U.S. Donald Trump looks at a debit card used to distribute COVID-19 relief money to citizens during a Cabinet meeting in the East Room of the White House on Tuesday, May 19, 2020 in Washington, DC, USA. president.
Kevin Dietch | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Donald Trump's new cryptocurrency project has gotten off to a rocky start.
World Liberty Financial, which aims to be a type of crypto bank, announced the move a day after project co-founder Zachary Folkman said “well over 100,000 people” were on a whitelist for investments. The token sale started on Tuesday.
However, WLF's website suffered periodic and prolonged outages throughout much of the morning and early afternoon, contributing to limited sales. As of Tuesday afternoon, only about 4,300 unique wall addresses held the token, representing about 4% of the total number of registrants, according to blockchain data tracked by EtherScan.
The platform says it has sold over 532 million tokens at 15 cents per token. This is less than 3% of the 20 billion tokens available for general sale.
Throughout the day, the website displayed frequent “under maintenance” pages.
WLF did not respond to requests for comment.
The announcement of the glitch could be a setback for the Republican presidential candidate, just three weeks before the election. Mr. Trump and his family have been promoting the project since August, calling it “The DeFiant Ones,” a play on the abbreviation DeFi, which stands for decentralized finance.
Source: World Liberty Financial
In a roadmap given to prospective investors, first seen by The Block, WLF's proposal says the coin aims to raise $300 million in its first sale at a valuation of $1.5 billion. It is written. Folkman, who previously ran a company called Date Hotter Girls and is said to have helped develop the cryptocurrency project Dough Finance, said 20% of WLF's tokens will be allocated to the founding team, which includes the Trump family.
Digital coin WLFI will be a Regulation D token offering, subject to provisions that allow for capital raising without first registering securities with the SEC. Certain conditions must be met, including limiting the size of the sale and restricting it to accredited investors, defined in part as having a net worth of more than $1 million.
Few details have been released about the project's goals, but WLF officials said customers will be encouraged to lend, borrow, and invest in cryptocurrencies. No official whitepaper or formal business plan has been published, all that is clear is that investing in the project will give users the right to vote on the yet-to-be-launched WLF platform.
Last week, WLF began the process of gaining crypto banking approval from the DeFi ecosystem known as Aave.
Aave is open source and one of the longest running and most trusted cryptocurrency lending platforms in the DeFi space.
—CNBC's Kaan Oguz and Jordan Smith contributed to this report.
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