Holders of World Liberty Financial’s WLFI token can now buy and sell it for the first time after a July decision to make the token tradable came into effect on Monday.
The WLFI token trades at $0.26 after it began trading onchain 1pm London time, giving the project a market value of over $7.6 billion, per CoinGecko data.
But there’s a catch: only 24% of the token’s 100 billion supply is currently in circulation.
The remaining 76% is made up of non-tradeable tokens sold to the public, tokens set aside for the project’s co-founders, team, and advisers, and tokens for user incentives."
Tokens with low circulating supplies can more easily maintain high valuations.
But when the issuing project releases more tokens into circulation later, the price often falls as selling pressure increases. Supply and demand in action.
Such practices have been widely panned in the crypto industry.
“Only short-term scalpers who see a low circulating supply as an opportunity for quick gains are buying these,” Marc Weinstein, a partner at crypto investment firm Mechanism Capital, previously told DL News.
Huge valuation
World Liberty Financial is a decentralised finance protocol backed by President Trump, his family, and several Trump allies, including US envoy Steve Witkoff and his two sons.
The $7.6 billion market value makes WLFI the 30th most valuable crypto token, in between Sky’s USDS stablecoin and the Shiba Inu memecoin.
The project’s fully diluted valuation, which includes all 100 billion tokens that will ever be released, stands at around $26 billion.
The WLFI token’s soaring market value also adds another $760 million to the paper value of President Trump’s crypto holdings.
Political experts say that Trump’s swelling crypto portfolio, coupled with his administration overseeing a regulatory and legislative overhaul of the industry, raises conflict of interest concerns.
Trump-linked crypto projects have drawn the ire of his political opponents, who have decried them as “open corruption.”
The White House refutes the allegations.
“President Trump’s assets are in a trust managed by his children. There are no conflicts of interest,” Anna Kelly, the deputy press secretary, told DL News in May.
Small supply
Of the WLFI tokens that are currently tradable, only around 6.8% appear to be liquid according to information provided by the project.
Almost half of the circulating tokens are still held by the project.
Another 7.7 billion tokens are held by Alt5 Sigma Corporation, a crypto treasury company that bought $750 million worth of WLFI from the project in August for $0.20 per token, 30% lower than the token’s current market value.
That leaves just 2.8 billion tokens that the project said it has designated for liquidity and marketing purposes, and just over 4 billion allocated to public sale participants.
When World Liberty Financial gave token holders the ability to vote on whether or not to make WLFI tradable in July, it stipulated that not all the tokens sold to the public would be made tradable immediately.
The 4 billion WLFI unlocked today represent just 20% of what those participants bought.
The remaining 80% of sale tokens will be subject to a second community vote to determine their unlock and release schedule.
However, with sale participants paying between $0.015 and $0.05 per token, they’re already sitting on substantial profits.
