NEW YORK (Reuters) -Some of the digital tokens backing the Trump family’s cryptocurrency venture, World Liberty Financial, began trading on Monday, the cryptocurrency company said.
The World Liberty tokens, known as $WLFI, were sold to investors after the Trump family and its business partners last year launched the venture, a “decentralized finance” platform that has also issued a stablecoin.
In July, investors in the tokens voted to make them tradable, paving the way for their sale and purchase – and potentially boosting the value of the president’s holdings of them. Early investors can sell up to 20% of their holdings, World Liberty has said.
Several of the world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchanges, including Binance, OKX, and Bybit, are offering the tokens on their platforms to trade starting on Monday. The token was last trading at $0.3115, according to CoinGecko.
Since World Liberty’s launch last year, the Trump family has made around $500 million from the project, according to Reuters calculations based on the company’s terms and conditions, transactions traced by crypto analysis firms, and publicly disclosed deals.
The tokens were not made tradable at their initial sale. Instead, they gave holders the right to vote on some changes to the business, such as its underlying code. Early investors have said the primary draw of $WLFI was the connection to Trump and their expectations that the tokens would grow in value due to his backing.
Making the tokens tradable allows investors to determine their price, enabling speculation, earning trading fees for exchanges that list them, and likely stoking interest from a wider swath of crypto investors.
World Liberty and Trump’s other crypto businesses have faced criticism from Democratic lawmakers and government ethics experts who say the Trump family’s forays into the cryptocurrency businesses, at the same time as the president reshapes the regulatory framework that governs digital currencies, represent profound conflicts of interest.
The White House has said repeatedly that Trump’s assets are in a trust managed by his children and that there are no conflicts of interest.
(Reporting by Michelle Conlin, Tommy Reggiori Wilkes and Zaheer Kachwala; Editing by Alex Richardson, Rod Nickel)
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