The Trump family’s up-to-date crypto venture, World Liberty Financial, is off to an inauspicious start after website outages constrained investors’ ability to participate in its inaugural token sale event.
The WLFI crypto token went on sale on Tuesday around 9 a.m. EST. As of this writing, the site is still suffering from reliability issues, which is causing some visitors to land on an error page. “We are currently unable to connect to the server for this app or website,” the notification reads.
This is shown by data from the Etherscan analytical platform Only 8,500 people took part in it in the token pre-sale so far, purchasing approximately 750 million tokens between them – 3.75 percent of the total available in the pre-sale. A representative of World Liberty Financial had already done this before he said on X that 100,000 accredited US investors have been pre-approved after registering interest in the token.
World Liberty Financial Advisor, Sandy Peng he told cryptocurrency website CoinDesk that the site has stopped working due to increased traffic. She said that within an hour of the token sale going live, it had over 70 million unique visitors. The organization did not immediately respond to a request for further comment.
Website issues make it hard to accurately assess investor appetite for the WLFI token. However, the rocky launch will give pause to those concerned about the potential for Trump’s project to stunt the DeFi industry if it fails.
Since August, the Trump family has been promoting World Liberty Financial as a way to “revolutionize finance” and “return finance to greatness.” The site lists presidential candidate Donald Trump as a “major supporter of cryptocurrencies” and his sons Eric, Donald Jr. and 18-year-old Barron – as “Web3 ambassadors”.
The World Liberty Financial platform is intended to provide peer-to-peer lending and lending in the spirit of what is known in the crypto world as decentralized finance, or DeFi. However, tough details about the project have not been revealed. Despite many announcements teasing the project on Telegram and X and the publication of, among others, a kind of manifesto As for the purpose of the project, the Trumps provided almost no information about how the platform works or the range of services available to customers.
This created an opening for bad actors. At the end of August, impersonators used the project’s Telegram channel – advertised as “THE ONE [sic] a place to get official news” — to advertise an inauthentic token giveaway. In early September, X accounts belonging to Lara Trump, Eric’s wife, and Tiffany Trump, the former president’s daughter, were allegedly compromised and used by hackers to trade another crypto token allegedly associated with World Liberty Financial.