Sooo, it happened - the Trump-backed DeFi project, World Liberty Financial, unleashed its token, WLFI, onto the open market.
It hit major exchanges like Binance, Kraken, Bybit, and OKX yesterday.
And it came with a bang. The price doubled instantly, the market cap hit nearly $10B at one point, and WLFI briefly became the #20 biggest crypto in the world.
... before it crashed.
The token's now ~50% lower than its all-time high, and the market cap's down by $3B.
WLFI was pitched as a governance token last year - the idea being that holders could vote on how the platform evolves.
Cool cool. Except... the ownership is super top-heavy:
👉 Team & advisors control ~33.5% of the total supply
Roughly a third of the supply is locked up with the people who built and promoted the project.
👉 Treasury → ~20%
Another big slice went into a treasury controlled by World Liberty Financial itself - again, not in circulation.
👉 The Trump fam → 22% - 24%
Filings and media reports say that roughly a quarter of the entire token supply is linked directly to the Trump family. At launch, that alone was worth billions on paper.
Put together, insiders control ~70% of all WLFI. For everyday holders, that means two things:
When insiders sell, retail can do little but watch the charts bleed;
Governance is more illusion than reality. The token may be marketed as community-driven, but insiders control enough supply to push through any decision they agree on.
Ay, and wouldn’t you know it, there's already a major proposal up for a vote.
In response to the crash, World Liberty Financial introduced a new governance plan we like to call burn, baby, burn.
The idea: use 100% of the fees earned from WLFI's protocol-owned liquidity (aka POL) to buy WLFI on the open market - then burn it.
This means those tokens would get sent to a "dead wallet" - gone forever, never tradable again.
... "Lmao, ok, but why?" 😀 Glad you asked:
👉 Reduce supply → fewer tokens = more scarcity.
👉 Support the price → regular buybacks create buying pressure, which can stabilize or increase prices.
👉 Reward holders → as supply goes down, each remaining WLFI becomes slightly more valuable.
So yeah, a buyback-and-burn can help stabilize the price and make the token look more appealing - if people actually use the platform and those fees keep coming in.
But it won't fix the centralization problem, and it won't clean up WLFI's reputation (which isn't at its best state rn - the mood seems to lean more skeptical than supportive online).
... Unless they plan to burn the doubts as well? To be continued.
Now you're in the know. But think about your friends - they probably have no idea. I wonder who could fix that... 😃🫵
Spread the word and be the hero you know you are!
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