Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is pushing the Trump Organization’s new crypto platform, which was just renamed from “The DeFiant Ones” to “World Liberty Financial.”
In a post to his 90 million followers on X, the former president shared a video of himself with a voiceover: “This afternoon, I'm laying out my plan to ensure the United States becomes the crypto capital of the planet. They want to strangle you. They want to put you out of business. We will not allow that.”
It was unclear who Trump meant by “they,” and a spokesperson for his campaign did not immediately respond to CNBC's questions about the announcement.
In his post, Trump tagged a verified X-account called “World Liberty Fi,” or WLFI. The account has more than 20,000 followers and a handful of posts that began on August 22.
Trump's sons Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump are also involved in the project.
“Excited to announce the launch of @WorldLibertyFi! A new era in finance has dawned,” Eric said in a post on X on Wednesday.
The crypto project's accompanying Telegram channel, which was also renamed World Liberty Financial, had more than 52,000 subscribers as of Thursday morning, and the number is growing.
The announcement came a day after Trump launched a new round of his NFT trading cards.
Collect trump cards
Source: Collecttrumpcards.com
Like the crypto platform, the non-fungible tokens are a private Trump family venture in the digital currency space and have no official connection to Trump's presidential campaign.
But the campaign and the private companies are intertwined, promoting the NFTs and the crypto platform as part of Trump's political brand and marketing them to his supporters.
For Trump, these private crypto companies offer a way to both attract crypto voters and donors and make money.
The Republican presidential candidate tends to be a pro-cryptocurrency candidate and has become increasingly optimistic about the industry.
Donations and expressions of support from the crypto voting bloc followed. The latest count from the Trump camp put the total amount of crypto donations at $25 million. CNBC could not independently verify this figure.
Some details about World Liberty
Until Thursday, it was unclear what exactly the World Liberty Financial platform would do and whether the project was ready for operation.
Two of Trump's sons, Eric and Donald Trump Jr., have given different portrayals of what the digital bank wants to offer users.
Trump's eldest son recently said the family is working on developing a crypto platform that could compete with the traditional banking system.
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“I think there was a lot of inequality because only certain people could get funding. […] So the idea of decentralized finance is obviously very attractive to people like me who no longer have a bank account,” Donald Trump Jr. said in the interview with Locals.
Eric, meanwhile, told the New York Post that the project is about digital real estate, which could mean tokenizing assets in the real world or selling digitized versions of assets in the metaverse.
The former president described the project to his 7.5 million followers on Truth Social last week as an opportunity to “take a stand – together.”
“For too long, the average American has been squeezed by the big banks and financial elites,” Trump wrote.
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