Trump to launch cryptocurrency platform | News.az

Former US President Donald Trump is expected to announce a new cryptocurrency project on Monday, to be led by his two oldest sons, News.Az reports citing Fox Business.

Trump’s crypto platform will be called World Liberty Financial and will be formally unveiled at 8 p.m. ET by the former president at an event at his Mar-a-Lago residence that will be broadcast on X Spaces.

“We’re embracing the future with crypto and leaving the slow and outdated big banks behind,” Trump said in a video posted to social media platform X on Thursday.

The former president and his sons Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump have been promoting the project on social media in recent weeks in advance of the platform’s launch, though they haven’t gone into detail about how the platform will operate.

Crypto news outlet CoinDesk obtained excerpts of a draft white paper describing the project, which noted that the former president’s 18-year-old son, Barron, is listed as the project’s “DeFi visionary.” DeFi is shorthand for “decentralized finance” and is a reference to financial services performed on a public blockchain.

CoinDesk said, according to a person familiar with the plans for World Liberty Financial, that the new platform would include a new non-transferable cryptocurrency token called WLFI. The outlet’s source noted that as of early September, World Liberty Financial hadn’t finalized its plans.

According to the white paper draft reviewed by the outlet, 70% of WLFI tokens would be reserved for the project’s founders, team and service providers, while the remaining 30% of tokens would be distributed via a public sale with some of the proceeds going to insiders and to support the platform’s operations.

Trump has highlighted crypto as a part of his campaign platform and said he wants to make the U.S. the “crypto capital of the planet” – though the new project linked to his family could raise concerns about conflicts of interest.

The former president previously raised concerns about crypto during his first term in office. In a 2021 interview on FOX Business Network’s “Varney & Co.,” Trump said he has “not been a big fan” of cryptocurrencies and warned it’s “potentially a disaster waiting to happen.”

News.Az