好消息，你投的WLFI要解鎖了；壞消息，得先等川普下班

Original | Odaily (@OdailyChina)

Author｜Azuma (@azuma_eth)

On the evening of April 15th, the official team of the Trump family's crypto project, World Liberty Financial (WLFI), which has been deeply embroiled in controversy recently, released a community proposal regarding the "unlocking of WLFI tokens for early supporters, founders, team, and partners." Unsurprisingly, this once again made WLFI the center of public attention.

• Odaily Note: For details on the recent controversies surrounding WLFI, please refer to "Sun Ge 'Rights Protection' Confronts Trump Family, WLFI is the Real Crypto Scythe".

Public Sale History and Early Unlock Status

There's no need to elaborate on the basic information about WLFI. Here's a brief review of the project's public sale history and early unlock status.

WLFI has a total supply of 100 billion tokens. It previously opened two rounds of public presales to the public.

• The first round of presale began in October 2024, priced at $0.015 per token, with a total of 20 billion tokens (20% of the total supply). The first round progressed slowly initially due to significant FUD in the market at the time. However, after Trump announced the token, WLFI's popularity gradually increased, and it successfully sold all 20 billion WLFI tokens on January 20, 2025, raising $300 million.
• Immediately after the first round concluded, WLFI launched a second round of presale, priced at $0.05 per token, with a total of 5 billion tokens (5% of the total supply). The second round sold out on March 14, 2025, raising $250 million.
• In addition to the two public sales, according to WLFI's official tokenomics, the project also conducted presales for strategic investors and institutional participants, totaling 8.893 billion tokens (8.893% of the supply), priced at $0.1 per token.

In summary, WLFI sold a total of 33.893 billion tokens (33.893% of the total supply) through presales.

On September 1, 2025, WLFI officially launched, and presale participants experienced their first unlock. Users who participated in the two public presale rounds could unlock 20% of their tokens after signing the token unlock agreement and completing the activation process. The remaining 80% would be unlocked based on subsequent governance decisions. Institutional investors' allocations were not unlocked at that time.

After its launch, WLFI was heavily speculated on by the market. The on-chain price once broke through $0.45 on the first day, and prices on some second and third-tier exchanges even briefly surged above $1. In the following months, WLFI's price gradually declined from above $0.2, and at the time of writing, it is approximately $0.08.

For users who participated in the first round of WLFI presale (cost basis $0.015), even if they only unlocked 20% of their tokens, selling them over the past few months would have allowed them to recover their principal and even make a profit. However, for second-round presale participants (cost basis $0.05), most users have not yet recovered their principal unless they sold during the initial high-price surge.

Most users weren't too worried initially — surely they could make some profit once the remaining 80% unlocked, right? But as WLFI's price continued to decline, presale users' anticipation for the subsequent unlock became more urgent.

Yet, no one expected WLFI to cause trouble with the unlock rules.

WLFI's Unlock Proposal, Oh Wait, It's an Unlock Notice

According to the proposal posted by WLFI's official team on the forum, the unlock rules for the remaining WLFI tokens held by early supporters (presale users), founders, team, advisors, and partners are as follows.

• For presale users (currently involving 17,043,666,558 WLFI tokens; this number may change as some presale users have not yet claimed their tokens), all locked tokens will undergo a two-year lock-up period, followed by a two-year linear unlock period — meaning it will take four years to fully unlock.
• For founders, team, advisors, and partners (involving 45,238,585,647 WLFI tokens), 10% of all locked tokens (i.e., 4,523,858,565 WLFI) will be permanently burned and removed from the total supply. The remaining 90% (40,714,727,082 WLFI) will undergo a two-year lock-up period, followed by a three-year linear unlock period — meaning it will take five years to fully unlock.

Alright, here come the criticisms. Most users who considered investing in WLFI were drawn by the Trump family's name. But now, they're being asked to wait four more years to receive their tokens. By then, Trump's current presidential term would have long ended. It's uncertain whether Trump would even remember his sons' involvement in this project, and his own status is a question mark...

Another point that must be mentioned: perhaps to showcase WLFI's decentralized spirit, the proposal "humanely" states that if the proposal is passed, tokens belonging to holders who do not explicitly accept the vesting plan will remain locked indefinitely — in other words: "You can disagree, but if you do, they're locked forever!"

Perhaps anticipating strong community resistance, WLFI even engaged in comment moderation on the official governance forum. As shown in the image below, with just a quick scroll, you can see numerous highly uniform, suspected bot replies (all starting with YES).

Finding a genuine human reply is rare. One such reply said: "Damn it, I'm going to send these bastards to jail!"

Speculation on WLFI Team's Motives

Finally, let's speculate on the WLFI team's motives. Some friends are asking why the WLFI founders and team would voluntarily burn 10% of their tokens. Personally, I think there are two possible scenarios.

One is that the WLFI team has great love for the community and is sacrificing for it. The other is that burning 10% of the tokens is merely a performance to appease the community (look how much we've sacrificed, it's not easy). After all, the value of a 10% portion that can only be fully unlocked years later is questionable itself. What the WLFI team truly desires is to lock everything up, because the current token distribution aligns with their maximum interests. Even though they can't openly access their own tokens, there will always be various hidden allocations under the table — that's the real purpose of tokenomics.

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