| It turns out that even the backing of the Trump family isn't enough to bring decentralized finance into the mainstream. The highly anticipated World Liberty Financial, a DeFi project endorsed by the Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and his sons Eric, Donald Jr., and Barron Trump, finally held its token sale earlier this week. Despite the project's ambitious goal to "revolutionize finance," its public token sale initially attracted only a tiny fraction of its target.
Perhaps prospective investors are turned off by the fact that the project is designed to heavily reward the Trumps. A "gold paper" detailing World Liberty's plan says that the principals of an entity called DT Marks DEFI LLC, which includes Donald Trump, will receive 22.5 billion of the tokens — worth $337.5 million at the offering price — and has the right to receive 75% of the protocol's net revenues.
Or one could argue that the lukewarm reception of the tokens may not fully reflect true demand for DeFi and World Liberty, given the barriers to participating in the sale since it's only available to accredited investors. Yet a broader look at the current DeFi landscape shows that the sector remains far from its heyday. Unlike the surging prices of Bitcoin and Ether, DeFi, which aims to replace traditional finance one day, has yet to regain the momentum it enjoyed a few years ago.
"During the last DeFi summer of 2020, US interest rates were close to zero, and on-chain DeFi yield was extremely high," said Sandy Peng, co-founder of blockchain solution Scroll and an advisor to World Liberty Financial. "That attracted a lot of capital to flow on-chain. That dynamic is reversed right now." DeFi exploded during that so-called DeFi summer, as peer-to-peer lending and trading platforms attracted billions of dollars chasing high yields amid the ultra-low interest rate environment of the Covid-19 pandemic. This surge brought hope to advocates envisioning a future of finance running entirely on blockchains without any middlemen.
However, over the past year, that vision has started to seem less attainable. The persistently high interest rates in traditional markets are part of the challenge, but they aren't the only factor. "Growth in DeFi is perceived as slow due to a lack of new innovations," said Shuyao Kong, co-founder of blockchain project MegaETH, who pointed out that the existing DeFi projects remain the same ideas as those of the last bull cycle — such as trading, lending and aggregators for high yields. Even the World Liberty Financial project is not building a new concept, but is simply built atop of Aave, the largest DeFi lender by total value of tokens sent to the platform. World Liberty Financial did not respond to a request for comment. In addition to the lack of innovation is the increased scrutiny on the nascent industry, especially in the US. For example, the Securities and Exchange Commission has warned Uniswap Labs, the developer of the popular namesake decentralized exchange, that the startup may face potential enforcement action for operating as an unregistered exchange and broker dealer. "GM! Who's ready to transform the future of finance with us?" World Liberty Financial's X account asked on Oct 8. Well, at least for now, it seems like the future of finance is unlikely to be transformed by World Liberty Financial or even the rest of DeFi. | 
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