FX168 Financial News Agency (Asia Pacific) reported that former US President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump's decentralized finance (defi) project World Liberty Financial token WLFI officially went on public sale on Tuesday, October 16th, but only sold about 4% of the tokens, equivalent to $12.45 million. This means that the Trump family's plan to raise $0.3 billion in funding unexpectedly fell short, and the financial revolution did not start smoothly.

With the US presidential election coming up in about 3 weeks, Trump's decision to publicly sell WLFI tokens at this time has sparked discussions in the crypto community. Trump announced this news in a tweet on Tuesday, with one WLFI token priced at $0.015, purchasable with Ether (ETH), USDT, USDC, or WETH. #USPresidentialElection#

(Source: Twitter)

However, according to CoinDesk, the public sale of WLFI tokens faced challenges right from the start. The sale began at 8:40 am Eastern Time on October 15th, with the official website crashing multiple times within the first hour of going live. Despite this, nearly 2900 investors managed to purchase the token.

On-chain data shows that in the first hour of the public sale, approximately 0.344 billion WLFI tokens were sold to about 3000 individual wallets. However, so far, only 0.83 billion tokens have been sold, amounting to $12.45 million, representing about 4% of the 20 billion tokens allocated for public sale, far below the $0.3 billion fundraising target.

(Source: World Liberty Financial official website)

WLFI advisor and Co-Founder of Scroll blockchain network Sandy Peng attributed the official website crash to excessive traffic, stating that the team did not anticipate such a high level of interest. His Scroll network will host the blockchain applications of World Liberty Financial.

According to Peng, within the first hour of going live, the World Liberty Financial official website experienced 72 million unique visits. The website went offline due to high traffic, but intermittent recovery later indicated a switch to a new website hosting service.

As introduced by the official team before the token issuance, the WLFI token will be used for governing the World Liberty Financial platform. The platform aims to enable user participation in lending and other DeFi activities. The WLFI token is temporarily non-transferable, with a lock-up period of 12 months. Holders can vote on protocol upgrades, technical changes, partnership promotions, and security risk monitoring.

Non-transferability of WLFI tokens is expected to be a significant factor causing hesitation among traders.

The total supply of WLFI tokens is 100 billion. Holders can propose changes for the platform's future. Since all WLFI tokens are non-transferable, they will remain locked in wallets or smart contracts indefinitely unless there are rule modifications in the future. The WLFI team states that all governance decisions will comply with US regulations to ensure legal conformity in any changes.

WLFI token sales are restricted to non-US individuals and eligible US investors. World Liberty Financial officially declared that before the token launch, over 0.1 million qualified US investors were whitelisted. Restrictions on US investors aim to protect WLFI from violating US securities regulations.

In the USA, accredited investors authorized by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) can invest in unregistered securities, such as stocks before initial public offerings (IPOs). They must meet specific income and net worth criteria, for example, an annual income of $0.2 million and total assets exceeding $1 million.