Trump’s crypto website crashed after its token went on sale

Former President Donald Trump’s cryptocurrency project, World Liberty Financial, launched its token sale on Tuesday — and its website crashed shortly afterward.

The whitelist for the much-hyped but still largely unexplained decentralized finance project opened on September 30th for accredited investors and non-US persons. World Liberty Financial co-founder Zach Folkman claimed on Monday that “well over 100,000 people” had signed up to buy its token WLFI, according to CNBC. As of publication time, the site appeared to be back online.

However, according to blockchain data tracked by Etherscan, just 5,317 unique wallet addresses held the token as of Tuesday afternoon, and World Liberty Financial said it sold more than 532 million tokens of the 20 billion made available for public sale.

Sandy Peng, a WLFI advisor, told CoinDesk that the outages resulted from excessive traffic. “The team wasn’t expecting this level of interest,” Peng said, adding that the website received 72 million unique visits in the first hour after the token launched.

CoinDesk reports that the WLFI token, which will be non-transferrable for now, will be used to govern the World Liberty Financial platform. Holders will be able to have a say in protocol upgrades, technical changes, promotional partnerships, and oversight of security risks. The platform itself will let users borrow and lend cryptocurrency.

Despite Trump and his associates’ promotion of World Liberty Financial as a tool to help unbanked and de-banked people, only those who meet the Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) accredited investor requirements can purchase WLFI. To qualify as an accredited investor, a person must have an income of at least $200,000 (or $300,000 with a spouse) and/or a net worth of at least $1 million, excluding their primary residence.

World Liberty Financial released a so-called “gold paper” about the token on Tuesday, which lists Trump as the “chief crypto associate.” His three sons — Eric, Donald Trump Jr., and Barron — are listed as Web3 Ambassadors. 

According to the paper, the World Liberty Financial protocol “plans to provide users with information and access to third-party DeFi applications, including third party digital wallet providers for acquiring, holding, and transferring stable coins, and non-security digital assets.” Notably, the paper says that the tokens “ARE NOT AVAILABLE FOR U.S. PERSONS” and “HAVE NOT BEEN REGISTERED WITH ANY U.S. OR OTHER AUTHORITY.”