World Liberty Financial, the Trump family’s crypto project, is buying back its own token.
Over the past 12 hours, the project spent $10 million buying just over 59 million WLFI tokens through CoW Swap, a decentralised exchange, onchain records show.
It comes after a September proposal for the project to use fees it generates to buy back and burn WLFI tokens passed a governance vote.
The buybacks have so far done little to spur investor interest, with WLFI trading up just 0.4% over the past 24 hours, per CoinGecko data. The token trades down 50% from its September all-time high.
World Liberty Financial is a decentralised finance protocol that plans to offer lending, borrow, and exchange services using its USD1 stablecoin.
The project came under increased scrutiny earlier in November after a 60 Minutes investigation tied a $2 billion investment deal between crypto exchange Binance and Abu Dhabi’s MGX to former Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao’s recent presidential pardon.
Critics say the deal, which was conducted using World Liberty’s USD1 and catapulted the asset into the top 10 biggest stablecoins, was done as a favour in exchange for the pardon.
Binance CEO Richard Teng, and Zhao’s lawyer Teresa Goody Guillen, have both dismissed claims that the exchange helped boost USD1 before Zhao received the pardon.
Buyback boom
World Liberty Financial sold 35 billion WLFI tokens to investors for a total of $550 million between October and March.
The token allows holders to vote on protocol decisions, although the project does not refer to itself as a decentralised autonomous organisation, or DAO, a type of popular crypto collective based around token holder voting.
It’s not the first time World Liberty has bought back its own token. On October 10, the protocol spent around $9 million buying back almost 51 million tokens.
In recent months, more and more DeFi protocols are experimenting with buying back their own tokens in a bid to shore up investor confidence.
An October report from crypto market maker Keyrock found that the top 12 revenue-distributing DeFi protocols spent almost $800 million on token buybacks and other revenue-sharing activities in July, a more than 400% increase since the start of 2024.
“Much like public companies that use buybacks to signal long-term commitment and instill investor trust, crypto teams leverage them to enhance token value and communicate conviction in the project’s future,” Amir Hajian, the Keyrock researcher who wrote the report, said.
Tim Craig is DL News’ Edinburgh-based DeFi Correspondent. Reach out with tips at [email protected].
