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Former President Donald Trump will formally announce his World Liberty Financial cryptocurrency platform Monday night, which will be led by his sons.
“We’re embracing the future with crypto and leaving the slow and outdated big banks behind," Trump said in a YouTube video posted on X last week.
Trump said the announcement would be on Trump's X Spaces channel at 8 p.m. ET.
NBC News reported earlier in the day that events surrounding the launch at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida would continue despite the reported assassination attempt on him at his nearby golf course.
CoinDesk reported earlier this month, citing a white paper draft it obtained, that 70% of World Liberty Financial’s WFLI “governance” crypto tokens will be owned “by the founders, team, and service providers.” The other 30%, the report said, will be sold “via a public sale,” and some of the proceeds will also go to project insiders, but some will be reserved in a treasury “to support World Liberty’s financial operations.”
The white paper, CoinDesk reported, said Trump’s crypto currency “will be non-transferrable and locked indefinitely in a wallet or smart contract until such time, if ever, $WFLI are unlocked through protocol governance procedures in a manner that does not contravene applicable law.”
According to CoinDesk, Trump is listed in the white paper as World Liberty Financial’s “chief crypto advocate,” and sons Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump share the post of “web 3 ambassador. Barron Trump is its “DeFi visionary,” the white paper reportedly said.
DeFi is short for decentralized finance.
The launch is in line with Trump’s remarks on the campaign trail where he has pledged to make the US the world’s “crypto capital” if he wins the White House again.
It also has raised some ethical concerns by corruption watchdogs.
“Taking a pro-crypto stance is not necessarily troubling; the troubling aspect is doing it while starting a way to personally benefit from it,” Jordan Libowitz, a spokesperson for government watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, was quoted as saying by the Associated Press earlier this month.
Bitcoin (BTC-USD), on Monday was +3.75% over the last 24 hours to $57,521.69 in trading volume of $32.32B, according to CoinDesk data. Meanwhile, Ethereum was -4.36% over the past 24 hours to $2,280.76 on volume of $17.25B.
Here are some popular cryptocurrencies and related exchange-traded funds of interest: (LTC-USD), (XRP-USD), (IBIT), (ARKB), (GBTC), (BRRR), (BTCO), (HODL), (BTCW), (FBTC), (BITB), (EZBC), (BITQ), (DAPP), (BKCH), (BLOK), (CRPT), and (IBLC).
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