Trump-linked World Liberty Financial to raise $300 million at $1.5 billion valuation: Roadmap

The token sale for World Liberty Financial — a DeFi project linked to former U.S. President Donald Trump and his three sons — is slated to start next week, according to a roadmap shared with prospective investors that was seen by The Block.

The roadmap says that the “initial sale” of WLFI will look to raise $300 million. It will sell 20% of the token supply at a $1.5 billion fully diluted valuation. 

This suggests there could be more token sales to follow. In an X Spaces last month, Folkman said 63% of the token supply would be sold to the public, with 17% going to user rewards and 20% to the team.

The roadmap clarifies that WLFI will be a governance token used to vote on decisions regarding the future development of the WLFI platform. These tokens will be non-transferable for the first 12 months. Even if the community decides to vote on the tokens becoming transferable during this time, it will only be implemented after a year. The governance features will be live immediately, regardless of their lack of transferability.

World Liberty Financial’s future plans

World Liberty Financial is an upcoming crypto project spearheaded by co-founders Steve and Zach Witkoff, Zak Folkman and Chase Herro. The project’s mission statement is to drive mass adoption of digital assets through a compliant one-stop platform for alternative finance. 

The project touts Donald Trump as Chief Crypto Advocate and his three sons as Web3 Ambassadors. It says Polychain Capital General Partner Luke Pearson is Head of Platform, and Dolomite co-founder Corey Caplan is Head of Technical Strategy.

The first phase of World Liberty Financial is to launch a version of DeFi lending platform Aave on the Ethereum Layer 2 network Scroll to let users lend and borrow tokens, starting with bitcoin, ether and stablecoins. This part of the plan has already begun. The project asked today for a temperature check — which is the first step in a governance proposal — on a motion to deploy an instance of Aave V3. The platform would give 7% of its token supply to Aave DAO for voting with and providing liquidity, along with 20% of fees generated by its platform on an ongoing basis.

The second phase is to integrate with exchanges and let users on-ramp and off-ramp with onchain attestations of know-your-customer protocols. World Liberty intends to create a stablecoin-focused credit card for letting people spend their tokens in the real world.

The final phase of the project is to fractionalize real-world assets and obtain regulatory licenses for doing so. This can include hotels and sports clubs. At the same time, the project hopes to establish a settlement platform for stablecoins.

World Liberty Financial is available to accredited investors within the U.S., qualified investors in the UK and investors outside those two countries. The project has criticized "outdated policies and regulations in the U.S." with respect to these restrictions.

The roadmap noted that it could be subject to change. World Liberty Financial did not respond to a request for comment by publication time.