Original | Odaily Planet Daily (@OdailyChina)

Author｜Azuma (@azuma_eth)

On the evening of April 15, the Trump family's crypto project World Liberty Financial (WLFI), which has recently been mired in public opinion turmoil, officially released a community proposal regarding the "unlocking of WLFI shares for early supporters, founders, teams, and partners." Unsurprisingly, this once again made WLFI the focus of public opinion.

• Odaily Note: For details on the recent public opinion controversy surrounding WLFI, please refer to "Brother Sun confronts the Trump family for 'rights protection,' WLFI is the crypto industry harvester"

Public Offering History and Early Unlocking Situation

There is no need to elaborate on WLFI's basic information; here is a brief review of the project's public offering history and early unlocking situation.

WLFI has a total supply of 100 billion coins and has previously opened two rounds of public pre-sales.

• The first round of the pre-sale started in October 2024, priced at $0.015 per coin, with a total of 20 billion coins (20% of the total supply). The first round of WLFI pre-sale progressed slowly because the market was filled with a lot of FUD, but after Trump issued the coins, WLFI's popularity gradually rose, and it successfully sold 20 billion WLFI tokens for raising $300 million on January 20, 2025.
• After the first round of pre-sale ended, WLFI immediately launched the second round of pre-sale, priced at $0.05 per coin, with a total of 5 billion coins (5% of the total supply). The second round of pre-sale sold out on March 14, 2025, raising $250 million.
• Aside from the two rounds of public sales, according to WLFI's official token economic model, the project also pre-sold a total of 8.893 billion tokens (8.893% of the supply) to strategic investors and institutional participants, priced at $0.1 per coin.

In summary, WLFI has sold a total of 33.893 billion tokens through pre-sales (33.893% of the total supply).

On September 1, 2025, WLFI officially launched, and pre-sale participants welcomed their first unlocking—users who participated in the two rounds of public pre-sale could unlock 20% of their tokens after signing the token unlocking agreement and completing the activation process, while the remaining 80% unlocking would need to wait for subsequent governance situations. The shares of institutional investors have not yet been unlocked.

After WLFI launched, it was actively speculated by the market. On the day of launch, the on-chain price briefly exceeded $0.45, and prices in some second and third-tier exchanges even surged above $1 in a short span. However, in the following months, the price of WLFI gradually started to fall from above $0.2, and as of the time of this writing, it was reported at about $0.08.

For users who participated in the first round of WLFI pre-sale (cost price $0.015), even if only 20% of the tokens were unlocked, as long as they had sold in the past few months, they had basically recouped their principal or even made a profit; however, for users in the second round of pre-sale (cost price $0.05), most had not yet recouped their principal unless they had capitalized on high prices at the beginning of trading.

Most users initially were not too worried about this— as long as the remaining 80% could be unlocked, surely they would be able to make some profit, right? But with WLFI's price continuously dropping, pre-sale users' anticipation for the subsequent unlocking became more urgent.

However, no one expected that WLFI would encounter some issues with the unlocking rules.

WLFI's Unlocking Proposal, oh no, it's an Unlocking Notification

According to the proposal released by WLFI official on the forum, the unlocking rules for the remaining WLFI shares of early supporters (pre-sale users), founders, teams, consultants, and partners are as follows:

• For pre-sale users (involving 17,043,666,558 WLFI, as some pre-sale users have not yet claimed their tokens, the number may change), all locked tokens will undergo a two-year lock-up period, after which they will enter a two-year linear unlocking period— meaning it will takefour years to fully unlock.
• For founders, team members, consultants, and partners (involving 45,238,585,647 WLFI), 10% of all locked tokens (i.e., 4,523,858,565 WLFI) will be permanently destroyed and removed from the total supply, while the remaining 90% (40,714,727,082 WLFI) will undergo a two-year lock-up period, followed by a three-year linear unlocking period— meaning it will takefive years to fully unlock.

Now, here's the catch. Most users who initially considered investing in WLFI were drawn by the reputation of the Trump family, but now you are asking them to wait four more years to get their tokens. By that time, Trump's presidential term will have long ended, and not to mention whether Trump even remembers that his sons were involved in this project, his status is also a question...

Another point that must be mentioned is that, perhaps to showcase WLFI's decentralized spirit, WLFI has also "humanely" stated in the proposal that if the proposal committee passes it, the tokens of holders who have not clearly accepted the ownership plan will continue to be locked indefinitely—translated, that means: "You can disagree; if you don't agree, your tokens will be locked for a lifetime!"

Perhaps anticipating strong resistance from the community, WLFI even conducted comment control on its official governance forum. As shown in the picture below, just by scrolling through, you can see a large number of uniformly formatted replies that are suspected to be from bots (all starting with YES).

It's rare to find a reply from a real person, and it said: "Damn, I want to send this group of beasts to jail!"

Speculations on WLFI Team's Motives

Finally, let's guess the motives of the WLFI team. Some friends are asking why the WLFI founders and team would actively destroy 10% of the tokens; personally, I believe there are two possible scenarios.

One is that the WLFI team has great love and is self-sacrificing for the community. The other possibility is that the destruction of 10% of the tokens is just a scheme to appease community sentiments (I have sacrificed so much, it's not easy), after all, the value of a 10% that cannot be fully unlocked for a few years is questionable. The WLFI team may actually want to lock it all up because the current distribution of chips aligns with their maximum interests. Although they do not get to visibly own their tokens, there will always be some hidden allocations under different names—that is the purpose of the token economic model.

The above is purely personal speculation. If you ask me which scenario I believe more, it’s definitely the first one.

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