Well, the much-hyped token from the Trump-backed World Liberty Financial platform is finally out there. WLFI, as it’s called, started trading this week. But if you were expecting a huge splash, the initial reaction seems a bit more like a cautious toe-dip into the water. The buzz was certainly there in the lead-up, but the actual price action has been, well, a little underwhelming so far.
A Rocky Start on the Charts
According to the data from CoinGecko, the WLFI token has already seen a drop of around 12% since it began trading. It’s trying to find its footing near $0.24, which might be its first real test of support. Earlier on Monday, it actually swung between a high of about $0.33 and a low that dipped to $0.23. That’s a pretty wide range for a debut, and it leaves the current price sitting noticeably below that initial peak.
Maybe the market is just taking a wait-and-see approach. It’s hard to say.
Not a “Memecoin,” Says Trump Jr.
The project’s promoters are clearly trying to position this as something serious. Donald Trump Jr. took to X to make the case, arguing that WLFI isn’t just some speculative joke. He called it the “governance backbone of a real ecosystem” that’s focused on “America FIRST” principles. The platform itself, World Liberty Financial, was set up last fall with the former president listed as a “co-founder emeritus” alongside his sons.
The setup is a bit unusual. They created a massive 100 billion tokens from the get-go. About a quarter of those were sold off, raising a claimed $550 million. But here’s the catch—those tokens couldn’t be traded on the open market until recently. A vote last month finally unlocked them for trading, which technically gives the whole batch a paper value in the billions.
Political and Financial Entanglements
And this is where things get tricky. Public disclosures show Donald Trump himself held a huge chunk of these tokens—something like 15.75 billion of them. At today’s price, that’s a paper fortune worth billions. It’s this kind of overlap that has critics making noise.
Senator Elizabeth Warren and others have pointed out the potential for a major conflict of interest here. The concern is that financial stakes this large could shape policy and regulatory decisions if there were a future administration. It’s a valid point, I think.
The company isn’t stopping with WLFI, either. They’ve already launched a dollar-pegged stablecoin, and a major market maker has talked about moving reserves into it. It feels like they’re building a whole parallel financial system. Whether it gains broader trust beyond a core group of supporters is the real question nobody can answer yet.
