The people behind World Liberty Financial – former President Donald Trump, his sons and his business partners – have made many promises about the revolutionary potential of the cryptocurrency platform. It will free “the average American” from “the big banks and financial elites,” Trump posted on Truth Social. It will help the unbanked and unbanked, Donald Trump Jr. said in an X Space. No one involved in the project has said how this will happen or what exactly World Liberty Financial is doing. The mystery service is now accepting registrations – but not from everyone.
Despite sparse details about World Liberty Financial, the company's whitelists are now open, the company announced on X and Truth Social on Monday. The platform now allows US-based accredited investors and non-US persons to begin the Know Your Customer (KYC) verification process. It's worth reiterating: neither Trump nor anyone else involved in World Liberty Financial has explained in detail what service the platform actually provides.
Here’s what we know: World Liberty Financial has stated its goal is to drive “mass adoption of stablecoins and decentralized finance.” Near the end of a more than two-hour X Space announcement of the project, World Liberty Financial financial advisor Corey Caplan said it would “sell and otherwise distribute governance tokens called WLFI.” CoinDesk It was previously reported that World Liberty Financial would be built on the Ethereum blockchain and Aave, a decentralized finance platform, and would focus on a “credit account system.”
CoinDesk also received a white paper about the project, which stated that 70 percent of WLFI would be owned by World Liberty Financial's founding members, team and service providers. But during the platform announcement stream, Caplan said that the “fake news media” had gotten the details wrong and that 63 percent of tokens would be sold to the public.
“Additional information about World Liberty Financial is intended to be available only to individuals who have been pre-qualified by completing a KYC process,” the World Liberty Financial website states. In a post on
The Securities and Exchange Commission defines accredited investors as people with a net worth of at least $1 million – excluding their value Main residence – either individually or jointly with a spouse or partner. Your annual income must be at least $200,000 alone or at least $300,000 in the last two years with a spouse or partner. Additional requirements apply to freelancers and companies.
The SEC estimates that more than 24 million American households qualified as accredited investors in 2022. That's a not-insignificant number of Americans – nearly 20 percent of U.S. households, a number partly due to recent inflation. But it's still a far cry from the unbanked and underserved communities that Trump and his sons claimed World Liberty Financial was supposed to help. And to reiterate, we still don't know what it does.