The Trump family's new crypto venture, World Liberty Financial, is off to an inauspicious start after website crashes limited investors' ability to participate in an inaugural token sell-off event.
The crypto token, WLFI, went on sale around 9 a.m. Eastern time on Tuesday. At the time of writing, the website is still plagued with reliability issues, pushing some visitors to an error page. “We are currently unable to connect to the server for this app or website,” the notice reads.
Data from analytics platform Etherscan shows that only 8,500 people have participated in the token presale so far, collectively purchasing around 750 million tokens (3.75 percent of the total available in the presale). A World Liberty Financial representative had previously said on X that 100,000 accredited US investors had been pre-approved after registering interest in the token.
World Liberty financial advisor Sandy Peng told crypto media outlet CoinDesk that the website went down due to an increase in traffic. More than 70 million unique visitors arrived 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.
The website issues make it challenging to accurately assess interest in the WLFI token among investors. But the troubled launch will give pause to those concerned about the Trump project's potential to set back the DeFi industry if it fails.
Since August, World Liberty Financial has been marketed by the Trump family as a way to “revolutionize the financial world” and “make the financial world great again.” The website lists presidential candidate Donald Trump as “chief crypto advocate,” and his sons – Eric, Donald Jr. and 18-year-old Barron – as 'Web3 ambassadors'.
The World Liberty Financial platform aims to offer peer-to-peer lending and lending, in the spirit of what is known in crypto land as decentralized finance, or DeFi. But hard details about the project are not yet known. Despite making several announcements teasing the project on Telegram and that are available to customers.
This created an opening for bad actors. In late August, impersonators used the project's Telegram channel – pitched as “the ONLY ONE [sic] place to get the official news” – to advertise an inauthentic token giveaway. In early September, X-accounts of Lara Trump, Eric's wife, and Tiffany Trump, the former president's daughter, were allegedly compromised and used by the hackers to sell another crypto token supposedly related to World Liberty Financial.
