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

Research Institution: Mint Ventures

Introduction

After Circle’s listing, the stock price surged dramatically (recently showing a significant decline), and the concept stocks of stablecoins in the global stock market have also been exceptionally agitated. 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, news has emerged that the Trump family’s purebred project, World Liberty Financial, may have its tokens unlocked for circulation ahead of schedule, which is a significant piece of news in the otherwise bleak and uninspiring altcoin market.

So how is World Liberty Financial doing at the moment? How is the token mechanism designed? What should be used as an anchor for valuation?

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

PS: This article represents the author’s interim thoughts as of the time of publication, which may change in the future. The views expressed are highly subjective and may contain errors in facts, data, or reasoning logic. None of the views in this article constitute investment advice, and criticism and further discussion from peers and readers are welcomed.

Business: Current 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 USD stablecoin. USD1 is a stablecoin that is 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 launched yet.

USD1 business data

As of June 2025, the circulating supply 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 scale of USD1 on BNBchain accounts for 97.8%, with the vast majority of USD1 being issued on BNBchain.

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

From the perspective of token holdings, 93.7% of USD1 (corresponding 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 token scale of USD1, we find that its market value was only about 130 million before May 1, 2025, but on May 1 itself, the scale surged to 2.13 billion, increasing by nearly 2 billion dollars overnight.

Growth curve of USD1 scale, source: CMC

This scale of surge mainly comes from MGX, an Abu Dhabi investment company, making a $2 billion equity investment in Binance in May 2025, where it chose USD1 as the payment currency in the transaction. Currently, the scale of USD1 tokens remaining in Binance’s address is also around $2 billion.

This means:

After Binance accepted a USD 1 investment from the Abu Dhabi investment firm MGX, it did not convert it into US dollars or other stablecoins, making it the largest holder of USD 1, accounting for 92.8% of the total USD 1 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 the London-based crypto fund Re7 to launch a USD1 stablecoin vault on the Ethereum lending protocol Euler Finance and the Binance Chain staking platform Lista, in order to expand the influence of USD1 within the Ethereum and BNB Chain ecosystems. Lista is the main BNB staking platform funded by Binance Labs.

In addition, the largest decentralized lending platform Aave has also initiated a proposal to introduce USD1 into Aave on the Ethereum and BNBchain markets, and the draft has currently been approved by vote.

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

The competitive advantage of World Liberty

The competitive advantage of World Liberty is straightforward: the powerful influence of the Trump family in politics gives this project an inherent advantage in certain types of business development that other projects do not possess. This project may also serve as a channel for the transfer of benefits that individuals, organizations, and even countries with a demand for Trump in business and politics might be willing to explore.

Binance issued USD1, issued by World Liberty, as a funding vehicle, accepting a massive investment from the Abu Dhabi investment firm MGX, and subsequently held it interest-free (which effectively supports USD1’s TVL), and quickly launched USD1, which is the best example.

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

The Trump family’s channels for receiving benefits are very numerous, and World Liberty may not necessarily be the one chosen by the deliverers. ( Regarding the various means by which the Trump family gathers wealth, you can read the article published by Bloomberg in late May of this year:

THE TRUMP FAMILY’S MONEY-MAKING MACHINE

A text, very diverse )

The WLFI token itself is decoupled from the value of the World Liberty project (which will be detailed in the token model section below).

The Trump family may essentially abandon the heavy operation of the project during or even after the sale of tokens, soft exit (referencing all the cryptocurrency assets previously issued by Trump, from Trump tokens to various NFTs).

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 Donald Trump, the 45th and 47th President of the United States, along with his three sons—Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, and the only 17-year-old Barron Trump.

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

In the project’s “Golden Book”, the four members of the Trump family are defined in this way as well:

Nonetheless, the emission positions of the four members of Trump are ahead of many 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 minor detail is that Donald Trump himself, as well as another “honorary Co-Founder” Steven Witkoff (who was previously titled Co-Founder on the official website, now changed to “honorary Co-Founder”), both have a nearly invisible small footnote “1” added to their position descriptions, with an explanation of this footnote placed at the bottom of the webpage in small print: “Removed upon taking office.” This means that once the individual takes office, his “honorary Co-Founder” title will be removed.

This is a typical compliance practice aimed at preventing conflicts of interest between government officials and company interests while performing 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 Trump’s long-time business partner, New York real estate mogul Steven Witkoff, who serves as the honorary co-founder. He is the founder and chairman of the Witkoff Group and has known Donald Trump since the 1980s. The two have maintained a long-standing relationship, often playing golf together, and are well-known as “old friends and business partners.”

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

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

Apart from political and business celebrities, the technology and operations of WLFI are mainly handled by people from the cryptocurrency industry. Zak Folkman and Chase Herro, both co-founders, are serial entrepreneurs in the cryptocurrency space. They previously founded the DeFi platform Dough Finance, but the project failed early on due to a hacker attack, making their entrepreneurial experience hard 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 owned by the Trump family.

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

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

The Trump family’s equity changes in the World Liberty Financial project.

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

From the initial 75% to 40%, the equity that has decreased may have been transferred to Sun Yuchen, DWF Labs, and the Aqua 1 Foundation, which recently announced 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 the team allocated 35% of the tokens for the token sale, but currently only 25% of the public sale has been completed, and there is still no answer on how to handle the remaining 10%.

In addition, the tokens of WLFI, aside from the public offering portion which clearly states an expected lock-up period in December as per the additional terms, do not have specific unlocking conditions and times for the other portions of the tokens. However, currently, like the tokens from the public offering portion, they are all in a non-transferable state.

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

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

Token Function

WLFI is a purely governance token. WLFI does not have any dividend or profit rights and does not represent a claim to equity in the project company. Its value mainly comes from participating in governance.

Distribution of protocol revenue

The official white paper of WLFI states the handling of protocol income for WLFI as follows:

“The initial $30 million protocol net income will be deposited into a reserve controlled by WLF (at this time, WLF refers to the project, later changed to WLFI) through multi-signature, to be used for operational expenses, compensation, and obligations. The protocol net income includes WLF income from all channels, including but not limited to platform usage fees, token sales, advertising revenue, or other sources of income, after deducting the 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 most of the fees received for the deployment of the protocol.”

In other words, the revenue from the protocol mainly goes to the entity companies behind WLFI (although these companies have committed to using a large portion of the fees to support the protocol), but it is clear that the WLFI token itself does not have a direct link to business revenue.

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

Since the core business of WLFI is stablecoin, we can refer to the valuation level of its main competitor Circle, which is already listed, and use its “market cap/stablecoin market cap” ratio to “roughly” estimate the reasonable valuation range for the WLFI token.

As of the end of June, the size of USDC was approximately 61.7 billion.

At the same time, Circle’s market capitalization was $41.1 billion, and if options, convertible bonds, and others are taken into account, the approximate fully diluted market capitalization is $47.1 billion.

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

If we calculate based on the current stablecoin scale of WLFI at 2.2 billion, then the market value of the WLFI project is 22*0.66~0.76, corresponding to a project valuation between 1.452 to 1.672 billion US dollars, 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 around the breakeven point for the first round of public investors. There are high expectations for WLFI, and possible reasons include:

WLFI was initially not fully unlocked, and its circulating market value is much lower than the FDV, allowing WLFI to enjoy a higher premium.

WLFI is in its early stages, and its potential growth rate is much higher than Circle.

WLFI has strong political resources and should have a “Trump premium,” with many projects eager to collaborate with WLFI.

The sentiment and bubbles 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 and enjoy high market sentiment.

……

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

Stablecoins are a business with a very strong network effect, and leaders should have a stronger competitive advantage and higher valuation premium compared to new players (consider the comparison of the earning capacity of the number one in the field, Tether, with the second, Circle).

The income from the WLFI project is unrelated to WLFI, and the WLFI token lacks value capture, thus it should be heavily discounted during valuation.

Currently, 93% of the market value of WFLI’s stablecoin is supported by Binance, which naturally results in very low adoption and severely inflated trading volume.

WLFI may just be one of the many “white label licensing projects” of the Trump family, and they may be as ruthless in selling and operating it as they are with Trump tokens and a series of Trump NFTs, making it potentially unfeasible for long-term investment.

The liquidity in the crypto market, especially for altcoins, has long dried up. Secondary players hardly believe any stories that lack solid business data support, and most new coins that are launched are in free fall.

……

As an investor, which side of the opinion do you tend to adopt? Different people have different views.

In the author’s view, the short-term price trend of the WLFI token after its launch will hinge on two factors. On one hand, it depends on the final content and timing of the passage of the Genius Act. More importantly, it hinges on whether the Trump family is willing to place WLFI in a relatively core position as a medium for interest exchange amidst various interests and transactions. This is specifically reflected in how “influential individuals\business entities\sovereign states” actively embed USD1 (even if symbolically) into their business processes in order to gain political and commercial benefits, such as using USD1 as investment currency (for equity investment() or settlement currency (for 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 streams.

Let us wait and see the development after WLFI is launched.

So, when will the WLFI token be transferable?

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