On Monday, former President Donald Trump made good on his months of flirting with the crypto industry.
During a two-hour livestream on X Spaces, Trump, his sons, and their business partner Chase Herro, who once described himself as the “dirtbag of the internet,” debuted a new crypto endeavor called World Liberty Financial. Trump’s appearance was largely promotional. In his opening remarks, Trump did not speak directly about World Liberty Financial,instead touching on Sunday’s thwarted assassination attempt, giving a condensed version of his campaign stump speech, and outlining his hopes for the future of cryptocurrency in the U.S.
“If we don’t do it, China’s going to do it,” Trump said. “China’s doing it anyways and if we don’t do it we’re not going to be the biggest and we have to be the biggest and the best.”
The Trumps themselves don’t own or operate any part of World Liberty Financial, according to Bloomberg. Instead the project appears to be run by Herro and Zachary Folkman, who used to teach classes on how to pick up women. Herro and Folkman were introduced to Trump’s sons via real-estate investor Steve Witkoff, he said during the livestream.
The two also earned the praise of Donald Trump Jr, who touted their expertise in macroeconomics. “You could put them in a board room at Goldman Sachs and they’d smoke the people in the room,” he said.
World Liberty Financial is a project in what is known as DeFi, or decentralized finance, in which users of a platform can lend and borrow crypto to another without an institution, like a bank, in the middle. During the livestream, Donald Trump Jr. spoke of the family’s own experience being debanked, a term referring to the difficulties certain individuals or companies have in accessing credit lines from established financial institutions.
“There was a time period where the Trumps could have picked up the phone and called any CEO, of any bank, and got a loan from anyone in the world for any project with low (loan-to-value ratio) and things like that, then we got into the political arena and like that it was turned off,” he said.
In a decentralized financial network, individuals can broker such deals with each other directly with transactions recorded on smart contracts stored on the blockchain. Folkman and Herro had previously been involved in a DeFi platform called Dough Finance. Dough Finance had previously been hacked, according to reporting from CoinDesk, which also obtained a white paper related to World Liberty Financial.
As part of the project, World Liberty Financial will launch a new cryptocurrency that will be a non-transferable token that will allow holders to vote on governance matters related to the platform. The token is somewhat similar to the idea of voting shares in a publicly held company.
World Liberty Financial did not respond to a request for comment sent via X.
Trump’s sons have teased the project for several weeks. An earlier version of it was called the DeFiant Ones, a play on words with DeFi. In August, Eric Trump hinted at the platform in a post on X. “I have truly fallen in love with Crypto/DeFi,” he wrote. “Stay tuned for a big announcement…”
I have truly fallen in love with Crypto / DeFi. Stay tuned for a big announcement…@Trump@realDonaldTrump@DonaldJTrumpJr
— Eric Trump (@EricTrump) August 6, 2024
In recent months on the campaign trail, Trump has warmed to crypto. At a major Bitcoin conference in Nashville, Trump said he wanted to make the U.S. the “crypto capital of the world.” He himself has dabbled in digital markets with several NFT collections, including one of his mugshot. In July, the Trump campaign raised some $3 million from various donors with ties to the world of cryptocurrencies. That happened just a few months after he became the first presidential candidate to accept campaign donations in cryptocurrency.
All that is a stark contrast to where he stood in the past. In 2021, the former president called Bitcoin a “scam against the dollar.”
On Monday’s livestream, Donald Trump Jr. acknowledged he too had been a relative latecomer to cryptocurrency and decentralized finance. However, he said his family’s recent difficulties securing lines of credit helped him change his mind. “We went from being the elite in that world to being totally canceled and it changed our perspective so much,” he said. “We understand what so many Americans are going through.”