On Monday, former President Donald Trump made good on his months of flirting with the crypto industry.
“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 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.
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…”
