Trump-Backed Crypto Smells Like A Rug-Pull

If this is real, there’s a serious fucking glitch in the matrix…

Sometime on September 11th I started noticing that there were tweets showing up in my timeline referencing some “Trump Crypto”, called “World Liberty Financial”, but I didn’t recognize any of the handles and didn’t really spend any time on them, mentally dismissing them as pushing one of the countless crypto scams, memecoins or otherwise flakey endeavours that may enjoy a brief “pop” before ultimately flaming out.

The emails from my Bitcoin Capitalist subscribers started rolling in on the 12th, asking me about it. One reader asks:

“Wondering if you will do a special on Trump entering  the fray of Crypto with worldlibertyfinancial[.]com and how this plays out on many different fronts.  Most importantly here in the States why he would do this at this time?   

We would love to know your insight.” 

Indeed. My off-the-cuff response:

Frankly, this has “shitcoin” written all over it and I can’t believe he’s doing this in the run up to the election.

I thought the entire thing was an celeb endorsement scam but it looks like the Trumps are really behind it.

Shaking my head, frankly.

That’s my first take. I’ll dig into it.

I’ve since done so and at first it really boggled my mind that this could possibly be something that is really backed by the Trumps. At first it looked like something his kids are mixed up in (Eric Trump and Don Jr are purportedly listed in a leaked white paper as the project’s “Web3 ambassadors”, and Baron, who is eighteen years old, is their “DeFi Visionary”).

On August 22, @realDonaldTrump and @DonaldTrumpJr Twitter accounts – tweeted a Telegram channel called Defiant1s  announcing the time to take back finance “from the elites”.

Then there is a tweet on August 29 where the @TheRealDonaldTrump account posts a video montage of Trump’s crypto plan for the US,  cribbed from prior speeches, including his keynote speech at the Bitcoin 2024 conference in Nashville in July – and that tweet also tags @worldlibertyfi – the “official” account for World Liberty Financial that was created in July.

Then on September 12th, the @realDonaldTrump account tweeted out an announcement of the coming launch, which is purportedly happening on a Twitter space on September 16th:

The announcement was presented by “Rug Radio”(!) and “World Liberty Financial.

In the world of crypto the phrase “rugged”, “rug pull” and “rugging” has a very particular meaning: it’s the equivilent of a “pump-and-dump” in the stock world, where some garbage penny stock gets promoted and pushed and the insiders, who loaded up beforehand, unload at the top.

In the crypto version, a “rug pull” is when people are lured into some token project, like an ICO, the funds raised ostensibly to be used to carry out the project’s stated mission – but, what happens instead is the project founders either disappear with the funds, leaving the investors with now-worthless tokens – or they just sell the token itself into the hype-cycle, before the inevitable crash.

Even the WLFI tokenomics scream “rug-pull”

We don’t know much about the WLFI tokenomics. Coindesk apparently has a copy of a  “leaked” whitepaper but nobody else has seen it, and Coindesk haven’t released it, nor have they even replicated any screengrabs or choice excerpts from it – which I’d expect if somebody had a copy of something like that.

The tokenomics behind WLFI – the governance token for World Liberty Financial are a throwback to the 2017 ICO boom, but even more egregious.

According to Coindesk:

“A whopping 70% of Trump-backed World Liberty Financial’s WLFI tokens will be reserved for the project’s insiders…Of the remaining 30% of the tokens distributed via a public sale, the founding team will also receive a portion of the proceeds”

and,

When asked if a 70% allocation to insiders is high, one source who advises projects on such matters replied, “LMAO. Nice joke, ser.”

Apparently the public tokens will also be locked indefinitely, meaning non-transferrable, and thus – it would appear, much harder to actually profit from selling (they could, in theory, earn protocol fees, but we’d have to actually see the white paper to know for sure).

The Coindesk article goes on to break out some of the principles behind World Liberty Financial, including a founder of a DeFi platform that got hacked in July and another that runs a competitor to OnlyFans.

It all just looks so really, obviously bad that I’m having a hard time believing it.

There are two possible scenarios: Shitcoin or Rat-fuck

When I sat down to research and write this piece, the entire angle was “I can’t believe Trump is pulling a shitcoin launch this close to the election”.

The original title was “Tump Backed Crypto Smells Like A Shitcoin”.

The more I started digging into it, the less sense any of this made.

Scenario #1) Trump really is the “Chief Crypto Ambassador” for World Liberty Financial

After winning over much of the Bitcoin space in Nashville just a couple months ago, this is the surest way to to alienate them:

Scam pump and dump promoter.

Right before an election.

Insanity.

— FRANCIS – BULLBITCOIN.COM (@francispouliot_) September 12, 2024

Pretty well sums it all up.

Let’s keep something else in mind:

Trump has already been fighting lawfare on all sides, the Dems are trying to block his path to the presidency any way they can – and now – after he just promised to fire SEC Chair Garry Gensler on day one if he wins in November, he’s going to hand the guy the perfect setup to indict him before the election?

The more I worked on this piece, the more something just feels off

Scenario #2) This is some sort of psyop

The more I look at it, the more I think the Trump World Liberty Financial deal is either a psyop or a serious glitch in the matrix.

The announcement is presented by “RUG RADIO” ffs.

Like what the hell? pic.twitter.com/1UkW0g5BIW

— Mark Jeftovic, The ₿itcoin Capitalist (@StuntPope) September 13, 2024

The worldlibertyfinancial[.]com domain was registered in June, and there isn’t much more than that Telegram channel. Nothing wrong with that, per se – but it’s also where 100% of the memecoins and 110% of the shitcoins and 1,000% of the scamcoins are run from.

It was created August 6th and started posting about the Trump DeFi project on August 15:

Donald Trump hasn’t mentioned any of this from his Truth Social account. Neither Donald Jr. nor Eric Trump have mentioned World Liberty Financial by name on Twitter.

In early September Lara Trump and Tiffany Trump also  tweeted about World Liberty Financial, but claimed they were hacked.

As weird as it may seem, those videos posted via @realDonaldTrump  tagging @WorldLibertyFi and together with the one from @DonaldTrumpJr promoting the Telegram channel would fit if those accounts were also compromised (tbh, the one from Sept 12 with Trump announcing the coming livestream could seem like a deepfake, who knows these days).

But if that were the case, why aren’t the Trumps or anybody else commenting on it or denying the affiliation or deleting those tweets?

If so many Trump family accounts were hacked, and limited to Twitter and no other social media platforms, one possibility could be a security weakness particular to twitter, or how the members of the Trump family interact with that platform, or perhaps a rogue operator within the company.

But even if this were the case, to what end? Is this just the mother of all shitcoin pumps? Or a more complex rat-fucking psyop to discredit Trump? I can’t believe I just typed that because it sounds like something straight out of the bowels of Qanon.

In their Telegram channel, World Liberty lists multiple smart contract auditors reviewing their code, and state the entire project is a fork of Aave, whom they are actively collaborating with.

None of those accounts have ever mentioned World Liberty or acknowledged the WLFI project.

Well @peckshield @fuzzland_ @zokyo_io @BlockSecTeam – can you confirm you’ve audited the code?

Can @aave confirm collaborating with @worldlibertyfi ? pic.twitter.com/HwxkGsykKH

— Mark Jeftovic, The ₿itcoin Capitalist (@StuntPope) September 13, 2024

But something doesn’t add up, and if this is just a pump-and-dump crypto scam and Trump the candidate is involved then it truly is mind-boggling.

I guess we’ll have a better idea come September 16th.

Update: Martin Shkreli (re-)enters the picture

After I posted this last night, I received an email from a credible source who wishes to remain unnamed (hey, if the MSM can do it…) that disgraced pharma CEO,  and convicted felon, Martin Shkreli is behind it (“he is controlling Barron”).

In June, Shkreli reportedly launched a different shitcoin, the “DJT” token on Solana, and claimed he was doing so in partnership with Barron Trump. I remember the story, I had it in my notes for the July issue of TBC but cut it as I surmised then that Shkreli was up some to sort of celebrity endorsement scam and even suspected at the time it was all a ruse to damage the presidential campaign of The Donald (in other words, a psyop).

I asked my source if there was confusion with the earlier DJT token and he/she/they/them/xat replied:

“He [Shkreli] is the mastermind behind all their crypto affairs “

Some mastermind. The DJT token provides a textbook case of what our aforementioned story arc of a rug-pull:

The fully diluted valuation is only $2.4 million (although effectively zero because there’s no liquidity) – down from a peak of $169 million when it launched (10 billion token supply, at 0.017).

This is what most altcoin, and all memecoin and scamcoin charts look like, over the long haul – and this is what I expect WLFI will look like, whether Shkreli is mixed up in it or not. Neither the Coindesk or Bloomberg piece mentions him.

If the Trumps really are putting their name to this, they either don’t understand what they’ve gotten themselves into, or they think they can make so much money off it when it pumps that it won’t matter.

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