The Trumps Have Gone Full Crypto With World Liberty Financial

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Eric and Donald Trump Jr., the sons of former president Donald Trump, have pledged to 'make finance great again' with a new family-run crypto endeavor called World Liberty Financial. Introduced in a meandering livestream on X Monday, the Trump family and their associates described World Liberty Financial as a crypto platform that would let users conduct transactions without a bank sitting in the middle and extracting fees -- a concept known as decentralized finance, or DeFi. While short on details, Donald Trump, Jr. and Eric Trump both stressed repeatedly that World Liberty Financial's primary goal was to make DeFi more broadly accessible. 'It's truly our job to make it understandable,' said Eric Trump during the livestream. 'We have to make it intuitive, we have to make it user-friendly, and we will.' Former President Donald Trump joined the call as well, stressing his pro-crypto stance. 'I do believe in it,' said Trump of cryptocurrency generally. 'It has a chance to really be something special.'

The Trumps aren't alone in leading World Liberty Financial. They're joined by crypto veterans Chase Herro and Zak Folkman, as well as Steve Witkoff, a real estate investor and friend of Donald Trump's. In addition to the platform itself, World Liberty Financial will come with a governance token, WLFI, which will provide owners the right to vote 'on matters of the platform.' Approximately 63 percent of the tokens will be sold to the public; 17 percent are set aside for user rewards, and 20 percent will be reserved for World Liberty Financial team compensation. World Liberty Financial will face steep competition in a DeFi market already crowded with similar services, among them Aave, Compound, Venus Protocol, and others. 'DeFi is pretty mature, especially on the over-collateralized side,' says Zach Hamilton, founder of crypto startup Sarcophagus and venture partner at VC firm Venture51. But the Trumps need not necessarily do anything novel, if they can capitalize on their mammoth public platform to peddle the new venture. '[World Liberty Financial] is launching with the most free marketing that any crypto company could ever get,' says Hamilton. 'Trump is the king of living rent free in people's minds.' 'I welcome any effort to bring DeFi into the mainstream,' says Brad Harrison, CEO of Venus Protocol. 'But like the autopilot in a Tesla, DeFi may give the appearance of something that's simple, but the inner workings are complex. Without a solid grasp of its nuances in the hands of seasoned technologists and financial engineers, a new platform risks being more of a branding exercise than a substantive and safe contribution to the space.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.