In brief
- President Trump and his family saw their net worth surge by almost $6 billion after trading began for WLFI.
- The family collectively owns 22.5 billion WLFI tokens, now valued at nearly $6 billion, though the tokens remain locked under a vesting schedule that has not yet been determined.
- WLFI’s market debut gave the project a valuation above $26 billion, even though the DeFi platform itself has not yet launched.
President Donald Trump and members of his family saw their net worth increase by nearly $6 billion Monday, in the minutes after public trading of their Ethereum token WLFI went live.
The token, which allows holders to participate in the governance of World Liberty Financial, the Trumps’ crypto platform, was previously locked and untradable. This morning, WLFI launched trading capability, setting the token’s previously undermined price at just over $0.30. It has since slipped to roughly $0.26 at writing.
That’s a substantial jump for WLFI, which was initially sold to investors for 1.5 cents a token in the fall, and then for 5 cents a token during a second round of fundraising. The company raised a total of $500 million from those public sales.
It’s a particularly rosy outcome for the Trumps—who collectively own 22.5 billion WLFI tokens, according to a disclosure on the World Liberty Financial website. That pile of tokens, representing nearly a quarter of the project’s total supply, is now worth a whopping $5.96 billion based on current prices.
The disclosure notes the tokens are owned by an entity affiliated with the president and “certain family members.” The identity of those family members have not been disclosed, though Trump’s sons—Eric Trump, Donald Trump Jr., and Barron Trump—are all co-founders of World Liberty.
Will the Trumps soon be able to dump those tokens on other investors and turn a massive profit? The answer is murky.
A statement issued by World Liberty earlier on Monday announced that 33.5 billion WLFI tokens reserved for team members are currently not circulating, and still remain locked. Those tokens will be unlocked over time via a vesting schedule, the project said, but that schedule remains “TBD.”
A World Liberty representative did not immediately respond when asked by Decrypt for any clarity on when a vesting schedule for the Trumps might be determined, or how long of a schedule it might be.
There are currently roughly 24.7 billion WLFI tokens in circulation, out of a total supply of 100 billion. At current prices, the token’s fully diluted valuation is worth over $26 billion.
World Liberty Financial is a decentralized finance project promising to connect non-tech savvy retail consumers with the often-opaque world of self-custodied crypto transactions. Despite launching its own stablecoin earlier this year, though, the platform has yet to launch.
Since returning to office, the president and his family have increased their net worths by billions of dollars, via crypto projects including World Liberty and the Trump meme coin. Earlier this year, Trump and his family netted hundreds of millions of dollars from initial sales of WLFI to investors.
In a disclosure filed in June, the president said he pocketed $57 million from World Liberty in 2024. That number is poised to be far higher in 2025.
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Source: https://decrypt.co/337574/trump-family-world-liberty-crypto-6-billion
