Trump-Backed World Liberty Financial To Begin $WLFI Sale, Crypto Users Slam Whitelist Requirements

World Liberty Financial, which was jointly launched by two of Donald Trump's son's announced that the public sale of $WLFI tokens will begin this week, marking one of the biggest milestones in the DeFi project's roadmap.

The crypto venture announced that token sales will kick off Tuesday for "everyone who qualifies through the whitelist." Many users are excited for the token sale, but others expressed frustration over the supposed "weeding out" of middle-class users.

Big Announcements Over the Weekend

Ahead of the upcoming token sale, the DeFi project unveiled its "vision" of how WLFI will help transform DeFi engagement for cryptocurrency users worldwide. Below are key highlights from WLFI's reveal:

• Global DeFi protocol – According to the team's Friday blog post, World Liberty Financial is working to launch a "robust and global decentralized finance protocol that aims to bring permissionless and peer-to-peer digital asset systems to everyone."
• Governance platform – The team will also launch a governance platform that WLFI token holders will use "to help shape the WLFI protocol through governance."
• Bringing in top blockchain leaders – The protocol seeks to "bring together" some of the leading blockchain and tech firms through strategic partnerships "to redefine the landscape of DeFi."
• Aave instance launch – Earlier last week, WLFI proposed to launch an instance on decentralized crypto lending platform Aave. The team explained Friday that the Aave instance launch is subject to a governance vote by both the WLFI governance platform and Aave DAO.

While many crypto users on X expressed excitement over the upcoming token sale, there were many others who called out the announcement for saying it was a "public" sale.

"It's not public when it's just for the 1% accredited investors," one user said, and another said, "once again middle class is weeded out!"

Another user said the token sale is only for "all the rich people and people that aren't U.S. citizens." When WLFI announced early this month that it has opened its whitelists, Republican presidential candidate Trump posted about the whitelists on X.

At the time, the crypto venture explained that the reason why not all Americans will be able to join the lists is "due to the outdated policies and regulations in the U.S." Among the requirements to become an accredited investor and be eligible for the WLFI whitelist is to have a net worth of over $1 million.

A Fishy Project?

One user argued that the crypto community should have been provided with more details about the project first "to win our trust before jumping into a public sale." For instance, the user said there should have been a white paper and tokenomics document release first before the WLFI token sale.

This isn't the first time doubts were raised about the legitimacy of the Trumps' DeFi project. A CoinDesk report previously revealed excerpts of a purported WLFI white paper that showed the project's code was "strikingly similar" to Dough Finance, which was exploited for over $2 million in mid-July.

It remains to be seen how Eric and Donald Trump Jr. will respond to concerns regarding their venture's "public" token sale.