Token unlocking is imminent: Overview of WLFI's business, background, token, and valuation expectations

Original author: Alex Xu, Research Partner at Mint Ventures

Introduction

After Circle’s listing, the stock price surged dramatically (recently showing a clear decline), and the stablecoin concept stocks in the global stock market are also experiencing unusual volatility. The U.S. stablecoin bill, the “Genius Act,” has passed the Senate vote and is now making its way through the House of Representatives. Recently, there have been reports from the Trump family’s purebred project, World Liberty Financial, that tokens may be unlocked for circulation ahead of schedule, which is a significant piece of news for the largely stagnant and lackluster altcoin market.

So how is World Liberty Financial currently performing? How is the token mechanism designed? What should be used as a benchmark for valuation?

In this article, the author will attempt to provide a multi-dimensional overview of the current business situation of World Liberty Financial, the details of the project background, the token mechanism, and the valuation expectations, offering several perspectives for observing the project.

PS: This article represents the author’s current stage of thinking as of the time of publication, and it may change in the future. The viewpoints expressed are highly subjective and may contain errors in facts, data, or reasoning. All opinions in this article are not investment advice, and criticism and further discussion from peers and readers are welcomed.

WLFI Business: Product Status and Core Competitive Advantages

World Liberty Financial (WLFI) is a decentralized financial platform co-founded by the family of U.S. President Donald Trump, with its core product being the USD1 stablecoin. USD1 is a stablecoin pegged 1:1 to the U.S. dollar and fully backed by cash and U.S. Treasury reserves. World Liberty Financial also has business plans for lending (based on Aave) and a DeFi app, but they have not yet been launched.

USD1 business data

As of June 2025, the circulation of the USD1 stablecoin is approximately 2.2 billion USD. Among them, the supply on BNBchain is 2.156 billion, Ethereum’s supply is 48 million, and Tron’s supply is 26,000. The issuance of USD1 on BNBchain accounts for 97.8%, with the vast majority of USD1 issued on BNBchain.

In terms of on-chain user numbers, BNBchain has 248,000 holding addresses, Ethereum has 66,000, while Tron currently has only 1.

From the perspective of token holdings, 93.7% of USD1 (equivalent to 2.02 billion) on BNBchain is held in two addresses of Binance, with 1.9 billion concentrated in one address of Binance (0xF977814e90dA44bFA03b6295A0616a897441aceC).

Looking back at the market cap of the USD1 token, we find that the market cap was only around 130 million before May 1, 2025, but on May 1 itself, it surged to 2.13 billion, increasing by nearly 2 billion dollars overnight.

The growth curve of USD1 in scale, source: CMC

The massive increase in scale is primarily due to the $2 billion equity investment in Binance by the Abu Dhabi investment firm MGX in May 2025, which chose USD1 as the payment currency for the transaction. Currently, the amount of USD1 tokens held in Binance addresses is also around $2 billion.

This means:

• Binance has not converted the USD1 investment from Abu Dhabi investment company MGX into US dollars or other stablecoins after receiving it, making it the largest holder of USD1, accounting for 92.8% of the total USD1 supply.
• If we exclude the tokens formed by this exchange, USD1 is currently a small-scale stablecoin with a circulating market value of just over 100 million.

In the future development of projects, this business expansion model is believed to reappear repeatedly.

Business Cooperation

In market expansion, WLFI is currently collaborating with multiple institutions and protocols.

In June 2025, WLFI announced a partnership with London-based crypto fund Re 7 to launch a USD1 stablecoin vault on the Ethereum lending protocol Euler Finance and the Binance Chain staking platform Lista, aiming to expand the influence of USD1 within the Ethereum and BNB Chain ecosystems. Lista is a major BNB staking platform invested in by Binance Labs.

In addition, the largest decentralized lending platform Aave has also initiated a proposal to introduce USD1 into the Aave markets on Ethereum and BNBchain, and the draft has already been voted through.

In terms of trading platforms, USD1 has been listed on CEXs such as Binance, Bitget, Gate, and Huobi, as well as on DEXs like Uniswap and PancakeSwap.

Competitive Advantages of World Liberty

The competitive advantage of World Liberty is simple and clear: the strong influence of the Trump family in the political arena gives this project an inherent advantage in certain types of business development that other projects do not have. This project is also a conduit for benefits that individuals, organizations, and even countries who have a demand for Trump in business and politics may be willing to explore.

Binance issued USD1 as a funding vehicle with World Liberty, accepted a huge investment from the Abu Dhabi investment company MGX, and subsequently held it interest-free (which is equivalent to supporting USD1’s TVL), and quickly launched USD1, which is a prime example.

However, there are three main risks for World Liberty token holders:

• The channels through which the Trump family accepts benefits are very numerous, and World Liberty may not necessarily be the one chosen by the benefactors. ( For a detailed look at the various money-making tactics of the Trump family, you can read the Bloomberg article published in late May this year: THE TRUMP FAMILY’S MONEY-MAKING MACHINE, which is quite eclectic. )
• The WLFI token itself is decoupled from the value of the World Liberty project (details will be provided in the token model section below).
• After the Trump family sells the tokens, they may basically abandon the heavy operation of the project even during the selling process, soft exit (referencing all the previous crypto assets issued by Trump, from Trump tokens to various NFTs)

WLFI Background: Support and Financing Details

Core Team Background

The core team of World Liberty Financial comes from the political and business sectors, which is also the source of the project’s core competitiveness and influence.

There is no doubt that the soul of the project is the 45th and 47th President of the United States, Donald Trump, along with three of his family members — Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, and the 17-year-old Barron Trump.

However, there has been a subtle change in the “project positions” on the World Liberty Financial official website in the past month. In the mid-June introduction on the official website, Donald Trump’s position was the rather vague “Chief Crypto Advocate,” and the positions of his three sons were also quite vague as “Web3 Ambassadors.”

In the project’s “Golden Book”, the four members of the Trump family are defined as follows:

Nevertheless, the emission positions of the four members of Trump are ahead of a number of project Co-Founders.

World Liberty Financial team introduction page in mid-June

However, recently, the official page of the team changed the introduction of the four individuals to: Trump himself - “Honorary Co-Founder”, while the other three sons became Co-Founders.

World Liberty Financial team introduction page in mid-June

Another small detail is that Donald Trump himself, as well as another “Honorary Co-Founder” Steven Witkoff (who was previously listed as Co-Founder on the official website and has now changed to “Honorary Co-Founder”), both have a nearly imperceptible footnote “1” added to their position descriptions, with the explanation for this footnote placed at the bottom of the webpage in small print: “Removed upon taking office.” This means that once the individual takes office, their “Honorary Co-Founder” title will be removed.

This is a typical compliance practice aimed at preventing conflicts of interest with company interests for government officials when they perform public duties, meeting the ethical requirements in the United States that public servants or senior government officials must sever private business ties.

But the problem is: Donald Trump is currently a public official in the United States - the President of the United States.

In addition to the Trump family, another heavyweight in the team is Donald Trump’s long-time business partner, New York real estate tycoon Steven Witkoff, who serves as honorary co-founder. He is the founder and chairman of Witkoff Group and has known Donald Trump since the 1980s. The two have had a long-standing relationship and often play golf together, being well known as “old friends and business partners.”

Since Trump took office, Steven Mnuchin has been appointed by Trump as the “U.S. Special Envoy to the Middle East,” directly reporting to Trump and playing a central role in major negotiations, including those involving Israel, Qatar, Russia, and Ukraine. He is also Trump’s “private messenger” to Putin, having visited Moscow multiple times to meet with Russian leaders on behalf of Trump.

The Witkoff family has also been actively involved in the project: their sons Zach Witkoff and Alex Witkoff are both co-founders of WLFI.

Apart from political and business celebrities, the technology and operations of WLFI are largely handled by individuals from the cryptocurrency industry. Zak Folkman and Chase Herro, both co-founders, are serial entrepreneurs in the cryptocurrency field; they previously founded the DeFi platform Dough Finance, but the project failed early on due to a hacker attack, making their entrepreneurial experience difficult to describe as successful. In the WLFI project, Folkman and Herro were initially the main controllers of the company, but in January 2025, they ceded control to an entity controlled by the Trump family.

Another core member, Richmond Teo, serves as the head of the WLFI stablecoin and payment department. Richmond Teo was previously the co-founder and former Asia CEO of the well-known compliant stablecoin company Paxos. Additionally, the team includes blockchain practitioners like Corey Caplan (Chief Technology Strategist) and Ryan Fang (Head of Growth), as well as traditional financial compliance experts such as Brandi Reynolds (Chief Compliance Officer).

The project also invited several advisors, such as Luke Pearson, a partner at Polychain Capital, and Sandy Peng, co-founder of the Ethereum Layer 2 Scroll network. Sandy Peng assisted with operational work during the token sale.

Changes in the Trump family’s equity in the World Liberty Financial project

In fact, the Trump family’s shareholding ratio in World Liberty Financial has been declining, currently down from the initial 75% to 40%.

From the initial 75% to 40%, the declining equity may have been transferred to Sun Yuchen, DWF Labs, and the recently announced Aqua 1 Foundation, which participated in a $100 million investment (this is merely speculation).

Financing History and Investment Institutions

World Liberty Financial has raised over 700 million USD through multiple rounds of financing since its launch in September 2024, with its valuation rapidly increasing after Trump’s inauguration and the issuance of tokens.

The author summarizes the financing situation of each round as follows:

It is worth noting that, according to the project’s Gold-Paper and website disclosures, the Trump family can receive 75% of the net revenue from token sales (which, through the resale of equity, should equal the disguised resale of token sales revenue), as well as 60% of the net profit from future business (from operating stablecoin business).

Token: Allocation Details, Token Functionality, and Protocol Revenue

Token distribution and unlock details

The governance token $WLFI of the WLFI platform has a total supply of 100 billion. According to the official “Golden Paper” token economic model, the distribution plan and unlocking schedule for the WLFI token are as follows:

It is worth noting that the team allocated 35% of the tokens for the token sale, but currently only 25% of the public sale has been completed. There is no answer yet on how to handle the remaining 10%.

In addition, the tokens of WLFI, apart from the public offering part which clearly states a lock-up period expected in December in the additional terms, do not have specified unlocking conditions and times for the other parts of the tokens. However, like the tokens from the public offering part, they are currently in a non-transferable state.

The ambiguity of the specific unlocking terms for the non-public offering portion of WLFI tokens has brought a high level of uncertainty to the project.

The worst practice is naturally when the team unlocks this portion of tokens in advance without prior notice and dumps them in the secondary market. A more reasonable approach would be to announce the unlocking plan for the non-public portion of the tokens in advance before the public WLFI unlocking and to conduct a phased unlocking through formal community governance voting.

token functionality

WLFI is a pure governance token, WLFI does not possess any dividend or profit rights, nor does it represent any equity claims against the project company. Its value mainly comes from participation in governance.

Distribution of protocol revenue

In the official white paper of WLFI, the handling of WLFI’s protocol revenue is stated as follows:

The initial net income of the $30 million protocol will be held in a reserve controlled by WLF (at this time, the gold book is referred to as WLF, later changed to WLFI) through a multi-signature, for the purpose of covering operational expenses, compensation, and obligations. The protocol’s net income includes WLF revenue from all channels, including but not limited to platform usage fees, proceeds from token sales, advertising revenue, or other sources of income, after deducting agreed expenditures and WLF’s ongoing operational reserves. The remaining protocol net income will be paid to entities such as DT Marks DEFILLC, Axiom Management Group, LLC, and WC Digital Fi LLC, which are associated with our founders and certain service providers (initial supporters). These entities have indicated to WLF that once the WLF protocol is launched, they plan to use a substantial portion of the fees received for the deployment of the protocol.

In other words, the income from the protocol primarily belongs to the entity companies behind WLFI (although these companies have committed to using most of the fees to support the protocol), it is clear that the WLFI token itself does not have a direct link to business income.

Valuation: How much is WLFI worth in the long term?

Since the core business of WLFI is stablecoins, we can refer to the valuation levels of major competitors that are already listed, such as Circle, and use its “market cap/stablecoin market cap” ratio to “roughly” estimate the reasonable valuation range for WLFI tokens.

As of the end of June, the scale of USDC is approximately 61.7 billion.

At the same time, Circle’s market capitalization is 41.1 billion USD. If options, convertible bonds, and other factors are taken into account, the approximate fully diluted market capitalization is 47.1 billion USD.

In other words, Circle’s “market cap/stablecoin market cap” ratio is: 411/617 ~ 471/617 = 0.66 ~ 0.76.

If calculated based on the current stablecoin scale of WLFI at 2.2 billion, the market value of the WLFI project would be 22* 0.66 ~ 0.76, corresponding to a project valuation between 1.452 and 1.672 billion USD, with the corresponding WLFI token price being 0.0145 ~ 0.0167.

Clearly, this is a number that WLFI investors find difficult to accept, as it is only near the breakeven point for the first round of public investors. Expectations for WLFI are very high, and possible reasons include:

• WLFI was initially not fully unlocked, and its circulating market value is much lower than the FDV, WLFI can enjoy a higher premium.
• WLFI is in the early stages, and its potential growth rate is much higher than that of Circle.
• WLFI has strong political resources and should have a “Trump premium”; many projects will be eager to collaborate with WLFI.
• The sentiment and bubble in the crypto market are more aggressive than in the stock market, and WLFI will enjoy a higher premium than Circle.
• WLFI may closely follow the timing of the passage of the U.S. Genius stablecoin bill to issue tokens, enjoying a high level of market sentiment.

……

However, we can also present corresponding counterarguments, such as:

• Stablecoins are a business with strong network effects, and leaders should have a stronger competitive advantage and higher valuation premium than new players (think about the comparison of the earning capabilities of the leading player Tether and the second player Circle).
• The revenue from the WLFI project is unrelated to WLFI, and the WLFI token lacks value capture, which should be heavily discounted during valuation.
• Currently, 93% of WFLI’s stablecoin market capitalization is supported by Binance, resulting in naturally low adoption and severely inflated business volume.
• WLFI may just be one of the many “white label licensing projects” of the Trump family, and they may operate with the same ruthlessness as Trump tokens and a series of Trump NFTs in terms of sales and operations, potentially making long-term investment impossible.
• The liquidity in the crypto market, especially for altcoins, has long been depleted. Secondary players hardly believe any stories that are not supported by hard business data, and most new coins that go online are in free fall.

……

As an investor, which side of the opinion do you prefer to adopt? It varies from person to person.

In the author’s view, the key factors determining the short-term price movement of the WLFI token after its launch depend on two aspects: on one hand, the final content and timing of the Genius Act’s approval; on the other hand, whether the Trump family is willing to position WLFI as a relatively core element in various interest exchanges and transactions, serving as a medium for interest swaps. This is specifically reflected in how “influential individuals\business entities\sovereign nations” actively embed USD1 (even if symbolically) into their business processes to gain political and commercial benefits, such as using USD1 as an investment currency (( equity investment) or as a settlement currency (cross-border trade).

If there is a lack of similar intensive business news after the launch, WLFI’s position in the Trump family’s business landscape may be worrisome, as they have better revenue channels.

Let’s wait and see the development after WLFI goes live.

So, when will the specific time for transferring WLFI tokens be?

I guess it will be after the official passage of the “Genius Act” in the United States (which has currently passed the Senate), that will be the time when the project parties can freely showcase their capabilities, and it won’t be long.