(Bloomberg) -- A cryptocurrency project that’s being promoted by Donald Trump and his sons is starting to take shape, with a focus on encouraging the dominance of the US dollar in decentralized finance.
While official details remain scarce, the project known as World Liberty Financial implied in social-media posts that it is being developed on top of a copy of Aave, a decentralized platform. Its goal is to drive mass adoption of decentralized finance, or DeFi, which is a corner of the crypto market where people can trade, borrow and lend digital assets using automated software in place of intermediaries.
The Trump-backed project will involve stablecoins, which are tokens typically designed to track traditional currencies like the dollar.
“By spreading U.S.-pegged stablecoins around the world, we ensure that the U.S. dollar’s dominance continues, securing America’s financial leadership and influence on the global stage,” World Liberty Financial said in posts on the X and Telegram social-media platforms.
The project marks the latest sign that former President Trump has fully embraced the crypto industry, which has gained more mainstream acceptance this year despite a long history of scams and scandals. The Republican presidential candidate’s sons, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., have been promoting World Liberty Financial on social media in recent weeks, and last week their father tagged the project in a post on X that contained a video of the candidate’s promise to make the US the “crypto capital of the planet.”
Entering the decentralized-finance space is fraught with risks. Many DeFi projects have gotten hacked over the years, and some token-issuing teams have engaged in so-called rug-pulls, the industry’s term for scams in which founding teams hype up a project only to dump their own tokens once retail traders begin buying. Total losses from the 50 biggest DeFi hacks have added up to $5.5 billion, according to a report from security firm Halborn.
World Liberty Financial itself got off to a false start on Tuesday night, when X profiles belonging to some Trump family members were compromised and used to issue fake announcements about the project, posts which Eric Trump called a “scam.”
The project plans to issue its own cryptocurrency, called WLFI, and its team has been circulating a draft white paper outlining the structure of the token, according to excerpts obtained by news site CoinDesk. About 70% of WLFI tokens will be reserved for insiders, an unusually large proportion compared with similar projects, according to the report. The rest will be made available through a public sale, though the founding team will receive a portion of the proceeds, CoinDesk reported.
The team behind the project includes members of the Trump family, as well as those behind a recently hacked app called Dough Finance, according to CoinDesk. The draft white paper said that all of Trump’s three sons, as well as several people who built Dough Finance, are involved, CoinDesk reported.
The blockchain wallet address which created Dough Finance’s underlying contract was originally funded by another wallet, according to blockchain data. That second wallet is now known by the Ethereum username wlfinancial.eth, after the person behind it purchased the domain last month. The wlfinancial.eth wallet was also an early adopter of Dough Finance, participating in the project’s token pre-sale earlier this year. It could not be determined immediately if the owner of wlfinancial.eth is directly linked to the Trump family project.
In recent weeks, Trump has been promoting himself as “crypto president,” vowing to create a national strategic reserve of Bitcoin and appoint regulators friendly to the industry if he returns to the White House. He has issued a fourth collection of nonfungible tokens and is selling new crypto-themed sneakers that were released in August.
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