Unveiling the Trump Family's Crypto Project WLFI "Asset Package": The Spillover Effect of Trump?
WLFI may become the "Huangpu Military Academy" of Trump's crypto economy.Author: Wenser, Odaily Planet Daily
With Trump successfully elected as "Time Magazine's Person of the Year" and gracing the cover on the 12th of this month, the Trump effect in the cryptocurrency market continues. Recently, the Trump family's crypto project WLFI (World Liberty) has brought a new wave of attention to the diverse tokens in the market. After previously acquiring a series of mainstream coins, infrastructure project tokens, and RWA tokens, the project officially announced its collaboration with Ethena Labs around 2 AM today, planning to integrate Ethena's yield token sUSDe into the WLFI lending platform.
Odaily Planet Daily will summarize WLFI's recent operations and their ripple effects for readers' reference.
WLFI's Recent Actions: Acquiring ENA, ONDO, and More
Around 4 AM yesterday, according to Onchain Lens monitoring, the Trump family crypto project WLFI (World Liberty) spent 250,000 USDC to acquire 231,726 ENA, increasing its ENA holdings to 741,687, with a total cost of 750,000 USD. Additionally, it exchanged 103 cbBTC worth 10.36 million USD for WBTC.
On December 16, WLFI spent 250,000 USDC to buy 134,216 ONDO.
On December 15, WLFI spent 500,013 USDC to acquire 509,955 ENA at an average price of 0.981 USD.
On December 13, WLFI spent 1 million USDC to buy 37,052 LINK and 151,985 USDC to acquire 422 AAVE; within 48 hours, the project cumulatively spent 10 million USDC to buy 2,631 ETH; spent 1,246,722 USDC to acquire 4,043 AAVE; and spent 2 million USDC to buy 78,387 LINK.
On December 12, according to Arkham monitoring, WLFI's multi-signature address held 14,573 ETH (approximately 57.03 million USD), 102.9 cbBTC (approximately 10.38 million USD), 3.108 million USDT, 1.515 million USDC, 41,335 LINK (approximately 1.17 million USD), and 3,357 AAVE (approximately 1.16 million USD). Notably, on that day, the project had just exchanged a large amount of stablecoins from token sales for ETH, at which time its ETH holdings were valued at over 50 million USD.
As previously shared by on-chain analyst Ai Yi, the non-stablecoin assets acquired by WLFI include LINK / AAVE / ENA / ONDO, half of which belong to leading DeFi applications and half to RWA assets. Interestingly, although COW is not in the World Liberty portfolio, the recent on-chain token purchases have all utilized Cowswap, leading to a nearly 93% surge in its price over the past seven days. This ripple effect is also reflected in the other tokens it has acquired:
On December 14, after buying LINK and AAVE, WLFI's holdings in the former had an unrealized profit of 299,000 USD; the latter had an unrealized profit of 338,000 USD.
On December 16, after the news of WLFI's acquisitions spread, ONDO broke through 2.1 USDT, reaching an all-time high, with a 24-hour increase of 16.33%.
On December 16, boosted by news of WLFI's various token purchases, COW broke through 1 USD, reaching an all-time high; ENA's price briefly rose to 1.33 USD, just under 0.2 USD away from its previous all-time high.
If BTC's price previously surged from 70,000 USD to break the 100,000 USD mark due to the "Trump effect," then undoubtedly, the tokens held by WLFI have also been influenced by this effect.
After all, in the eyes of cryptocurrency traders in the U.S. and around the world, WLFI is the "Trump-backed project."
WLFI Current Holdings Statistics: AAVE, COW
From the end of November to December 19, after achieving a token sales target of 30 million USD, WLFI's previous token acquisition operations included:
- 30 million USD USDC to acquire 8,105 ETH;
- 10 million USD USDC to acquire 103 cbBTC (converted to WBTC);
- 2 million USD USDC to acquire 78,387 LINK;
- 1.91 million USD USDC to acquire 6,137 AAVE;
- 750,000 USD USDC to acquire 741,687 ENA;
- 250,000 USD USDC to acquire 134,216 ONDO.
According to on-chain data site Arkham, the current holdings of the WLFI project are as follows:
14,800 ETH, valued at 54.89 million USD;
103 WBTC, valued at 10.45 million USD;
6,137 AAVE, valued at 2.12 million USD;
78,300 LINK, valued at 1.95 million USD;
741,000 ENA, valued at 860,000 USD;
134,000 ONDO, valued at 256,000 USD.
Stablecoins (USDT + USDC) holdings are approximately 10 million USD.
Currently, the total asset value of this multi-signature address is approximately 80.56 million USD.
WLFI Token Holdings Information (as of December 19, 5 PM)
WLFI's Difficult Growth Journey: From a 300 Million Goal to Just Scraping Together 30 Million
Looking back at WLFI's growth journey, it has hardly been smooth sailing.
At the end of August, Trump's second son, Eric Trump, the current Executive Vice President of the Trump Organization, announced the official launch of the crypto project WLFI (@WorldLibertyFi), aiming to create a new era of finance. Notably, after Trump's victory in the presidential election in early November, insiders revealed that this project was established to address funding shortages during Trump's presidential campaign.
After inviting numerous well-known figures, including the CEO of Paxos, the founder of Tomo Wallet, the CEO of Mixie Studios & Mixie Media, and co-founders of Glue, and experiencing a series of market skepticism and challenges, the WLFI project token presale finally launched on October 15.
Despite achieving an impressive "5 million USD raised within the first hour of presale," the market response was not ideal due to issues such as KYC verification, website crashes, and previous token distribution ratios. According to media reports, the roadmap indicated that WLFI's initial sales would seek to raise 300 million USD and sell 20% of the token supply at a 1.5 billion USD FDV.
By October 17, according to Lookonchain monitoring, WLFI had sold 83,373 tokens, with sales exceeding 12.5 million USD; over 10,000 users participated in the token sale, with address 0x2d24 spending 351.3 ETH (903,000 USD) to purchase 60.43 million WLFI, becoming the largest buyer.
Subsequently, according to a 13-page document titled "World Liberty Gold Paper," the Trump family would receive 75% of the project's net profits while bearing no responsibility.
The news caused an uproar.
Yat Siu, co-founder and executive chairman of Animoca Brands, Jehan Chu, co-founder and managing partner of Kenetic Capital, and Kain Warwick, founder of Synthetix, each raised questions, comments, and suggestions from their perspectives.
In early November, WLFI reduced its fundraising target by 90%, planning to sell only 30 million USD worth of WLFI tokens instead of the initially planned 300 million USD.
On November 20, WLFI sold approximately 1.35 billion tokens, with sales reaching 20,283,014 USD, accounting for about 68% of its revised fundraising target.
Just when many thought the project had hit a dead end and would struggle to reach the 30 million USD target, one person stepped in.
On November 26, Sun Yuchen announced a 30 million USD investment in the Trump family crypto project WLFI, becoming its largest investor. He also stated that the U.S. is becoming the center of blockchain, thanks to Trump's support for Bitcoin. Subsequently, he joined WLFI as an advisor.
I personally speculate that this is also the reason why WLFI recently converted cbBTC to WBTC.
As for the purchases of AAVE and LINK tokens, they are also related to previous collaborations------
On November 14, WLFI officially announced that it would adopt the Chainlink standard for on-chain data and cross-chain connections, as a secure way to bring DeFi into the next phase of mass adoption.
On December 13, the first community proposal initiated by the WLFI community to "deploy an Aave v3 instance for the WLFI protocol" was ultimately approved. It is understood that this instance will be managed by external risk managers and built on the existing Aave v3 infrastructure, eventually launching on the Ethereum mainnet.
Thus, WLFI transformed, not only successfully "staying at the table" but also potentially becoming the "crypto barometer of America."
Conclusion: WLFI Will Continue to Be Active in the U.S. Crypto Market, Becoming the "Crypto Flag"
According to a previous analysis, WLFI's actions of converting stablecoins to ETH indicate that the project is seeking to participate in a deeper level of the crypto economy. This may also suggest that the team believes ETH is a better reserve asset than the dollar. Notably, the first to notice this transaction was the renowned Ethereum investor and advisor Eric Conner.
As mentioned earlier, 75% of the net profits from WLFI's presale will be received by the Trump family, with no responsibilities. The document also emphasizes that Trump and his family members are not directors, employees, managers, or operators of WLFI or its affiliates, and states that the project and tokens "are not related to any political activities." The remaining 25% of the net agreement income will belong to the Puerto Rican company Axiom Management Group (AMG), wholly owned by project co-founders Chase Herro and Zachary Folkman. AMG has agreed to allocate half of its profit rights to Trump's friend and political donor Steve Witkoff and some of his family members' affiliated company WC Digital Fi.
In this light, WLFI may become the "crypto flag" of Trump's faction, leveraging trading operations to engage in deep collaborations with more crypto projects to promote the development of the U.S. crypto economy; on the other hand, the project will also provide certain financial support for Trump and his faction, facilitating various personal and political actions during future governance.
Around WLFI, a core team may emerge to drive the development of the U.S. crypto economy, and this project is expected to become Trump's "crypto Huangpu Military Academy."
