It’s finally here: Former President Donald Trump’s decentralized finance project will launch its token sale next week. In a Friday post on Twitter (aka X), World Liberty Financial announced that the public sale of tokens will start on Tuesday, October 15. The sale will be open to those who qualified through the whitelist. Prospective clients were able to apply for the whitelist starting in September. For now, World Liberty Financial is only open in the U.S. to accredited investors—that is, according to the SEC, those with a net worth of at least $1 million, either individually or with a partner (and excluding the value of primary residence). Accredited investors also have to have an annual income of at least $200,000—or $300,000 with a spouse or partner—for two years, the U.S. regulator says, with the expectation that the salary trend will continue in the current year. The project did say it hoped to eventually be open to all Americans. World Liberty Financial is an Ethereum-based decentralized finance (DeFi) project first announced by Donald Trump’s son, Eric, back in August. The project will provide borrowing and lending crypto services, the team behind the project said in an exclusive interview with Decrypt’s sister company, Rug Radio, last month. On Thursday, the project posted a blog explaining that it “aims to become the one-stop-shop for DeFi across the globe.” DeFi is the convoluted and experimental sphere in the crypto industry that wants to replace traditional financial services by using blockchain technology. A prime example of an established DeFi project is Uniswap, a decentralized exchange that anyone can use to swap digital coins and tokens. Many DeFi projects are considered risky, however, and hacks in the space aren’t uncommon. Republican candidate Donald Trump has come out explicitly as a crypto-friendly candidate ahead of the U.S. presidential election in November. Formerly against the space, Trump used to say that he was “not a fan” of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. But he has since dived into the world of NFT collectibles and even said that he wants all remaining Bitcoin to be mined on American soil. He has further said that World Liberty Financial will “help make America the crypto capital of the world.” Edited by Andrew Hayward
