TRUMP unveils new cryptocurrency platform after calling cryptocurrencies a 'scam' during his presidency

Tuesday, September 17, 2024 - Former US president Donald Trump along with his sons and entrepreneurs launched a cryptocurrency platform on Monday night, September 16.

Donald Trump headlined an event billed as the unveiling of a crypto platform promoted by the Republican nominee.

Little was revealed about the Trump family crypto project during a two-hour online presentation other than an offer to let people buy digital “tokens” giving them a vote in platform decisions.

The project, World Liberty Financial, will be part of the decentralized finance segment of digital assets and is supposed to help with financial security and being able to transact freely, Trump’s son Donald Jr. said in an X Spaces livestream on Monday.

World Liberty Financial intends to offer services based on so-called decentralized finance, a mechanism that eliminates the need for an intermediary such as a bank to carry out transactions with a third party, the politics-laced discussion indicated.

Decentralized finance, or DeFi, is based on blockchain technology, which keeps a theoretically open but tamper-proof record of transactions.

World Liberty Financial will enable users to lend or borrow cryptocurrencies to or from one another, a service already offered by many platforms.

Trump's son, Donald Trump Jr. touted this as “the start of a financial revolution,” during a session streamed on X, formerly Twitter.

Zachary Folkman and Chase Herro, the linchpins of the project and established cryptocurrency entrepreneurs, said the platform would primarily use “stablecoins”, which are backed by a traditional currency, most often the dollar.

As a result, they are free from the sometimes brutal fluctuations experienced by digital currencies untethered to real-world money.

World Liberty Financial wants to attract the masses to cryptocurrencies, creating a platform easily accessible to people, Folkman said.

Project leaders said they would sell tokens that give owners the right to take part in the governance of the platform, with 63 per cent of them offered to the public, 20 per cent going to the founding team and the rest set aside as rewards for users.

No timetable for the project was disclosed.

This comes as a surprise because during his presidency Trump referred to cryptocurrencies as a scam, but has since radically changed his position, presenting himself as a “pro-bitcoin president” if elected in November.