The World Liberty Financial token nosedived after being listed for spot trading yesterday, with early holders reporting problems accessing their funds.
The native token of the DeFi project directly connected to the Trump family, World Liberty Financial (WLFI), has nosedived nearly 20% in its first 24 hours of trading. The token’s listing for spot trading was accompanied by reports that some presale holders had trouble unlocking allocations.
WLFI was trading around $0.40 in pre-markets and then briefly popped above $0.44 when spot trading launched on multiple major crypto exchanges on Monday, Sept. 1. Within a few hours, however, it slid into the low $0.20 range and eventually settled around $0.23, where it’s trading at press time.
The WLFI token unlock was the result of a July governance vote that cleared a path to tradability for roughly 24.7 billion tokens. The change effectively set a market price for what had previously operated only as voting rights inside the World Liberty Financial ecosystem.
But the unlock didn’t go smoothly for all holders. Prior to it, many users reported errors and connection failures on the project’s governance forum to get access to Lockbox, a smart contract designed to temporarily hold tokens, allowing users to unlock them for transfer and trading. The WLFI team acknowledged the issues but didn’t provide details on what caused them.
Launched last year, World Liberty Financial positions itself as a decentralized finance company that looks to blend TradFi and crypto. The project was co-founded by multiple members of the Trump family, including two of President Donald Trump’s sons, Eric and Donald Jr.
Following WLFI’s listing on crypto exchanges yesterday, the token community proposed using all fees from the project’s own liquidity to buy back and burn WLFI tokens.
The move would permanently remove those tokens from circulation, rewarding long-term holders, and all burns would be tracked on-chain for transparency. If approved, it could kick off an ongoing program to keep buying and burning more WLFI as the ecosystem grows.
In mid-August, Nasdaq-listed blockchain infrastructure company ALT5 Sigma Corp. announced that it was creating the first ever WLFI treasury, with plans to hold around 7.5% of the token’s total supply.
