin — the notorious fraud that was a cryptocurrency in name only — than any serious altcoin I’ve ever heard of.
While Nikolaus and Calli believe the former president truly embraced Bitcoin, I don’t think he actually changed his mind on cryptocurrency much at all since three years ago… I think he just wants in on the scam.
Watch the full Coffeezilla episode here:
This article is a Take. Opinions expressed are entirely the author’s and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.
