Recently, Trump's official meme coin $TRUMP has attracted much attention, and the World Liberty Financial (WLF) project supported by the Trump family has also received more attention. Some friends who have not made money on $TRUMP are considering whether to subscribe to the WLF project's token $WLFI. The first round of fundraising for the project just ended on January 20, and the second round of fundraising was also launched on the official website. $0.05 per coin, do you want to buy it?
Let’s first look at the basic situation of the project, then analyze the fundraising situation, and finally draw a conclusion.
Basic information of the project
The project was founded by two unknown entrepreneurs and Trump's son. Trump himself and his family members supported the project, and Sun Ge and other cryptocurrency experts were invited as consultants. The goal of the project is to promote the adoption of US dollar stablecoins and maintain the global reserve currency status of the US dollar. The content of the project is to develop lending protocols DEFI and stablecoin wallets.
The project will issue 100 billion governance tokens (100 Billion) on the Ethereum mainnet, and the white paper clearly states that the tokens cannot participate in dividends. 35%, or 35 billion, of which will be sold publicly, and the remaining 65% will be given to the community, early supporters and the team.
Project Fundraising
First fundraising
The project's first fundraising will start on October 15, 2024. The project owner plans to sell 20 billion tokens at a price of $0.015 per token, raising $300 million, corresponding to a valuation of $1.5 billion.
Within 20 minutes of the start of the financing, 220 million tokens were sold. Later, it received support from Sun Ge, Masayoshi Son. However, the first round of financing has been ongoing and has not been completed quickly.
After Trump launched the official meme coin on January 18, 2025, the Trump booth project WLF also received more attention and exceeded the first round of token sales on January 20: 21.3 billion tokens were sold and US$319.5 million was raised.
Second Fundraising
The project team seized the opportunity and immediately launched the second phase of fundraising, planning to sell 5 billion tokens at a price of $0.05 per token, raising $250 million, corresponding to a valuation of $5 billion.
Regarding the current fundraising progress, the project's official website has the following progress chart
This picture shows the first and second rounds together, which is easy to be misunderstood. Let's understand it carefully. The Total sale volume: 25.00B here refers to the total token sales volume of the first and second rounds combined, 25 billion, not the 5 billion tokens in the second round alone.
The 22.26B tokens sold here also include the 21.3 billion sold in the first round, plus the 960 million sold in the second round.
The 2.744B tokens remaining here are the 2.744 billion tokens that have not been sold in the second round.
It can be seen that the second round of fundraising has just completed more than 20%. Unlike the progress bar showing "almost". In addition, the $0.05 above is not the subscription price of the 25 billion coins, but only the subscription price of the second round.
Use of funds raised twice
The project raised $319.5 million in the first fundraising. As of January 21, 2025, the second fundraising sold 960 million coins at a price of $0.05 per coin, raising $48 million. The total fundraising so far is about $370 million. From arkm.com, we can see that the current market value of the project address 0x5be is about $350 million. About 60% of the positions are ETH and stETH, about 20% are US dollar stablecoins, and about 15% are BTC. In addition, it holds a small number of DEFI tokens, including decentralized lending AAVE, important infrastructure oracle LINK, new algorithmic stablecoin ENA, and stablecoin main transfer network TRX. It can be seen that the project's positions are basically in important projects and are more professional. But one thing to note is that the operation of this project is not a fund-style - "issuing $WLFI tokens to raise funds, purchasing mainstream project tokens with growth potential, and $WLFI token holders share the share of the asset portfolio appreciation." The project white paper clearly states that the $WLFI purchased by users is only a governance token. The $370 million has already belonged to the project owner. The project owner has only made the above asset allocation. The value and income here, according to the white paper, have nothing to do with $WLFI holders.
Is it worth buying?
The largest decentralized exchange, Uniswap, has a total market value (FDV) of $13 billion; the largest decentralized lending, AAVE, has a total market value (FDV) of $6 billion. These two platforms have been developed for many years and are both industry leaders. Their market values are only in the range of $5-10 billion. However, WLF, which does not have any products, has a market value of $5 billion in this round of fundraising, which is obviously too expensive. In other words, it has completely overdrawn its growth space. As a project coin, WLF must make its business scale comparable to Uniswap and AAVE in order to support the market value of this round of fundraising, not to mention the growth space.
In addition, the project has to sell 35 billion tokens in total, with 10 billion more to sell in addition to the 25 billion in the first two rounds. The valuation of the project in the first round of financing was $1.5 billion, and the valuation of the second round of financing was $5 billion. Linghu believes that the valuation of the third round of financing is at least $10 billion. The subscription price of a single token has a growth process from $0.015, $0.05 to $0.1. It is very difficult to raise capital with a valuation of $10 billion. However, if the project must develop according to the pace written in the white paper, it will have to pass the final stage of selling 10 billion tokens to raise funds. Considering the difficulty of this stage, it may take a long time before the tokens can be traded.
Finally, all buyers of token sales are sellers after the tokens are listed. In addition, the 65% of tokens held by the project party are also sellers. All these sellers need strong buyers to take over. The premise of strong buying is that the scale and profitability of the project are good enough (although the profits are not given to the holders, the currency circle still surprisingly maintains a reference relationship between business volume and market value). If it is as good as the existing industry leaders, then everyone can make a profit. If it can be several times the scale of the current leaders, then we can expect several times the return on the current investment. The operation mode of the entire project is still the VC coin mode criticized by the currency circle.
But can this project do the same as the industry leader (we don’t lose money), or even several times more than the industry leader (we can make money)? I think it can’t be done if we look at the team. The two founders have done offline business, but it was not big. It is difficult to make a career in web3. The only hope here is that Trump will give this company a "franchise" to do monopoly-level business and get high and stable profits. So whether to buy this coin is to bet on whether this will happen.
The Trump family is outside the cryptocurrency circle, and relying on celebrity effects to create memes is the best path. Linghu prefers to buy the couple's meme coins at a low point rather than participate in $WLFI. The above analysis is for your reference.
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