WLFI positions itself as a DeFi yield gateway for the U.S. public
75% of protocol revenue flows directly to insiders
Ownership is heavily concentrated among the Trump and Witkoff families
Regulatory and political risks overshadow otherwise functional tech
USD1’s success depends more on governance and compliance than yield mechanics
World Liberty Financial blends DeFi yields, political power, and centralized economics into one of crypto’s most controversial experiments.
World Liberty Financial is a testament that if Fortune 500 companies took crypto seriously with a proper PR plan, they’d rank into the top 50 tokens pretty quickly. At the time of recording, they are the 38th largest crypto token, with a $4 billion market cap. However, the owners of WLF face controversy over shady interactions, with media outlets calling them out for mixing politics with personal gain.
Let’s get right into it—this one was a tough one to crack. In its gold paper, World Liberty Financial positions itself as a protocol that opens the doors to democratizing DeFi yields from Aave and Euler Finance for the general American public. On the surface, the protocol appears as a DAT–stablecoin hybrid, where WLFI DAT treasuries are used as collateral to generate yield that is then compounded to issue USD1 stablecoins. The treasury is valued at just over $7 billion, where 96% of the treasury consists of WLFI tokens. On the other hand, the USD1 treasury—operated by crypto custodian BitGo—openly publishes attestation audits on its approximately $2.7 billion treasury, backed by cash and U.S. Treasuries. However, its last report was published in September 2025, following its token unlocks. No official statement pins down the reason why, but reports point toward operational bottlenecks caused by regulatory scrutiny. As if this couldn’t get any more complicated, WLFI also holds a Strategic Treasury as part of its August 2025 expansion plans with ALT5 Sigma Holdings, which I’ll get into later.
At the helm of this operation sits the Trump family, represented by Eric Trump, who owns 60% of the protocol. However, since the September token unlocks following the presale, leadership has started to rotate toward representatives of the Witkoff family, the co-founders who own over 30% of the protocol and are long-time associates of the Trumps. They own the protocol through a web of LLCs, allowing them to legally nominate themselves as non-employees while shielding themselves from liability in their promotional roles. Sounds complicated, but it essentially allows them to bend reality slightly—going as far as nominating President Trump at one point as its Chief Crypto Advocate, before he became President, of course.
Jumping back into tokenomics: $WLFI has a fixed total supply of 100 billion tokens on Ethereum, with no inflation. Apart from being used as collateral to issue USD1 stablecoins, its other utility is purely governance, with zero rights to protocol revenue. WLFI generates revenue through lending fees on Aave and Euler, trading pairs on exchanges, and USD1 yields.
25% of revenue goes back to the treasury for $WLFI buybacks or burns and compounds into minting more USD1
75% of revenue goes directly to the protocol owners For perspective, the Trump entity owns 60% equity but captures 75% of the upside.
Token allocation breaks down as follows:
30% to public sales
33% marked for incentives
30% allocated to co-founders
3.5% to the team and advisors (vested)
At the time of this recording, 27% of the supply is in circulation. The remainder is non-transferable after one year and non-economical, unless decided otherwise in a governance vote. The project has raised $550 million, with a $1.5 billion public presale valuation.
The private sale is where controversies began. Crypto billionaire Justin Sun reportedly invested $75 million into the protocol and was shortly named an official advisor—after which SEC charges against him were dropped. MGX, led by an Abu Dhabi royal family member, announced it would finance a $2 billion transaction on Binance using USD1. Following that transaction, CZ received a presidential pardon, and one of MGX’s sister companies received hundreds of thousands of scarce computer chips. There are also reports tying World Liberty Financial to ALT5 Sigma, which invested $1.5 billion into WLFI tokens for a strategic treasury, as well as links involving foreign political actors. But I’m no longer a journalist—I want to keep us on track in this Whitepaper reading.
On the roadmap front, WLFI has focused on USD1 integrations, token unlocks, and RWA tokenization. And have they been hitting milestones? Yes.
March 2025: USD1 integration announced on the Tron network
September 1, 2025: 5 billion tokens (20% of presale supply) released; the treasury absorbed 7.283 billion tokens net via incentives
Looking ahead to Q1 2026, the protocol is exploring RWA tokenization, multi-chain RWA reserve expansion, and USD1 debit cards—subject to DAO approval and regulatory considerations.
World Liberty Financial faces several risks:
For an industry that stigmatizes centralization and champions decentralization, World Liberty Financial is the complete opposite. It’s an experiment that could open a new meta for TradFi-style asset management on-chain. WLFI tokens function as pseudo-AAVE affiliate tokens, where only 25% of revenue value is redirected via buybacks. USD1 itself doesn’t raise immediate red flags—but the regulatory probes and political entanglements do. Time will tell whether the protocol delivers on its roadmap or whether the 75% revenue skim simply fuels insiders. That’s it for this episode of Whitepaper. I’ll see you on the next one.