Crypto News: Trump tokens' mysterious timeline

Teresa Xie gives an update on the World Liberty Financial project's token offering, and how there is no word yet on when buyers will be able to sell the cryptocurrency.

More than 16,000 people are currently holders of the World Liberty Financial token, two weeks after the project backed by Donald Trump and his sons began selling the cryptocurrency to accredited investors on its platform. So far, World Liberty Financial has raised $14 million of its planned $300 million from the token sale, according to the project's website.

Unlike other governance tokens such as those associated with Uniswap, Aave and Maker -- which allow owners to vote on the governance of the project -- buyers of World Liberty Financial have no real rights and can't trade it. That raises the question: What exactly is the purpose of this digital asset?

"I don't even know if you could say it's a speculative token, because it's not built for anything yet," said Adam Morgan McCarthy, an analyst at crypto analytics firm Kaiko Research. "It's like a receipt for something that hasn't been made."

The Trump-backed project launched a day after the former president emerged from a second apparent assassination attempt. 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.

In excess of 16,000 holders for a speculative asset with no protocol yet is quite high, according to McCarthy. Still, the number pales in comparison with other governance tokens like COMP, AAVE, and UNI – all of which have between 150,000 and 400,000 holders.

The platform's token presale came three weeks before the presidential election and accompanies Trump's efforts to appeal to crypto voters.

While some investors may hope that the election results will go Trump's way and make the token worth holding, McCarthy cautions against that strategy.

"In theory, it will have nothing to do with it," he said of the election results. "What will drive this is anything that indicates there will be actual infrastructure behind it."

Anyone hoping for a quick, profitable trade on the WLF token is "going to be disappointed because it's non-transferrable," he added. "There's no timeline on when that will lead to being transferred. And there's no timeline on anything here."

$100 million

Sequoia Capital stands to make more than $100 million after investing $19 million when it led the Series A funding of stablecoin platform Bridge, which is being acquired by Stripe.

"The polls are showing a 50-50 race yet you can buy Harris at less than 40% odds. Any sports bettor will tell you that's a decent bet."

Kubs Lalchandani

Lawyer and predictions market bettor

Describing why he is betting on the 2024 election after markets like Polymarket and PredictIt moved too far from the polling numbers.

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