Former U.S. president and Republican presidential bidder Donald Trump has announced that his family’s cryptocurrency lending platform, World Liberty Financial — which aims to replace traditional banking — will launch on September 16 during a livestream video.
In the post, Trump declared his plan to embrace crypto and leave “slow and outdated big banks behind,” marking a historic about-face from his previous hostility towards digital currencies.
Trump went as far as to give a speech at the Bitcoin Conference in Nashville, Tennesse, earlier in July, where he promised to fire the crypto industry’s bête noire Gary Gensler if he returns to the White House. He also said he would stop the United States from dumping any of its 213,000 BTC. Instead, he would create a strategic Bitcoin reserve.
Trump and his sons, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, have teased the World Liberty Financial project for the past two months. A draft of the white paper noted that the project would let users store money in a digital wallet and offer a credit account system to facilitate decentralized lending and borrowing. The platform also includes a non-transferable governance token.
World Liberty Financial has touted a partnership with decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol Aave, suggesting the platform is built atop the Ethereum blockchain.
Most recently, the team behind World Liberty Financial indicated plans for U.S. dollar-backed stablecoins, saying the platform seeks to “spread U.S.-pegged stablecoins around the world” to maintain global U.S. dollar supremacy.
Skepticism Abounds For World Liberty
Some commentators have criticized Trump’s decision to launch the World Liberty Financial project.
Democratic Congresswoman Maxine Waters, for instance, earlier this week cited the upcoming Trump-backed project as an example of increased risks that investors face when engaging in DeFi.
“While decentralized finance, or DeFi, aims to create greater efficiencies and transparency, it can also pose heightened risks of hacks, scams, unequal information, and conflicts of interest that can harm consumers and investors,” Waters posited. “We’ve seen this play out in the new DeFi venture that Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. plan to launch called World Liberty Financial.”
Moreover, Trump ally and Castle Island Ventures partner Nic Carter asserted in a Sept. 6 interview that the project was a “huge mistake.”
“It looks like Trump’s inner circle is just cashing in on his recent embrace of crypto in a kind of naive way,” Carter opined. “Frankly it looks like they’re burning a lot of the goodwill that’s been built with the industry so far.”
