TRON founder becomes Donald Trump’s biggest DeFi protocol investor

What’s new? TRON blockchain founder and head of HTX and Poloniex crypto exchanges Justin Sun announced that he has become the largest investor in Donald Trump’s World Liberty Financial DeFi protocol. The entrepreneur invested $30 million in the project, noting that the United States will become a global blockchain hub thanks to the efforts of the 47th president-elect. “TRON is committed to making America great again and leading innovation,” Sun concluded.

Source: X.com

What else is known?

“Together, we’re driving innovation, aligning on a vision for a stronger blockchain future, and contributing to the growing ecosystem. Exciting times ahead!” stated the World Liberty Financial team.

Source: X.com

Notably, the announcement did not have a positive impact on the exchange rate of the TRON (TRX) native token. The asset has lost 5% overnight and is trading at $0,1989. TRX ranks 11th in the overall cryptocurrency ranking with a capitalization of $17,2 billion.

The World Liberty Financial project, led by the Trump family and investors Steve and Zach Witkoff, Zachary Folkman, and Chase Herro, was announced in August as an alternative to the services of traditional banks.

In September, details on the allocation of WLFI non-fungible governance tokens were announced: 62,66% is allocated for the SEC-supervised token sale, 17,33% is reserved for the payment of rewards to system participants, and 20% is reserved for the team.

The token sale was planned to raise $300 million, which would be divided between the project’s multi-signature reserve wallet and the team.

Sales were slow at the start. In the first 24 hours, they raised only $11,6 million, and the website malfunctioned several times. By the end of the month, the team cut the sales plan by 90%, from $300 million to $30 million.

Despite Trump’s victory in the November 5 presidential election, which caused a sharp rise in the crypto market, WLFI’s initial sales plan has not been achieved to date.

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Since the token sale started on October 15, 3 388 760 194 WLFI have been sold for over $50,83 million. 20 332 wallets have participated, according to the Dune platform.

World Liberty Financial is a lending protocol built on the Ethereum blockchain and Aave protocol tools with similar functionality.

According to the codebase, which was later removed from GitHub, the project also relied on Dough Finance’s DeFi protocol by WLFI team members Zachary Folkman and Chase Herro. In July, Dough Finance lost $1.8 million in a flash loan attack.

Earlier this month, the WLFI team announced that the protocol will begin using the Chainlink (LINK) decentralized oracle network standard for interconnectivity. Many large traditional financial institutions, including SWIFT, DTCC, BNY Mellon, and Citi already use Chainlink solutions.

It was also reported that WLFI plans to issue its own stablecoin. Paxos co-founder Rich Teo was appointed as one of the top managers of the project. The regulated Paxos company issues its USDP stablecoin, PYUSD stablecoin under the brand of payment company PayPal, and USDG stablecoin together with Singapore’s largest bank DBS.

Justin Sun, despite the popularity of the TRON blockchain with its high speed and low fees, has a mixed reputation in the crypto space. Some community members criticized his joining the BitGo custodian team, which is responsible for issuing wBTC wrapped bitcoins. The Coinbase exchange has since announced the delisting of the asset.

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Sun has also been linked to the TUSD stablecoin team, although it denies such claims. S&P Global Ratings specialists put the asset in the last place when assessing the stability of the largest stablecoins.

In addition, the Sun-led exchanges HTX (formerly Houbi) and Poloniex lost over $210 million in hacks late last year, and the HTX blockchain HECO Network recently announced it was ceasing operations.

As for TRON, the blockchain is actively developing as a platform for launching meme tokens, whose popularity in the crypto market continues to grow. The blockchain Solana with its PumpFun launchpad remains the leader in this segment, but TRON offers a similar platform, SunPump, where anyone can launch their asset for a small fee. In August, SunPump halved trading fees, which boosted TRON’s on-chain activity and revenue.